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<blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 8913970" data-attributes="member: 19857"><p>So back in the 90s TSR threatened to do exactly this sort of thing. They sent out cease and desist letters to fan sites all over the internet to tell them to take down material that infringed on their copyrights. And they weren't talking about copies of their published work, they were talking about anything that discussed D&D at any level, including fan created monsters, character, adventures, settings, etc. They claimed that the terms Armor Class and Hit Points were their intellectual property and demanded that sysadmins delete what we called "net books" at the time because they were using their property without a license.</p><p></p><p>IIRC they threatened the Ars Magica archive even though there was no D&D material on it and on Usenet I recall other folks saying that they also got the order even though their ftp sites had no D&D content on them at all just other RPG content. However I don't think anyone actually got sued over it, just a lot of bad will generated with threats. IIRC eventually they hired Sean Reynolds to be their internet guy and he worked his tail off trying to calm everything down.</p><p></p><p>That incident is one of the many reasons Wizards felt like they had to issue an OGL to the fans in the first place, just to assure everyone that they weren't going to go off and sue everyone. So yeah, I can kinda see why people would be worried about history repeating.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Jer, post: 8913970, member: 19857"] So back in the 90s TSR threatened to do exactly this sort of thing. They sent out cease and desist letters to fan sites all over the internet to tell them to take down material that infringed on their copyrights. And they weren't talking about copies of their published work, they were talking about anything that discussed D&D at any level, including fan created monsters, character, adventures, settings, etc. They claimed that the terms Armor Class and Hit Points were their intellectual property and demanded that sysadmins delete what we called "net books" at the time because they were using their property without a license. IIRC they threatened the Ars Magica archive even though there was no D&D material on it and on Usenet I recall other folks saying that they also got the order even though their ftp sites had no D&D content on them at all just other RPG content. However I don't think anyone actually got sued over it, just a lot of bad will generated with threats. IIRC eventually they hired Sean Reynolds to be their internet guy and he worked his tail off trying to calm everything down. That incident is one of the many reasons Wizards felt like they had to issue an OGL to the fans in the first place, just to assure everyone that they weren't going to go off and sue everyone. So yeah, I can kinda see why people would be worried about history repeating. [/QUOTE]
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