11 minutes ago, nexttwelveexits said:

I'm genuinely surprised that more meme-hosting sites haven't been slapped with C&Ds for hosting and making money off things like this.

10 hours ago, tortugatron said:

I don’t see vassal affecting sales at all.

If anything it drives sales

3 hours ago, thespaceinvader said:

Yeah, why would anyone make anything for free except the entire internet?

When the service is free, you are the product.

3 hours ago, thespaceinvader said:

Yeah, why would anyone make anything for free except the entire internet?

Like, the entire internet runs on software that is free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer. It wouldn't function if that software wasn't free.

Also, public media exist. Youtube is free, and it's honestly trivial to copy content from it and distribute it freely. But people still make high quality youtube content. Freely accessible webcomics and web serial fiction exist, but people still make livings off them.

Not to mention that public domain media still make money, even though it's trivial to get them for free. Not for the original creator, sure, but the original creators of everything that is in the public domain by default (as opposed to having been put into it by waiver of copyright somehow) has been dead for a century. What do they care? Further, it's not like people don't use those public domain media to make their own original reproductions of them. How many versions of Romeo and Juliet have there been? How many of them made lots and lots of money? Hundreds, thousands, possibly even millions, and several, respectively.

Nonetheless, I'm not in favour of complete abolition of IP law or rights - I'm much more in favour of a distinct loosening of the restrictions around derivative works, and a DRAMATIC shortening of the time of absolute copyright protection, to a level much more akin to patents, on the order of 10 to 20 years after initial publication, with much wder freedoms of use and reproduction thereafter.

70 years after the death of the author is ludicrous, and that's the *minimum* length of copyright, as is the ability to dump on harmless derivative works like fanart and fanfiction.

But that's probably a matter for a different thread in a different forum.

Ehm, are you sure that's how it works?

3 minutes ago, Darth Meanie said:

When the service is free, you are the product.

Came here to say this.

YouTube is a company which sells viewers to advertisers. There ain't nothing free about it.

But I agree with shortening the copyright length. 20 years seems fine

5 hours ago, xanderf said:

Honestly, it's the only reason this game exists - or, heck, any of the movies past the first one.

I mean, seriously - consider how much any of that costs to do. Paying actors, composers, special effects teams, directors and model builders, etc. And then on the game side - development time, testing, production, distribution...it's cost, cost, cost, everywhere. SO many people involved bringing SO many talents to the table to get things to a quality we want to have on our tables and TVs.

Would anyone risk that much time and money, if they knew that seconds later everything they did would be freely available to anyone with no compensation to themselves, and all of that effort wasted?

Copyright/trademark/patent/etc laws - there are certainly issues, here. On the whole, though, I'd really rather we have what we have, than nothing at all. Without some protection and guarantee that an artist's work will provide some kind of return for themselves - some possibility of a living, given enough time and effort - then nobody would ever bother, and we'd never have seen anything like this franchise. We've benefitted - at least in this specific case - more from IP laws than we've lost.

Sometimes it becomes ridiculous. Take for instance the music industry. Radio stations pay to play their music. To listeners it's free. BUT if I own a business and have a radio station playing in the background, I have to pay or face a lawsuit! THAT is B.S.!

1 hour ago, Darth Meanie said:

I'm sure they have to pick their battles. It costs money to issue a C&D, so unless it is really hurting your product (or could down thy road), sometimes they probably just need to let some things slide

The cost of a C & D is trivial. The lawyers are already on your payroll. The shotgun approach is often used. From what I understand that was the approach of GW a few back.

16 hours ago, CRCL said:

Cease and desist orders against a well loved, community produced tool? Asmodee should ask GW how much the gaming community appreciated that.

I'm not sure you'll like the answer they get.

Honestly, when it comes to IP, there's a lot of no win scenarios. If you let someone use it, even if it doesn't hurt your business model, without permission and without contesting it, you risk losing the rights to it because the next entity that comes along who actually does hurt your business can point to your previous inaction.

Some C&Ds and seemingly idiotic fights over IPs are just initiated to let people know that your **** is not up for grabs and frequently the company issuing the C&D or lawsuit is ambivalent about the outcome.

13 hours ago, xanderf said:

Ask yourself this - if someone was attending the Superbowl, propped up their digital camera and started broadcast streaming the game on YouTube on their own...what do you think would happen? And why would you think this is any different - from the pure perspective of copyrighted images and text, trademarked logos and names, etc?

I'm not sure what the tickets you'd buy to get in say about "recording or telecasting" the game on your own. Considering the game is actually broadcast "free of charge" on publically available TV makes me think there isn't a lot that could be done to stop someone with their bootleg, single camera, view of the game. Unless your entry into the game specifically says you couldn't I don't see why you couldn't.

13 hours ago, xanderf said:

25 minutes ago, StevenO said:

Considering the game is actually broadcast "free of charge" on publically available TV makes me think there isn't a lot that could be done to stop someone...

I’m pretty sure the NFL is very clear about rebroadcast rights (and that you don’t have them). And it’s still not free, because similar to YouTube, you’re still the product... it’s just less targeted.

Just now, PaulRuddSays said:

I’m pretty sure the NFL is very clear about rebroadcast rights (and that you don’t have them). And it’s still not free, because similar to YouTube, you’re still the product... it’s just less targeted.

The thing is you're not "rebroadcasting" their broadcast. You're making your own granted there may be provisions on the ticket that say you can't do that.

If you want to look as some crazy IPs you might want to look at Paris and the Eiffel Tower which some seem to think is illegal to just photograph.

1 hour ago, MasterShake2 said:

Honestly, when it comes to IP, there's a lot of no win scenarios. If you let someone use it, even if it doesn't hurt your business model, without permission and without contesting it, you risk losing the rights to it because the next entity that comes along who actually does hurt your business can point to your previous inaction.

Some C&Ds and seemingly idiotic fights over IPs are just initiated to let people know that your **** is not up for grabs and frequently the company issuing the C&D or lawsuit is ambivalent about the outcome.

I work in a different kind of IP field (patents), but typically you would decide on your IP strategy broadly and stick to it until there’s a change in your business model. At least in our field, the lawyers are a sunk cost, so I would have no objection to submitting hundreds of C&D because they’re ultimately going to stem from form letters, and their business model is predicated on the intrinsic market value of the brand.

I would also guess that the Disney IP strategy assumes that major players are broadly compliant, and that most enforcement will be targeted to mid-size players. As a consequence, most of the people served will be massively outclassed in legal firepower, which means it’s really not a very big risk for further legal effort - the clear incentive is to comply

So, I agree that you don’t want to be too big of a fish here.

7 minutes ago, StevenO said:

The thing is you're not "rebroadcasting" their broadcast. You're making your own granted there may be provisions on the ticket that say you can't do that.

If you want to look as some crazy IPs you might want to look at Paris and the Eiffel Tower which some seem to think is illegal to just photograph.

Don’t get into design copyright, it’s even weirder.

And when when you think about the law, always assume that it’s written in the worst framing versus your position. In this case, I’m pretty sure that the correct understanding is that the NFL owns the broadcast, literally, in the same way that a studio owns a movie. You’re not allowed to have a copy unless they give it to you or you buy it.

2 minutes ago, PaulRuddSays said:

Don’t get into design copyright, it’s even weirder.

And when when you think about the law, always assume that it’s written in the worst framing versus your position. In this case, I’m pretty sure that the correct understanding is that the NFL owns the broadcast, literally, in the same way that a studio owns a movie. You’re not allowed to have a copy unless they give it to you or you buy it.

This is why you shouldn't have ethical problems breaking the law. None of it makes sense.

8 minutes ago, Commander Kaine said:

This is why you shouldn't have ethical problems breaking the law. None of it makes sense.

I mean, I’m not a lawyer, and this isn’t a focus in my business, so definitely do a little validation if you’d like to. I could be wrong on some of the copyright specifics for sure. Overall, a lot of these things really do make sense if you know how the legal system runs, but most people don’t care and have no reason to learn where law diverges from common sense.

But it on the other hand, the cost-benefit analysis definitely favors compliance, even if your version of ethics seems to diverge pretty far from mine. A $20 blu-ray isn’t worth it, since I can absolutely confirm that assertion against trivial targets is a valid IP strategy. Someone mentioned this above, but it’s worth emphasizing.

So, tl;dr don’t break the law...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this the tournament billing itself as an online regional, complete with regionals prizes donated? So besides all of the copyright infringement, could it have been that they crossed the line into messing with organized play events?

18 minutes ago, PaulRuddSays said:

Don’t get into design copyright, it’s even weirder.

And when when you think about the law, always assume that it’s written in the worst framing versus your position. In this case, I’m pretty sure that the correct understanding is that the NFL owns the broadcast, literally, in the same way that a studio owns a movie. You’re not allowed to have a copy unless they give it to you or you buy it.

When it comes to your own personal recording of a Football game or some other sporting event I'm not sure they "own" your content. There's pretty much no question that the NFL "owns" the broadcast you see on TV but how much of the rest of it I highly question. You take a selfie video of you and your partner with the field in the background does the NFL own that and have the right to sue you out of existence should you post it to Facebook?

When it comes to movies if you have legally obtained your "spoilers" there really isn't anything a studio should be able to do to keep you from putting it out. If you're on public property where photography/videography are legal and someone happens to be filming a movie down the street where you can see it you should be able to shoot away. Now maybe you'll run into related issue with "modelling release" type information about a person's image.

Back in the days of film and difficult audio recording these things weren't so complicated by these days when it seems everyone has a decent camera and audio recorder available with them at all time these issues are a lot more complex.

3 hours ago, StevenO said:

The thing is you're not "rebroadcasting" their broadcast. You're making your own granted there may be provisions on the ticket that say you can't do that.

The TV networks pay an immense amount of money to the NFL for “exclusive” broadcast rights. It is incumbent upon the NFL to ensure that what they are selling to the TV networks is actually exclusive. If any yahoo can stream the game from their phone, the NFL can’t charge those TV networks as much for “exclusive” access.

4 minutes ago, skotothalamos said:

The TV networks pay an immense amount of money to the NFL for “exclusive” broadcast rights. It is incumbent upon the NFL to ensure that what they are selling to the TV networks is actually exclusive. If any yahoo can stream the game from their phone, the NFL can’t charge those TV networks as much for “exclusive” access.

I suspect your ticket to the game has fine print telling you all of those things you aren't supposed to do with your purchase and holding it effectively being a contract.

5 hours ago, LHyoda said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this the tournament billing itself as an online regional, complete with regionals prizes donated? So besides all of the copyright infringement, could it have been that they crossed the line into messing with organized play events?

This is also probably part of it. FFGOP needs to be able to control where regionals are to have power.

8 hours ago, skotothalamos said:

I'm not sure you'll like the answer they get.

A swing and a miss.

I was referring to many years ago when GW used to ignore it's player base and hand out cease and desist orders like the world's worst Santa Claus. The headline you quoted literally refers to that: "...bounce back from a difficult period."

They've made rather large gains in terms of their relationship with their player-base precisely because they started listening to them, and stopped a bunch of their more toxic business practices. It's a lesson from history that FFG should heed; it's never a good idea to take for granted, ignore and/or antagonise your player-base.

4 hours ago, StevenO said:

I suspect your ticket to the game has fine print telling you all of those things you aren't supposed to do with your purchase and holding it effectively being a contract.

Yes, it does.