Official response from Leon about ToEE tools

Hmmm, I wonder... the copyrighted material would, i think, only pertain to the greyhawk material... lots of generic D20 stuff (using core rules) is freely avaliable.

Anyway, if you were going to try and broker some kind of deal, i would say screw atari and go right to WOTC- and make sure you let them know what a monumental mess Atari has made of things and how they have set DnD CrP games back 20 years, dragged the WOTC/DnD name through the dirt by asociating it with a dodgy product, failed to provide support to Toika to fix the mess atari created etc...

 

I second that! I can see WotC being much more sympethetic to our 'cause' than some money-grubbing conglomerate!

 

What the

Troika caused there collapse not Atari. Atari gave them more than enough time to do the job. Get the facts straight before spouting opinions. Besides WOTC are about as unaware company there is, except for maybe card games. Don't get me wrong Troika had great ideas and I love playing TOEE as is, but they droped the ball not Atari.

 

You seriously need to work on your reading comprehension skills. Where in this thread does anyone say that Atari was responsible for Troika's demise? We're talking about the tools here, jeez. Apparently Troika can't release them because of licensing issues. So, uh, get your facts straight before putting words into other people's mouth.

 

It was very cool of Leon to give such a clear response at this time and I hope he and the other Troika people can come out of this ok. Thanks for getting this reply.

Thing is, we need to approach Atari first and use WoTC as last resort. No-one likes someone trying to leverage them (and to be honest WoTC may well not be able to do anything anyways).

If it's licensing then we need to now get an official Atari response - and then start a 'free ed' campaign

 

Atari's official D&D guy right now seems to be John Hight. He's the producer in charge of Dragonshard, NWN 2 etc. I have no idea what his e-mail adress is, though. Maybe something as simple as firstname.familyname@atari.com.

Atari/WotC allowed BioWare to distribute a toolset with their game, why not Troika?

 

Hold up

You seriously need to work on your reading comprehension skills. Where in this thread does anyone say that Atari was responsible for Troika's demise? We're talking about the tools here, jeez. Apparently Troika can't release them because of licensing issues. So, uh, get your facts straight before putting words into other people's mouth.

Anyway, if you were going to try and broker some kind of deal, i would say screw atari and go right to WOTC- and make sure you let them know what a monumental mess Atari has made of things and how they have set DnD CrP games back 20 years, dragged the WOTC/DnD name through the dirt by asociating it with a dodgy product, failed to provide support to Toika to fix the mess atari created etc...

My comment was in response to Morgoth's statement. I hope you all can get these tools which you speak of. I think you all have done an awsome job so far with all of your mods and such. I just didn't care for that little statement Morgoth put in the end of his statement. I ain't starting no crap. I just wanted to respond to Morgoth and I should have quoted him/her. My reading skills are fine. Just need to quote before I wrote. Peace.

 

According to the open game license you'd have to talk to both atari and wotc in order to get consent to alter copy righted game content. See section 7.

However, 1d allows you to enhance such material without restriction so long as you abide by all other terms of the liscense. For example, there are companies that have published books with information explaining the effects of experience and leveling up on characters even though this is expressely prohibited by the license.

The liscense doesn't seem to be directed towards modding or even computer simulation of the PnP rules. So it may not cover it, atari may have exclusive rights to develope 3.5 in the form of a computer simulation. Thus wotc and/or atari may not be able to give you the rights alone.

It would be nice if you could just post the Open Game License and the D20 System Trademark License, but its illegal to distribute them without consent from WoTC.

The only legal training I've had is from a few under-grad courses (its maybe going to be a minor) so I could be way off. It seems to be pretty clear to me that you must contact both, they will at least be able to tell you where to go next.

That being said I scanned the atari site and it appears the best way to begin is as they suggest, see the warning section, and to ask them questions. Thus this the link to the legal info portion of the site.

http://corporate.infogrames.com/legal.html

It contains contact information for their legal stuff, including a link to the corporate and financial communications manager's email. I doubt he'll reply but he may pass it on to the appropriate people, and if not its worth a shot. The mailing info may actually be more productive. Generally it is. You'd need to set up your inquiry according to some formal "querry" standard, I have no idea what it is for source code, editing tools, or computer stuff. You may have to send them a letter/email just to find out. That's what you have to do for stuff like publishing, and other forms of intellectual property that have or involve publication and a current owner/publisher/copyright holder.

Unfortunately, Hasbro is much more corporate than Atari. If you attempt to find submission info on the WoTC site it takes you to Hasbro, if you search for WoTC on the Hasbro site it takes you back to wizards.com. If you manage to find the submission info on the Hasbro site, you get the oh so friendly we don't take submissions. If you attempt to find any sort of contact information you get re-directed. If you attempt to find information for research then you get redirected to general research sites (like the New York Times). The only solution that I can figure out is to go to wizards, click on corporate info, click on help, and then submit a question along the lines of "How do I get permission to use WoTC copyrighted material in computer media" or "How do I find out about currently held copyrights on WoTC material in relation to computing media". And keep on sending until they reply. Basically, your asking how do I ask a question. And some times with big companies you have to keep on asking. With smaller ones they'll tell you how to submit a question.

The final option would be to become a university and do whatever you want under the heading of higher education. Universities are immune so long as the abide by minimal criterion (i.e. this is the property of so and so).

 

Way to go, Leon!

Concerning the d20 stuff (which is not the same as OGL) - you guys should have a look at the official d20 System Guide. It explicitly states: No Covered Product may be an "Interactive Game" ... This is further explained in their Software FAQ. Interactive games are excluded because WotC has exclusive licensing agreements (with Atari, I presume).

What this basically means is, we can forget the idea of creating new D&D modules and releasing them under the d20 license. Ain't gonna happen. What we'd need is the same kind of agreement BioWare obviously has with Atari/WotC concerning NWN mods. I'm not a legal expert either, but it does seem strange that Troika can't release their ToEE WorldED because it supposedly contains D&D material, while at the same time people are creating tons of mods using the NWN toolset. That's not fair.

 

I have a different problem with the copyright issue.

As far as I know, as long as the tools require a copy of the game to work, no copyright is being violated. So if I purchase a copy of the game, and then "obtain" a copy of the WorldEd, I am not violating any copyright, since it requires the games resources to work.

This is of course totally aside from the fact that Atari has allowed ToEE to be modded, and has allowed posts on their own moderated message board which discusses this fact. All of this is of course completely against the license agreement we all had to click through to install the game. However since Atari has allowed this violation of the license agreement to continue for over a year, I believe they have legally given up all rights to stop that type of activity. This means we are safe to do almost what ever we want with our legally purchased copies of ToEE. So if we do get a copy of WorldEd from Troika, it will not violate anything.

This of course only my opinion, I am sure a copyright lawyer would have a few choice things to say about this whole issue.

In the end, Troika doesn't feel comfortable releasing the ToEE tools. Atari has thus far been deaf and dumb to the whole issue. WoTC cares more about cards than anything D&D, so we are simply caught desiring something that will be difficult to get, but I feel our persistance will get what we want.... Eventually.....

-Firestrand