Ethical moderation issue

[Paolo D.]

Hi Ron,

this decision seems right to me, that's quite the thing I was thinking to.
This should enable the users/authors to share and link free or out-of-sell material, while protecting everybody's right to sell games. And so, it's very "The Forge-ish".

Best,
Paolo

[M. J. Young]

I arrived to this thread a bit late, but wanted to make an observation.

I'm not sure whether it's in any of the posting statements, but it's always been at least my impression that the rule here (as with most sites) is that posters do not post anything they do not have the legal right to distribute.  You can certainly quote from a copyrighted rule book for which you do not have the rights, but you cannot post the entire rule book.  If I were to post the entire OAD&D book collection on my web site, you can be certain WotC would take a legal interest in having me remove it; if I were to link to an illegal copy of those books, they would likely consider me complicit in the piracy.

I think the policy Ron stated is appropriate; I think that the simpler way to state it is that no one can post material here if the legal rights to the material belong to someone who has not given permission for such postings, and that includes posting links to such material that is illegally posted elsewhere.  There is a sense in which the Internet is one vast document with a legion of authors, and we become responsible for the information we link from our own sites, what is called "incorporation by reference", that if I post a link to material somewhere else I have effectively included that material here.

So I think this is not a new policy at all, but a clarification of the policy that has always existed here:  do not post material that is not yours to post.

--M. J. Young

[Erik Weissengruber]

The policy is a pragmatic one and in line with a good naive/insightful aphorism:

"Information may want to be free - but creators of information still need to eat".

http://robertfripp.com/diaries.htm?artist=&show=&member=3&entry=1370