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naturalcrit / homebrewery

Create authentic looking D&D homebrews using only markdown
https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com
MIT License
1.09k stars 326 forks source link

Licensing questions #723

Open draconius1 opened 6 years ago

draconius1 commented 6 years ago

I really appreciate your work and thanks for what you do for the community. I would like to publish some content on DMSGuild and I know that you have given permission to use your program for publishing. My question is the background , letter fonts, boxed graphics, footer art, that are default with the program royalty free or included with the license you give to use your site?

athelu commented 4 years ago

I believe that technically the look and feel of the default document is modeled after the WOTC Trade-dress - so the author here has no ability to provide a license.

Any content generated would have to be seen as free community content and published under OGL with no profit since it is relying on the trade-dress.

Gazook89 commented 3 years ago

@calculuschild @ericscheid This can probably be closed, unless something is going to be added to the site to clarify licensing.

calculuschild commented 3 years ago

The closest thing we've got is this on the homepage:

Legal Junk The Homebrewery is licensed using the MIT License. Which means you are free to use The Homebrewery is any way that you > want, except for claiming that you made it yourself.

If you wish to sell or in some way gain profit for what's created on this site, it's your responsibility to ensure you have the > proper licenses/rights for any images or resources used.

All of the graphics/fonts were created by us or by users on reddit (/r/unearthedarcana, etc.), so the fonts and graphics individually are fair use. The DMSGuild even provides style guides and artwork for authors with example fonts, etc. to use that very closely match the published WOTC styles, minus coloring and background images, so it would seem if you are aiming to publish on DMSGuild you have more liberty to use their Trade Dress (although I can't find anything specific on that). Publishing your work elsewhere for profit is probably not so obvious.

I'm going to opt to keep this open for now, because this is something we probably should nail down a little better with more research.

Gazook89 commented 3 years ago

I randomly came across this Angry DM post from 5 years ago that in my opinion provides some plain english clarity about the WotC IP environment. Just wanted to leave it here in case others coming across this Issue find it informative.