OTU Only: [SUMMARY] The Setting Canon of the Official Traveller Universe

[Orr]

The last time I checked on some of Piper's books copyright at the Library of Congress, all of them were under public domain, with no copyright holder. I did not check Little Fuzzy, but I would be very interested in finding out how there were TWO copyright holders of the same work. As Little Fuzzy is available for download on Project Gutenberg since April of 2006, why have not these copyright holders filed suit to have it removed?

Beats me. Here's the link to the post in question on Scalzi's blog.

Why don't you pay your lawyer to ask his lawyer why his agent had to negotiate with the copyright holders? :file_21:

The Gutenberg Project has an Australian sister site called, remarkably enough, Project Gutenberg Australia. Read can learn about it here The two sites aren't linked in any "official" manner, mostly to shield the original Gutenberg in the US from copyright claims. Thanks to different copyright laws, PGA can host files which it's US sister legally cannot. The US site can and does direct users to PGA downloads, so people can download from PGA thinking they're downloading from PG-US. (There is a similar Gutenberg site located in Canada for similar reasons.)

Be sure to check that all the files you've downloaded from Gutenberg came from the US site and from redirects to PGA and PGC. I'm sure you wouldn't want to have copied anything illegal under US law, however inadvertently.

 

[Timerover51]

I have been going through the online copyright list of the US Library of Congress. There is no current copyright on Little Fuzzy. There is a copyright on a very short illustrated story adapted from Little Fuzzy. If he used material from Fuzzies and Other People, then that would have come under copyright as that was published posthumously, well after Piper's death. As for Piper's other stories, aside from copyrights on compilations of his short stories, none of his works are still under US copyright. The copyright on the compilation only covers the compilation, the copyright does not extend to the original stories making up the compilation.

As for Andre Norton, none of the works showing up on Project Gutenberg are still under copyright. Oddly enough, while Sargasso of Space, the first in the Solar Queen series, is still under copyright, three follow-on books are not, Plague Ship, Voodoo Planet, and Postmarked the Stars. That does make using Limbo directly off-limits.

Now, I think that this has gotten the thread enough off-topic, that this discussion should close, and the thread continue to discuss what is and is not the setting canon. If I have any more questions, I will contact Don directly, via email.

 

[Carlobrand]

...So there seems to be a bit more at work here than "Herp derp... It's on Gutenberg so I can do whatever I please... hurr durr'...

"Herp derp"? Really? The man's asking a straightforward question and delivering properly researched information, and he gets "Herp derp"??

Copyright is a tricky issue. D&D has a lot of cool critters on the public domain, or the open-allowed, or whatever it is that they do in game publishing to let other publishers use their work, but I know of at least one popular web cartoonist who had his work tied up in knots for months because he featured a certain squid-headed cthonic humanoid that was not among the list of allowed D&D critters - said beastie shall remain unnamed for copyright reasons.

The writer in your link borrowed from a work now in the public domain but still had to worry about a copyright held by a derivative work. Even if he'd had the law on his side - and possibly he did - hiring lawyers, paying court fees and experiencing delays while the court hammers things out can get expensive. Proactively avoiding that hassle is usually the cheaper route. It might be safest to avoid directly borrowing from published works even if they're clearly in the public domain - we might stumble into some other game publisher who figures, even if wrongly, that because he's incorporated those public elements in HIS work, he's now entitled to copyright protection. Not having to pay attorneys is cheaper than paying attorneys and winning.

Do we have a Traveller Norton-Piperesque sector courtesy of one of the supplement publishers?

 

[Timerover51]

Do we have a Traveller Norton-Piperesque sector courtesy of one of the supplement publishers?

I am working on one.