<BLOCKQUOTE>quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Elliot:
I have the TD with the Trojan Reaches data to hand - It is No.20 (July 1990). The magazine also contains an adventure set in the Florian League in the TR. Looking at the legals, it appears that DGP made no concession to the copyright for the TR from any non-GDW source.
Copyright is acknowledged to GDW for anything that has appeared in a product published by GDW and in my opinion this means that FFE has the rights to the Egryn subsector (because of Adv 4: Leviathan) and the map (because of the Atlas of the Imperium ). If any other data was published on the TR by GDW, it is FFE's as well (but my collection doesn't extend that far).
As to Third Imperium magazine, sorry, never got it... (wish I had!)
[This message has been edited by Elliot (edited 19 August 2001).]<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
OK, I may be way off base here because everything I (think I) know I've stuck together from various hints and allusions, but as I understand it, the question isn't the copyright as such but the right to base new material on the copyrighted material. In other words, not the right to scan a page of the Travellers' Digest and republish it, but the right to set adventures on worlds described in TD, make references to people mentioned in TD, etc. Roger Sanger has explicitly acknowledged Marc Miller's right to use the DGP material that way. The dispute (again, as I understand it) is whether MM can pass along that right to third parties.
So what I am hoping is that the fact that the material was published in another place before being sold to TD would affect this. Maybe it doesn't. I have a basic knowledge of copyright law, but I don't understand the intricacies involved in this particular question (In my opinion the mere fact that you write in a shared universe ought to mean that permission is implicitly granted to any other author (any other legitimate author that is) to reference your material. I know that isn't the case, but I purely don't understand why not).
Hans
