Potterband?

[gglibertine]

I'm surprised no one's made a Harry Potter variant of Angband... or have they, and it's just not listed on the site? I think there are a lot of possibilities there; while there aren't quite as many classes etc. (though I can think of several offhand: Aurors, Potion Masters, Alchemists, Seers, and even Muggles) or monsters, but maybe there could be a Quickband variant? It seems like an interesting idea to me, anyway.

[pav]

Miss Rowling is guarding her intellectual property with an eagle's eye. Potterband would not be legally feasible, I'm afraid.

[Bandobras]

Is there a precedent? I mean any fan art, a game best, not sued to death immediately? Because for Tolkien, Lovecraft, Zelazny and several other settings there are such precedents, which is why we hope we won't follow the way of PernAngband...

[Big Al]

I don't know about any precedents, but I know that at one point in the angband development history (it might have even been back as far as moria), the maintainer got express permission from the Tolkien estate to use his intellectual property.

[ekolis]

Of course, they probably conveniently forgot any such "agreement" by now, seeing as it's barely remembered here and nobody bothered to actually GET IT IN WRITING... any one of us could report Angband and get it shut down right now if we so desired

Seriously, if this whole "intellectual property" nonsense is such a big issue, why don't we have people crying "Allah Ackbar" and trying to nuke Washington over it? Or at least trying to elect representatives who will stand up against it? Honestly it makes me wonder if anyone is ever going to take an ordinary Joe like me or you seriously... either approach I take is not going to achieve much - nobody believes me when I threaten or take responsibility for acts of terrorism (believe me, I've tried - what do I have to do, grow a three-foot beard and wear a turban before they take me seriously? :P), and does anyone really believe that elected representatives are going to listen to anyone without a billion dollars to bribe them with?

Maybe the free-software commie terrorist Martian zealot anarchist Satanists are right after all... *sigh* I'd hate to be put out of business myself as a software developer, but then if they're right, there's no place in the economy for an honest wage-earning coder, because everyone who would be coding would have to do it for free just to compete, and nothing would get done, unless some giant corporation decided to sponsor you, at which point you'd be selling out to the big-business Nazi fascist Illuminati Mafia fat-cat anti-Christs on the other end...

edit: P.S. I am SOOOO tempted to report Angband right now... I just want to test the waters, you know??? I've got the page open right now to file a report with the SIIA and all I need to do is click submit... I'm just afraid of destroying this community...

[takkaria]

edit: P.S. I am SOOOO tempted to report Angband right now... I just want to test the waters, you know??? I've got the page open right now to file a report with the SIIA and all I need to do is click submit... I'm just afraid of destroying this community...

I don't actually believe Angband infringes on Tolkien's property, unless it includes quotes, which I didn't think it did (though some of the monster descriptions may have them). Realistically, the monsters in Angband have not really got the same abilities as those found in Tolkien, and the Tolkien material is a minority of material in the game. I don't believe you can copyright names, so I reckon Angband's actually pretty safe.

IANAL.

[konijn_]

I don't actually believe Angband infringes on Tolkien's property, unless it includes quotes, which I didn't think it did (though some of the monster descriptions may have them). Realistically, the monsters in Angband have not really got the same abilities as those found in Tolkien, and the Tolkien material is a minority of material in the game. I don't believe you can copyright names, so I reckon Angband's actually pretty safe.
IANAL.

Hmmm, from WikiPedia :

In early editions of Dungeons & Dragons, there was a race of demi-humans known as hobbits that were very much like those found in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The Tolkien estate did not appreciate the resemblance and threatened legal action against TSR, the makers of Dungeons & Dragons.[citation needed] TSR renamed the folk halflings, another word coined by Tolkien for the race, but not as commonly used in the books.

Cheers,
T.

[Bandobras]

Another problem is that AFAIK Tolkien Estate does not own the rights to games, as the rights were sold long ago (for pennies, of course, together with film rights, IIRC). Was the permission granted _so_ long ago? Or was it granted by the new owners of the rights?

My hopes are based on the fact that nobody sued us to that moment, which may mean the interested parties treat fan art leniently, or there was indeed a permission, or they didn't yet spot us. The last possibility is the least comforting, but is Angband really so invisible? I mean, even the name is Tolkienian! Still, ekolis, please don't report on us. I think if they _get_ a report and do nothing, their legal grip on the right diminishes more than if they pretend not to see us, so this may prompt them to react.

[takkaria]

In early editions of Dungeons & Dragons, there was a race of demi-humans known as hobbits that were very much like those found in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The Tolkien estate did not appreciate the resemblance and threatened legal action against TSR, the makers of Dungeons & Dragons.[citation needed] TSR renamed the folk halflings, another word coined by Tolkien for the race, but not as commonly used in the books.

Note "threatened". Note also that we could rename hobbit to halfling easily enough and avoid the same difficulty. Note triply that it's been shown multiple times (most recent ones I recall being one involving the Da Vinci Code, and another about Rowling's use of Muggles in the Potter books) -- at least in the UK -- that we're pretty safe using names from his books.

[aeneas]

I'm also NAL, but I think that in cases where a name is very tightly linked to a particular author's works they can sue over it. You can't copyright titles either, but Harlan Ellison won a case where the title "I Have No Mouth but I Must Scream" was used by another party- it is so distinctive, and so tied to Ellison, that the court sided with him. On a lighter note, I believe Johnny Carson won a suit against a portable toilet company that introduced a product called "Here's Johnny".

I don't claim to know how a suit against Angband would turn out if fought out in the courts, but I'm not sure it matters. Unless there were someone with deep pockets willing to underwrite it, just the threat of a suit could be enough.

EDIT: Hadn't sen the above post when I wrote mine... those cases were not in the UK, so there are questions about jurisdiction... but international jurisdiction shopping has become pretty common lately. Just as the US has less stringent laws around defamation, the UK probably has less stringent IP law.

[gglibertine]

Doh! I hadn't even thought of the copyright issues. Which is silly, since ordinarily I'm a stickler for that kind of thing.

It's true that some authors are much more generous than others when it comes to allowing the use of their characters/ideas/whatever. I can't really blame the ones who aren't so lenient, since there *is* a risk of losing future lawsuits if you let some people get away with it.

I was just talking to an author friend last night about the amazing variety of ways you can get into trouble with copyright. She's always having to stop people who want to give her suggestions, because if she happened to write something similar in the future, they could theoretically claim rights to the idea.

[Jude]

As long as nobody's making money off a variant I find it hard to expect legal troubles.

However, Harry Potter just doesn't have a magic system that lends itself to angband...the main way of killing is just with one spell that kills you outright; not very conducive to strategy and long fights.

[camlost]

As long as nobody's making money off a variant I find it hard to expect legal troubles.

Pernband ran into exactly these troubles.

However, Harry Potter just doesn't have a magic system that lends itself to angband...the main way of killing is just with one spell that kills you outright; not very conducive to strategy and long fights.

It would probably be more conducive to a very different style of game than Angband, but variants can do that. I would imagine a dungeon dive rather than crawl would work just fine. Maybe little or no levelling up, but a race to the bottom for an artifact or something with little killing would work just fine.

The real trouble is that it very well might devolve into rocket launcher tag.

[EricDerKonig]

As long as nobody's making money off a variant I find it hard to expect legal troubles.

However, Harry Potter just doesn't have a magic system that lends itself to angband...the main way of killing is just with one spell that kills you outright; not very conducive to strategy and long fights.

On the other hand, most other spells aren't deadly, forcing you to be more creative in handling monsters (e.g., levitate it over a spiked pit, maybe?). This could resut in pretty interesting gameplay, if done well.

[Rizwan]

It would be better to leave race, religion and cultural slurs out of these discussions. Lets have nice clean discussions without the indiscriminate insults

why don't we have people crying "Allah Ackbar" and trying to nuke Washington over it? ... what do I have to do, grow a three-foot beard and wear a turban before they take me seriously?