The Harvest Moon Consortium

[Winterhawk99]

Intellectual property rights.

I got flamed today on a discord server about some of the things I have said on HMC about intellectual property rights. It actually kind of came out of left field. There is a person on Harrowport by the name of RogueKaz who I played with years ago on another server that did it.

I don’t really remember which server, but when I hear the name Kaz I remember we used to have a pretty good time Rping and I always thought he was a pretty cool Cat. Still think so which was why it caught me completely off guard.

It left me to introspect my own ideas about intellectual property rights and how I feel about it now. Why you ask. Because over the years people often evolve or devolve in big subjects like this as we age. So, something I may have said years ago may not be what I think now or something I said years ago may have been at a bad time in my life when I was more aggressive and may have been just spouting off when I had a good drunk on.

He used my own words against me, but I also saw how RogueKaz cherry picked what he choose to show to others. For myself. It gives me an opportunity to think about the subject and write how I feel about it now.

So, tonight instead of working on the current novel I’m going to write this article.

I was pretty clueless about Intellectual property rights until 2009. By that time, I owned my own persistent world and was working with it. The custom content wars broke out. Barry1066 the leader of the CEP was stripping other people’s work on the vault and putting it into CEP without contacting them or even mentioning the authors in CEP. It started an all-out war among custom content makers about the subject of ownership.

It almost destroyed NWN as a mainstay of gaming and led to a lot of questions and not many answers. Many custom content makers flat out left the community. I was at the time an up-and-coming content maker and had just been invited into the CTP group. I tried to basically stay out of it until something happened that put me smack into the middle of it.

I had an override Hak pack of custom content. A woman by the name of Sharona Curves stole some models that Borden Ha’elven made for me. I had to go to the NWN vault owner and protest about it for Borden. Sharona took the custom content down and that was the end of it.

Since that time, I have shown not so much by words by doing my philosophy about custom content. All the stories that the Winterwolf and the Bardic Circle on this forum that I and Rdjparadis transferred from the original Bioware forums have the author’s name at the bottom or top if it was not us. You can go there and look for yourself.

As far as the D&D games I put on the forums I clearly state who the Dm and players are. We have an agreement that the Dm is the screenwriter/director and the players are the authors. And they are on the very first posting.

This is the post for the Kozakuran campaign:

Several months ago, the server Adalee to which I like to play went down until the end of june to go from Beta to a standardized persistent world. I started up a Kozakura pnp campaign once a week for 4 hours to help folk bide the time on discord.

Last week I asked them if I could put their adventures into storybook form. They agreed and I will be posting it here. I am not the Author or authors of these stories. It's my players that decide how the plots go. I just referee the chaotic mess (chuckle) They are the Authors I'm just a choreographer and ghost writer making an outline for them to tell their stories.

We currently have Three player/Authors (guys if you want your real names here, I'll gladly edit this post)

1. Maxalpd playing a Fey/elven arcane archer by the name of Drasta
2. Shalvaney playing a Hengyokai mastiff from Shou-lung named Sei
3. the1kobra playing a kozakuran Kobold in the service of a spirit dragon.

The next post will be the start of their story. (I might need a few days. I am still writing a novel.) There are 3 more slots open. It's a flexible friendly game. The mad dm isn't really strict on the rules just yet because of the levels of the party. if you want to bump me on discord. my name there is winterhawk99.

And this is the post for She came from the Sea:

This my character in the next campaign after the Kozakura campaign. This time we are playing in the nation of Wa (similar to Japan in the Edo period rather than in the warring clans' period as Kozakura is.) Again, the author is not just me. We have our four players.

Shalvaney: Playing T'kharr a Gnoll priestess who worships the broken God Illmater
Maxpd: Playing Balan a gold dragonborn paladin who worships the north wind Bahamut
Winterhawk: Playing Mingzhu a sea spirit folk shamaness that worships the path of enlightenment
The Eye of Jom: Playing Zee Vogel a human swashbuckler and 7th heir to the diamond industries fortune

The1Kobra: He is our Dm/screenwriter an director playing all other npcs.

Again, we looked out for people’s rights.


Now comes the fuzzy part of Players stories that come directly from NWN play. When you write a story about your character it is bound to include other characters of other people. I believe it perfectly find to add them to your story but there is a boundary. When you include other people’s characters you talk about what happened from either the views of your own character or as in the third person. When you start putting words or the thoughts down of the other person’s character (in other words take that person’s character over) then you’ve crossed the boundaries of intellectual property.

Now if that other person’s character says something to your character. Yea you can write it just don’t put words in their mouth or thoughts in your head yourself. If you look at everything I have written on my player stories that’s exactly what I have always done to my knowledge. And that’s what I believe everyone should do.

If you look at my Character Brath. He was expressly made so that I could take other people’s stories and turn them into good stories. In each instance I put the player character’s name on as the author that told Brath the story. You can them all on this thread: https://www.harvestmoonconsortium.com/f ... 138&t=2864

As far as books. That’s not quite fuzzy. On all my Children of hell books including the one I’m working on I looked up all the characters I used and only put characters in of other players that authorized me too. There were a few that said no. Like a woman by the name of Maddyanne who did not want me to use her characters. She is a theater actress. So, I did not.

Thus, I have a long history (by action) of protecting intellectual property rights of others and being super conscious about other people’s work. May I have missed something by mistake. Sure, I’ve written so much over the years and undoubtably a mistake here are there is made. And as I have progressed through the years and evolved my own ideas about this subject may have changed greatly but my actions have always been one of reserve and making sure names of others are included in works.

Now I don’t know why RogueKaz has a grudge against me. I’ve always had pretty warm feelings when I hear his name. Maybe he doesn’t like my politics, Maybe I offended him or one of his friends in a review. I don’t know. But in a way I am glad he did it so I could introspect over the subject of Intellectual property rights and what exactly should be done and should not.

Thank you RogueKaz. Perhaps I have learned a few new things as I thought about it today.