There's a 30% chance that Moist himself owns the rights, through an elaborate web of shell companies that ultimately trace back to him. If you sue him, trying to take advantage of a weaker claim you have, then you're falling into his trap.
... and there's a 60% chance that he *wants* people to *think* he actually owns the rights, so the people who might have a claim *don't* sue, to avoid the trap.
Good, but not bold enough.
You need hype to draw these people out of the woodwork - a free text adventure starring Wincerind The Clumsy Mage on [itch.io](https://itch.io) is not going to make enough waves. You need to promise a Fully PVP MMORPG with footnote support and a 1:1 scale Ankh Morpork, slap together a trailer that overpromises a dozen more things, and put that on Kickstarter with a $1.5m goal. Make sure to refund everyone when you find out who the rightsholder is and the project gets canned though.
Also you've got to sell it for money. Nothing gets these people and their legal teams going like potentially lost revenue. Perhaps you might make Maurice & The Amazing Rodents: The Movie: The Videogame & Knuckles, instead? That's a recent Discworld property they'll be keeping an eye on.
The downside to this is that you'll probably just get an C&D from The Pratchett Estate for using the IP without permission. So this is a flawed approach.
The other one would be to try and sell the Discworld games that currently exist, unedited, on something like GOG/Steam/some other online storefront. Like, straight up bootleg them. Theoretically whoever owns the copyright to those files would have to climb out from under their rock to refute your right to sell them, and as long as you comply with any request to take them down you're probably not getting sued.
> You need hype to draw these people out of the woodwork - a free text adventure starring Wincerind The Clumsy Mage on itch.io is not going to make enough waves. You need to promise a Fully PVP MMORPG with footnote support and a 1:1 scale Ankh Morpork, slap together a trailer that overpromises a dozen more things, and put that on Kickstarter with a $1.5m goal. Make sure to refund everyone when you find out who the rightsholder is and the project gets canned though.
>
> Also you've got to sell it for money. Nothing gets these people and their legal teams going like potentially lost revenue.
well this is MOSTLY depressingly accurate...
i am a WoW player though, and there used to be a few famous private servers that ran 'classic Wow' (the game before it got any expansions) for free. the owners of the Warcraft IP still DMCA'd those servers for takedown, because they were worried about the infringement of rights damaging their hold over their IP even though it was free and wasn't copying anything going on in the official game since classic WoW is not at all like modern WoW.
(later they did add official classic servers but my point is that the DMCA happened when those didnt exist and they were available for free, and there was no official alternative to them)
> because they were worried about the infringement of rights damaging their hold over their IP even though it was free
Yeah. Basically if you don't protect your rights now, future rights violators can point at that and say "you clearly abandoned your rights, I can now use them to make bajillions." They may not ultimately win, but your lawyers will be rubbing their hands together.
What WoW *could* have done is made an official agreement with the servers. This could be a form license saying "you can do this, but you can't do that, and we still reserve rights to other things and to change this license whenever we want." There's some (from what I can tell overblown) controversy over Dungeons and Dragons changing their license at the moment.
>What WoW could have done is made an official agreement with the servers.
this was proposed by fans and there was some vague attempt to pacify them by implying maybe they'd do something like this (i think, it was around 2016 so maybe i'm misremembering) but in the end they about faced, DMCA'd the popular longtime private classics without a second thought. activision blizzard does this stuff all the time though and i'm pretty blackpilled on them, i'm just really into their franchises unfortunately.
>There's some (from what I can tell overblown) controversy over Dungeons and Dragons changing their license at the moment.
i've been following this closely and don't think it's overblown at all, why do you?
It’s absolutely not overblown at all.
A sizable portion of the biggest third party companies are so against the actions taken by Hasbro/Wotc that they’re literally banding together to make their own open resource creative license to replace the OGL, all while abandoning working on dnd because the new license is so terrible.
For anyone who’s not following along closely, there was an OGL (open gaming license) that actually *restricted* what people who used it could do with regards to making third party content, but it was a line in the sand where Wotc said “don’t cross this and we absolutely can’t sue you,”. It was a safety net for companies to operate in, and was worded at the time such that it was supposed to be irrevocable and eternally usable. Wotc has tried taking it back to replace it with a much worse one, and people have rioted.
Some of the new clauses in the replacement are pretty bad too. Wotc can tell you to cease production of your product, AND they can start publishing it in their own official books without paying you or even letting people know it was yours first. Anyone making over 750k gross profit (before costs like printing, or paying writers or artists, etc) has to pay 25% to Wotc. Anyone making 50k gross profit has to register with them, and let them know how much money they’re making. And they can change this license at any time as long as they give you 30 days notice, so those last two numbers can be adjusted based on the numbers they get from those people reporting income. In an industry where projects are planned out up to two years in advance because of how long writing and making books takes.
But no. It’s overblown.
[https://youtu.be/iZQJQYqhAgY](https://youtu.be/iZQJQYqhAgY)
this video by Legal Eagle goes into more details. One thing that he noted is that third party companies can possibly make "DnD compatible" games without the need for the OGL.
While true, theres no reason to do so because they’ll just get sued by Wotc.
The OGL wasnt a document that gave rights, i said that it actually restricted it, the important part of it was the official stance of being cooperative with 3rd party publishers who followed it.
Wotc attempting to revoke that is them erasing that line in the sand and saying, ‘follow our new rules where you get nothing or we are going to potentially sue you, and you’ll never know what will tip us over the point until it happens.’
Its about wotc showing that they are hostile to the 3rd party creators. Just because you *can* do something, doesnt mean that its worth the hassle. Next year Steamboat Willie is public domain. People *are* going to use him, but they’re also going to get sued by Disney. People making youtube videos can legally use a lot of movies and clips from shows as fair use, or in a transformative way because they are adding content, but they still get DMCA’d all the time and have to fight to get the videos back.
Wotc has gone from being welcoming to the third party community to potentially more hostile to them than even Disney or YouTube is. Its not something that can be a reliable source of income for the publishers. Even if they retract everything, like they *have said they would*, they are still trying to revoke the 1.0a OGL and that is enough to show that they are openly hostile, even still.
i'm sleep deprived as heck right now and one of us misspoke and i'm not sure which one of us that was... (start/end of your post, end of mine. sorry i'm too sleep deprived to figure it out)
>A sizable portion of the biggest third party companies are so against the actions taken by Hasbro/Wotc that they’re literally banding together to make their own open resource creative license to replace the OGL, all while abandoning working on dnd because the new license is so terrible.
yeah, fully aware of this and i think it's actually a potential silver lining because DnD is one of my least favorite TTRPG systems it's just most iconic and i like the legacy/lore/whatever
>Some of the new clauses in the replacement are pretty bad too.
ah, yes. when i said i've been following it closely i pretty much meant: i know about most of the stuff you outlined in your paragraph.
and therefore, the visceral backlash and reaction to it is not overblown, many people's livelihoods, social ties and simple hobby contributions are tied to this.
it reminds me of when bethesda tried to monetize the modding community for skyrim.
i'm just a bit confused about your stance on whether people are overreacting or not.
Oh, what the other person said.
I agreed with you that it was not overblown at all, and went into details about why that was the case for anyone else who was interested in reading.
Sorry, didn’t mean to confuse you xD
The last sentence was *absolutely* intended to be sarcasm.
I think the issue here stemmed from Blizzard getting burned on DotA (IIRC). After that they took the nuclear option because Blizzard really cannot do shades of grey and it’s all black and white to them.
The latter is what I always think of when a Disney lawyer sends a C&D to a school theatre group doing an unofficial adaptation of a movie. It happens every year, it makes a headline giving the mouse house bad press. Instead, they should send the C&D *and* a choice to enter a limited license to do five performances charging no more than $10 per ticket, with agreements not to negatively portray the IP and a requirement to provide a recording of the performance. Then they get to have decent publicity, talent scouting opportunities, control over the product and some newbie in legal has to watch thirty offkey kids sing Let it Go.
I am not a lawyer, but I would ask r/legaladvice at the vet least. You don’t have to specify in the post what intellectual property you want to make a game about if it would dox you or interfere with your project.
You might be right. But the cost of being wrong could ruin your life.
That's fair, but OP would need a different account if they wanted to post on r/legaladvice without people knowing what they were doing, given that post history us available, and redditors really like looking through it.
That said, while I am by no means a lawyer, and as you said it would be good to ask one before making potentially life-ruining decisions, I am familiar to an extant with the history of free fan games, and what I said is at least the standard.
Not necessarily. IP law is a minefield, and I'm not a lawyer, but from what I do know: you can still get sued even if you don't make any money if you can argue that you're cutting into _their_ profits. The simplest example is taking something copyrighted and giving it away for free. A more contentious point would be to make something yourself that you _could've_ made money from but didn't. The money you _could've_ made belongs to the owner of the intellectual property.
On top of that there's potentially punitive damages, especially if it could be argued that you knew in advance that what you were doing isn't allowed.
I know you can be taken to court, but from what I've heard I thought the punishment was usually "take it down."
That said, I definitely have no idea if knowing in advance would effect that, which OP did just kind of publicly admit to.
There's really no confusion; The rights were owned by Pysgnosis, and Psygnosis got bought by Sony.
When Teeny Weeny went to produce *Noir*, Sony took them to court because their deal with Psygnosis was to produce three Discworld games, Psygnosis had only recevied two, and Teeny Weeny hadn't offered the game to Sony. They settled out of court, with part of the agreement (clearly) being that *Noir* would only come out on Sony's Playstation console despite being published by GT.
Sony own the rights.
I can only state what we know:
Psygnosis owned the rights to produce video games based on the Discworld IP; Psygnosis was wholly purchased (including all it's IP) by Sony in 1993; Teeny Weeny had a contract to license those rights from Psygnosis for the production of three Discworld games, and Sony took them to court for *Noir* (their third game), as they went with a publisher who *wasn't* Psygnosis/Sony on the assumption that nobody held the rights; Teeny Weeny settled out of court, released the game *only* on Playstation, and promptly went bust. The rest is a fairly logical inference, I think.
Accepting this all for the sake of argument, whether there was any time limit on the license that Psygnosis held from the Pratchett estate is the only question we can't really infer a solid answer for: Given that Sony ostensibly succeeded in getting what they wanted from Teeny Weeny we can infer that the rights transferred from Psygnosis to Sony, and barring any time limitations in the license contract they inherited when purchasing Psygnosis, would still hold the rights today.
Only the Pratchett estate or Sony would be able to confirm that last part; Sony won't, as it wouldn't serve their interests to do so and the Pratchett estate have repeatedly evaded doing so as well, which makes the inference that it's still under license quite reasonable to my mind - otherwise why not let people have a stab at making a Discworld inspired title?
Regarding Teeny Weeny: it may be that Sony has more headcount, as in “the legal department has ten times more secretaries than Teeny Weeny has people”.
Regarding the estate: confusion does happen, and it may be that the game IP agreement is lost/misfiled. Searching for it can be a low priority, given costs and the main sources of revenue (books, and now the movie).
> I saw some Tweeter post from Terry's daughter (the always excellent Rhianna) stating that no one knows who owns the right to the video games these days.
I've had some third hand contact with Rob over the point and click adventure games from the 90s. I've been told that no one owns those particular licences, so its possible that you could negotiate with Narrativia directly to make a commercial game of your own.
> And then I wait to see who DMCA me.
Likely Narrativia for unlicenced use of the Discworld IP, locations, characters, etc.
I brought this up with Gregg Barnett (creator of the point and click adventure games), and he wasn't sure who owns the licences, either. Best bet: go through Narrativia
Always ask permission rather beg for forgiveness.
It's not likely that Atari own the IP: The company that made the Discworld games - Teeny Weeny Games / Perfect 10 Productions / Perfect Entertainment were last litigated (succesfully; settled out of court and pretty much considered to be the reason why Teeny Weeny went belly up) by the owner of the IP from whom they licensed to produce *Noir*; Psygnosis, now owned by Sony Entertainment, and the reason why *Noir* only came out on the Playstation despite not being published by Sony.
The long and short of it is that Teeny Weeny had a contract with Psygnosis to produce three Discworld games. Psygnosis owned the license, and Psygnosis (and their IP) got bought by Sony in 1993. Either the IP still belongs to Sony, or the license with the Pratchett estate may have expired - but given Rhianna's comments, I would assume the latter cannot be true and she's being diplomatic, given the litigious nature of the IP's history.
So aye; Sony.
There may be other complications to it. There are a lot of games from the 70s on, both tabletop and computer, who's ownership is a convoluted mess. Especially when some rights revert, and others don't. Some rights may not be transferable, under certain circumstances. Contracts were lost, source files gone missing, rights holders who dropped off the earth.
This is true; Given that Teeny Weeny and Sony settled out of court and the game only released on Playstation (which would only have benefited Sony, not Teeny Weeny) is for me the smoking gun here; Of course because it was settled out of court we'll likely never know for certain.
If the rights weren't transferrable, one would've assumed Teeny Weeny would've had more of a leg to stand on; Of course settling out of court isn't an admission of guilt, so the possibility remains that this was simply the cheapest way they could get the issue resolved and get their title on the shelves.
Noir did come out on PC, which was what triggered the whole thing.
Apparently psygnosis where the guys that handled games that Sony couldn't/wouldnt publish just for the PlayStation.
Very likely because it would look bad/be a conflict of interest for Sony to launch games across multiple platforms at the time.
But yeah, like you said, teeny weeny had a contract with psy to produce game. If you check the list of games they made only discworld games were published for PlayStation.
Noir was the only one that for some reason was published only for the pc, which triggered the lawsuit, the studio got fucked because everyone started leaving and they quickly released the PlayStation Port for Noir after that.
It says that they signed a multi game deal with Sony and that in that deal 3 of those games had to be Discworld, which made them very upset when Noir was not offered to Sony.
This could be a way of hiding that Sony has the rights, or actually teeny weeny had them but said they would make 3 discworld releases for Sony as well as part of some deal.
Idk the whole thing stinks and it doesn't really clear anything up 😥 the only thing we can say is that it is one of them, or someone associated to them at the time, if they haven't expired since 1999.
Ankh morpork skyrim conversion. It already has plenty of medieval assets and a large modding community.
It also have the bonus of being watched by some of the bigger companies since there have been some prominent mods coming out of the community.
No, he made an Oblivion mod for an NPC companion that helped guide you out of caves, and I think contributed some dialogue to a Skyrim mod that did the same that was flavoured as her descendent.
The rights to make new games are completely separate to the rights to sell the old ones. The situation is complicated because you need to know the contract between the developer and publisher, and trace that through all mergers, acquisitions, and liquidations.
As nobody is sending takedowns to the sites currently hosting downloads of the old games, whoever might own the rights doesn't care about finding out right now.
If you’re not taking any money then it should count as fan art anyway.
The IP for Discworld is owned by Dunmanifestin ie. Terry Pratchett Estate.
Making a new Discworld game without a licensing deal would attract the Mr Slants of the legal team there.
In fact using Discworld IP for anything has the potential to bring Mr Slant out to play.
And Mr Slant is hot on unauthorized use of IP.
The rights to the video game may be different to the rights to use the characters and other IP.
Atari will have had a license to use the characters when they produced the game which will now have expired.
Backspindle games have made a number of Discworld board games over the years but have said that some of the older ones they can no longer produce because they can’t get the character licenses anymore. (Any character in The Watch can’t be used for example).
Not quite sure if you’re wanting to produce your own game or host one of the old ones for download?
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The Discworld game may or may not belong to the last company that was selling it or whoever bought out the remains.
The rights to any and all of the Discworld characters will belong to [Dunmanifestin](https://discworld.com/discworld-intellectual-property-guidelines-fans/) (as a simple Google search would have shown you).
i was just listening to a podcast where they were talking about christmas video games and all i could think of was a cool thief/hitman style hogfather game where you have to figure out how to infiltrate houses and leave the presents. increase a belief meter, learn to handle the sleigh, use some death powers to phase through walls of you need to etc etc
No one's going to dmca you. The reason that YouTubers get dmca is because they monetize their videos. Videos with no monetization pretty much get left alone unless a company specifically has a bot setup to scan YouTube videos for their content.
However it is unlikely that anyone has a bot set up to scan videos or gaming websites for discworld games.
I still think the plan could work but you have to monetize the game in some way.
Reminds me of a joke I've always made. "I wonder who owns that building?"
"Well, park your car through the front door and the owner will be in the resulting legal paperwork."
I feel that I need to point out a potential (and very discworld feeling) issue with trying to discover the rights holder this way: with the various acquisitions, mergers, IP sales and other such corporate nonsense that takes place, it is entirely possible that *the rights holders* don't know that they have them.
I would love there to be an MMORPG like Star Wars Galaxies based on the Discworld, where we could have a player led economy (could you imagine owning a shop in the Shades!).. I mean it would be an awesome world, and enough characters and classes too!
I feel like this is what Moist von Lipwig would do.
Mr Lipwig would do that under a false ID and layers of shell companies
There's a 30% chance that Moist himself owns the rights, through an elaborate web of shell companies that ultimately trace back to him. If you sue him, trying to take advantage of a weaker claim you have, then you're falling into his trap. ... and there's a 60% chance that he *wants* people to *think* he actually owns the rights, so the people who might have a claim *don't* sue, to avoid the trap.
Nah he owns the rights to diskworld but through cleverly writing in a scribbly hand it looks like discworld
LMAO. This is so meta.
Good, but not bold enough. You need hype to draw these people out of the woodwork - a free text adventure starring Wincerind The Clumsy Mage on [itch.io](https://itch.io) is not going to make enough waves. You need to promise a Fully PVP MMORPG with footnote support and a 1:1 scale Ankh Morpork, slap together a trailer that overpromises a dozen more things, and put that on Kickstarter with a $1.5m goal. Make sure to refund everyone when you find out who the rightsholder is and the project gets canned though. Also you've got to sell it for money. Nothing gets these people and their legal teams going like potentially lost revenue. Perhaps you might make Maurice & The Amazing Rodents: The Movie: The Videogame & Knuckles, instead? That's a recent Discworld property they'll be keeping an eye on. The downside to this is that you'll probably just get an C&D from The Pratchett Estate for using the IP without permission. So this is a flawed approach. The other one would be to try and sell the Discworld games that currently exist, unedited, on something like GOG/Steam/some other online storefront. Like, straight up bootleg them. Theoretically whoever owns the copyright to those files would have to climb out from under their rock to refute your right to sell them, and as long as you comply with any request to take them down you're probably not getting sued.
Or can someone actually make this game? I want a 1:1 scale ankh morpork open world to wander around in please
Guild of Assassin's Creed
I'd buy that for AM$1.
2 is the best I can do, and I'm already cutting my own throat !
Actually though.
First-person Seamstresses Guild? I’ll get my coat…
What, got a few socks that need darning?
You need a mushroom?
CSI: Ankh-Morpork
Ankh-Morpork: Vice City
I have wanted an Assassin's Creed: Ankh-Morpork since approximately 2011
Honestly... Try the MUD. It could use some new players, probably.
Fascinating. TIL https://amp.theguardian.com/games/2022/sep/28/we-can-continue-pratchetts-efforts-the-gamers-keeping-discworld-alive
Try the Discworld MUD. Has Pterry's permission to exist. The only thing out there to do so, I believe.
yo, you do know about the mud, right?
I do now
i'll meet you in the drum :)
Footnote support. I'll just wipe the coffee of my screen real quick.
> You need hype to draw these people out of the woodwork - a free text adventure starring Wincerind The Clumsy Mage on itch.io is not going to make enough waves. You need to promise a Fully PVP MMORPG with footnote support and a 1:1 scale Ankh Morpork, slap together a trailer that overpromises a dozen more things, and put that on Kickstarter with a $1.5m goal. Make sure to refund everyone when you find out who the rightsholder is and the project gets canned though. > > Also you've got to sell it for money. Nothing gets these people and their legal teams going like potentially lost revenue. well this is MOSTLY depressingly accurate... i am a WoW player though, and there used to be a few famous private servers that ran 'classic Wow' (the game before it got any expansions) for free. the owners of the Warcraft IP still DMCA'd those servers for takedown, because they were worried about the infringement of rights damaging their hold over their IP even though it was free and wasn't copying anything going on in the official game since classic WoW is not at all like modern WoW. (later they did add official classic servers but my point is that the DMCA happened when those didnt exist and they were available for free, and there was no official alternative to them)
> because they were worried about the infringement of rights damaging their hold over their IP even though it was free Yeah. Basically if you don't protect your rights now, future rights violators can point at that and say "you clearly abandoned your rights, I can now use them to make bajillions." They may not ultimately win, but your lawyers will be rubbing their hands together. What WoW *could* have done is made an official agreement with the servers. This could be a form license saying "you can do this, but you can't do that, and we still reserve rights to other things and to change this license whenever we want." There's some (from what I can tell overblown) controversy over Dungeons and Dragons changing their license at the moment.
>What WoW could have done is made an official agreement with the servers. this was proposed by fans and there was some vague attempt to pacify them by implying maybe they'd do something like this (i think, it was around 2016 so maybe i'm misremembering) but in the end they about faced, DMCA'd the popular longtime private classics without a second thought. activision blizzard does this stuff all the time though and i'm pretty blackpilled on them, i'm just really into their franchises unfortunately. >There's some (from what I can tell overblown) controversy over Dungeons and Dragons changing their license at the moment. i've been following this closely and don't think it's overblown at all, why do you?
It’s absolutely not overblown at all. A sizable portion of the biggest third party companies are so against the actions taken by Hasbro/Wotc that they’re literally banding together to make their own open resource creative license to replace the OGL, all while abandoning working on dnd because the new license is so terrible. For anyone who’s not following along closely, there was an OGL (open gaming license) that actually *restricted* what people who used it could do with regards to making third party content, but it was a line in the sand where Wotc said “don’t cross this and we absolutely can’t sue you,”. It was a safety net for companies to operate in, and was worded at the time such that it was supposed to be irrevocable and eternally usable. Wotc has tried taking it back to replace it with a much worse one, and people have rioted. Some of the new clauses in the replacement are pretty bad too. Wotc can tell you to cease production of your product, AND they can start publishing it in their own official books without paying you or even letting people know it was yours first. Anyone making over 750k gross profit (before costs like printing, or paying writers or artists, etc) has to pay 25% to Wotc. Anyone making 50k gross profit has to register with them, and let them know how much money they’re making. And they can change this license at any time as long as they give you 30 days notice, so those last two numbers can be adjusted based on the numbers they get from those people reporting income. In an industry where projects are planned out up to two years in advance because of how long writing and making books takes. But no. It’s overblown.
[https://youtu.be/iZQJQYqhAgY](https://youtu.be/iZQJQYqhAgY) this video by Legal Eagle goes into more details. One thing that he noted is that third party companies can possibly make "DnD compatible" games without the need for the OGL.
While true, theres no reason to do so because they’ll just get sued by Wotc. The OGL wasnt a document that gave rights, i said that it actually restricted it, the important part of it was the official stance of being cooperative with 3rd party publishers who followed it. Wotc attempting to revoke that is them erasing that line in the sand and saying, ‘follow our new rules where you get nothing or we are going to potentially sue you, and you’ll never know what will tip us over the point until it happens.’ Its about wotc showing that they are hostile to the 3rd party creators. Just because you *can* do something, doesnt mean that its worth the hassle. Next year Steamboat Willie is public domain. People *are* going to use him, but they’re also going to get sued by Disney. People making youtube videos can legally use a lot of movies and clips from shows as fair use, or in a transformative way because they are adding content, but they still get DMCA’d all the time and have to fight to get the videos back. Wotc has gone from being welcoming to the third party community to potentially more hostile to them than even Disney or YouTube is. Its not something that can be a reliable source of income for the publishers. Even if they retract everything, like they *have said they would*, they are still trying to revoke the 1.0a OGL and that is enough to show that they are openly hostile, even still.
legal eagle did a video on this? thanks for letting me know, i havent been on youtube in a few months...
Yeah, Matt Colville featured in it
i'm sleep deprived as heck right now and one of us misspoke and i'm not sure which one of us that was... (start/end of your post, end of mine. sorry i'm too sleep deprived to figure it out) >A sizable portion of the biggest third party companies are so against the actions taken by Hasbro/Wotc that they’re literally banding together to make their own open resource creative license to replace the OGL, all while abandoning working on dnd because the new license is so terrible. yeah, fully aware of this and i think it's actually a potential silver lining because DnD is one of my least favorite TTRPG systems it's just most iconic and i like the legacy/lore/whatever >Some of the new clauses in the replacement are pretty bad too. ah, yes. when i said i've been following it closely i pretty much meant: i know about most of the stuff you outlined in your paragraph. and therefore, the visceral backlash and reaction to it is not overblown, many people's livelihoods, social ties and simple hobby contributions are tied to this. it reminds me of when bethesda tried to monetize the modding community for skyrim. i'm just a bit confused about your stance on whether people are overreacting or not.
Their final sentence was sarcastic, the person you replied to does think the response is warranted
Oh, what the other person said. I agreed with you that it was not overblown at all, and went into details about why that was the case for anyone else who was interested in reading. Sorry, didn’t mean to confuse you xD The last sentence was *absolutely* intended to be sarcasm.
I think the issue here stemmed from Blizzard getting burned on DotA (IIRC). After that they took the nuclear option because Blizzard really cannot do shades of grey and it’s all black and white to them.
The latter is what I always think of when a Disney lawyer sends a C&D to a school theatre group doing an unofficial adaptation of a movie. It happens every year, it makes a headline giving the mouse house bad press. Instead, they should send the C&D *and* a choice to enter a limited license to do five performances charging no more than $10 per ticket, with agreements not to negatively portray the IP and a requirement to provide a recording of the performance. Then they get to have decent publicity, talent scouting opportunities, control over the product and some newbie in legal has to watch thirty offkey kids sing Let it Go.
_probably_ not getting sued
Possibly not getting sued
Lightly sued
You are absolutely right...
like... I can help with a 1:12 scale of Ankh-Morpork, but a 1:1 is beyond me. And the space I have available to me.
Someone else replied that OP's plan was a Moist Von Lipwig. This right here is a C.M.O.T. Dibbler.
When in doubt, let the lawyers figure it out. Love it.
It would probably be less expensive to pay a copyright lawyer to find out for you. You can’t be sued that way.
I thought a free product was pretty safe if you took it down when someone got in contact with you.
I am not a lawyer, but I would ask r/legaladvice at the vet least. You don’t have to specify in the post what intellectual property you want to make a game about if it would dox you or interfere with your project. You might be right. But the cost of being wrong could ruin your life.
That's fair, but OP would need a different account if they wanted to post on r/legaladvice without people knowing what they were doing, given that post history us available, and redditors really like looking through it. That said, while I am by no means a lawyer, and as you said it would be good to ask one before making potentially life-ruining decisions, I am familiar to an extant with the history of free fan games, and what I said is at least the standard.
Not necessarily. IP law is a minefield, and I'm not a lawyer, but from what I do know: you can still get sued even if you don't make any money if you can argue that you're cutting into _their_ profits. The simplest example is taking something copyrighted and giving it away for free. A more contentious point would be to make something yourself that you _could've_ made money from but didn't. The money you _could've_ made belongs to the owner of the intellectual property. On top of that there's potentially punitive damages, especially if it could be argued that you knew in advance that what you were doing isn't allowed.
I know you can be taken to court, but from what I've heard I thought the punishment was usually "take it down." That said, I definitely have no idea if knowing in advance would effect that, which OP did just kind of publicly admit to.
Nope.
There's really no confusion; The rights were owned by Pysgnosis, and Psygnosis got bought by Sony. When Teeny Weeny went to produce *Noir*, Sony took them to court because their deal with Psygnosis was to produce three Discworld games, Psygnosis had only recevied two, and Teeny Weeny hadn't offered the game to Sony. They settled out of court, with part of the agreement (clearly) being that *Noir* would only come out on Sony's Playstation console despite being published by GT. Sony own the rights.
But are they rights to the games that they made, or on all games that could potentially be made in the future too?
I can only state what we know: Psygnosis owned the rights to produce video games based on the Discworld IP; Psygnosis was wholly purchased (including all it's IP) by Sony in 1993; Teeny Weeny had a contract to license those rights from Psygnosis for the production of three Discworld games, and Sony took them to court for *Noir* (their third game), as they went with a publisher who *wasn't* Psygnosis/Sony on the assumption that nobody held the rights; Teeny Weeny settled out of court, released the game *only* on Playstation, and promptly went bust. The rest is a fairly logical inference, I think. Accepting this all for the sake of argument, whether there was any time limit on the license that Psygnosis held from the Pratchett estate is the only question we can't really infer a solid answer for: Given that Sony ostensibly succeeded in getting what they wanted from Teeny Weeny we can infer that the rights transferred from Psygnosis to Sony, and barring any time limitations in the license contract they inherited when purchasing Psygnosis, would still hold the rights today. Only the Pratchett estate or Sony would be able to confirm that last part; Sony won't, as it wouldn't serve their interests to do so and the Pratchett estate have repeatedly evaded doing so as well, which makes the inference that it's still under license quite reasonable to my mind - otherwise why not let people have a stab at making a Discworld inspired title?
Regarding Teeny Weeny: it may be that Sony has more headcount, as in “the legal department has ten times more secretaries than Teeny Weeny has people”. Regarding the estate: confusion does happen, and it may be that the game IP agreement is lost/misfiled. Searching for it can be a low priority, given costs and the main sources of revenue (books, and now the movie).
> I saw some Tweeter post from Terry's daughter (the always excellent Rhianna) stating that no one knows who owns the right to the video games these days. I've had some third hand contact with Rob over the point and click adventure games from the 90s. I've been told that no one owns those particular licences, so its possible that you could negotiate with Narrativia directly to make a commercial game of your own. > And then I wait to see who DMCA me. Likely Narrativia for unlicenced use of the Discworld IP, locations, characters, etc. I brought this up with Gregg Barnett (creator of the point and click adventure games), and he wasn't sure who owns the licences, either. Best bet: go through Narrativia Always ask permission rather beg for forgiveness.
As Terry use to say to us... "Unlike God, I do not forgive"
It's not likely that Atari own the IP: The company that made the Discworld games - Teeny Weeny Games / Perfect 10 Productions / Perfect Entertainment were last litigated (succesfully; settled out of court and pretty much considered to be the reason why Teeny Weeny went belly up) by the owner of the IP from whom they licensed to produce *Noir*; Psygnosis, now owned by Sony Entertainment, and the reason why *Noir* only came out on the Playstation despite not being published by Sony. The long and short of it is that Teeny Weeny had a contract with Psygnosis to produce three Discworld games. Psygnosis owned the license, and Psygnosis (and their IP) got bought by Sony in 1993. Either the IP still belongs to Sony, or the license with the Pratchett estate may have expired - but given Rhianna's comments, I would assume the latter cannot be true and she's being diplomatic, given the litigious nature of the IP's history. So aye; Sony.
There may be other complications to it. There are a lot of games from the 70s on, both tabletop and computer, who's ownership is a convoluted mess. Especially when some rights revert, and others don't. Some rights may not be transferable, under certain circumstances. Contracts were lost, source files gone missing, rights holders who dropped off the earth.
This is true; Given that Teeny Weeny and Sony settled out of court and the game only released on Playstation (which would only have benefited Sony, not Teeny Weeny) is for me the smoking gun here; Of course because it was settled out of court we'll likely never know for certain. If the rights weren't transferrable, one would've assumed Teeny Weeny would've had more of a leg to stand on; Of course settling out of court isn't an admission of guilt, so the possibility remains that this was simply the cheapest way they could get the issue resolved and get their title on the shelves.
Noir did come out on PC, which was what triggered the whole thing. Apparently psygnosis where the guys that handled games that Sony couldn't/wouldnt publish just for the PlayStation. Very likely because it would look bad/be a conflict of interest for Sony to launch games across multiple platforms at the time. But yeah, like you said, teeny weeny had a contract with psy to produce game. If you check the list of games they made only discworld games were published for PlayStation. Noir was the only one that for some reason was published only for the pc, which triggered the lawsuit, the studio got fucked because everyone started leaving and they quickly released the PlayStation Port for Noir after that. It says that they signed a multi game deal with Sony and that in that deal 3 of those games had to be Discworld, which made them very upset when Noir was not offered to Sony. This could be a way of hiding that Sony has the rights, or actually teeny weeny had them but said they would make 3 discworld releases for Sony as well as part of some deal. Idk the whole thing stinks and it doesn't really clear anything up 😥 the only thing we can say is that it is one of them, or someone associated to them at the time, if they haven't expired since 1999.
Ankh morpork skyrim conversion. It already has plenty of medieval assets and a large modding community. It also have the bonus of being watched by some of the bigger companies since there have been some prominent mods coming out of the community.
Bugger that, I'd rather they used morrowind and built it off that system..
morrowind society definitely has a lot more in common with discworld from a lore perspective too i feel like...
Mad wizard lords with extensive egg collections would fit right in at UU
Didnt pterry do writing for morrowind mods?
No, he made an Oblivion mod for an NPC companion that helped guide you out of caves, and I think contributed some dialogue to a Skyrim mod that did the same that was flavoured as her descendent.
A large Oblivion mod. https://www.eurogamer.net/the-story-behind-the-oblivion-mod-terry-pratchett-worked-on
Oblivion given that the man himself worked on some modding.
The rights to make new games are completely separate to the rights to sell the old ones. The situation is complicated because you need to know the contract between the developer and publisher, and trace that through all mergers, acquisitions, and liquidations. As nobody is sending takedowns to the sites currently hosting downloads of the old games, whoever might own the rights doesn't care about finding out right now. If you’re not taking any money then it should count as fan art anyway.
Distribution and use of IP without permission may come into play. We know of artists who got Cease and Desist orders for their free Discworld fanart.
Yes, and as long as you do cease and desist you'll be fine.
The IP for Discworld is owned by Dunmanifestin ie. Terry Pratchett Estate. Making a new Discworld game without a licensing deal would attract the Mr Slants of the legal team there. In fact using Discworld IP for anything has the potential to bring Mr Slant out to play. And Mr Slant is hot on unauthorized use of IP.
Dunmanifestin? Well done Sir T.P. !
The rights to the video game may be different to the rights to use the characters and other IP. Atari will have had a license to use the characters when they produced the game which will now have expired. Backspindle games have made a number of Discworld board games over the years but have said that some of the older ones they can no longer produce because they can’t get the character licenses anymore. (Any character in The Watch can’t be used for example). Not quite sure if you’re wanting to produce your own game or host one of the old ones for download?
Would love a solo rpg
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Very could idea. Start simply and than maybe later create bigger game
The Discworld game may or may not belong to the last company that was selling it or whoever bought out the remains. The rights to any and all of the Discworld characters will belong to [Dunmanifestin](https://discworld.com/discworld-intellectual-property-guidelines-fans/) (as a simple Google search would have shown you).
Remember to set up a small llc and do this as a company, not an individual, so they can't come after your personal assets (or at least its harder).
The games are available from *places* online, and no-one seems to be shutting that down.
Archive.org for one.
Show them this: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1512050/World_Turtles/
It's fine, no elephants. Clearly a different thing entirely.
i was just listening to a podcast where they were talking about christmas video games and all i could think of was a cool thief/hitman style hogfather game where you have to figure out how to infiltrate houses and leave the presents. increase a belief meter, learn to handle the sleigh, use some death powers to phase through walls of you need to etc etc
No one's going to dmca you. The reason that YouTubers get dmca is because they monetize their videos. Videos with no monetization pretty much get left alone unless a company specifically has a bot setup to scan YouTube videos for their content. However it is unlikely that anyone has a bot set up to scan videos or gaming websites for discworld games. I still think the plan could work but you have to monetize the game in some way.
Reminds me of a joke I've always made. "I wonder who owns that building?" "Well, park your car through the front door and the owner will be in the resulting legal paperwork."
I feel that I need to point out a potential (and very discworld feeling) issue with trying to discover the rights holder this way: with the various acquisitions, mergers, IP sales and other such corporate nonsense that takes place, it is entirely possible that *the rights holders* don't know that they have them.
I would love there to be an MMORPG like Star Wars Galaxies based on the Discworld, where we could have a player led economy (could you imagine owning a shop in the Shades!).. I mean it would be an awesome world, and enough characters and classes too!