How did WoTC, and I suppose TSR back in the day, avoid getting sued over this shit?

How did WoTC, and I suppose TSR back in the day, avoid getting sued over this shit?

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Why would they get sued over it?

Because they were lifted wholesale from the Corum books, written in the early 70s. They just slapped on a new name and made both body parts from the same god instead of two brother-deities.

Not everyone has an autistic shitfit if their ideas are inspiring other nerds to be creative with their friends.

>They just slapped on a new name

That's all it ever takes.

Worked on halflings, treants, mind flayers...

This is not "inspired by" this is directly copied from, right down to how if you use them together you can see into a netherworld to summon allies from. They may as well have put in the "Ring of Thauron" that makes you invisible and gives you periodic Dominate with an opposed wisdom or maybe charisma check, but turns you evil over time and tries to return to the evil deity that made it.

Yet, they still would not get sued.

>D&D steals, borrows, and is inspired by a large amount of pop culture

color me SHOCKED good sir!

A lot of authors actually gave D&D permission to use their stuff. Jack Vance, for example, allowed a lot of material to be adapted from his books, perhaps most notably with the Ioun stones and spells like Prismatic Spray and notoriously with his style of magic.

>"Ring of Thauron" that makes you invisible and gives you periodic Dominate with an opposed wisdom or maybe charisma check, but turns you evil over time and tries to return to the evil deity that made it.
Great idea, I'll add it to my loot tables immediately.

If Blizzard can avoid getting sued over their chitinous evolving alien menace, I don't see what you're upset about.
Sage, delete your thread, you should have posted this twenty years ago.

And what are you going to do about it?

Get triggered.

sue you duh

It's about that time of year.

Because they were nerds and old hippies having fun, sharing ideas and messing around with each other. Moorcock was in the center of that.

Then it became another corporate cash-cow when MTG and WOW made way more money than anyone knew what to do with and they were bought out by profit-seekers with lawyers. So now IP is suddenly a thing, because it's not about the thing in itself, but about how much money it can make someone else in yearly dividends.

Yeah, it's kind of scummy, but on the other hand it gets people talking about the "original" material that inspired the new stuff, kind of like what happened in this thread. I think it's far worse to do something like what Monte Cook's "The Strange" does and actively ENCOURAGE you to rip off of public domain literature wholesale because he can't be assed to think of his own shit.

Shannara is a blatant ripoff of Tolkien, but the names are different'ish so it's okay. Shit, user, after Pacific Rim did well another studio put out Atlantic Rim shortly thereafter.

No lawsuits.

Unless it is exactly the same, name, appearance, etc, as in you just cut-pasted that shit, like Battletech did with Macross, it's fine.

wait
mind flayers come from where?

The fact that people get triggered triggers me.

Moron, they actually included the Melnibonean pantheon of Chaos lords in one of the early Deities and Demigods books. This shit just sorta was a thing back then and these days it has been kinda grandfathered in. Just roll with it.

>"Ring of Thauron" that makes you invisible
Obviously just copied Tolkien.

In fairness, battletech did pay money to TCI Imports to license the Macross stuff. They just didn't know that TCI simply took their money and didn't actually have the authority to license the images at all...and TCI didn't tell them.

It wasn't really stealing, so much as being hobbyists who didn't how international licencing worked.

Here's a shocker for you: concepts cannot be copyrighted. If you create something, and someone creates their own version of it, you can only sue them if you can prove that the person who copied you is intentionally trying to mislead people into thinking they are you. Which is why the "Ring of Thauron" is totally fine, so long as they aren't intentionally trying to sell their product as 'Lord of the Rings.' In fact, it might be specially protected under the parody laws.

>If Blizzard can avoid getting sued over their chitinous evolving alien menace
Tyranids stole more from Zerg than Zerg stole from Tyranids.
Do you even know what the nids looked like before StarCraft? They weren't all serpentine and insectile like they are now.

If you use something without permission from the Creator of the thing, it's stealing. Now and forever. Donut try and defend thieves, user.

It's intellectual property violation, which is a different thing from stealing. Don't conflate words. It isn't stealing any more than murder is stealing because you "stole" someone's life, or speeding is stealing because you "stole" some of the police officer's time that he had to use pulling you over.

Both were a result of Alien.

Cthulhu mythos.

Found the media thief. Oh, I'm sorry, 'pirate'. I hope Trump has the lot of your kind droned.

>WotC is stealing shit, being a general asshole and getting away with it wholesale
...and you are surprised why?

>being assblasted about "pirates"
>on Veeky Forums

look I get that it's hip and contrarian to be an uptight jackass these days but maybe you should chill

You changing the definition of words does not make it so. I never said that intellectual property violation wasn't wrong, hence the "violation" part, but it isn't stealing.

Conflating it with stealing is disingenuous, which I'm assuming is deliberate to add credence to your position. It's like if I said that not donating your entire net worth to charity is MURDER because if you did you would save some lives, and by not saving lives you're implicitly taking them, thus by not getting up from the computer right now, selling everything you own, and donating it to charity, you're a MURDERER because you're deliberately ending lives.

So do you see now why redefining words is something you shouldn't do yet, you FUCKING MURDERER?

True enough, but Tyranids still acquired scythe limbs distinctly reminiscent of Zerglings, Hydralisks, and Ultralisks when before they actually physically held swords.

Though now they've doubled back from that particular aesthetic and do both weaponized limbs and grasping limbs with weapons.

Well you can't get sued over lifting the Cthulhu mythos since it's mostly public domain to begin with.

That's like 80% of the reason why there are so many Lovecraft-inspired games and stuff.

Yes. Roleplaying games, and fantasy novels live in symbiosis. Generally speaking those who read fantasy stuff will be inclined to enjoy roleplaying games, while most roleplaying games inspire (some players) to check out the inspirational material, or other works of that genre.

>Well you can't get sued over lifting the Cthulhu mythos since it's mostly public domain to begin with.

Except for resembling Cthulhu in appearance, Mind Flayers aren't really inspired by him, anyway. Sure, they're weird and alien, but in a completely different way from the Big Guy.

Their resemblance is also only partially intentional...Gygax based them off of a cover painting for a book, The Burrowers Beneath by Brian Lumley (pic). Burrowers was steeped in Lovecraftian lore, of course, but I don't think Gygax intentionally copied Lovecraft so much as a someone else who was already riffing Lovecraft.

If you want to talk about blatant rip offs compare Coruscant in Star Wars to Trantor in the Foundation series, it's literally the same planet.

I don't think many people do, right or left.

They're both city-planets, but the similarity ends there. For example, in Trantor everyone is agoraphobic due to growing up in the enclosed confines of the city. There's one place in Trantor that's set higher than the rest so that you can see the glorious cityscape vista, and no one EVER goes to it because it makes people at best nervous and at worst induces outright panic attacks.

Coruscant, by contrast, is full of balconies, wide-open spaces, huge windows, and tons of clear views of the open sky. No one seems to be agoraphobic at all.

you can't copyright ideas only specific word-for-word expressions of ideas. soi, yes, the ring of thauron is possible.

the caveat to this is of course to know who you're messing with. if the IP holder has the means to shower you with fraudulent lawsuits, you might want to tread lightly. welcome to the real world of western democracies where everyone is equal in the eyes of the law - but only in theory.

They're also both capitals of vast galaxy spanning political entities.

Obviously there's differences between the two in terms of how they're depicted but the basic concept is identical. Can you think of some other earlier examples of city-planets that were capitals for galaxy spanning political entities?

>If it were so easy to get sued,
again: it IS that easy to get sued and get involved in a prolonged court battle. but you'd have to seriously piss off someone seriously to make them waste lots of money in trying to tie up your own financial assets in those court battles

Center-lefty here. The image is fine. It is clearly formatted, of an acceptable file size, and opens perfectly well when I click on it. It's totally legible, and its file name is an accurate description of what it is depicting, meaning that if saved to my hard drive it would be easy to find by simply remembering the key phrase of the article that the image contains.

I am not fond of the image's content however. No I am not.

>I am not fond of the image's content however. No I am not.
Yeah that's what I was referring to, that guys comment was kind of vague.

The joke
Your head

>Can you think of some other earlier examples of city-planets that were capitals for galaxy spanning political entities?

No, but that doesn't necessarily make Coruscant a ripoff of Trantor, merely something inspired by it. To be a "ripoff" the thing needs to be essentially the same. Trantor and Coruscant are not.

Besides which, Coruscant wasn't even invented by Lucas. It was originally from the Star Wars EU and was simply canonized by Lucas because he liked the idea. And at least in the Thrawn Trilogy of books (which were the first ones to properly name the planet; prior to that it had been called Imperial Center), Coruscant was described as still having large oceans, as Timothy Zahn personally disliked the idea of ecumenopoli.

Lucas' original galactic capital from the rough draft was called Alderaan, which was a gas giant with floating cloud cities.

>that doesn't necessarily make Coruscant a ripoff of Trantor, merely something inspired by it. To be a "ripoff"

"Inspired by" is just another word for "I couldn't think of something original, so I ripped off somebody else's originality."

If you can't be original, then you shouldn't try and be a content creator.

>If you can't be original, then you shouldn't try and be a content creator.
Name one creative work that isn't inspired by anything else.

The phrase "there's nothing new under the sun" was already true when it was first coined 2,000 years ago, user.

Honestly, it wouldn't be terrible as an idea.

A really successful genestealer cultist who was incorporated in the same way the swarmlord was so they can be remade and sent to infiltrate places.

Genestealer Cults/Nids are kinda short on special characters as it is. Doubly so any that are small enough to hide amid the swarm.

Not really. It's a common misconception that illithids are derived from Cthulhu Mythos because they have tentacles on their face, but the guy who came up with them has said that the actual inspiration was a painting by some pretty well known fantasy artist that had a skull with tree roots growing through it.
He thought the roots sticking from the bottom of the skull looked like tentacles, and came up with a monster with tentacles on its head that would stick them through a victim's skull to eat brains. That eventually became the mindflayers.

The "tentacle squid-face" thing was inspired by a Cthulhu book cover (with roots growing out of a skull or something?) but Mind Flayers are a TSR original.
One of the few that was actually made by an employee, rather than someone from an employee's game group, IIRC.

Not that it deterred Square Enix from nicking Mind Flayers down to the name, mind you.
Though I think they pay a pittance in royalties to do that these days. Used to be they filed the names off.

> desu
>sonic_youre_too_slow.png

Wasn't it Earth the one with the sinlge place with a cityscape?

Google lateral thinking