Havard Wrote:ZGG/Dustin Clingman/Code Monkey:
It is hard to say if they have any claim. This depends on the contract ZGG had with WotC and whatever contract ZGG and with Code Monkey. Most likely if they have any claim at all, it is to the specific content published while their lisence was in effect. This would prevent WotC from publishing things like the Redwood Scar or other books published during that era. I do not believe it would prevent WotC from rewamping the DA series for 5th Ed however.
Code Monkey has claim to Shaerdraeth, although that setting includes a few items that might be considered plagiarism, if not removed before publishing.
They have the exact claim in the front of the books they published.
There is no "copyright" on Blackmoor as a single thing. The single thing would be Blackmoor being an "Intellectual Property".
Those individual books all have their own individual copyrights. (And each one will become a public domain work on a different day.)
The ZGG/Dustin Clingman/Code Monkey stuff is copyrighted to whoever is named as the copyright holder. But if they do not still have a licence to use the IP rights, they would not be allowed to reprint it.
Not having the legal right to reprint something does not mean that WotC gains the right to reprint it. And it does not mean that WotC can sell the right to reprint those books to anyone else. What you have here is a series of
derivative works. Derivative works have their own legal complications as both parities have some sort of claim to the work.
If you live long enough to see the first Blackmoor products start to go into the public domain*, the interesting thing would be that the later derivative works would start to become works based on public domain material (instead of material still owned by WotC). So there would be a short time when ZGG/Dustin Clingman/Code Monkey could legally be reprinted by the copyright holders...just before that goes public domain too. (Once that goes public domain too, anyone will be able to republish it.)
* = We would probably all be brains in jars connected up to the Internet by that point. 
The time between the first Blackmoor product going public domain and the last Blackmoor product going public domain will be legally interesting, as it will be legal to make new Blackmoor products based on some of the IP, but not all of it. So any of the companies that own the copyright on any of the products might be able to take legal action against people printing Blackmoor material, but they would need to establish in a court that elements in the new books were taken from Blackmoor books that still had copyright protection.
To make things even more fun, we are not talking about US law here. We are talking about local copyright laws in individual countries. So one country might potentially drop Blackmoor into public domain before the US does. If that happens, it would be legal to repring Blackmoor products there (or create derivative works based on the Blackmoor products that had fallen into the public domain there) but it would be illegal to import those public domain products into countries where the copyright had not expired. :twisted:
There are a couple of
international copyright treaties that various countries have signed up to. That would probably override how long the
local copyright protection lasts, but I'm not sure what would happen if a country granted more protection than in the USA itself. It is possible that WotC or one of the other parties could try to fight international cases after Blackmoor goes public domain in the US. But, I personally think that they would not bother to try to enforce their rights at that point.
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