No, the preamble to the Wizards.com Terms of Use defines its legal scope as “this website”, upon which the TOU are posted. Since the TOU are used on multiple different “sites” operated by WotC, in several places they use “a Site” and “the Site” interchangeably. By doing so they make it so that agreeing to the TOU for one WotC site means that you’ve already agreed to the Terms of Use for any WotC site that uses the same TOU.

Everywhere the term “a Site” appears in the Wizards.com TOU, you have to read it as saying “a wizards.com website on which this TOU is posted.” Hence, the TOU, even if you sign it to get the Fan Site Kit, does not and cannot apply to your non-WotC site.

I got a small comment for your “Who owns your site” section.
Notice that it says “a Site” in the text you’ve quoted, which isn’t referring to any spesific sites. A fact that can only mean that they mean any site which uses their Fan Site Kit license. So, yeah. They would own your site, and everything you put on (or through, whatever that means) it.

Happy playin’!

Many major corporate license users (Microsoft, for instance) would certainly like licenses to be regarded as identical to contracts, but there’s a greater potential for what amounts to “entrapment” in the nature of a license than that of a contract, as they are differentiated under law.

Also, it’s worth noting that the term “license” as used here is really shorthand for a “license document”, which is (as the terms suggest) documentation of a grant of license. A grant of license, meanwhile, is a grant of privileges predicated upon a legal assumption of rights on the part of the grantor. Such grant of license may or may not be conditional, and it is generally the conditionality of a grant of license that results in a license document of the sort that is colloquially known as a “license”.

I am not a lawyer, this should not be regarded as legal advice, disclaimers, excuses, et cetera, et alii, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, ad ridiculum, blah, blah, blah. Don’t sue me if you do something stupid based on what I said, because my words bear no claim that they’re fit for any particular purpose.

Argh. I loathe civil law and the disclaimers it demands.

But seriously, why include such stupid provisions when you have the “we can yank the license at any time for no reason” clause? Mostly, you shouldn’t care about the above, and only if what they’re saying is getting really bad, they’re using your images to seriously promote other products (rather than comparing two things), or making images likely to give a lot of people a bad perception of D&D are you going to care, and in that case, everyone will understand why you yanked it.

It seems self-defeating to me.

It’s not, but it asserts that it is in Paragraph 2 and other places.

The common wisdom is that people can get by on fair use just fine, but there are some grey zones regarding roleplaying games and some people are operating in or near them (like Candlekeep) and they really need a policy to get WotC’s intentions clear.

It’s not the “Fan Site Policy” bloggers have been waiting for.

I believe you can use D&D game terms and trademarks in a blog post as a matter of fair use, or else newspapers wouldn’t be permitted to report on companies or products whose names are trademarked.

You can also get away with a lot in practice; WotC’s not in the habit of suing blogs, forums or fansites, and has turned a blind eye to anything short of PDF piracy.

That’s astonishingly dreadful for a legal document.

So, you could be right that WotC upper management had the more significant role in creating this thing. Given that I’m already shouting and jumping around in the original post, though, I wanted to give them at least that benefit of the doubt. I just don’t know for sure either way, and this does read to me more like translated lawyer-ese than anything else.

This I’m pretty skeptical about. Would legal actually write “The ’suits’ in Wizards’ legal department require us to tell you that Wizards Materials in the Tool Kits are for your personal Fan Site use only…”, which is both (a) asinine, (b) completely off-tone for any legal agreement, and (c) wierdly refering to themselves?

More likely it’s WOTC public relations writing this (i.e., S. Rouse), with some random snatches of input from WOTC legal, who really don’t give a crap to spend any really time on the project. That’s been historically the M.O. for a few years now.

The point of a fan site policy isn’t to trick fans into writing about stuff so that WotC can then sue them. It’s an honest expression from the company of what they are and are not concerned about. By definition, they won’t sue you over the things they say they won’t sue you over, which is worth a lot to fans. (It would also be a public relations nightmare if they sued someone in contradicted of a fan site policy.)

The very fact that people are getting up in arms about this, and not just people who don’t like 4e, is evidence that such a policy matters quite a bit, and is very much needed.

(Where, by “needed”, I mean “needed in order to reassure your customers that you won’t sue them for doing normal fannish things”, of course. I’m not talking Maslow here.)

Just because people are clamoring for a fan site policy does not mean that one is necessary.

I wasn’t commenting on the impossibility of a fan site policy. I was commenting on the infeasibility of putting together a policy that actually says something along the lines of “The following is an exhaustive list of things that we will and will not sue you over,” especially when dealing with a company as valuable as WotC.

And yes, fair use is a defense. So is “But I agreed to this policy!” Policy or not, if ANY company wants to file suit for use of their properties you’re going to have to come up with a defense. Furthermore, most of those policies include arbitrary ways in which the company can revoke your use of the policy/license (Paizo, for instance, revokes your privilege if they believe you are in the publishing business, whatever that may mean).

In short, this is a lot of people getting up in arms over something that actually matters very little. Keep blogging (with confidence!) and don’t use the fan site kit if you don’t like it.

However, I’m going to chuckle at these assertions:

“What you’re looking for simply isn’t necessary”

Oh good. Mr Rouse will be relieved to know that everyone nagging him for a fan site policy for the last year were figments of his imagination. Also, up is down and black is white.

…”and I’m not even sure it’s something that is feasible to begin with.”

White Wolf, Paizo, Pinnacle, and every other game company (save Palladium, but they’re “special”) have a fan site policy. You should inform them of the impossibility of this. See above re: up is down.

“There are PRECIOUS few ways that you could create a fan site that isn’t protected by fair use”

Of course. I know this, and you are clearly smart enough to know it too. However, you’re also smart enough, then, to know that fair use is a reactive defence that can be used in a court after paying through the nose for the privilege of defending yourself from a frivolous lawsuit. Most people don’t bother financially ruining themselves when a corporation comes knocking with a C&D over a fan site. Most shut down, or get shut down by surprise if the corp goes straight to the hosting company.

Fair use is not enough for everyone to blog with confidence (glad you’re an exception), which is why fans have been demanding a policy statement. I’m not saying WotC will issue frivolous lawsuits or C&Ds, but that people will avoid doing things due to concern that WotC might. Go back and read the definition of “chilling effect”. You don’t personally have to feel it or observe it for it to exist. (In fact, by its nature, selection bias is a built-in misfeature of the chilling effect.)

As an example of a game with the opposite of a chilling effect, there is a fan-run Savage Worlds wiki full of homebrew game rules and setting conversions. Is there something like that for 4e, and if so, are the operators going about their business confidently? (To be clear: an honest question.)

What you’re looking for simply isn’t necessary, and I’m not even sure it’s something that is feasible to begin with. There are PRECIOUS few ways that you could create a fan site that isn’t protected by fair use, and almost all of them involve stealing large chunks of material wholesale from WotC products.

It seems, largely, that the part of the blogosphere most up in arms over the fan site policy are the ones who don’t even have cause to care in the first place. The most prevalent negative sentiment seems to be, “Well, I don’t like 4th Edition, BUT IF I DID I wouldn’t use this license.”

Meanwhile, the people running 4e fan sites are keeping level heads and going about their business, with or without the license.

@Fimmtiu: I dunno, wouldn’t three people running that make Wizards’ server die? I mean, considering how technically inept they seem to be… [/snark]

@walkerp: I’m not sure. I do wonder how much of the existing state of the art Wizards is aware of. They did act as if nothing but 3e existed with which to compare 4e when they launched it, and this seems to be similarly blinkered.

Thanks, everyone else, for the comments, links, and retweets. My ultimate hope is that Wizards realises that they still need a proper, public, company policy statement about fan sites beyond this license. Maybe that’s a hope in vain, but I hope nonetheless! I may not be much of a fan of 4e, but I don’t want to see 4e bloggers stifled by an idiot company.

And the link to my post where I specilate on the interpretation of the bit you quote me on is here:
http://www.examiner.com/x-7705-Phoenix-RPG-Examiner~y2009m8d6-Wizard-of-the-Coast-releases-fan-site-toolkit-controversy

It’s a license for them to play Marketing Russian Roulette with a full loaded Internet/Customer-Perception pistol.

Nice. Must be the same team that came out with GSL v1.0. Except I don’t know who inside WotC will carry the fight to make it better.

Nice post. Thank you.

while true ; do wget -q –referer=http://www.wizards.com/fankit/fantoolkitdnd.html http://ww2.wizards.com/company/press ; sleep 10 ; done