After TSR's announcement hit the net, a number of people began openly discussing whether Internet users should accept the company's position. Five important points raised at this early stage:
Can we trust them? What if TSR takes all this stuff sent to (or taken by) MPGN and begins to publish it for profit (perhaps online, perhaps via CD-ROM)? What if MPGN closes off anonymous ftp and begins charging for access?
It is important to note that TSR has a long and somewhat infamous legal history, going back to the inception of the company when the Tolkien Estate sued over the inclusion of Balrogs and Hobbits in Classic D&D, and later, when Dave Arneson sued over his copyrights being violated when AD&D was published (clearly a derivative work of Classic D&D of which he was the co- author), and still later when TSR was forced to remove the Elric, Grey Mouser, and Cthulhu Mythos sections from the Deities & Demigods publication, due again to copyright violations. Because of incidents like these, many netters hold a strong distrust for TSR, particularly as it concerns matters of creative intellectual property.
Censorship. Since all submissions must now go to one site
(MPGN), that gives the site administrator (Rob Miracle) the
ability to censor. Usenet is essentially a wide-area community
devoted to the free exchange of ideas and information. Creating a
bottleneck only promotes censorship and everything Usenet stands
against.
Does TSR have the ability to enforce such edicts? Clearly,
they have the ability to threaten the FTP sites into closing.
Could they also threaten internet backbone sites into dropping
certain newsgroups (such as rec.games.frp.dnd)? Also, how do
international trademark and copyright laws differ around the
globe? What impact does this have on the legality and
enforceability of TSR's position?
Is TSR doing this because it must in order to protect its
copyrights and trademarks? There are people on both sides of this
issue, some stating that TSR is only doing what it legally must
in order to protect is intellectual property.
Other people counter that the company is going well beyond
this point. Because TSR has a nasty reputation as being sue-happy
(Mayfair and GDW being two well-known examples of what many
people view as TSR-mischief), some netters wonder if there is a
hidden agenda at work. Perhaps TSR has plans for the net (such as
reaching customers through it and making more money), but that in
order for these plans to work, the company must force its own
fans into submission.
A third group of people take a less sinister stance, noting
that TSR may simply be afraid of competing against hundreds of
fan-authored products. Since the Internet is growing so rapidly,
there is no telling just how many fan-authored products may exist
in the future, or just how many of these will be of "good"
quality. Linux, a freeware product by UNIX enthusiasts on the
Internet, is already taking sales away from OS producers. Might
the same situation happen for publishers of roleplaying products?