I have been meaning to do this for a long time. If you previously reported such a violation and we agreed it was a violation and took action to crush the pirates, you deserve a GIA commendation. Just Email us a reminder with a few details of the incident and we'll give you your award!

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Friday, August 01, 2008 - 03:04 pm: Edit

We'll come up with a system for people who report several violations to win a GIA Bronze Star or something.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, February 20, 2012 - 07:04 pm: Edit

Somebody needs to do better research, or finish reading something he only started.

Weapons charts from SFB/FC (or other games, including RPG stats) are certainly covered by copyright. The general idea that "charts cannot be copyrighted" (go read the law) applies to public information (say, baseball scores or the stats on a tank like weight, caliber of main gun, and horsepower). Even then, the format of the information can be copyrighted.

SFB weapons charts are "engineering definitions of a weapon that we made up or paid for the right to use" and are copyrighted. (Copyright law also declares charts which consist of information that the author calculated as graphics which are covered by copyright.) So, posting an SSD that includes a phaser-3 chart is legal only with permission of ADB, permission we freely give under our web policy. I might take a moment to comment that our web policy is about the most generous one out there short of an absolute open license which we cannot do and comply with our Paramount contract.

Posting your own SSDs of ships you create or variants of ships are still derivative works (even if more than 20% different from some original ship, even if 100% new) and by copyright law require permission of the underlying copyright holder to post. If it’s something for use with any scifi game, it’s kosher. If it can only be used with one or more SFU games, it’s a derivative of our copyrights.

I might also say that in the case of people who post SSDs we have, when we found them, told them they need to repost them with the notice listed in the web policy. We have never asked anyone to take their entire site down.

If they're violating somebody else's copyrights (e.g., Paramount, Lucasfilms, somebody else) we're more likely to just report them to the legal department of the big corporations with a reputation for protecting their IP.

In one recent case, somebody had posted a bunch of SSDs years ago, we noticed and pointed out the law and the web policy, and he shut the site down rather than repost them because he had not played SFB in years (nor had he updated the website in years) and he just didn't care. We did not ask, tell, or order him to take the site down. We just asked him nicely to comply with the law.