MAJOR RAKAL'S BBS TIPS 7: Whose Material Is It, Anyway?

One of the great things about the World Wide Web is that it's so easy to create graphics or write articles and post them on your web site where millions of people around the world can see them. One of the not-so-great things about the World Wide Web is that it's so easy for those millions to download, alter, and redistribute your work without you ever knowing about it.

At various times, people have posted dream cards on this BBS that others claimed to have created. Some were text only, others were graphic images of complete cards, linked from the poster's website (in days gone by; this is no longer possible) . "Top Ten Lists" have been posted here, and readers said, "This looks awfully familiar." Review writers like me get requests for reposting our articles on other people's sites. So what's appropriate and what's not? Here are a few simple guidelines.

First, Decipher owns copyrights and trademarks on their card designs (borders, icons, card text, etc.), and Paramount owns copyrights on the images on the cards. That means they have the right to determine how those designs and images are used. In order to protect their rights (and Paramount's), Decipher does not allow people to post card images based on the Star Trek CCG on their websites. If you want to create dream card images for fun and to impress your playing partners in private use, you can do that. But you can't sell them or publish them, and "publishing" includes posting on a website.

As far as other material goes, if you didn't create it, don't post it on this BBS, or anywhere else on the Web, without the author's permission. Just stating that you didn't create it, or even giving the author credit, isn't good enough; you have no right to post someone else's work, even if credited, without their permission. And not knowing where the material came from is no excuse. If you don't know, then you clearly don't have permission. Dream cards don't spring into existence spontaneously; someone put a lot of work into them, and they have the right to decide how they will be used.

So if you find a neat website with a lot of cool dream cards (text), or a funny Star Trek Top Ten List that you want to share with everyone here on the BBS, ask the owner of the website (most have a mailto: link onsite) if he minds if you send it in. Also (and this is very important), ask him if he created the material you want to use, or if he got it from someone else. If the latter, you will have to ask that person for permission. If someone sends you a file of material, don't just assume he created it, or that he is giving you permission to post it (or even has the right to give permission); ask!

If the owner of the material gives you permission to use it, first, keep a copy of the email granting permission, for your own protection. (If someone else later claims it was his, you can at least show that you had reason to believe you had permission to use it.) Then, give him credit for it when you post it here (or on your own website), and state here that you are reposting it with permission. It's simply unethical to present someone else's creative material as your own.

But don't be surprised if you aren't granted permission. That's the owner's right, and you must honor his wishes. Although many people are flattered if you want to pass on their work, others prefer to keep it exclusively on their own site, where it cannot be altered in any way (even inadvertently) and where they are sure people will know who it belongs to; they will probably, however, be happy to let you post a link to their site on the BBS. That's a good compromise: you let others know about a cool website that they might not find otherwise, without misleading anyone into thinking that you wrote the material yourself; the owner gets more visitors to his site.

Maybe you feel that it's all right to post something without permission because you made a few changes to it, so it's not really the same material, right? Wrong. Unless you make so many changes to it that it's unrecognizable to the owner as the original (in which case, you might as well have started from scratch), you are still violating the owner's rights. Changing the stats slightly on a dream card (+1 on the Integrity, -1 on the Cunning), giving him a Command star instead of Staff, or rewording the lore slightly doesn't make it unrecognizable. Unless the card was pretty generic to start with (again, why did you bother?), the owner will know it was his. Likewise, if someone took one of my Romulan Reviews, reworded a few paragraphs while still giving the same information and reaching the same conclusions, changed the combos at the end, and posted it under his own name, I would still know it was mine (even if he took off the warbird sig file).

Bottom line: have some consideration for the work of others. Don't use it without their permission, and don't try to pass it off as your own. Half the fun of this game is the chance to be creative--developing devious strategies, dreaming up dream cards, designing killer decks. Copying what others have done isn't half as satisfying.

Jolan tru,

Major Rakal

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