| From: | Brian Johnson expatrie@*******.net |
|---|---|
| Subject: | Idea - Meta Index |
| Date: | Fri, 23 Jun 2000 21:00:52 -0500 |
> official go ahead, it is still legal to create such an index. Does anyone
> know the law on this? Does an index count as "fair use"? Naturally, I'd
much
> rather do it with FASA's permission.
Opinion: Doubt they'll go for it. Digital (roughly) is very threatening to
anything flat (paper, CD, tape, vcr, dvd, et. al.) They're a publishing co.:
They want to keep publishing, unless they're looking to broaden and expand
(voir: decipher merger-which was canned), seems improbable. They want their
product to remain useful. It sounds threatening (have you considered that they
might not even like email? consider the level of the web site --archaic--as
indicative of co. policy/enthusiasm for tech.) maybe to you it doesn't menace,
but look at it from "their" side where anyone can basically query the database
for all the stuff, and you could (very slowly) reverse engineer the information
(Shadowrun is heavily setting, so this information is more vital to them) -
obviously one book contains a sentence like "government of malaysia was
overthrown by _ in _. This impinges on the books' usefulness.
(Read the Prince. Established powers dislike change, because change isn't easily
predicted and they might lose power, consider MPAA, etc. vs. MP3, napster, etc.
Broadly interpreted / incorrectly packaged this is what you propose).
>>>>>key point
I would very much doubt the fair use would fly, unless they approve, and why not
respect their decision (whatever it may be), for once instead of going ahead
after someone says no. Really the safest way might have been to go was go ahead
and not tell them. Easier to get forgiveness than permission. Since you
basically propose compliling the indexes (and TOC) of the books, they clearly
hold the rights to such. As you intend to expand further, they don't hold the
copyright explicitly, but implicitly, you could argue you are basing your work
off of their work product, thus it is theirs to control and disseminate.
Going the opposite direction, it is possible (unlikely) they might just have
something like this on-site (in which point they would feel very threatened
having it accessible by the public without their control over it). I doubt many
companies are going to go in this direction unless they have an aggressive
managment team/ leader / visionary who doesn't care about risk. If FASA were
privately held, this might be the case. Otherwise I'd expect the most
"traditional" businesses to be the least aggressive in the digital demesne. You
could repackage the thing as a "knowledge base" and propose the project as
internal (then they might give something away in the response--i.e do they all
ready have it). Liken it to Miscreantsoft (which is more "accepted," and back
away from GNU and EFF and all those "political" groups (i.e. organizations that
are non-profit and have ideology). Furthermore, summarize and don't get
technical on how it is to be done - send it as an idea. You might have
overwhelmed them with the details of the idea, so the idea itself isn't clear.
I don't really want to debate the merits of Msoft, GNU, EFF, FASA corporate /
expansion stragegy and business plans, etc. Just spitballing. Streamline the
proposal and go postal (that's mail, not crazy).
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