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In Forgotten Lawsuit, TSR Sued Wizards of the Coast
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<blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7878769" data-attributes="member: 6873517"><p>TSR was notorious for threatening legal action at the time. For instance, there was a lot of fan-made material at that point. Much of it was hosted on university-owned servers (which was very common at the time across the entire web then) and so when they decided to stomp on it, universities pulled everything to avoid any litigation risk. The same thing was happening in many other areas of fandom, such as lyrics or guitar tab archives, so TSR was hardly unique.</p><p></p><p>This stirred up a lot of negative publicity and was, eventually, followed by a retrenchment when they figured out that they'd really stepped in it. It was a classic example of corporate tone deafness. To their credit, they did back off and eventually hired Sean K. Reynolds, who was a prolific Usenet poster and budding RPG author, to try to mend fences. This largely worked, but TSR itself went under not too long afterwards and got moved to Seattle after the WotC buyout. I believe this was one of the reasons the OGL was developed, which lays out exactly what is and is not open content.</p><p></p><p>The owners also seemed to be engaged in a lot of legal action against each other at different points, most notably when Gygax got forced out of the company and, previously, when they screwed Dave Arneson out of his share (and lost, and had to pay him out and put a note in <em>Monster Manual II</em>). The court cases that were pulled were from Lexis Nexis and were posted publicly. They were clearly transcripts, although I suspect that most of them would have been in state court. If someone wanted to forge them... I suppose.</p><p></p><p>It was going on in the mid '90s and the posts should be archived on Usenet, although it would be a bit of a search to turn them up. It's possible I have misremembered some things, but I think based on poking around in various blogs and such that I just searched it's not too far off.</p><p></p><p>Here's <a href="http://www.seankreynolds.com/misc/howIgothiredatTSR.html" target="_blank">Sean K. Reynolds</a>' blog post talking about this time. I had forgotten Rob Repp. Also see the <a href="https://www.evilhat.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/DD70s_PreRelease_TSR.pdf" target="_blank">extensively researched book by Shannon Appelcine</a>, p. 106, if you want to cut to the chase scene. And <a href="https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/rec.games.frp.dnd/tsr$20lawsuit%7Csort:date/rec.games.frp.dnd/aKCmBZfswXI/21OnAtQ742cJ" target="_blank">the judgment that was posted from Westlaw</a> (not Lexis Nexis... oops) all those years ago, which was the case TSR lost when they tried to screw Arneson out of his royalties.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Jay Verkuilen, post: 7878769, member: 6873517"] TSR was notorious for threatening legal action at the time. For instance, there was a lot of fan-made material at that point. Much of it was hosted on university-owned servers (which was very common at the time across the entire web then) and so when they decided to stomp on it, universities pulled everything to avoid any litigation risk. The same thing was happening in many other areas of fandom, such as lyrics or guitar tab archives, so TSR was hardly unique. This stirred up a lot of negative publicity and was, eventually, followed by a retrenchment when they figured out that they'd really stepped in it. It was a classic example of corporate tone deafness. To their credit, they did back off and eventually hired Sean K. Reynolds, who was a prolific Usenet poster and budding RPG author, to try to mend fences. This largely worked, but TSR itself went under not too long afterwards and got moved to Seattle after the WotC buyout. I believe this was one of the reasons the OGL was developed, which lays out exactly what is and is not open content. The owners also seemed to be engaged in a lot of legal action against each other at different points, most notably when Gygax got forced out of the company and, previously, when they screwed Dave Arneson out of his share (and lost, and had to pay him out and put a note in [I]Monster Manual II[/I]). The court cases that were pulled were from Lexis Nexis and were posted publicly. They were clearly transcripts, although I suspect that most of them would have been in state court. If someone wanted to forge them... I suppose. It was going on in the mid '90s and the posts should be archived on Usenet, although it would be a bit of a search to turn them up. It's possible I have misremembered some things, but I think based on poking around in various blogs and such that I just searched it's not too far off. Here's [URL='http://www.seankreynolds.com/misc/howIgothiredatTSR.html']Sean K. Reynolds[/URL]' blog post talking about this time. I had forgotten Rob Repp. Also see the [URL='https://www.evilhat.com/home/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/DD70s_PreRelease_TSR.pdf']extensively researched book by Shannon Appelcine[/URL], p. 106, if you want to cut to the chase scene. And [URL='https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/rec.games.frp.dnd/tsr$20lawsuit%7Csort:date/rec.games.frp.dnd/aKCmBZfswXI/21OnAtQ742cJ']the judgment that was posted from Westlaw[/URL] (not Lexis Nexis... oops) all those years ago, which was the case TSR lost when they tried to screw Arneson out of his royalties. [/QUOTE]
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