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I almost created a tag for legal or copyright issues when making the question What guides and resources exist for creating custom classes in Dungeon World?, but held off because I figured it was better to discuss it on meta first.

I know that any actual direct legal advice or questions fall outside of the scope of RPG.SE, but I was wondering if legal questions related to publishing aspects of different RPGs (such as creating content for them) would fall under our scope, and if so, why not create a tag to bind these questions together?

The argument against would be each system having its own unique guidelines and choices by the publisher. The argument for in my mind is to group questions about copyright and legal use together so anyone looking for issues related to RPGs and that could easily get a broad swath of related questions across multiple systems.

Should there be a tag for legal/copyright-related questions?

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Maybe I'm missing something, but how would answers to these types of questions avoid having legal advice in them? \$\endgroup\$
    – Wibbs
    Jan 30, 2014 at 19:23
  • \$\begingroup\$ I can't help but feel that these types of questions might be kinda off-topic. The fact that they're about an RPG is a detail that could be completely ignored since what you're really after is "what legal guidelines can I follow when writing something to be published that is derived from something else?" And I don't think a RPG site is the best place to get an answer for that. \$\endgroup\$
    – Ellesedil
    Jan 30, 2014 at 21:23
  • \$\begingroup\$ @ellesdil check the meta question I posted about it. We have plenty of questions on here with upvotes related to this. I'm mot asking for general copyright law, but about Dungeon World's license and their example. \$\endgroup\$
    – Joshua Aslan Smith
    Jan 30, 2014 at 21:26
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    \$\begingroup\$ Yeah, I understand that. In fact, I upvoted KRyan's question because I thought it was interesting. But if you had removed all RPG-specific context, you'd still get similar answers dealing with references, fair use, and all that stuff. Ultimately, you're asking about using content and the type of content just so happens to be a RPG which seems irrelevant to what you are actually asking. Anyway, I'm not committed to this opinion, it was just my initial reaction once I read this meta question and actually thought about it. \$\endgroup\$
    – Ellesedil
    Jan 30, 2014 at 21:43
  • \$\begingroup\$ This question is now on hold for being off-topic. We should probably pick a direction on this meta question. \$\endgroup\$
    – Ellesedil
    Mar 3, 2014 at 14:43
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    \$\begingroup\$ Looks like someone went ahead and created a copyright tag. So... does this meta question even matter? \$\endgroup\$
    – Ellesedil
    Mar 13, 2014 at 18:24
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    \$\begingroup\$ @ellesedil I created the tag after getting answers that led me to believe the community would support it. \$\endgroup\$
    – Joshua Aslan Smith
    Mar 13, 2014 at 18:28

2 Answers 2

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Such questions are clearly related to one another. Assuming they are valid questions in the first place (and we have had a few that seemed popular and acceptable), it makes sense to have a tag to tie them together. That answers may differ depending on system is... completely irrelevant? to its validity as a tag; after all, most every tag is going to be answered very differently in different systems, since systems do things differently.

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    \$\begingroup\$ +1 Such questions are on topic for the site and certainly valuable to be grouped. \$\endgroup\$
    – mxyzplk
    Jan 31, 2014 at 2:01
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Legal issues for RPG's are quite different from those relating to fair use/etc for most other content that laymen commonly encounter - music&video.

So it would make sense for such questions to be on exactly this sub-site of SE, and a separate tag as well.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ Exactly- fair use is personal, publishing it bring in the whole commercial aspects (even if "free") \$\endgroup\$
    – Jim B
    Jul 8, 2015 at 21:18

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