I don't know very much about copyright laws etc, but as a for instance, if I had a set of dragon magazines from 1 to 134 that had cost me nothing really over the years and I wished to distribute them to friends in an electronic form, would this be allowed?

There is no charge being made and maybe a few beers might exchange hands or a duplicated old module or something, but essentially I would pass them to people for free on a CD/DVD?

I thought initially it would be a no no, but as there is no cash taken, profit made, or personal gain, does it actually matter?

Any advice would be appreciated...  

Cheers
Dave

I'm pretty sure distributing copies is illegal.  Its not so much that you aren't making a profit but that the copyright holders aren't making a profit for your distribution.

Or, you could give them the real magazines and the backups; they could forget to give the backups to you after they give you back the physical magazines. I'm not encouraging it.

ashmire13 wrote:I don't know very much about copyright laws etc, but as a for instance, if I had a set of dragon magazines from 1 to 134 that had cost me nothing really over the years and I wished to distribute them to friends in an electronic form, would this be allowed?

There is no charge being made and maybe a few beers might exchange hands or a duplicated old module or something, but essentially I would pass them to people for free on a CD/DVD?

I thought initially it would be a no no, but as there is no cash taken, profit made, or personal gain, does it actually matter?

Any advice would be appreciated...  

Cheers
Dave

As Mars stated, no, it is illegal to distrubute copies whether electronic or physical to anyone. You can make and use your own back ups, but you are not allowed by law to distribute them.  Whether you are selling them or giving them away makes no difference in terms of the law.

Aneoth wrote:
Ask Busman.
He appears to think that he is the site Expurt on Copyright Law here.

I agree with king... this was a simple question of distribution only, your comments are old hat and boring and just strike of a long term grudge.

Get over it, eh?  

Here's my take on it from a UK standpoint.

Distribution of copyrighted material without permission is illegal. It's that simple. What you need to ask yourself is this: Do you have a moral problem doing so? Are you happy that your piers may have a moral problem with you doing it? Are you likely to be caught? Are you likely to be prosecuted?

You also need to understand what copyright laws you are breaching. Does the company actually own copyright over the magazine? Or do the individual authors own that copyright? Do the copyright holders actively enforce their copyright? Or has the copyright lapsed?

In the United Kingdom, materials contained within a printed periodical lapses from copyright after 20 years from date of printing and becomed public domain property. The only issue with distributing magazines in PDF form after they have lapsed in the UK is that you do still breach trademark law if the product (such as White Dwarf) is a trademarked name. You cannot be seen as proffiting from someone elses trademark.

Speaking hypothetically, of course:wink:,  if someone owned a Dungeon mag and it was missing it's poster, or fold-out map or tokens or whatever, could the owner get/purchase a copy of such from someone else?    

I have a pretty good collection of the things, but several issues are missing one thing or another.  There is the 'incomplete to the complete thread" (or whatever it's called) route, but so far that's been unsuccessful.  It's not a big deal to me, but the question comes to mind.

That all said, I'd still buy a DVD with Dungeon #1 to #150 on it, regardless of it's source.

NetRodent wrote:Assuming the piece that is obtained is original, and not an unauthorized copy, there is nothing wrong with that.  

If it was a copy it would be technically illegal.

If you own an authorized copy of a work, & it has missing parts, you are allowed to own copies of those missing parts.