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Legal Horse ManureAll righty. Let me make something completely clear. Legally, RPGClassics functions just like an archive - like a library of sorts. That means that, while we have the right to store FAQs, for the purpose of making them easily accessible to the public, we are not allowed to make any money off of them, nor are we allowed to alter them in any way, or in any way fail to give credit where credit is due. We do all of these things. In addition, we try to at all times ask the author if we can use their FAQ before putting it up on our site. It's a courtesy we provide to our FAQ writers, because they deserve to have some say in where their FAQs are located online, EVEN IF THE LAW SAYS THEY DON'T. That is, even though we are a non-profit organization as well as an archive, and as such have the legal right to bypass the FAQ writers entirely, we think that's a somewhat shitty thing to do. Now for a bit of history. Back in the days, we used to have a database, as well as a complete list of everyone who gave the ok for all their FAQs to be in the database. In the confusion caused by the deletion of the database, much of the information on who said it was ok for their FAQs to be up was lost. When we made this new database, we sent out emails to all the authors of the FAQs we had - however, many of the addresses no longer existed. So Mazrim, using the partial list from before, as well as his memory of maintaining that old database, assumed that for the people who already gave their permission before (many whose email addresses were now invalid), that the permission still stood. However, as even Mazrim's memory has its faults from time to time, it is entirely possible that your FAQ may be in here, without your having given us express permission. Before you try to take legal action (which wouldn't work anyway, as we do actually have the legal upper hand), just send us an email. We'd prefer just a slap on the wrist, of course, telling us, "naughty disorganized database maintainers, no cookies for you tonight!" but still giving the OK to keep your FAQ up...but if, for whatever reason, you're so incensed that our sloppy organization prevented us from asking for your permission that you don't want your FAQ anywhere NEAR rpgclassics, that's fine too. Just send us an email saying so, and we'll happily remove it. In case you're skeptical about the legal claims I'm making (which no doubt you are), then I invite you to peruse http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/index.html - basically everything the US government has to say about copyright and intellectual property law. If you come to a different understanding of the laws than I did, you're welcome to let us know at dbteam@rpgclassics.com. We can chat. :) |