Darth Tang's "A Strange and Incomplete Tale"

[theunshaven]

I wish to archive a story put up by a poster going by 'Darth Tang' on RPGnet from 2003. It is well written and entirely creepy for a wide variety of reasons.

The above link does go to it, but it's on a section of RPGnet which is inaccessible without an account... although accounts are Entirely Free.

So here goes.

Comments

[vektortgecko]

I'm of the opinion that unless otherwise stated, if it's put up in public on the internet with no explicit restrictions put on its use, noncommercial reposting, linking (or making-a-local-copy-for-yourself-in-case-it-disappears) w/ citation or otherwise appropriate attribution is essentially fair game.

Consider: The entire premise of the internet archive organization's "wayback machine"

Legally, if he wanted to make some kind of copyright claim on it, I imagine he'd likely be within his rights, as the creator of a work is granted a de-facto automatic copyright on that work, and the mere act of publishing a copyrighted work in a publicly visible place does not diminish the copyright. Although it's worth noting that (at least here), you are expressly granted the right to make a private copy of a copyrighted work for personal use - and since the publication medium here was "free on the open internet", that would make him an authorized party, and permit making a personal copy (Warning: IANAL. Yes, that sounds dirty, but it's an acronym! SCIENCE!)

But insofar as being a good citizen about duplicating publicly posted content along the lines of blog posts or forum posts on the open internet, it's generally accepted that providing accreditation/citation/attribution and a link back to your source is the socially acceptable and polite thing to do.

If you were being legally exacting about it, excerpting with accreditation/citation/etc. would be the most solid way to go about it (as I'm pretty sure that excerpts of copyrighted works in this context are protected under fair use)

[theunshaven]

Yah, I'd link back to it if it were possible. In fact, I'll put a link up anyway - people just need to get an RPGnet profile to use it.

If Darth Tang asked, I'd pull it in a hot second for basic politeness-sake.

This is something I'd link to on Twitter... if again I could do that.