Copy/pasted campaign description: Is this allowed?

I'm not sure if this is the right place for this. It's the closest match I could find. Recently a player left my campaign to create a clone . And by a clone I don't mean that he used the same campaign seed or basic idea, I mean that half his campaign description is literally copy/pasted word-for-word from my old one (mine has since been updated to reflect the evolving plot, but that doesn't change the fact that he's using my writing to advertise his campaign), and in fact he used to have the entire description and even the name copy/pasted. At this point he's walked it back to only having the first few sentences of the copy/pasted description (which means players scrolling through the LFG listings still see nothing but my writing advertising when looking at his campaign; the point where he started writing isn't visible until you click the Read More link), but he's also stopped responding to my messages telling him to write his own description, so I doubt he's going to be walking it back any further. Is there any kind of rule against this sort of thing?

<a href="https://wiki.roll20.net/Terms_of_Service_and_Priva" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.roll20.net/Terms_of_Service_and_Priva</a>... We take seriously the copyright concerns of our users. When disputes arise, we rely on established means of resolution, and would require a full Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice. That would include a signed statement made under penalty of perjury outlining your claimed materials and the specific issue of infringement.

Both campaigns are Star Wars campaigns and as such the descriptions for both include terms that are currently owned by Disney. If this were a legal issue, I would be contacting my lawyer, not posting to the internet. The reason I'm posting it to this forum is because this kind of cloning is toxic to the community, and requiring GMs (many of whom are high school students and basically none of whom have any experience defending copyrights) to write up DMCA takedown notices to resolve them is not going to deter the cloners.

What would deter the cloners? What do you expect the operators of roll20 to do in a situation like this? Take sides, mediate, come on that is a bit like calling 911 when McDonald's won't serve you chicken nuggets. How is this practice toxic to the community? The community wouldn't even notice it if you hadn't brought it to their attention. Why does this bother you at all? I mean the guy copied your intro and premise for an rpg adventure, he didn't publish a novel you had written. His game has no effect on you and your group having fun in your campaign. His story will be completely different because he will be running it and other players will be going through it. Three sessions into the two campaigns they won't resemble each other at all I bet.

I half agree with John. But if it happened to me, I would bet I would contact the mods instantly if the person refused to change it. It is toxic to the community, but in such a small dosage, therefore it doesn't harm the community yet. Reading the two though, it seems as if the cloner changed it enough. You should consider it a victory Chamo.

I'm no expert but wouldn't your text have to be copyrighted in the first place in order to claim copyright infringement? And wouldnt you have to prove that the infringing party is making a profit from it?

General Z. said: I'm no expert but wouldn't your text have to be copyrighted in the first place in order to claim copyright infringement? And wouldnt you have to prove that the infringing party is making a profit from it? Countries that have signed the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886) do not require registration for an author to claim copyright; the US signed on to the Convention in 1989. (The UK signed the Convention in 1887, but didn't implement most of it in law until 1987.) You do not have to prove that the infringing party is making a profit in order to pursue them (although if they're not making a profit, they may be able to argue Fair Use), however if you don't have the copyright registered, your avenues are limited. For example, an unregistered copyright in the US cannot receive statutory damages (and some US courts won't even let you sue unless your copyright is registered). Any country that's a member of the World Trade Organization is a de facto signee of the Berne Convention, since the WTO requires that its members follow the majority of the provisions listed in the Berne Convention.

@John: All the mods have to do is send a message informing someone that doing something isn't allowed and that'll got most people to act. The practice is toxic because people as a general rule do not like to have their work stolen. It can make people distrustful and discourages originality. And it's really weird how you use someone stealing a fully written novel as point of comparison, because again, if someone were stealing something that important I would be contacting my lawyer, not a message board. Do you overestimate the power of Roll20 devs that drastically? In any case, it does hurt my campaign, because both campaigns are actively seeking new members, and since the campaigns are nearly identical obviously people are only going to join one or the other, and since the part of the blurb that's visible from the LFG screen is copied word-for-word from my old one, players who would be pulled in by my writing but not his will go to his campaign anyway (and quite possibly walk away disappointed, since he actually can't write like me). So yes, he is actively hurting my campaign by using stolen work. And @Jake: My campaign blurb has updated to reflect a changing plot. If you want to compare my old blurb to his current blurb, you can find my old one at this cached page: <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cac" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cac</a>... The original blurb for my campaign was: "After millenia of tyranny, the Infinite Empire has collapsed. Deprived of a common enemy, the Free Worlds of the Core have gone to one another's throats. Coruscant seeks to assert its influence over its errant colonies, Corellia rabidly opposes the threat of imperialism, the Duro Kingdom grows its colonial empire while striving to remain aloof from human politics, a paranoid Azure Imperium sees treachery all around, and in the middle of it all Alderaan seeks to maintain the fragile peace." Just in case Google updates their cache. If he had copy/pasted some text towards the end of his description I really wouldn't care so much. Players hunting through LFG are unlikely to see it, so I'm not likely to lose players to his campaign for work that I did.

This is sort of the danger of doing anything on the internet. I always imagined Campaign material to be fair use. I've had friends crib my stuff, mostly without asking, since i do more DMing than most. It is basically artistic expression, though 95% of a good DM is not in the written material, but in how the DM runs the material. I think a DCMA take down might be overkill for a D@D Campaign as well. Not defending the practice, just think it needs to be taken into context. I basically steal art of the internet for 95% of my games. They are just pretty pictures, but I consider this 100% fair use. I'm showing the art on freely available websites to illustrate a cool daemon or weapon that the players found to make it more real to them. I play with friends mostly, but next year, i'm hoping to run this campaign i'm doing now with strangers on roll20. I'm hoping someone steals my campaign. I'll ask if they want to cast it, so i can twitchTV into their games and see how they did it differently. Role-playing is cooperative and not a competitive venture. 'Steal' my stuff ... please. Imitation is flattery. as a side note, your concern about player competition is not as big as a worry as you might imagine. Players are easy to find. Game masters are rare. It's a sellers market. If your running your own material, then you already win, and filling a party shouldn't be hard. How many groups of players are spamming LFG looking for GM's?