Special Features is a regular feature here on the MCG website, in which MCG team members discuss projects they’re working on, interesting MCG activities, or things that inspire their work. This column is written by Charles.
I just updated the Fan Use Policy. It was high time; while I made only one substantive change, a number of the policy details were a little stale. If you have a website or other online resource supporting Numenera, The Strange, or the Cypher System—particularly if you’re using any of our artwork or game text—you might want to check it out, just to make sure you’re up to date as well.
(The one change of substance: I’ve made it explicit that it’s OK to indirectly monetize your site, through, for example, onsite advertising or Patreon support. Check out the policy for all the details.)
What’s this Fan Use Policy all about? Glad you asked!
The Fan Use Policy outlines how you can make and share content about our games—and even use our art and some of our text—without worrying that we’re going to get our legal hackles up. On the one hand, we have the legal right to come down on any site that uses our intellectual property (text, art, and trademarks) without our permission. But that’s not good for our community, and it’s not the sort of people (or company) we want to be. On the other hand, if we pay no attention to that sort of thing and just let the internet do what it wants, the intellectual property that pays our bills and gives our games a future could spiral out of our control. And that’s not great for our community (or our company), either.
So the Fan Use Policy is basically a handshake agreement between you and us. You agree to a set of boundaries (fairly wide-open boundaries) around how you’ll use our content. And we assure you that, within those boundaries, we aren’t interested in hassling you about that use (and in fact, if you’re adhering to our guidelines, we will do our best to support you in your endeavors).
You get to post interesting content, the MCG community is enriched by what you create, and we retain legal protection of our brands and games. Win-win-win.
Emails sent to fanfare@montecookgames.com (the fan use contact email) come to me, so I get a sense of which parts of the policy tend to confuse people.
Let me start with about versus for. If your content is about our games—you’re writing a review, doing a podcast, broadcasting a game on Twitch—the Fan Use Policy doesn’t apply. We don’t have, or want, the right to govern what you say about us or our games.
On the other hand, if your content is for our games—you’re posting characters or adventures or foci or creatures, and so on—that’s where the policy comes into play. And in that case, we only want to protect our copyrights and trademarks, and the rights of our licensees.
Another thing I’m often asked about is downloadable items. With some exceptions (see the policy), the Fan Use Policy prohibits posting anything in the form factor of a product—anything that is intended for download to use offline or to be installed and run on a local device. Some people feel this is an arbitrary distinction, and they aren’t wrong—but we have our reasons. When people produce things that look like products, we have to police them more closely. They can undermine licensed products that our licensees paid money for the right to make. And they don’t support communities the way sites that feature interaction do. (We do have other avenues for products—even free products. Check out the Numenera Limited License, for example.)
Finally, some folk feel that our Fan Use Policy is more restrictive than legal fair use. This is a fuzzier one, because fair use is a general legal concept, not a specific set of rules. What constitutes fair use is highly dependent upon context. (Unless you’re an intellectual property lawyer, if you think you know what fair use entails in every circumstance, you are almost certainly wrong.) But more to the point, remember what I said above about our handshake agreement. What we ask of you is what we feel we need to keep our properties secure without having to police your site closely. Might there be a defensible use of our art or text that’s outside the Fan Use Policy? Mmmaybe. But if you want to push that boundary, you force us to pour more scrutiny on what you’re doing. That’s no fun for us or for you.
By my count, there are currently a couple dozen fan-created sites out there supporting Numenera, The Strange, and the Cypher System. Because of the Fan Use Policy, we can support their growth without it threatening our intellectual property. And that’s great for our entire community.
