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sno4wy
Senior Scribe
USA
466 Posts |
 Posted - 20 Jul 2015 : 01:35:51
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I apologize if this topic has come up before and again for the amount it has to do with our world than with FR. The recent thing with potential art copyright changes has me thinking about the admittedly rather unrelated matter of the copyrighting and trademarking of aspects of the Forgotten Realms.
Just out of curiosity and for fun's sake, I did searches on the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the United States Copyright Office for the terms, "Elminster", "Toril", "Farideh", "Drizzt", "Jarlaxle" and "Forgotten Realms". I was surprised that some of these terms didn't return any hits. I might be going about it completely wrong of course, but these search engines seem fairly flexible in their automatic search criteria. I was also surprised that searching for "Drizzt" returned an entry:
quote:
Drizzt Do Urden verses The Scanvenger of Sin.
Coffee Bean Buddha, et al. : 1.
SRu001157226
2014
It sounds completely unrelated to anything RAS, TSR or WotC. O_o
My question then is, assuming that I'm not making a critical mistake in my searches, why are characters not being trademarked and/or copyrighted? I realize that I'm most likely missing something extremely obvious here and I apologize for my ignorance on the matter, but I'm hoping to rectify those things. Whenever someone creates a fan work containing these characters, they always (well, the polite ones anyway) include a note to the effect of, "[Character] is (C) [Author] & WotC", however, is it actually the case that a specific character may not actually be copyrighted? If not, why is that the case?
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Realmsian Characters Copyrights/Trademarks
