Re: [piecepack] Creating and selling Piecepacks

[Eric Wald <groups@...>]

slpjeff12 wrote:
> Hi all.
>
> If I were to go for a slice of the art show/craft bazaar market and
> make my own piecepacks, would it be OK to include any of the games
> from the .org website if I said something like "When you pay for the
> materials, you get the rulebook free?" and pricing so as to reflect
> only the materials used (I work a lot with polymer clays, which would
> be REALLY cool as pieces)?  Obviously, the creators' names would
> appear in the reprints.

That has been the cause of some debate over the license of games.
Unfortunately, you have to check the license of each game you might wish
to include.  Selling at a bazaar technically qualifies as commercial, so
you would be safest to stick with games that don't have a restriction on
commercial redistribution.  You probably wouldn't be sued if you stray
beyond that, but why take such a risk?

For example, listed alphabetically:

- A Knight's Tale has been released under the GNU Free Document License,
  which explicitly allows commercial redistribution: safe.
- Activator and Alien City include a clause allowing redistribution with
  attribution: safe, as long as the author's name appears and nothing is
  changed.
- Baseball has no explicit license, so copyright law applies: not safe.
- Bingo Battle has been placed in the public domain: safe.
- Dungeon Builders has been released under the Creative Commons
  Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license: not safe.
- Men Overboard has been released under the Creative Commons
  Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license: not safe.

Pottery piecepack sounds like fun.  I wish you success at the bazaar.

> Would it be better/more kosher to simply include a "for rules and
> games, check out www...." card with the purchase?

By all means, place a "For more games" line in your rulebook.  However,
you'll probably find it much easier to sell to someone who hasn't
already heard of Piecepack if you include at least one set of game rules
with the physical product.  For best results, let it be one that uses
all of the pieces of exactly one piecepack, but without so much going on
that the new player feels overwhelmed.

- Eric