Fan made Rifts android app

[Mathew]

I was considering a fan-made android app to help in Rifts gaming. It would be free, and you would still need the guy the books to play, but it would aid in combat, dice rolling, character creation, random tables, etc. Would there be a problem with me making this, or would Palladium frown on this? Would I need to refrain from specifically using any trademarked Palladium terms, and just make it a generic gaming aid app dice roller with some home-made tables?

Thanks for any advice.

[Shark_Force]

history points to needing to make it generic.

edit: to clarify, i don't think i've heard of any android apps that do this sort of thing, but anything similar on a computer hasn't gone over well with palladium, and i can't imagine a different platform would change that.

[Josh Hilden]

If no one is making money on it then it's fair use. Like Fan-Fiction and Fan Sites.

But of course I'm not a lawyer.

[Shark_Force]

needs to be more than "not making money".

you can generally make something like this for your own personal use (and extending to your gaming group), but when it comes to *distributing* something like this to a broader audience, merely "not making money from it" is not going to cut it. fair use covers certain uses of material... "Examples of fair use in United States copyright law include commentary, search engines, criticism, parody, news reporting, research, and scholarship." (from the wikipedia entry on fair use).

so, for example, google can quote a small part of something when you do a search for that something (or include a thumbnail image if you're looking for a picture, etc). a researcher is generally allowed to include sections of another copyrighted work if those sections are part of their research. a critic can give an example of the horrible editing in a piece of work they are reviewing. and so on.

of course, that applies only within the US (other nations frequently have similar, but not identical, laws), and naturally it isn't always completely clear (lawyers being lawyers, pretty much no law is). but generally speaking, if you don't look through the list of reasons above and find that what you're doing falls clearly into one of those areas, i'd be quite careful about assuming something is fair use. and, depending on which country you live in, you may need to remove some of those things (for example, in countries where free speech is not as highly regarded, i would not be surprised to discover that parody is not on the list of reasons you can use someone else's IP).

[mercedogre]

fair use video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGlnKvjLFOs