Recently, the MoRA has looked into creating an agreement with NationStates Today, an international newspaper with a large reach.

I have made detailed explanations on Discord, and I will make them here when I have PC access, but, until then, the hypothetical TSP-NST news agreement can be seen here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YO5o...sp=sharing

Aga/Eunopiar

Mostly does boring things.

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I've thought about this quite a lot over the past few days. This is quite an unusual thing, and it deserves that time for introspection with an open mind.

My conclusion is not just that I'm against this, but also that we can't do this, RL legally.

The problem is that it's conflating IC and OOC in a way that are fundamentally incompatible. This text is, essentially, a license agreement between an entity that only arguably exists in RL terms (NS Today) and one that clearly does not exist in such a fashion (TSP, which at the end of the day is an IC construct unless somebody like Tsu were to register it). The text makes note of attribution and falls back to CC 4.0, which is a fine license, but TSP is not a legal entity that could be considered to produce materials that it could then license. Even if TSP were recognized as a legal entity, CC 4.0 explicitly forbids sublicensing (with good reason), but TSP's SJ delivering an article to NSToday is implicitly the sublicensing of one user's content by whoever did it on the side of TSP, something explicitly not allowed in CC 4.0.

There are other reasons, but they are much less glaring. It begs the question —Why do we even need this? Could we not already share SJ stuff with NST and discuss with them what sort of issues, spelling errors, etc. they see, and in turn provide an advertisement avenue for them?

If we do go forward with this (and I hope we don't), what we (TSPers) get out of the deal should and must be separately explained.

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Before Roavin's post, I hadn't realised NSToday took such an OOC-like approach to its content licensing. It's not necessarily a terrible thing but it is rather intimidating when considering that this is a game.

Does 2© imply that they foresee the possibility of RL disputes?

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I believe I can wrangle something out of this nonsense. 

Is there anything we would like to see in this agreement?

Aga/Eunopiar

Mostly does boring things.

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