The only people claiming rights to Lovecraft's work are Arkham House. Started by August Derleth, Arkham House believed that they had obtained the rights to Lovecraft's stories from Weird Tales. However, what Derleth didn't realize is that Weird Tales, throughout most of its publishing history, bought only first rights. Therefore, Derleth didn't actually have much--the rights for almost all of the stories all went back to Lovecraft. Lovecraft has no "estate" of any kind. Enough time has passed so that things are safely in the public domain.
Arkham House probably even realizes all of this, because it isn't try to fight against the innumerable Lovecraftian pastiches, rip-offs, comics, movies, and so on. That said, I've always felt that there's kind of an unwritten "gentleman's agreement" in the gaming industry that says that if you're going to use Cthulhu (and his cronies) extensively in a game book, you should at least be in contact with Chaosium and give them some credit. (A good argument can be made that it is almost solely through Chaosium's efforts that Lovecraft's work has resurged in popularity over the last 20 years--so they've earned some props, I think.) That's why, for example, there is a Call of Cthulhu d20 game and not a "Lovecraftian Roleplaying d20" game or some such. And lastly, of course, the story "The Call of Cthulhu" might be public domain, but the rpg Call of Cthulhu is not. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Lizard" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, April 03, 2003 4:57 PM Subject: Re: [Ogf-l] Recreating one of the deleted monsters (Kuo-Toa) > Smith, Andrew wrote: > > > To the best of my understanding all Lovecraft of public domain. Probably a good idea to double check though, after all congress keeps extending copyright, so its hard to be sure anymore. Not an issue for Deep Ones, but for other things I'd also check to be sure that what you want to use is actually Lovecraft's and not a later author's addition to the mythos. > > > > > Also, bear in mind the difference between copyright and TRADEMARK. You > can get killed on the latter. > > _______________________________________________ > Ogf-l mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l > _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
