EotE dice to be removed

As soon as I get a chance, I'm going to have to remove Edge of the Empire dice from Gamers Plane. I reached out to Fantasy Flight legal about having Edge of the Empire dice on Gamers' Plane. I was hoping I could continue to have the dice roller up, or come to some agreement, but unfortunately, tis not so. I was informed some icons are owned by Lucasfilms, which I understand, and can change. But in their words, "we would not want you to build SW Dice into your roller".

I'm thinking of getting a legal consult on this (though I'm not sure what kind of lawyer to look for... is this copyright law?). An easy solution would be to have a set of dice with my own icons, but I'm not sure if that falls within allowable bounds. Not sure if any of you are or know any lawyers I can speak to, but until then, I'll have to take the EotE dice down.

I'm actually kinda irked at this, specially being told that since they have an app to roll dice, they don't want me to have one, but they have dice stickers on their site, which means people don't have to buy their dice.

Random numbers and colors certainly are not copyright so it must be the icons. I see no harm in using colored dice and numbers. That said I am no lawyer. I think you would consult an IP lawyer.

It's standard business practice. If it is possible to secure a monopoly, even over an accessory to a product, and even over a free product, you should do that. This is a case where they can (because the icons or dice themselves are protected under IP laws). But, it's not about sales directly, it's about exposure and drawing people to look at your site. If you had a dice roller, people might use it instead of theirs and every person not using theirs is a person not looking at their site/logo/products. Irksome, absolutely.

I also recall FF cracking down on deck building resources for their Netrunner LCG in a similar way (because they released their own deck building application, and so went about getting the man-made ones taken down).

That's a good point Candi, one I considered.

Oh well, either way, I hope to figure out what options are open, because I'd like to have the EotE dice mostly because without, the game gets hard to play via PbP.

On top of Candi's excellent point, copyright and trademark holders need to protect their intellectual property. It's more complicated than how I'm about to explain it, but I pretty much sum it up. By allowing others to use their copyrighted materials without any special provisions, it weakens their claim to exclusive ownership of the copyright. The folks behind Savage Worlds take care of that with their special license for fan-made rules adaptations for different settings.

Taxus, I didn't mean to come across as indignant. For the most part, I support copyrights/trademarks; content creators need a measure of security on material they make. But as you mentioned in the second half, I also believe in creating fair use licenses, specially in situations like this, where you have a large community that often makes up their own stuff.

Over all, the only reason this irks me, as said above, is that they don't have a problem with people making dice stickers, thus avoiding having to buy physical SW dice, but they have a problem with me making a dice roller, because it directly competes with their own app. Over all, its somewhat sensible logic, but I don't like inconsistencies and I can't understand the overall motivation. Obviously its not money, since they don't mind loss from physical dice... so what is it?

Regardless, I'll think of some solution. I'll have to talk to a lawyer, but it may be the only solution is for players to get access to the roll conversion chart in the book, which may possibly, almost definitely, hope this is obtuse enough for FF Games to not get mad at me, be found online.

I got some "this is not legal advice" from a patent lawyer friend. Seems like since the icons are copyrighted, without approval from LucasFilms, those are a definite no-go; this isn't surprising in the least, and what I expected. Using a different set of icons may be ok, and mapping those icons to the usual results may be ok. I'm gonna be writing up a one page summary of the situation, and he'll be showing it to a copyright lawyer friend, who can try to give me a 10 minute consult (not in person, based on the sheet).

That sounds like a solid plan. Hopefully it can get resolved favourably!