A Gift Of An Unusual Sort For GM’s Day – The Silvervine Games General Print Disclaimer

Posted by John Arcadian on Mar 4th, 2011 in Downloads, Generic Gaming Article, News | 0 comments

It’s March 4th again, GM’s day. A day to celebrate everything about being a Game Master. To reward those who run our games, putting in hours of hard work beforehand or improvising on the fly to give us really great play experiences. GM’s day is also traditionally a day to put gaming supplies on sale, and that is something we’d normally do, but we’ve got something different for you this GM’s day. Let me start by telling you a little story.

A few months back, I was running a one shot of an adventure that I was writing a review of for Gnome Stew. My printer was busted, and I wanted to print some of the maps out in color anyways. I swung into a print shop, handed them my thumb drive and asked them to print 4 pages. “I’m sorry sir, due to corporate policy, we can’t print this. It is copyrighted material and you need written permission.” The company that made it neglected to put a print disclaimer on the pages for the printouts. Even though they were marked as printouts in big bold letters, and even though I could have called up the author and gotten the guy permission over the phone, the corporate policy required it in writing. That got me thinking. It’s easy to forget to include a print disclaimer on the pages that you should. There are also a lot of times when you might need to print out a section of the rules for quick reference. If you don’t have a printer, then you might get stuck on the wrong end of a corporate policy. Since Silvervine is a small company, and understands what GMs go through, we got with our legal rep and worked up something nice.

The Silvervine Games General Print Disclaimer

Definitions:

Any person who has purchased a Silvervine Games product is referred to as “owner”.
All Silvervine Games, Inc. products distributed in Portable Document Files (PDF), Tagged Image Format Files (TIFF), or any other electronic format are referred to as a ”electronic copy”.
All Silvervine Games, Inc. products distributed on paper are referred to as a “hard copy”.

Rights:

Electronic copy owners may print one hard copy of an electronic copy for personal, non-commercial use as a backup.
Electronic copy owners and hard copy owners may print up to and including 30 pages of any Silvervine Games, Inc. product for personal, non-commercial use in owner’s game(s).
Owners may not print any portion of a Silvervine Games, Inc. product for commercial use.
Silvervine Games Inc., reserves the right to rescind the rights granted in this disclaimer at any time via any medium.

Yup, in as plain English legalese as we could print it, we’ve got a blanket print disclaimer that covers our products. Basically, it gives you the right to print one full backup copy of an electronic product from Silvervine games and you can print limited sections if we forgot to put a print disclaimer on the individual page. If you get stuck at a print shop trying to print something, just point them to this page. We’re going to make our print disclaimer live perpetually at http://www.silvervinegames.com/printdisclaimer.

If you think this is a nifty idea, and that more companies should try to provide common sense solutions like this, spread the word. Talk about it on Facebook, Spread it on Twitter, send the link to your favorite bloggers.

We hope this small step helps smooth out any situations you might have. While we’ve currently only got the one product that we sell (there are a bunch of free downloads at our Drive Thru RPG store), we’ve just started work on our first published adventure, so this might come in handy for you in the future.

Good Gaming and Happy GM’s day.