As an addendum to the below, Mr. Fannon replied to by email with a curt
request for a copy of the original essay, finishing with "I will forward
it to my legal advisor and have a thorough comparison done."
Again, Mr. Fannon refuses to supply us with clear evidence of exactly
what wrong-doing has taken place and instead relies upon terse emails
and (un)subtle threats. I replied back pointing him to the URL of the
original document upon which ours was based. I look forward to his
reply.
The analysis software I ran gave a minuscule probability (far below
0.1%) that our essay was based upon Mr. Fannon's Gamer's Bible. I'm not
sure if I used to the software correctly, and will also be reviewing
both documents myself. If you wish to reproduce the results I downloaded
the following piece of software:
http://www.technocage.com/~caskey/marko/
The commands I ran were as follows (from the extracted marko-1.1
directory):
./bin/mstrip gamerbible.txt | ./bin/mstream2mtext > gamerbible.mtext
./bin/mstrip historyofrpg.txt | ./bin/mstream2mtext > historyofrpg.mtext
./bin/marko-db -a gamerbible.mtext -d gamerbible.db
./bin/marko-db -a historyofrpg.mtext -d historyofrpg.db
./bin/marko-db -c historyofrpg.mtext -d historyofrpg.db -d gamerbible.db
I really would like to get some external advice on this one. I am
planning to draft a letter to the FSF and the Wikipedia team. I reviewed
Greplaw and Groklaw, but neither seemed to offer legal advice or a forum
to post questions. Does anyone know of any forums?
Kind regards...
--
Ricardo Gladwell
President, Free Roleplaying Community
http://www.freeroleplay.org/
president@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Mon, 2004-08-30 at 12:07, Ricardo Gladwell wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> Just a quick update on this issue: Mr. Fannon responded to my email
> requesting evidence of copyright infringement. He replied be sending me
> Microsoft Word copies of the chapters from his book, stating "the
> nature, flavor, and flow of the work felt like it was my own work,
> reworded".
>
> I am preparing to run some analysis software on both documents to
> determine more precisely if any parts of the documents are copied from
> each other. I shall also be printing out and comparing both documents.
>
> However, by Mr. Fannon's own admission, there do not appear to be any
> direct copies of one document to another, only a vague suspicion that
> the document "felt" as though it had been "reworded". I have, once
> again, pushed back to Mr. Fannon to provide citations of direct copying
> since I can't help feeling he is pushing the burden of proof onto us.
>
> I am considering drafting a letter to Groklaw as Sam suggests. Does
> anyone have any advice and/or suggestions?
>
> Kind regards...
