Turning forum RPGs into published stories. Legal issues

[Swordfry]

A few years ago, I used to be very active on a fantasy forum, mostly doing some friendly forum role playing with a small group of friends. I am not too sure how it works on Mythic Scribes, but where I was every thread was a different game and anyone could play in it, putting in their character posts and furthering the story post by post. Well now I have been thinking that some of those stories I created could really make for some good real published stories.

First of all, I would only use the rpgs that I started and made the story for. Using somebody else's would of course be stealing. Second, I would cut out all of the other forum members' posts and characters. Hate to sound like a prude, but they usually only added bits to the story that only concerned their characters. And that's what I did too in other forum member's games. It was kind of an unspoken rule that only the creator made big change sin the story and plot, but little things were allowed to be made by other members. So honestly cutting everything out that was not mine in each story would still easily work, just less characters. Not to mention that there were really four of us, so the stories were always small in scale and scope.

I should make clear that this forum technically does not even exist anymore. The website runner shut it down due to low traffic, then brought it back, with everything deleted. But thankfully a couple of us rpg'ers were smart enough to save some of our posts for whatever future use or for rereading. When the forum came back, all that was left was a general discussions sub forum, and sub forums for all the author's different settings, because it is a forum on a fantasy author's website. But no more rpg sub forum at all.

My question is would there be any legal issues for making any of these saved rpgs of mine into published stories? Say I take one of my rpgs I started there, cut out everything, story inclusions, characters, everything created by the other forum members who participated in that rpg, and just use everything that was mine and even write in some new stuff. Are there any legal issues with doing that? Is it considered public domain? Even if the actual sub forum no longer exists and the only record of the stories are what I kept saved?

I should also make clear that I never knew any of the forum members personally at all, and am only barely Facebook friends with a couple of them. I would contact them about this and see if they are cool with this.

 

[Swordfry]

Bumping this now to hopefully get some replies.

 

[Queshire]

I am in no way qualified to answer this, but any way I look it should be fine. If you want to be completely safe you could probably use the RPGs as just a base for a story rather than directly porting them.

 

[Penpilot]

Not a legal expert, but if it's public domain, then anyone can use it without legal action, including yourself. But I don't think that's the case here.

If you created everything, at least the stuff you use, then I'm inclined to say it's yours to do as you please. Think about it this way, you created the material for others to use and play with. You did not create it and say here this belongs to all of us to do with as we each see fit. That's reinforced by the unspoken rule that only major changes were done by the creator.

Just because you shared something and allowed others to fiddle with it doesn't mean you lose your ownership over it.

 

[FifthView]

From the sounds of it, you should be perfectly fine. I'm not even sure why you are worried, since you've said you'll only use your own contributions to the thread, eliminating everything else.

Technically, the moment you write something, it's copyrighted to you. The same would go for whatever others write.

IF multiple people in a thread write actions for shared characters in their own posts–say, you create a character named Jorg and others, in their posts, use Jorg in their contributions–there might be an implicit granting of authority for them to use those same characters, at least within the scope of that thread.

IF, after cutting out everything everyone else contributed to the thread, you nonetheless use some of their ideas when you add more later....to connect your bits together, if there are any gaps after you cut out what others have written...there might be some problem I think? Is this what you mean, specifically? I'm not at all an expert, but it seems to me that if multiple people have contributed to a story and, later, you remove their words but retain many of the story ideas they introduced, you could run into trouble. I can just imagine a legal case coming out of Hollywood, of multiple screenwriters working on a script then one of them (or someone else, even) taking the script, removing their words, but adding "new" characters with different names and filling in the gaps by essentially recreating their contributions. That sort of thing seems ripe for legal disputes.

Maybe others can help answer these questions better than I can.