Dark Pack - Officially Sanctioned White Wolf Fan Sites
and Legal Notices on Web Usage
White Wolf knows that our fans like to support our games and products. We recognize that our fans enjoy expressing themselves creatively and enthusiastically about our products and games with one another. We encourage and appreciate greatly our fans' dedication, time, energy, and creativity when building and maintaining "fansites", or fan projects. However, we would also like for our fans to respect our rights as the owners and the creators of the intellectual properties, so here is the Dark Pack. These are GENERAL guidelines to our fans to help them build their fansites and create fan projects. These guidelines will help give you an idea of what is and is not appropriate.
How the Dark Pack Works!
The dynamic script of the Dark Pack fansites is designed to list the links to sites sharing a common interest in the World of Darkness, Aberrant, Trinity, Exalted, Scion, and anything White Wolf in general. This way everyone has a fair chance to get visitors. When following the Dark Pack links, you can click on the official logo on any page to return to the list. If you cannot for any reason, let us know where it happened.
The rules for fan projects are essentially to answer all of those burning questions that our fans have about fan projects. Everything from school projects to supplements and content to videos to using names and ideas for new products. We want to answer those burning questions to the best of our abilities, so you don't have to search the world over for them. Essentially, Dark Pack will give you an idea of what's okay but it's not meant to give you legal advice or explain trademark and/or copyright laws. You'll have to seek legal counsel or do a little research to understand trademark and/or copyright laws.
Trademark and Copyright Usage
White Wolf trademarked and copyrighted material may be used in the presentation of standard nonprofit, nonrevenue generating HTML World Wide Web Pages, non-graphical MUSHes, MUDs, MOOs, IRC and all similar Chat environments as per the Requirements and Restrictions listed below. If, for some reason, you do not wish to participate in Dark Pack, please understand and acknowledge that you and your site must still fulfill all of the other requirements listed on this page. The same goes for fan projects. They must be nonprofit and nonrevenue producing. No money. You cannot make any kind of money off of White Wolf intellectual property.
Your site should not have Google Adwords. Your site cannot be hosted by a company that inserts banner advertisements or Adwords, even if you do not get the revenue.
Requirements and Restrictions
The Requirements
You must adhere to the requirements to be permissible to use any of White Wolf and White Wolf related materials, names, logos, and etc.. You cannot violate any of the Restrictions listed below. Most importantly, you must announce to people at the earliest opportunity that the materials you are using on your site are protected by legal copyright and trademark laws. This means you must post the appropriate code listed below on the very first page of your website where someone sees any material that uses White Wolf intellectual property, whether it is a name, logo, piece of artwork, graphic, content, or an excerpt are protected intellectual properties. Usually, this means your home page of your fansite, but if you have a site that only has a small section dedicated to White Wolf material and the rest of the site is unrelated to White Wolf, you may post this code on the first page of that particular section.
Please include this code for fansites:
<a href="http://www.white-wolf.com/fansites" target="_blank"><img src="http://www.white-wolf.com/fansites/images/dplogo.jpg" alt="Copyright White Wolf Publishing, Inc." border="0"></a><br><a href="http://www.white-wolf.com/fansites/termsofuse.php" target="_blank">Copyright White Wolf Publishing, Inc.</a>
This code MUST appear on the first page of the website/section where any White Wolf materials appear. It is a requirement for fair use. If you repost any of our properties without our copyright, you are intentionally violating our Restrictions. It is stealing. Essentially, you are either sanctioned or do not have our permission, period. In recognition of your hard work and adherence to our requirements, we will place a link to your site in the White Wolf Dark Pack list of officially sanctioned sites. This will get you more visitors, help you make contacts, and be an edgy online badge to brag to your friends about.
If, for some reason, you do not wish to have your site listed in Dark Pack community, but you'd still like to create a fansite, you must still adhere to the requirements and restrictions and include this code on the appropriate pages instead of the Dark Pack code:
<a href="http://www.white-wolf.com/fansites/termsofuse.php" target="_blank">Copyright White Wolf Publishing, Inc.</a>
Please keep in mind that if you plan to use material or art that does not belong to White Wolf but wish to include it in the section or site with White Wolf stuff, then you still must adhere to the appropriate guidelines and laws concerning that material as well. This means you must be mindful of including other people's copyright text/code if you plan to use their materials and/or art in the same section or site as our stuff. If you do not, you will be misleading people to believe that that material belongs to us as well, and that's not OK.
Note to Overseas/Non-English Sites
If you are hosting a website in a foreign language and we have an officially licensed translator for the language, you must also have their permission to promote and host your website. If a translator requests that you remove the material, you must do so. This is the list of our officially Licensed Translators. If there are multiple translators for a particular language, seek the permission of the translator who focuses on the line that you are using on your fansite. For instance, if in Italy, you want your site to focus on World of Darkness, then you'd ask Twenty Five Edition. However, if you wanted to focus on Exalted, you'd ask Wild Boar. If you want to do both, ask both. Got it? Great.
RESTRICTIONS: Legally Apply to ALL Sites
You MAY NOT repost any of our downloadable files or PDFs on your site. This includes but is not limited to: character sheets, graphics, FAQs or online free products, other than those found on the Dark Pack resources. These items are White Wolf copyrighted and using them for "nonprofit personal use only" does NOT imply permission to distribute them in any form.
Fees Or Charges
Fansites and fan projects must be nonprofit, nonrevenue generating. You may not sell time, space, advertising, services, and products or solicit money or goods in any way through your site. You may not solicit donations in order to create fan projects or to maintain fan sites that use our stuff. Basing, borrowing, deriving, taking ideas from our stuff is still using our stuff, so please don't try to get money for it.
Text
You must list our copyright on your homepage.
© [year] CCP hf. All rights reserved. Reproduction without the written permission of the publisher is expressly forbidden, except for the purposes of reviews, and for blank character sheets, which may be reproduced for personal use only. White Wolf and XX are registered trademarks of CCP hf. All rights reserved. XX, XX, XX and XX are trademarks of CCP hf. All rights reserved. All characters, names, places and text herein are copyrighted by CCP hf.
Please insert the book/line and/or the intellectual property you are using for your site or project where the "XX" are. We know that many of our fans use multiple lines or different intellectual properties of White Wolf's and we want you to know you still have to acknowledge and credit those lines appropriately.
Please keep in mind that anything that is based on, derived or taken from our works is still owned by us. For instance, if you make a character from clan Gangrel, remember that is not your character and could never be used without our permission. If you make a clan logo that has a clan symbol as a portion of it, you could never publish that piece of art without our permission. Even without this copyright on your home page, that law still applies, so make it easy for both of us and post it.
You must have a link to our homepage displayed prominently on your homepage:
http://www.white-wolf.com
You cannot use more than 1500 words. We are not trying to nitpick here, so if you use the word Daeva 15 times, all 15 does not go towards the 1500 words; it'd count as one. We are referring to 1500 separate terms or words from our products. In other words, don't go overboard and use all of the terminology from our products.
You may not quote more than 10,000 words from any White Wolf Product. The key word here is "quote." Please don't quote large portions of our books and post them is what we are trying to get at here. If you pretty much copy and paste an entire book for viewing or distribution, you are giving away our book. It does not matter if it's in the old World of Darkness or out of print. We still offer ALL of our books for sale on Drive Thru RPG.
You cannot use more than 3 pieces or elements of art taken from any single book. This means don't go crazy and take the layout of the books, the logos, and the names for the site or project.
You cannot have character generation rules listed on your site or in your project or complete power listings (even if they are your own modifications). You can, however, list any changes to the rules.
You may not repost any of our downloads on your site. For example, you cannot repost character sheets, so if you want to help other fans find one of our resources, then provide a link to it on your site. For example:
http://www.white-wolf.com/downloads.php?category_id=2
Please remember that you cannot repost entire books or enough information to run games. Your copy or copies of our stuff are for your personal use only, and you cannot distribute copies to others.
Artwork
No more than three pieces of art may be taken from any book.
All graphic elements (Clan/Tribe/Tradition/Arcanos/Kith Logos, etc.) that may be used are found [here - This resource will be made available soon]. You may use these icons as is, or adjust them for color, texture and size to meet your needs. You may not change the basic shape or proportions of those icons. Keep in mind that just because you move the art around or change a few things about it, it doesn't suddenly become your art. It's still ours.
You may not use graphics taken from the White Wolf Web Site. This includes our animated symbols! All online graphic elements must be designed and created by you for your own site. We are always working very hard to create our own look and would not like to see it duplicated.
Audio & Video
For usage of our properties in audio recordings that consist of dramatic usages, podcasts, blogging, and etc. that directly quote or use our properties, you are limited to it being no longer than ten minutes in duration. No, you cannot record or video tape yourself reading our entire book to post on your site. It's similar to you just giving away our books.
White Wolf, Inc. reserves the right to withdraw these usage rights at any time with no prior notification.
Downloads
Downloads from our website are for personal use ONLY. You do not have permission to repost, propagate, or distribute these downloads from our site. If you wish to be helpful, then direct others to the downloads by providing a link to the appropriate pages. Many downloads can be found at
http://www.white-wolf.com/downloads.php, and many other sections of our site offer even more downloads. If you think a download is useful, then respect the wishes of those who created it and provide a link to it rather than stealing it.
Also, please don't post our entire books for PDF download either. Even if it is free, it doesn't make it okay. Once again, you are giving our hard work away for free. Even if it is the old World of Darkness, we did not abandon it or forget or forfeit our rights to it.
Be creative and have fun with our ideas but always remember to be respectful of our rights as the copyright and/or trademark owners.
White Wolf | CCP North America Inc. reserves the right to remove sections and/or withdraw these usage rights at any time without prior notice. We also reserve the right to exercise our discretion in regards to what is and what is not appropriate for fansites and these guidelines are subject to change according to our discretion.
Website Terms of Use
By clicking the "I Agree" link below and registering your fansite with the Dark Pack, you are agreeing to abide by these terms of service.
I Agree | I Do Not Agree
