Yesterday i made a posting within a recruitment thread that had a few links to some documents that i was sharing out with my fellow players, only to have the posting deleted later in the day, with the comment that "file sharing is not OK on paizo. If it is an open document, please direct them to its product page or its proper home".
I am curious to know what made my posting not conform to the rules of paizo, since these files were linked to my personal drive, which is where i saved and shared the documents. these documents are out there in the interzweb, but are incredibly difficult to locate. I felt that by sharing these documents from a single location met the old criteria that existed here on paizo. They werent copyrighted by anyone, no one had direct ownership of them, and it even says at the beginning of these documents that they are to be shared with everyone.
So does that mean that if i wish to link one of these documents, i have to find the actual website (which may actually be someones own google drive account and they are openly sharing the document) and use that, but still face the possibility of having the link removed? What about game aides then? I have a spreadsheet that i use as my map for combat, but since that is shared through google drive, will that be deleted as well since its not being posted from a local home webpage?
Thanks in advance
It could be that Paizo just have a policy against any kind of file being linked directly from their site, in which case it's better to link to a web page that lists them instead - you could easily set up such a thing using one of the many free blog sites, I think, and then point your players at that instead.
They could do this, for example, to protect against people blaming them for a file containing a virus, or possibly just to ensure they don't have to take responsibility for checking to see if every link is legal or not.
One could make the arguement that even linking to a webpage that lists the file shares would go against their file sharing rules.
Does anybody know where i could find these rules?
no, these were fan made wheel of time expanded use rules. nothing paizo related...unless paizo picked up the license for WOTRPG that im not aware of?
WOOT WOOT!!!
thank the manufacturer for backups, right?
I'm pretty sure the policy (which is not written anywhere, as far as I know) is simply that you can't link to bootleg files, whether directly (i.e. a specific file on a file sharing site or in your dropbox) or indirectly (i.e. forum which discusses dewatermarking). There's nothing inherently wrong about linking to files, to the best of my knowledge.
I suspect they check on anything which might be their own property more thoroughly, but that's just an assumption. My guess is the links got mistakenly seen as distribution of someone else's copywritten rules, rather than a fan-made ruleset.