A statement from Pamela Bowles of Decipher's legal department, October 21, 2003


"I would say that postings in pure fan areas belong to the fans. That doesn’t mean one fan couldn’t “rip off” another, but that is all at their own risks. Further, Decipher will not step in to mediate such a disagreement. The only thing from Decipher’s perspective would be that we are continually generating and exploring new ideas and if we were to pursue something that was similar to something a fan posted, we aren’t going to be responsible for the coincidence or have our idea “held hostage” in order for a fan to try to claim a royalty. To that extent, they are also posting at their own risk.  It is important however to realize that we don’t spend time hanging out on those areas of the site to get ideas and most monitoring is done by volunteers, so we truly don’t spend much time on these boards.

There are certain areas (especially with the RPG stuff) that are Decipher sponsored areas and if someone submits something to be posted in one of those areas, then they are relinquishing copyrights/ownership to Decipher.
Again, this is to protect Decipher from having someone approach us 5 years from now and say “hey, you used that on your website and now we want $50,000”.

I hope this makes sense and alleviates the concerns of the fans.
While this could change in the future (though I don’t expect it will) the above would be the general guideline."

Respectfully,
Pamela Bowles
Associate General Counsel
Decipher, Inc.