Ye Olde Inn

I once saw someone post an email from Hasbro customer care that was essentially permission to homebrew as long as it was personal use. Now I can’t find the post. Anyone see such an email?

I’m trying to print some cards with makeplayingcards.com (I’ve done many times before) It’s all entirely custom cards for personal use but using HQ21 treasure card backs and equipment card backs and MPC are asking for a copyright authorization letter. I’m so annoyed.

I haven't seen that post. I did post that I was trying to find out if we could post homebrew material using their icons (the idea being that we would just be posting quests) but the response I received after two months was to visit hasbro.com. I never tried to follow up again.

I guess it was on the FB group, not here

There's a fine line here and I would encourage caution so as not to draw the ire of legal types.

This is why I don't reproduce their stuff exactly but make many changes with my custom cards. Not just the size and colors, but transformative alterations to images, changing the text, etc, so it won't be confused with an official product. If you're just straight up copy and pasting the Hasbro commercial cards, I could understand if they were applying more scrutiny to the cards.

I'm no lawyer, but perhaps instead of copying and pasting the "C" from the original, put 'Homebrew' or something on there so it's painfully obvious it's not real (like how they put "play money" on toy dollar bills for kids)?

And finally, don't sell them... don't even act like you're going to sell them. The Hasbro remake is still being sold, vs. the classic legacy HQ products that have been out of print for decades.

Kurgan wrote:There's a fine line here and I would encourage caution so as not to draw the ire of legal types.

This is why I don't reproduce their stuff exactly but make many changes with my custom card.

Yes. I would emphasize that these were entirely custom, homebrew cards, and not a “copy and paste” of their cards. The only copy and paste really would be the artwork on the card backs (treasure, equipment, and artifacts).

I contacted Hasbro customer care and they sent me a “permission to use” pdf to fill out and return. I guess I’ll see what they say.

Care to share the .pdf? Might be interesting to check out while we see what happens on their side.

EDIT: it's this one? https://docs.hasbro.com/upload/legal/intellectualpropertyform.pdf

Nlinindoll wrote:

Kurgan wrote:There's a fine line here and I would encourage caution so as not to draw the ire of legal types.

This is why I don't reproduce their stuff exactly but make many changes with my custom card.

Yes. I would emphasize that these were entirely custom, homebrew cards, and not a “copy and paste” of their cards. The only copy and paste really would be the artwork on the card backs (treasure, equipment, and artifacts).

I contacted Hasbro customer care and they sent me a “permission to use” pdf to fill out and return. I guess I’ll see what they say.

That's pretty cool that they did that! Hope it works out. If it's just a matter of making more changes, you could always do that, including modifying the cardback artwork.