Me too! 
Yeah and you can tell from the way CE started off that the lore was tossed in afterwards. It’s all… pieced together into a mess that they have never explained because frankly, they can’t.
If that is the take people are taking, that is just ****ing sad. Because it is not the modders fault that Funcom can’t get their **** sorted out correctly.
as far the lore goes, howard’s hyborian age has a long history of being abused. in the 60s and 70s, the only way to read it was interspersed with changes and pastiche stories by sprague de camp et al. in the 80s several other authors had their cracks at it, as well as movies that were pretty lose with all the source material.
in the end, what is the true ‘lore’ is up for debate. for a howard purist, if it wasn’t in the original stories as published in weird tales, it’s non canon and not part of the lore. for someone who actually believes that funcom ‘owns’ the intellectual property rights to characters and settings whose fundamental defining characterstics are now public domain in the USA, then the ‘lore’ and the ‘canon’ is whatever funcom says.
for me, it’s howard + whatever i fancy. i’m a believer in the public domain, i think the actual legal precedence in the US is pretty clear that most of howard’s original works are PD and funcom’s IP claims are as bogus as the claims made by the arthur conan doyle estate several years ago (they lost in the chicago’s federal court district, precedence is set, the fundamental characterstics and settings of a work are a part of the work, and are only extended by later publications when those publications create new characterstics and settings. if x public domain, all of x is public domain, not what the author of x’s great great grandchildren’s corporate IP ‘holders’ say it is)
sorry, i end my tirade, i know alot of ppl dont agree with me.
moral of the story, howard lore first, and the interpreter’s interpretation second. conan exiles is an interpretation.
To a large degree I agree with you here. Certainly as a server owner myself and a roleplay server at that, we’re often confronted with situations where questions arise that simply are not answered by REH. And so all we can do is look at the overall body of his work and extrapolate. I just wish Funcom were better at that and quit throwing in every piece of Conan-esque crap they run across. LOL
I also doubt that Funcom’s IP claim would hold up if tested. The author is long-dead, the stories are almost 100 years old by now… hard to fathom how they’d argue exclusive rights to that.
That aside, legal rights to an IP do not, in my opinion, force the rest of the world to accept the rights holder’s creations as canon.
The law restricts how others can use the content. But it doesn’t force them to like it, buy it or accept it as canon.
If a rights holder manages to make a fandom follow their vision for the IP is a matter of persuasion, not law.
As many others, I do not “believe” in midi-chlorians. Sue me, George Lucas / Disney. Same is true for the Conan IP. The guys who made the Conan animated series probably had the rights to do it, but we still don’t have to accept it as canon.
Hoooowever, I think Funcom treated the IP very well so far. There was too much magic in Age of Conan, they filled a lot of gaps with their own inventions and used some non-Howard stories as well as the movies, even the non-Schwarzenegger one.
But I think it all fitted very well overall, and some concessions have to be made to make a fun game out of an IP.
I’m actually surprised how much they stick to the setting and atmosphere in some cases. I mean… come on, a game that encourages slavery? In this day and age? With human sacrifice, cannibalism, and even gasp nudity?
What I want to say: It’s some law that forces us to accept their content as canon, but overall, they’re good at making us believe that’s how Howard might have designed a video game. Okay, with a tad less ■■■■, but still, pretty close.
The censored word above describes non-concesual sexual intercourse and rhimes with “ape”.
yah i am fairly happy with funcom’s interpretation as well. i have no problem with them doing their own thing, and i think they’ve mostly done it well.
i still chucle when i talk to james van der beek… er… i mean Conan, in sepermeru. he has a totally neutral accent, yet when i travel up north the ‘real’ Cimmerians have their scottish-esque accents intact
Okay I’ll admit that guy always cracks me up.
“Because it’s foggy!”
yes, he is the best dialogue npc in the game, hands down
You may find that hard to believe, but the character of Conan does not enter the public domain in the United States until 2028. So yes, here in the US they hold the exclusive rights to this character and any court of law in said country WILL uphold their legal ownership of said rights. That is how copyright law works.
Well, that all depends on who the rights holder is. If the rights holder of a written work is the person who wrote said work themselves, then yes. You would be foolish to assume otherwise. They wrote the work after all.
Now in the case of Robert E. Howard who ended his own life shortly after he stopped writing the Conan stories this is a very different situation. Especially as he had no children with whom to entrust his creations to. So they have passed through many different hands over the many decades after his death and much harm has been done to his wonderful works, so much so that entire generations grew up reading edited / altered version (and generally speaking always for the worse) of his stories without ever knowing, because the people who held the rights to his work didn’t bother to mention that they were changing things.
The above mentioned L. Sprague de Camp is the guilty party I am speaking of, and he was also the person with whom was brought in to be the “advisor” for the Conan the Barbarian movie in the 80’s. I wonder why the Conan character in that movie resembled the Conan in the Howard stories as much as … well… literally nothing comes to mind. Aside from the name, they had nothing in common.
So in all honesty, if the rights holder is the actual person(s) who created the work, then yes their say should be taken as lore. If they are not, then no, it should not.
Now you see, that is something entirely different. That was something created by the actual person who created the Star Wars movies in the first place. That was not the creation of some rando who bought the rights years later, and it has absolutely nothing to do with Disney because the prequels came out many many years before Disney bought the rights to Star Wars. So you kinda lost this one (though I dispise the preuels as well so I don’t disagree with you 
).
Pretty sure they made that series under license, which has nothing to do with owning the rights.
Yes, but it was an MMO so they had to. I am glad that they did not do so with Exiles.
And I loved playing as my Necromancer. 
I believe that it was @DanQuixote years ago that started a topic for a bit “stretched filters” in here. It’s annoying sometimes indeed 
.
Yet how lovely is the company in here, what a beautiful conversation in this topic. It’s rare and i enjoy the hell of it, thanks @Alexandria for starting it. These conversations are comforting and educational for me.
Conan Exiles feedback Players Helping Players
A vantagem que o jogo de conan exiles está com menor preço histórico 
agora pessoal que foi de BAN pode comprar mais uma conta 
espero que a funcom começe a dar BAN igual a riot direto no MAC 
I’m not an expert on that, but even if it’s 2028, it doesn’t seem that far away.
There’s some controversy around the issue, as can be read here:
Maybe the issue has to be seen in more detail: If some stories are in the public domain by now, but others aren’t, it might be legal to use parts of the works, but not others. Might be difficult to differentiate in practice - but that’s my guess on the situation.
The main difference is, the stories are in PD, which means you can reproduce them and whatnot “for free”. That is separate from the Character rights itself which is what would be required to create new material using said character. For that you would need to license the rights from the owner of the IP. This is how a site like Project Gutenberg is able to host the stories on their site free of copyright infringement, the stories are in the PD. But they cannot create NEW stories about the character without a valid license to do so.
i respectfully disagree with you now just as i did before. see Klinger V. Conan Doyle Estate
the fundamental characteristics and setting of a work are part and parcel to the work. if the work is public domain, then those fundamental characteristics and setting are also public domain, including characters. there is federal precedent on exactly this issue.
this citation in particular: Where an author has used the same character in a series of works, some of which are in the public domain, the public is free to copy story elements from the public domain works. See 1 Nimmer on Copyright § 2.12 (citing Nat’l Comics Publ’ns, Inc. v. Fawcett Publ’ns, Inc., 191 F.2d 594 (2d Cir.1951)) (“Clearly anyone may copy such elements as have entered the public domain, and no one may copy such elements as remain protected by copyright.”)
Klinger v. Conan Doyle Estate, Ltd., 988 F. Supp. 2d 879, 889 (N.D. Ill. 2013)
And yet there is legal precedent with Conan himself.
A Federal Judge cracked down and levied a fine for copyright infringement against the unauthorized sales of Conan miniatures in 2018.
So yeah, clearly the character of Conan is very much still protected under copyright no matter how much you want to disagree with me. And a federal judge would have to disagree with you on that matter.
When it comes to American justice, it often comes to how well the lawyers are able to argue their case. In the Conan miniatures case, the artist couldn’t even afford to attend the trial or get a lawyer to defend his case.
In the Conan miniatures case, it wasn’t even just about using the name Conan with the works, they even questioned the artist’s permission to use the likeness (after the artist ceased to sell his product under the name Conan, renaming it to “The Barbarian”. And, considering how the world is full of works featuring underdressed dark-haired muscular men, ruling all of them to require a license from Conan Properties International LLC would go beyond whatever the copyright laws originally were intended for.
The miniatures industry has plentiful examples of stuff that is obviously intended to represent someone else’s copyrighted material, but as long as trademarked names or obvious iconography are not used in the “derivative” works, courts have generally ruled them to be okay. As much as they’d like, Games Workshop does not own sole rights to futuristic armored soldiers with big shoulder pads (nor, in fact, to the term “space marine”).
Mickey Mouse (in his Steamboat Willie incarnation) became public domain at the start of this year. What’s stopping many people from utilizing this and creating derivative works is the fear of Disney lawyers. Disney can afford to run court cases costing millions just for the sake of denying competition.
The Klinger vs. Conan Doyle estate case was interesting in the regard that the defendant was actually (financially) able to defend their case. I wonder if the Sanchez vs. Conan Properties case had gone differently if both sides had been able to attend with equal legal expertise.
It’s really a pretty sad story, the way the rights to Howard’s estate passed from hand to hand with basically no understanding on what exactly was passed in the first few decades after Howard’s death (and against Howard’s last will, too). That kinda makes the whole “Conan Properties” questionable, made more so how tooth and nail they’ve fought to “protect” the IP under various owners, from Paradox to Cabinet to Funcom/Tencent.
Regarding the Klinger vs. Conan Doyle estate case, one has to consider that a US court decided in favor of a US citizen against a foreign company. There are respected voices that question the neutrality of US courts. So, a case with the roles reversed might go another route. Maybe, US courts would feel bound by the precedent set in that case, even if being forced to judge in favor of a foreigner. Maybe they wouldn’t.
Anyhow, a court case with a US company in a US court is costly and of questionable outcome, which is why the question of Conan copyrights may be undecided in court for a few years more. When anyone want to acquire a license from the supposed Conan rights holders, their questionable legal status would probably play a major role in the negotiations. If Disney, for example, was dead set on making a fourth Conan movie, they’d most likely be able to muscle their way through the process with little or no fees.
the biggest difference between howard’s work and the conan doyle case is that in 2013 when the conan doyle case happened, the holmes and watson stories published prior to 1923 were undeniably public domain. the howard stories that are currently public domain are so because the copyright was not renewed, not because the copyright truly expired under copyright law. thus those REH works are de facto public domain, and not undeniable public domain. as oduda pointed out, it won’t become undeniably public domain until 2028. would that make a difference in a court case when arguing from the precedent set in the klinger case? maybe. funcom’s lawyers might make a better argument than what my lawyers would make, and that precedent would be ruled as moot.
the difference between this hypothetical matchup and the case of the miniatures is that the ‘offending party’ didn’t even show up and made no argument. the only argument made in front of the court was the argument in favor of the rights-holders.
in any case, i’m not going to be publishing a conan story and hiring a lawyer to defend my position, so all we can do is argue on this forum. i think we can do that without being snide and dismissive of each other, can’t we?
This is an extreme tangent.
But when talking about the rights to Conan, after Howard’s death (which was ruled a suicide) the man he hated most in life and the prime witness to his death, who also happened to be his sperm donor, was given control of his media properties, despite Howard having a will designating a different heir.
Dig deeper, it gets extremely, how do the kids say, spicy.
Well actually you can do that. In Europe. The copyright has already lapsed over there. You just can’t publish them in America. So come 2028 there will likely be a bunch of “new” Conan stories popping up that have already been written and published in Europe for several years. 
I’ve actually enjoyed out exchanged on the subject matter. It has made me think far more on the subject than I had done so previously and do more research, which I enjoy doing!
