Criticism
After its initial success faded, the company turned to legal defenses of what it regarded as its intellectual property. In addition, there were several legal cases brought regarding who had invented what within the company and the division of royalties, including several lawsuits against Gygax. These actions reached their nadir when the company threatened to sue individuals supplying game material on Internet sites. In the mid-1990s, this led to frequent use of the nickname "T$R" in discussions on RPG-related Internet mailing lists and Usenet, as the company was widely perceived as attacking its customers. Increasing product proliferation did not help matters; many of the product lines overlapped and were separated by what seemed like minor points (even the classic troika of Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance suffered in this regard).
The company was the subject of an urban myth stating that it tried to trademark the term "Nazi". This was based on a supplement for the Indiana Jones RPG, in which some figures were marked with "NaziTM". This notation was in compliance with the list of trademarked character names supplied by Lucasfilm's legal department. Later references to the error would forget its origin and slowly morph into the urban myth.
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“A tailor can adapt to any medium, be it poetry, be it criticism. As a poet, he can mend, and with the scissors of criticism he can divide.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“Unless criticism refuses to take itself quite so seriously or at least to permit its readers not to, it will inevitably continue to reflect the finicky canons of the genteel tradition and the depressing pieties of the Culture Religion of Modernism.”
—Leslie Fiedler (b. 1917)
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)