Credit, permissions, thanks and the like

[eepjr24]

This is partly a rant, partly looking for resources to help. I GREATLY prefer asking permission to use someone else's work, whether in a derivative fashion, for conversion and use in an originally unintended way or other purposes. Sometimes it's a map, sometimes it's a TTRPG module or reference, sometimes it's a historical paper, etc. A problem that I run into all the time is that I either cannot find the author to credit them (either because they left no contact info, the contact info is expired or they did not even identify themselves with a name, etc.) or if I can find them they have become popular and no longer wish to be contacted by mere mortals. In the last week I have encountered one each of the above, one with a common enough name that I found several thousand possibilities, the other I actually managed to find an old interview that gave me breadcrumbs to find their current author pages, facebook, etc. In the second ones case, he appears to have turned off all default contacts (on FB, Good Reads, his webpage, etc.).

I understand maybe he gets swamped with autograph requests, scams, charities, and whatever else. But how do you actually contact these people in cases where all you want is just to let them know you are using something or basing something off their work? Any tips? Maybe I should just move on, but I always think that I would want to hear about it if someone enjoyed something I did enough to use it themselves, even tangentially.

- E

[JoshStolarz]

I think it’s admirable that you want to reach out to them and give credit or just let them know you’re using their work. Definitely not a bad thing. But, just to ease your mind a bit, if they have gone through the effort to make contacting them nearly impossible they probably don’t care haha. So then you have to ask yourself, are you doing it for them or for you?

Again, not to say you shouldn’t do what you do, but really…sometimes it’s okay to just let it go.

- Josh

[eepjr24]

Again, not to say you shouldn’t do what you do, but really…sometimes it’s okay to just let it go.

- Josh

Probably that is the answer in the end. I guess I was just hoping someone would say, "Oh, didn't you know about this resource for asking permissions?" but the chances of that were low. Ah, well, moving on.

- E