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View Full Version : Copyright search engine?


Orion283
November 17th, 2005, 10:57 AM
Is there some kinda online search engine that tells you what stuff is public domain and what's owned by somebody? I poked about copyright.gov but it was a tad cryptic.

I have an odd habit of amalgamating things. When I'm writing my mind will dredge up all sorts of things, and on more than a few occasions I'll come up with something only to find out later that I actually got it from an external source and just forgot about the source.

And in other cases I'm just not sure if a particular idea is owned by somebody or not. In the immediate future I need to figure out what to do about those wolves the goblins ride. Google says 'warg' is a specific Tolkien widget, but 'worg' seems to be up for grabs, despite both referring to essentially the same creature. Though I think D&D's worgs can talk too. Some time down the road I'll also need to definitively know whether or not 'blaster' and 'phaser' are spoken for.

Aimless
November 17th, 2005, 11:06 AM
Well, most stories haven't been patented yet s you should be pretty all right. Warg is probably based on the Germanic word for wolf (varg, in Swedish), so I don't see how it can be copyrighted :| Blaster is a regular English word. Not sure about "phaser" :o