Yeah, this is how I found that out, too.
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I’ve got a related question about submitting such a work to the IFComp (I’ve emailed the organisers but not heard back yet)— what if the copyright holder was the author themselves? Not that he would do this, but would GRRM be allowed to adapt A Song for Lya and submit it to the comp, re-using most of the existing text (along with many additional passages)? Or would that fall foul of Rule #3? The work would have been previously released, albeit in a different medium entirely.
I’m not an IFComp organizer, so take this with many grains of salt, but since the transformative works guidelines say “You may not, however, fill your game with dozens of paragraphs of descriptive text copied word-for-word from that same Prior-Created Content, unless you have obtained a license from the Prior-Created Content’s copyright holder”, it sounds like if you had permission to include someone else’s previously published text, it would be fine to have in the Comp (thus presumably not falling afoul of rule 3), so I would imagine that would also apply to your own work—i.e., it’s fine to include text that was previously published as long as the game isn’t previously released.
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This isn’t a direct reply to anyone else in the thread but … I think one issue is that most IF events host copies of games that are entered (on-site and/or on the IF Archive). They probably don’t want to deal with takedown requests or legal claims.
Itch io and similar sites have a way of handling takedown requests. I guess anything is possible, but generally, the creator doesn’t have to deal with it … the host just takes down your game.
I’m planning to submit a translation/adaptation of a 1990s game script to Spring Thing’s Back Garden next year and I’m going to ask the organizers not to host it for this reason.
If they decline, that’s okay, but hopefully the assurance of external hosting helps.
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My intuition is that adapting a novel into a work of IF is enough of a transformation to count as a new work, for the IFComp rules.
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I think the concern is less about his publishing contracts and more about the IFComp having rules against prior release.
Gotcha. Deleted.