Sorry!

Yesterday (3/31/98) we received a registered letter from the Avalon Hill Game Company. Our excitement over the mystery soon evaporated as we read on. The letter was essentially a cease-and-desist order written by Avalon Hill's legal department, demanding that we take down The Diplomatic Pouch and threatening legal action based on copyright infringement if the order is not followed.

Having finally gotten a web site up for their company, Avalon Hill's intent is to extend the web content for their more popular games. Prior to that, it seems, they are working to eliminate anything that could conceivably serve as competition to their site.

We called the person who sent the letter to discuss the matter, explaining that we are a not-for-profit site, that we are clear about not being affiliated with Avalon Hill, and that AH's copyright over Diplomacy, rules and maps is prominent throughout the site. We also mentioned that given the number of hits our site gets, we're probably helping them sell games. The response can be summarized as "Anything you wish to say on the matter should be said in writing. Your comments will be considered, but don't hold your breath; it's a policy matter, not a personal one."

We've drafted a letter explaining what The Diplomatic Pouch represents, what we think the benefit to Avalon Hill is, and even offering to help them out with their web site development, both by making some of our content available as well as by linking to it once it's up to increase their traffic. We remain pessimistically optimistic about what the reply will be. It's likely that The Pouch will not return, or that if it does, it will be in a substantially lighter form to avoid any copyright problems. But we don't really know yet.

Specifically, we question the prudence of trying to continue things like the game queues, which could draw attention to the PBEM judges at a point where that attention might be undesirable. Certainly things like a convention/tournament calendar would be fine for us to have, but we still need to consider what the value of a DipPouch-lite would be. If our content is so limited that we won't be serving a large audience, it may just not be worth continuing. Any changes in status will be announced here and on rec.games.diplomacy.

Until this matter gets resolved, we want to discourage any negative response towards Avalon Hill from our readers!! The best case scenario is that their interpretation of The Pouch is a misinterpretation and this can all be amicably resolved. For the time being, we'd like to avoid any reaction that might get us on their bad side. For those readers who would like to voice support for our existence, we have set up a petition page where you can append your name and email address to a letter of support for The Diplomatic Pouch:

We are considering making minimal changes to the pages and reopening soon as a site devoted not to Diplomacy but to a public-domain game, checkers. Other than the fact that only two people (rather than seven) play, the games are pretty similar. As in Diplomacy, checkers uses exactly two types of pieces (regular pieces and "kings"). And a jump is rather like a convoy, when it comes right down to it. So we figure it wouldn't take all that much to change all of our existing pages and quickly become the pre-eminent site for checkers instead of Diplomacy.

Thanks for coming by over our three years of existence. It's been a trememdous amount of fun.