> Hypothetical: Lime-Green Ronin publishes Mercenaries of Seaport as > 100 percent open text. The company intended to do this, but the only > written documentation of this intent is the book itself.
I think they're probably unlikely to be able to make a compelling case that the material was released in an unauthorized fashion - although it would be unlikely, in today's environment, for a product to be released sans advertising, and "100% Open Game Content" has become a popular advertising angle for small publishers making it very, very hard to claim an error post-publication anyway. To be crystal clear: This is not an analogy to the situation WotC finds themselves in at present. Factors bearing on the WotC situation: 1) Public comments >specifically< about the material that was mistakenly released as OGC predating the release of that material indicating that they did not intend to make that material OGC. 2) The material in question has been obviously removed from thousands of passages of text where it otherwise appears in the primary source material, clearly indicating intent on the part of WotC to remove that content universally. 3) WotC is not dealing with a significant amount of content, not even so much as a paragraph of material - in fact, it is dealing with >two words<. 4) Those two words have been registered as a trademark and vigorously defended by WotC and its predecessors for nearly 25 years as the exclusive property of the owner of D&D, and nothing in WotC's public or private correspondance or commentary indicates any interest whatsoever in changing that stance. This is, in fact, a very unusual situation, and not one that I suspect will be oft repeated due to the unique nature of the prior commentary and long history of defense of exclusivity of the content in question. Ryan _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
