I'm curious: If a company declares something OGC in one book, can they later on in another book declare it PI? And what does that due to the people who want to use it? Is it OGC or is it PI content?
Essentially, WotC declared d20 as OGC in the 3.0 SRD. Now they are trying to close that. I thought that had been argued to death as not possible. The reverse was, but not closing something. You could always open it more, never close. Most of the stuff declared as PI in there were never in the original SRD, So it is not an issue. I'm not sure what their legal department is trying to do with it... There is something funky up. That also begs a question: Can you PI something that you never use in a product except in the PI designation? That would just seem weird, but it is what they are doing with 'Red Wizard of Thay' and others in that list. Andrew McDougall a.k.a. Tir Gwaith ----- Original Message ----- From: "woodelf" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, July 21, 2003 7:42 PM Subject: Re: [Ogf-l] SRD released (apparantly) At 17:32 -0400 7/21/03, Joe Mucchiello wrote: >From Legal.rtf: The following items are designated Product Identity, >as defined in Section 1(e) of the Open Game License Version 1.0a, >and are subject to the conditions set forth in Section 7 of the OGL, >and are not Open Content: Dungeons & Dragons, D&D, Dungeon Master, >Monster Manual, d20 System, Wizards of the Coast, d20, Forgotten >Realms, Faerūn, character names (including those used in the names >of spells or items), places, Red Wizard of Thay, Heroic Domains of >Ysgard, Ever-Changing Chaos of Limbo, Windswept Depths of >Pandemonium, Infinite Layers of the Abyss, Tarterian Depths of >Carceri, Gray Waste of Hades, Bleak Eternity of Gehenna, Nine Hells >of Baator, Infernal Battlefield of Acheron, Clockwork Nirvana of >Mechanus, Peaceable Kingdoms of Arcadia, Seven Mounting Heavens of >Celestia, Twin Paradises of Bytopia, Blessed Fields of Elysium, >Wilderness of the Beastlands, Olympian Glades of Arborea, Concordant >Domain of the Outlands, Sigil, Lady of Pain, Book of Exalted Deeds, >Book of Vile Darkness, beholder, gauth, carrion crawler, tanar'ri, >baatezu, displacer beast, githyanki, githzerai, mind flayer, >illithid, umber hulk, yuan-ti. > >No more "Wizards doesn't have PI" rebuttals. doh! Well, not really--i hadn't actually been using that loophole, exc-- hey! they've claimed "d20" as PI. Guess that puts the spotlight directly on the question of whether any "authority to contribute" is required for PI, as well as the questions of if that authority requires ownership in the usual IP sense (i.e., no unqualified common terms). Not to mention that a bunch of the other terms could now force the question of whether PI is meaningful outside of OGC, since, as others have noted, almost none of those terms actually occur within OGC (legally, at least) anywhere. [In case anyone cares: i stick by my guns that they can't claim "d20" as trademark *or* PI. I wonder if i'll ever do anything that challenges that claim.] _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
