Derivative works matters in this case if the OGL has a
requirement that forces you to make *all* of your derivative works (from other
OGC) into OGC.
If someone can establish that the OGL says this then they can
force a publisher to open up anything that a judge decides *is* derivative of
the SRD or any other OGC document in the section 15 listing of a disputed
publication. The copyright holder would not loose their
right to own the copyright of the document, but they would loose their right to
be able to not define derivative work as Open Game Content if they wanted
to use the OGL [1]. If the people that share this opinion are correct publishing
derivate material and not declaring it as OGC (even PIing the names if they are
similar to existing ones that you base your work on) might be illegal under the
terms of the licence.[2]
So what othaherzog was talking about
comes back to "Does the OGL have some power over derivative works"? There is a
definition "Derivative Material" in the OGL section 1 (b) which states that it
means: "copyrighted material including derivative works and translations
(including into other computer languages), potation, modification, correction,
addition, extension, upgrade, improvement, compilation, abridgment or other form
in which an existing work my be recast, transformed or adapted"
So in that context derivative works are controlled by the OGL
in some way where as copyright is not. Derivative works is also mentioned in the
definition of Open Game Content but from my reading of this it doesn't seem to
imply that something that is a derivative work of a product that is not OGC is
turned into Open Game Content. It doesn't seem to rule on it one way or the
other. Although most people here that express an opinion, seem to believe that
derivative work based on OGC must by law become OGC itself. I wonder if they
have the same opinion about "Derivative Material" that they have about
"derivative works". As the upper case definition covers extensions and additions
it would make *any* new rule OGC if you could convince a judge that the OGL was
written with that interpretation in mind.
David Shepheard
[1] I think that a court might be
able force a rewrite of the Open Game Content definition of an individual
licence to allow people to treat disputed "derivative works" as Open Game
Content (as long as they put a OGL in the back of *their* publications etc etc).
This of course is assuming that the hypothetical publication with "derivative
works" didn't cause it's publisher to loose the right to "Use" the
OGL and be forced to pulp every OGL product they own. The termination
clause of the licence doesn't say anything about that, however it does say that
sublicenses survive.
Perhaps this part of the licence could be used as a
counter-claim by anyone who was taken to court after using "crippled content"
(and not correctly extracting PI terms claimed by the person taking them to
court). If they could establish to a judge that these were derivative
works (of OGC works mentioned in the section 15 of the product) then
perhaps they could pull the rug out from the people that had started the first
court case. However, that is another discussion entirely! ;-)
[2] What I mean by this is that if I write an Open Game
Content spell called "Create Ice Cream" and you use my use my OGC in your book
and add a new spell called "Improved Create Ice Cream" the derivative work
principle (if it is correct) would prevent you from defining "Improved Create
Ice Cream" as PI because I have already defined my term as OGC and you *can not*
base PI on OGC.
Having said that. I'd like someone who has this belief
to "join the dots" for me here as I don't even understand how the OGL keeps
OGC as OGC after multiple uses (unless that is implied from standard
copyright law and/or the trail back to the original copy of the OGL
that was attached to the OGC). |
_______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
