On Monday, April 12, 2004 6:29 PM Lizard wrote: > Nor are they copyrightable in the US. This doesn't invalidate the > OGL in the slightest. It's a CONTRACT. You *voluntarily* waive some > rights in order to get the benefits. If you don't think the > tradeoff is worth it, don't use the OGL.
Have I claimed that PI as such might invalidate OGL? Not to my knowledge. Well, the Freedom of Contract seems to be more restricted in some EU countries compared to the US. As I have said before, the provisions made in the second sentence of section 7 have no legal validity in Sweden - period. This has nothing to do with thinking that the trade-off is not worth it - the Licensor is simply not able to make those demands. This will not invalidate the OGL - the section 12 is also not valid in Sweden. > > Games for example have a weaker protection in Europe as compared > > to the US. Game rules can not be patented, nor can they be > > copyrighted as such. The higher demand of originality also makes > > a lot of game rule descriptions non-copyrightable. > > This is ALSO true in the US. Hmm, I was under the impression that games could be patented in the US, but if thatâs not true then I was obviously wrong. I ran a query at http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html once and came up with quite a few hits (more than 10 000) when searching for âgamesâ so I honestly thought games could be patended in the US. But then if games cannot be patented how could one license the game mechanics? Besides, in the EU game rules and any methods and proceedures related to them are explicitly excluded from the patentable subject matter: For example, from the Belgian Patent Law we can learn that: âArt. 3.â1. The following in particular shall not be regarded as inventions within the meaning of Article 2: (1) discoveries, scientific theories and mathematical methods; (2) aesthetic creations; (3) schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or doing business, and programs for computers; (4) presentations of information.â In the US Patent Law there is no such rule (as far as I can tell), this is the difference in the patentablity of games I was thinking of. It is aperantly possible to patent a game in the US, it might be very unlikely that you would succeed but you could try â in Europe it's impossible to patent game rules. > Peter, you need to research US copyright law more before you start > saying the OGL is void in Europe. Given most of what your > describing is identical between US and European law -- and given > the nature of the Berne convention -- I think you're incorrect in > your assumption the OGL is not valid under European law. Eh, the main reason I believe OGL might have trouble in the EU are because of the regulations on trademark use in section 7. I have also made the comment that some jurisdictions in the EU have special rules for how contracts dealing with the transferral of copyrights are to be formed. When someone issues an OGL in the EU he/she will do so under his own law - not US law. While it probably would do me good to read up a bit on US copyright law it wouldnât help me with an analysis of OGLâs legal status in Sweden, only knowledge of Swedish law will help me do that. As for the similarity of US and EU copyright laws. Itâs true that the laws can *appear* to be similar but the foundation behind the laws are quite different and while in practice the âoutputâ might be similar, one should be careful when drawing any conclusions from this apparent similarity. /Peter _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
