<<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.
>>
No it doesn't. It requires you to make everything that's not PI OGC. But that's irrelevant, because it also makes the entirety of the covered work OGC except for the parts that are PI. Or so it seems to me.
"Open Game Content" ... means any work covered by this License, including translations and derivative works under copyright law, but specifically excludes Product Identity.
It doesn't say it "means _only_ translations and derivative works". So, rightly or wrongly, I'm reading that to be a point adding emphasis, rather than a clause limiting the scope of "_any_ work covered by this License".
If "_any_ work covered by this License" must be OGC except for the parts that are PI, then the clause about translations and derivative works isn't adding a whole lot to the sentence, except a little emphasis.
Because in either case, the point is that you can except PI from what would otherwise be OGC.
If you own it and you declare it as PI, it is excepted from the stuff normally required to be OGC.
In derivative works, you are riding a narrow line, because you have to own it to declare it PI. So, you've got to be careful that you don't declare parts as PI that appropriate parts of somebody else's 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.>>
No, because the definition excepts anything appropriately marked as PI. Read the entire definition, not just a part of it. There's an exception there.
<<
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. >>
Well, first, material derivative of OGC need not be in an OGL covered work. It could be out there in normal fair use and copyright violation land. So keep that in mind first and foremost.
It makes it clear that any work covered by the license is OGC minus the PI. That's clear enough for me, unless somebody's got a strong argument as to why that reading would conflict with some other clause outside the definitions section. In that case, it may not be the reading that's wrong, but that the license needs reformation. On this point, I don't think either is true. I think the license is actually reasonably clear.
<<Although most people here that express an opinion, seem to believe that derivative
work based on OGC must by law become OGC itself.>>
There would be no PI then, or it would require you to start defining everything as some form of compilation or another (if when it's illogical to do so). If half my rulebook is derivative, and if I don't fight for the notion that I actually have a compiled work, it's probably going to be construed that I have net one work and one work only there, and that it is a derivative work. It may have derivative and non-derivative parts, but the work as a whole would be a derivative work.
If 100% of a derivative work has to be OGC, there could be no PI. PI exists precisely because, within a derivative work, unless a license requires you to surrender copyrights, there's stuff that you own, stuff the other guy owns, and gray areas where you have co-ownership, or where just the other guy owns the mixed stuff.
PI allows you freedom to interact with the parts you own in a derivative work.
<<[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.
>>
If PI has to be owned, and if ownership means, "per IP law" then no single spell name could be PI'd unless it was a trademark. As a short phrase it's neither copyrightable nor patentable in any real sense. Collections of spell names would gain copyright protection, but not individual names. I'd assume that if "ownership" means "copyrighted, trademarked or patented" (and it may or may not), then individual spell names have no more copyrightability than does a recipe. Recipe books are copyrightable, but a single recipe (except creative _expression_ talking about the recipe) is not.
So, this example may be sort of moot.
<<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).>>
Easy. If you can only PI things you own. And if everything in the covered work is OGC that's not PI. You PI the things you own, and everything else is rendered OGC.
Since you don't own somebody else's text, you can't PI it. It automatically gets redeclared over and over again as OGC.
Lee
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