In a message dated 6/1/2004 2:32:53 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<<--PI follows the "white-out" method for interpretation purposes--you can't get it from that source, but if you can legitimately get it from some other source you're in the clear>>
The "get it from somewhere else" method really adds a lot of weight to the notion that PI must be "owned" to be declared (my reading of the PI definition). You can't gain PI protection over things which are not copyrightable, aren't trademarked, and aren't patented, and you don't need to "get them from somewhere else" because if they aren't copyrighted, patented, or trademarked, then they are by definition in the public domain. Unless "ownership" implies something other than "having secured rights to the material via normal IP law", then when people PI stuff that isn't copyrighted then you can insert it right back in.
I disagree. I think Ryan (and Clark?--i forget who all has taken this position now) is right that PI might not require ownership of any sort to be valid PI. It just might not be effective. I don't think a PI declaration has to be effective to be valid--why you'd bother making an ineffective PI declaration is another matter.
<<--given those two, i don't care whether or not there are standards for the declaration of PI, because it is trivially circumvented. >>
Well, one area of concern is if people try to PI formulae that are unique to them. If they are unique, but not ownable, then they can't be PI'd (if ownership is determined as above). In which case, you would, at worst, have a text where that section was not OGC, but since it's not copyrightable, then you should be able to reinsert it.
And that's one place where "PI is always valid but not always effective" differs from "PI must be ownable": by that interpretation, if it's moderately unique the fact that it can't be owned might not prevent circumvention, if there is no other source for it. Whereas if PI claims over non-ownable material simply are invalid, then, as you say, the material would be effectively public domain. Mind you, i'm not taking a stand over which situation is better, just pointing out one of the few places they differ.
<< It only comes up when it is blatantly obvious, such as claiming as PI something that never appears in the work>>
By one school of thought, if the OGC/PI declaration is part of the covered work, then the PI declaration could be self-referential, in which case you could PI something that only appears in your PI declaration. And thus the d20 SRD (no illithids in there, right?).
Hmmm...never thought of it like that. But a good point--since we don't have hard-n-fast rules on what constitutes "the work", i can't definitively say that the OGC/PI declarations are in some sense "outside of" it. Seems pretty sketchy to me, however. And still not valid *if* the "PI is a subset of OGC" theory is correct, since the PI declaration hasn't been identified as OGC (except, perhaps, for a few 100% OGC works, depending on the wording of their declaration--frex, i explicitly excluded the ToC and credits pages when designating the OGC in my otherwise-100% OGC prettied-up D20SRD). And perhaps valid but ineffective if PI protection is, basically, the "white-out" interpretation, and only mono-generational.
--
woodelf <*>
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