Ryan S. Dancey wrote:
I wish the CC license system was not designed around such a complex
licensing strategy. That's an echo of part of what Dvorak is trying
(albeit badly) to say in his article. Its so confusing that a pretty
intelligent guy, who has been in the IP wars as long as I've been an
adult, had unanswered questions about it
One of the reasons I did not believe it would be useful for Open
Gaming is that the license structure is so complex that I feared many
people who might otherwise want to try Open Gaming publishing would be
unable to do so due to license complexities. Worse, the existance of
the varient CC licensing structure meant that nobody could be told
simply "it's a Creative Commons license" - because that doesn't mean
anything specific. CC doesn't grant any specific rights, or impose
specific limitations. Someone who thought they understood a CC
license from some other project might make very big mistakes if a
different set of CC terms was used for the System Reference Document.
And this is worse than the fact that you can't say "this is D20 System"
because it doesn't mean anything specific? Even "this uses the D20STL"
isn't a terribly useful statement, if you're curious about the content,
rather than the legal status.
And, while picking a license may be complex, at least the licenses are
readable and clear. I don't see anything like the still-unresolved
ambiguity over exactly who has authority to declare IP, what can be
declared IP, and what the scope of said declarations is.
Actually, i'll even take a stronger stance. The only way to figure out
what the WotC OGL means is to read it (complete with lots of ambiguous
clauses due to grammar errors and typos), or spend a bunch of time on
this list. I've never even read the fine print on most of the CC
licenses--i read one of them in toto the first time i discovered
CC--because they have handy summaries of what they do. The WotC OGL
doesn't actually say that there can be content in my work that is
neither OGC nor PI--i have to figure that out somehow. If i want to use
a CC license, the very name of the license tells me almost everything i
need to know about it, and picking a license is a clearly-explained
series of mostly-binary choices: i do/don't want people to be able to
make commercial works with my license; i do/don't want derivative works
to be required to use the same license; etc.
I really don't see why it's all that likely that someone might think the
rules regarding a book that says "This work released under the Creative
Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license" are exactly the same as those
governing a book that says "This work released under the Creative
Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license". If that scares them away, i can't
believe they'd even consider wading through the terms and implementation
of the WotC OGL. For the WotC OGL to be merely no more complicated to
implement than the CC licenses, it would need a plaintext summary,
something along the lines of "To use this license, designate what
material you want others to be able to use as OGC, designate the
material that you want to make sure no one uses as PI, and anything left
is still protected by copyright."
Oh, and any plaintext interpretation of the license should be clearer
than the WotC FAQ, or the license itself should be cleaned up:
*Q: If something is clearly identified as both Open Game Content and
Product Identity in the same work, what is it?*
A: Product Identity.
*Q: If I identify something as Product Identity, then in the future I
distribute that material as Open Game Content, does the material
become Open Game Content?*
A: Yes. By doing so, you will be relinquishing your claim that the
material should be considered Product Identity.
Now order of operations matters on designation? So i can render all my
own previous PI declarations null and void just by inadvertently missing
them in one work? Even if the deriver has access to those previous
works? [mind you, i personally rather like this interpretation: it
implicitly says that if i have two sources for something, one of which
claims the content as PI and one of which does not, the latter trumps;
the prohibition is on reuse, not use. But that seems like an awful
narrow interpretation of PI, especially considering how WotC uses the
terms in their own works.]
My other complaint is that none of the CC license varients allow an
easy mixture of open and closed content within a readable scope of
work. They all depend on chapters, segments or appendices to
segregate open and non-open content. Obviously, that would not have
worked for gaming.
Huh? I'll accept "would not have worked the way the WotC OGL works" or
"would not have worked the way you want it to", but, IMHO, almost all
the problems with the WotC OGL stem precisely from the attempt to mix
open and non-open content in an indescriminate matter, and, even if i
weren't philosophically opposed to the admixture, i'd argue against it.
I really don't see requiring large blocks of text (such as chapters) to
be either open or not, and relying on trademark to protect those few
special terms in an otherwise-open block of text that really need to be
protected.
I also think the CC project has the same failings as many "open"
licensing projects, (and again an echo of Dvorak) - way too much
effort spent differentiating between "commercial" and "noncommercial"
use. On this issue, I'm with Stallman. If "Freedom"(*) is your
objective, then make your stuff Free. Don't screw around with half
measures.
Yeah, i agree with you there: making it viral is appropriate, saying
"you can't make money with this" is at best silly, and at worst
counter-productive. [n.b.: before someone calls me a hypocrite on this,
yes, Dread has been released under the CC
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license; i was out-voted. We may
"upgrade" it later, allowing more rights (i.e., rereleasing without the
non-commercial restriction).]
----
[aside: WotC has really expanded and improved their FAQ since the last
time i looked at it. It's still missing some key bits, but it's a lot
more comprehensive than it used to be. though there are still some
questionable bits:
Q: I want to make a product that claims compatibility with someone
else's Trademark, and uses Open Game Content. I'm going to put the
Open Game Content in a separate booklet in a box, and only use the
Trademark on the packaging on the box. Can I get away with this?
A: No. The terms of the Open Game License extend to the whole work. If
you have questions about the technical legal definition of a "work",
consult your legal counsel.
So, apparently several books sold bundled together are one work, but a
single issue of a magazine is multiple works. Or Dragon is in a lot of
trouble.]
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