Tim Dugger wrote:
On 4 Sep 2005 at 16:05, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
If this is the case, then there's no such thing as the "third type of
content" and a whole bunch of stuff has been published under the OGL
using an incorrect interpretation of the license. I wonder if the fact
that WotC hasn't taken any steps in the past five years to correct
this misinterpretation would work against the company if it tried to
start enforcing this interpretation now.
I view it as squares and rectangles. All squares are rectangles, but
not all rectangles are square.
You have a "work", as defined by Ryan to be an entire product from
cover to cover. In this "work" you are required to declare what is
OGC, and to declare what is PI. However, there is nothing in the
license that says "the entire work IS OGC unless it is declared PI".
My interpretation is that the work contains OGC, PI, and anything
else not declared by the first two. That "anything else" is still bound
by the OGL, especially where the OGL superceeds copyright law.
That "anything else" can include such things as public domain
material (such as the names of the Norse Gods).
If the entire work were considered to be OGC, except for what was
declared PI, then there would be absolutely no reason to declare
what is OGC, as it would be implicit that if it is not declared as PI it
would be OGC. However, this interpretation fails because it is
possible to incude public domain material (such as the names of
Norse gods) in a work. Since the names are public domain, they
cannot be declared OGC nor PI because the contributor does not
own the rights to declare it as one or the other, and if a work
contains only 2 types of content (OGC & PI), then it would be
impossible to use any public domain material within a covered work.
Thus, any work which included such would be in violation of the
OGL
Alternately, you can declare "Thor" as PI or OGC. And someone would
therefore be required to not use, or make OGC, respectively,"your"
version of the word "Thor". They could, alternately, choose a different
source if one were available--like, oh, say, PD. Since "authority to
contribute" is not explicitly defined, and exactly what you are
prohibited from WRT PI is not explicitly defined, and what authority, if
any, you need to declare PI is not explicitly defined, it seems
perfectly reasonable to me that you could declare a PD element as either
OGC or PI, and thus force those who derive from it to treat it as such.
And equally reasonable, and in no way a contradiction, to say that those
very same people could instead cite the PD--rather than your work-- as
their source for those specific elements.
Let me use an alternate, and hopefully less-muddled, example. Let us
suppose for a moment that the vitality/wounds system in Spycraft is
closed content, that the same system in Uneathed Arcana is OGC, and that
the Star Wars D20 game had been released under the WotC OGL and the
vitality/wounds system there had been declared PI. Further, assume that
the systems are identical (rather than nearly-identical). I believe that
you could cite Spycraft and UA in your Sec.15, and use the
vitality/wounds system. The fact that it is not available to you via
Spycraft doesn't prevent you using the identical content via UA.
Moreover, IMHO, you could cite UA and Star Wars D20 in your Sec.15, and
still use the vitality/wounds system, verbatim from UA, even though that
would be identical in content to using it verbatim from Star Wars D20.
That is, the power of the prohibitions of PI is only as great as the PI
is unique. Likewise, the requirements of OGC are only as powerful as the
OGC is unique--if you can reasonably invent the content in a way that
makes you legitimate creator/owner, the fact that it *could have been*
copied from or derived from someone else's OGC doesn't make it necessary
to designate it OGC itself. As a concrete example of this, the starship
construction system in T20: it could have been derived from the existing
D20 System OGC. However, it actually was derived from the existing
MegaTraveller/Traveller: tNE rules. Therefore, they were not required to
make it OGC, and chose not to. Perfectly legitimately and legally, IMHO.
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