Hey, everybody, I'm looking for opinions on a practical problem involving a long Section 15.
A couple weeks ago, Highmoon Media Productions released the first issue of its PDF magazine Targum, a licensed magazine supporting Green Ronin's Testament setting. No problems with that one. With issue #2, though, Highmoon was given permission to expand coverage to include two other Green Ronin Mythic Vistas settings: Trojan War and Eternal Rome. The problem is that the Section 15 entry for Eternal Rome is horrendously long: 71 upstream references, and just shy of 1,000 words. (And I don't want to get into a debate about the way the OGL is setup up to cause just this sort of Section 15 monster; I'm having that discussion elsewhere without much satisfaction.) Nothing can be done about the length of the Eternal Rome Section 15: If someone wants to borrow OGC from that book, or from a magazine that borrowed OGC from that book, then that's what they're stuck with. Sorry folks. But what if someone reading issue #2 of Targum, with its mix of Testament-, Trojan War-, and Eternal Rome-derived articles, wants to borrow some Open Content from a Testament-based article? Is there a way to keep him by being frightened away by the requirement to use the whole Eternal Rome Section 15 notice, since there were also Eternal Rome-based articles in the issue? Taking the currently-projected contents of Targum #2 as an example, there's going to have the second part of an article on the 12 Tribes of Israel (which uses Testament OGC), an article on writing materials used in the ancient world (which really doesn't use much of any OGC, but let's call it Testament anyway, just for the sake of argument), and one on Roman villas (which might use some Eternal Rome OGC). If Highmoon does the usual thing, and just prints one license covering the whole magazine, anyone wanting to reuse OGC from either of the Testament articles will have to use the overly-long Eternal Rome Section 15. One option would be to print a separate license and Section 15 for each article. That would cover the situation accurately and license-legally. With a paper magazine it would be impractical, because of the large number of pages of repetitive license pages that would be required: 1 page each for the two Testament-derived articles, and 2 pages (or more) for the Rome-derived article (and possibly more pages if there are more articles in the issue, which is the current plan). That would work, but would still be annoying to buyers who'd accuse the publisher of padding the page count, and it would be enraging to people who open the PDF and hit "print" without previewing the pages to see which ones needn't be printed. But stealing an idea (but not the application of it) from Necromancer's "Tome of Horrors," can Highmoon do a single license page with multiple variant Section 15s? Could it print a single OGL, but when it gets to the Section 15 put: "12 Tribes of Israel: Part 2"; author Daniel Perez, and "Ostraca: Ostraca," author Spike Y Jones, Targum Issue #2; publisher Highmoon Media, copyright 2006 -- and then include the Testament-derived Section 15. then, in big, bold letters: OR "Roman Villa"; author Daniel Perez, Targum Issue #2; publisher Highmoon Media, copyright 2006 -- and then include the full-length Eternal Rome-derived Section 15. That would mean that anyone using Testament-derived OGC would only need to reproduce the Testament Section 15 (plus the Targum copyright notice, of course), and only anyone using Rome-derived OGC would be forced to use the Eternal Rome Section 15. There'd also have to be a paragraph (right under the P.I. and OGC declaration paragraphs) on how to use the two different Section 15s -- something akin to "Tome of Horrors'" page of instruction on how to use that book's more complicated Section 15 system. (But this implementation is simpler, so wouldn't need as much explanation.) I think this would be license-legal, and would be seen by readers as a nice gesture on Highmoon's part to try to make the best of a difficult situation. What does everyone here think? Spike Y Jones, developer of Eternal Rome and Testament, and Targum columnist _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list Ogf-l@mail.opengamingfoundation.org http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l