----- Original Message -----
From: "Faustus von Goethe" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, June 27, 2000 10:12 AM
Subject: Re: [Open_Gaming] OGL and Intellectual Property
> You can enclose the monsters "stats" in a greyed out "stats block" and
> declare at the front of the book that anythong greyed out is "open" and
all
> of the rest of the text is closed.
>
That's the idea, yes, but implementation can be tricky. For instance, you
create your race of snakemen, but you want to keep the race closed. So you
name the race and describe the race's culture in the regular text of your
book and put the statistics in a greyed out 'stats block.' No problem.
Now you move on to your next creation, mongoosemen. Mongoosemen hate
snakemen with a passion. In fact, this hatred is so great that it gives
mongoosemen +2 to hit when fighting snakemen. So in the greyed out stats
block you put "+2 to hit when fighting snakemen." The problem is that you've
just opened the name of your snakemen race. Your book is leaking your IP
through 'open' holes.
Under the OGL as it stands, designers will have to be very careful when
their rules refer to elements of their closed setting. In any reasonably
complex setting, rules referring to the setting are fairly common. Using
unique names is a common way of giving a setting a distinct character, and
if you lose control of those unique names, you lose control of your IP.
This is the heart of my concern. The example above demonstrates what I mean
when I say that rules and adventure material are not wholly distinct. They
overlap and merge and get muddled together. When this happens, you must be
very careful to preserve the integrity of your IP because the OGL will tend
to leak your IP. The difficulty this presents (and perhaps impossibility in
many cases) will tend to keep non-WotC professionals with new IP away from
OGL.
WotC doesn't have to worry about this because they are not using d20 and the
OGL to describe their settings. They are using the rules of D&D. We can't
use the rules of D&D; we must use d20 as described in the d20SRD, and the
d20SRD is released under the OGL. Sure, d20 is based on the rules of D&D,
but that doesn't make D&D open or covered by the OGL.
As it stands now, the OGL serves a purpose and will no doubt be useful to
many people. But I think it would be more attractive to more people if it
addressed this tendency to leak IP.
-kenan
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