On Thu, 29 Jun 2000, John of the Collective wrote:
> A simple way to fix this would be to in the copyright section right after the
> D20 and OGL licenses put in language such as this.
>
> All content in greyed boxes in this book is designated Open content. With the
> exception, All the proper nouns detailed below are closed and copyright 2000 by
> sonso games.
>
> Terms covered
> Snakemen
> Mongoosemen
> .......
>
> Since the OGL doesn't define how to indicate closed content, simply make sure
> that any content that is clossed is defined as such.
>
> Remember, for practical purposes, only proper nouns can be protected anyway.
Unfortunately proper nouns cannot be copyrighted by themselves so your
proposal would not provide the protection you are seeking. In order to
protect a proper noun you need to be able to trademark it. Something that
is more complicated that copyrighting and also probably impossible with
the terms "snakemen" and "mongoosemen". I assume what people are
concerned about protecting is 'their' version of such creatures, which
would naturally require more than just a name to describe. The entire
description would of course qualify for copyright protection.
While personally I don't think just using the name of a creature in an
OPEN section of the text would be sufficient to bring the entire
description of the creature (assuming it was described in a CLOSED
section) into the OPEN, I think the suggestion about describing any
benefits in a generic way (+2 to hit mortal enemy as opposed to +2 to hit
snakemen) is a simple way around this. Explaining who is a creature's
mortal enemy would then be something covered in the CLOSED descriptions of
the creature.
alec
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