At Sat, 24 Jun 2000 11:39:03 -0600, Brad Thompson wrote:
>Ah, but if you take someone else's book of non-copyrightable rules and
>rewrite them, then you have created a derivative work, because you based
>your version of the rules on their book. Rules cannot be copyrighted, but
>the source is still protected. If you make a work that is substantially
>similar to a copyrighted work even if that similarity is only the rules, AND
>you had an opportunity to make use of the copyrighted work when creating
>your own, then the burden of proof falls to you to prove that your work is
>independent and not derivative.
Pardon the newbie jumping in here, but I think that I should point out that this is
probably not accurate. I am not a lawyer, nor is this intended to be legal advice,
but I am in law school and have a particular interest in intellectual property law.
Rules are not protected by copyright. In my opinion, that means that only the
author's specific expression and any graphics used to illustrate the rules are
protected. Otherwise, by the above logic, only one person could write a book about
variant Poker rules, and that'd be the end of books about Poker. If the similarities
between the two books are limited to rules, ideas, and processes, then there's no
infringement, IMO, no matter how much some would wish it to be otherwise.
Jeroen Halstad
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