Had a fantastic meeting with legal today. Brian Lewis, who is the chief
corporate counsel for WotC sat in and had lots of positive things to say
about the process.
We're going to be making some changes to the text over the next day or two,
and hope to have an "approved" license ready by Monday of next week.
The biggest change we're going to be making is adding a clause that
basically prohibits anyone who uses Open Game Content from using another
company's trademarks on that product without permission.
This is another "carrot and stick" clause. The idea behind this clause is
to stop someone from just putting "this product is compatible with the D20
System. The D20 System is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast and is not
used with permission." on their Open Gaming products without conforming to
the D20 System license; or worse, using someone's game brand name (clearly
for me, the worst case would be to have someone use D&D). The legal issues
here are so murky that nobody wants to even render an opinion on how
effective a suit might be if one were brought to stop this kind of use.
Brian also would like to take a crack at cracking the nut of "game rules" as
a definable intellectual property. He's going to try and draft some clear
language that will make it very easy to keep the game mechanics separate
from story-character IP, and get rid of some of the ambiguity in the
existing license.
Ryan
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For more information, please link to www.opengamingfoundation.org
