> LaPierre, Bob
>
> One of the reasons this point is included seems to be to keep it
> to the _least_ legal complication. To wit: If I develope a system
> for running a circus and you create a supplement so people could
> run acrobats in my setting, and Doug uses your rules in his
> supplement on theives and conmen but I didn't get "Barnum &
> Baileys" permission to use their name and now it is in both of
> your works because I used it. Now _you_ are responsible for
> removing content that I shouldn't have had in mine to begin with.
> By asking permission beforehand it will avoid a possibly ruinous
> rewrite of a system. I don't like the additional work anymore
> than anyone else but I like reprinting my work even less.
This would indeed be a thorny problem, but you've missed an important
detail.
Under the license currently posted at the OGF website, all trademarks which
are not owned by the author must be in closed content, and therefore we
cannot derive from them. This is because the author does not have the right
to grant a 'perpetual, world-wide, royalty-free, non-exclusive' sublicense
of that mark. If we derive from your work and use that mark, we would be
violating your closed content. In such a situation, you might not care
about the violation, but it would exist.
On the other hand, under the new agreement, you would either use the mark
with permission of B&B or not at all. B&B is NEVER going to grant
permission to use the mark in Open Content, because of the difficulty in
defending their mark once they grant 'perpetual, world-wide, royalty-free,
non-exclusive' rights to everyone who wants to use it - the OGL is simply
too easy to exploit in areas other than games. They MIGHT grant it for
closed content, but the unintended consequences of it's use make this highly
unlikely.
Here is a real-world example of why this won't happen: The Denver/Boulder
newspaper 'Westword' is running a contest for the worst United Airlines
screw-up of the summer. The prize is a pair of tickets anywhere in the
country on Frontier Airlines. Frontier originally had no problem with the
publicity they paper would give them. However, when they discovered the
exact nature of the contest (at publication time), they did not like the
fact that it appeared that Frontier was bashing it's big brother in the
industry. They forced the paper to publish a written notice that they were
not associated in any way with the contest. Since they had not granted
explicit permission to use their mark, they had easy deniability, which
would have been impossible if they had chosen to be more closely tied to the
newspaper on this contest.
It is reasons like these that companies will NOT grant permission to use
their trademarks in games - they have no time to make sure they are used
properly, and no financial incentive to do so. The risks are too great, and
the benefits vanishingly small.
This amendment is a defacto ban on all trademarks not specifically
associated with small-time RPG publishers, and even then I suspect such
permission will be very rare and based more on trust and personal
relationships than financial gain.
-Brad
winmail.dat
