From: "Brad Thompson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Nothing personal Ryan, but "as far as I'm concerned" doesn't really cut
it.
> The OGL is a binding legal contract now, and your opinion won't matter one
> bit as far as what does or doesn't pass the test of 'clearly indicated'.
Since the "Reasonable Person" test is purely subjective and is not a defined
set of rules, there is nothing other than opinions until a specific case
goes in front of a specific court and a specific judge or set of jurors
decide what is reasonable and what isn't. Thus, it would be foolish of me
to say "this is reasonable, but this is not reasonable". All I can do is try
to provide some guidance about the matter from my perspective. YMMV.
> A PDF is a nearly ideal format for
> many OGC applications, but it doesn't fit your definition.
PDF is a challenging case. The viewer is widespread and essentially free.
However, without that viewer there is no good way to get the raw text out of
a PDF file. I suspect that as long as the viewer is available free of
charge and is widely distributed, a court would find a PDF file to be
"reasonably" easy to read and thus used as a medium to clearly identify what
content was Open Game Content.
> What about a ZIP file?
ZIP is a non-proprietary format for which there are numerous extractors
available both as free software and non-free software. I think it is
reasonable to assume a consumer could open a ZIP archive and extract the
OGC.
> A Microsoft Help file?
If the text is visible when viewed as raw ASCII the format is probably OK.
I don't know enough about the Help file format to know if the content is
easily extractable without a Microsoft tool. Even if not, I suspect that a
court would find it reasonably easy to get the OGC out of a MS Help file.
> What about authors who want to use the DMCA
> to protect their digitally-distributed commercial work, and use encryption
> to protect their PI?
Case by case depending on the challenge of extracting the information which
is Open Game Content. I could easily see a format that would not be
reasonable.
> But if their policies are
> controlling the OGF/OGL then it really isn't open, is it?
I don't know how we got down this path to the Conspiracy again, but the
problems with digital files and the OGL have nothing to do with Hasbro.
They have everything to do with not turning the OGL into a software license
(if you remember, I suggested doing exactly that at one point last spring -
requring digital files to be released using an OSI certified license, which
was roundly (and fairly, I admit) criticized.)
The problem is that the license uses a very simple, very lightweight system
to keep Open Game Content easily extractable - the clause that it be
"clearly identfied". The nature of digital files is such that with little
effort and often by accident, Open Game Content can be rendered impossible
to detect or separate from the larger work. The alternative is a very
detailed, very specific license (like the GPL), or an impossible-to-use
license requiring complete human-readable distribution of the content (which
would kill PDF and ZIP for example).
My opinion is that the problem is one only solvable with time and with
revisions to the license once we have some perspective on how the project is
progressing in the real world. Time has to pass at its own rate, and
there's essentially no chance that a revision to the license will be
undertaken any time in the foreseeable future. So for now we have to muddle
along with a less than optimal framework for non-human-readble digital
distribution of OGC.
Ryan
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