Oh, sure, Clark... Put together a professional legal analysis that puts my amateur analysis to shame... You don't just persuade me you're right, you beat me over the head with it!
> Lets look at the license. Does the license apply > product by product or is it really one license between > YOU and WOTC? One correction: product-by-product or one license, it's a license between YOU and CONTRIBUTORS: **************************************************************** 4. Grant and Consideration: In consideration for agreeing to use this License, the Contributors grant You a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license with the exact terms of this License to Use, the Open Game Content. **************************************************************** 1. Definitions: (a)"Contributors" means the copyright and/or trademark owners who have contributed Open Game Content; **************************************************************** Now clearly, Wizards is A Contributor in most cases of interest to us, but they're not the only Contributor. So doesn't party X have an Open Game License with party Y any time X correctly uses OGC from Y? And isn't Y the only one with standing to terminate that license? And is it possible for X to still have a valid Open Game License with party Z even if he loses the license with Y? In other words, in the Mongoose case, it is suggested that Mongoose may have incorrectly used material from SSS and the NetBook, among others. Would irrevocably losing rights to reuse SSS or Netbook works have ANY bearing on the license between Mongoose and Wizards? Is there just one, collective license between all Contributors listed in Section 15 and the "You" defined in the license? Or is there a license between You and each Contributor whose work you use? So here's the possibilities as I understand them. Clark (and others, of course), please tell me which makes LEGAL sense to you: 1. You have a collective product-by-product license with the set of Contributors upon whose work your product is based. Violating the license loses you the right to use any OGC from any Contributors within that one product, but does not preclude you using OGC from any Contributors within other works. 2. You have individual product-by-product licenses with each Contributor upon whose work your product is based. Violating the license with regard to one Contributor loses you the right to use any OGC from that Contributor within that one product, but does not preclude you using OGC from other Contributors within that or other works. 3. You have comprehensive individual licenses with the set of Contributors upon whose work your product is based. In other words, a license with company X that applied to every work in which you reused OGC from company X, etc. Violating the license with regard to one Contributor loses you the right to use any OGC from that Contributor within any product, past or future, but does not preclude you using OGC from other Contributors within that or other works. 4. You have some sort of gestalt license: a single comprehensive license with the set of all Contributors upon whose work any of your products is based. In other words, if you ever used OGC from company X, then company X would be a Contributor to your One License To Rule Them All. Violating the license with regard to one Contributor loses you the right to use any OGC any Contributor within any product, past or future. 5. Some other permutation I haven't imagined. And in ANY of these cases, if you found a new source of OGC that was not in any way derivative of OGC to which you had lost rights, could you have license to that OGC? Boy, this stuff gets complicated... Hey, minor legal nitpick: the different lettered clauses in paragraph 1 all end with a semicolon (proper grammar, and I assume proper legal); but item (g) -- NOT the last item in the list -- ends in a period. Tsk, tsk. Martin L. Shoemaker Martin L. Shoemaker Consulting, Software Design and UML Training [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.MartinLShoemaker.com http://www.UMLBootCamp.com _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
