Doug-
Here is the real issue: give the publishers a business reason to do it. Right now there isnt a good one.
Clark
Well, are we talking about a database containing the actual OGC, as Doug seems to be talking about, or just a citation database, as The Sigil seemed to propose?
If the OGC isn't accessible via the database--i.e., it's essentially just an index--then it seems to me that there are definite business incentives for doing so. Unless you *want* to sue someone for breach, i presume you'd like to make it as easy and idiot-proof as possible for others to reuse your OGC properly and cleanly. And if you could hand off the questions to a reliable 3rd party, you'd be eliminating the time/effort involved in answering "can i reuse this" questions (whether they are because of idiocy on their part, poor declarations on your part, or (excessive) politeness on their part), in return for the one-time effort to write up a quick summary of the OGC in each work you publish, and attach a copyright notice:
"Tome of Horrors
by Clark Peterson, et al
copyright SSS 2002
all monster stat blocks are OGC"
[any errors of content in that quote are my fault--don't have a copy in front of me to verify]
For most sorts of OGC where greater detail would be useful and there's a lot of detail, there's already an index created when the content is created. That is, IME, most books with lots of monsters or lots of feats have a list of them, somewhere--beginning of chapter, TOC, summary chart, etc. So cut-n-paste the Tome of Horrors TOC (or index, as applicable) from your source files, cutting page numbers or not, and append to the above declaration. There you go--5min? effort per book. Or am i missing something?
oh, and for a slightly trickier, example, since i realize that books of [insert discrete game element here] are probably the easiest to summarize:
"Dynasties and Demagogues
by Chris Aylott
copyright 2003 Trident Inc. d/b/a Atlas Games
--a conflict resolution system for political/social "combat", including new uses for the skills [insert skills list]
--the feats: [insert feat list]
--the spells: [insert spell list]
--the magic items: [insert magic item list]
--the prestige classes: [insert PrC list]"
And that's assuming it didn't have an "Index of OGC" that was already compiled to include in the book (which it does). That should be more than sufficient for someone to munge into a database, and maybe assign a couple more keywords to.
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Now, if we're talking a database that actually contains the OGC, doesn't just reference it, it may be a harder sell. I'll assume "because the whole point of open-content is making it easy for others to reuse, thus improving development and the end product" doesn't cut it, because if it did, you wouldn't need convincing--you'd already be putting all your OGC up on your website for free download, if not simply giving all your work away, rather than selling it.
But how about this: tit for tat. You put in not because you want to give, but because you want to take--but you can hardly expect there to be anything to take, unless people give. So you pony up your content, as a fair trade for everyone else ponying up their content, and you get easy reuse of others' OGC. Not to mention wheel-invention-avoidance. You have to know about and be able to reuse content, or the whole "many people building upon one anothers' works" thing won't happen. The citation database covers "know about"--but doesn't help "able to reuse" in a practical manner. You still have to go buy the product and retype/scan the text, or rely on a publisher with both the time and the inclination to give you the content in digital form.
Not t omention the time-savings in total. While it may take you more effort to provide your OGC to others than to not (depending, especially, on how your final document is formatted, and thus how easy it is to extract just the OGC), it still probably takes you less effort to extract and give away your OGC than it does to re-input someone else's OGC (since you have the digital files for the former, and not the latter). So, if everyone puts effort into making their own OGC reusable, everyone spends less effort than if they instead have to put in the effort on the other end of the chain. [Assuming, of course, that roughly the same %age of a company's body of works is reused OGC, across the board, and ditto for original OGC.]
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woodelf <*>
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://webpages.charter.net/woodelph/
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