I find it hard to believe that the intent of the license is to limit itself to copyrightable or trademarkable properties. If it was meant to do that, then there would be no reason to have a laundry list of things that are and are not copyrightable.
[hypothetical style="conspiracy theory"]
There could be a reason: specifically to extend the power of ownership of IP in RPGs. as has been pointed out numerous times on this list, exactly which portions of an RPG can be owned is up in the air--Ryan makes some convincing (though by no means definitive) arguments in favor of much more of the actual game being IP than standard copyright/patent implies. So, WotC realizes that it could lose control of everything but the trademarks, and the degree of control over those would be insufficient to prevent others from making D&D-compatible works, or even D&D clones. So they decide to undermine them by removing the incentive: they give away the mechanics. But, to do this, they have to assert their ownership of the mechanics--not many people are going to use their license if they say "we have no control over this material, you can copy it any time, but we want you to copy it our way". And they want you to do it their way, because that way they can add restrictions about the trademarks. And, while they're at it, they decide to go for the gusto: let's see how much other IP we can lock down. So, when putting in the PI definition, they include pretty much all the stuff that IP creators often wish they could control, but have so far been told they can't. If they're lucky, the general acceptance of the license will lend credibility to their claim of ownership over the whole game, should it ever come to court--and if some of the stuff in PI that isn't normally IP is accepted, that's just the icing on the cake. They don't need these concepts to be extended into general IP law, just accepted as a special case in the medium of RPGs.
[/hypothetical]
Now, Occam's Razor pretty much rules this one out, in the absence of corroborating evidence, so i think falling back on "never ascribe to malice what can be explained through simple stupidity" is sufficient. Given the things that have already come out about how the license likely doesn't say what they wanted it to say, i think that in the process of trying to break new ground (a copyleft with extra-tough IP protection grafted on to it), they may simply have goofed. But you asked (implicitly) what other reason their could be for a definition of PI that explicitly extends beyond the standard limits of IP.
--
woodelf <*>
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