On Tue, 22 Jul 2003 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I believe that either the license needs to be reformed to > drop things that can't be trademarked or copyrighted from the PI list > > OR > > The list goes far beyond normal copyright and trademark protections and can > extend to things which normally have no protection under copyright or trademark > law, and you can stop someone from using things that you normally have no > right to stop them from using
I think the license matches your second possibility, that it does extend beyond copyright and trademark protection, and that it can be used to stop someone from using things that couldn't be stopped outside of the strictures of the license. But I point out that you enter the license voluntarily, and in so doing you enter into a contractual agreement with the licensor in which you give up certain things (e.g., some fair use provisions of copyright law) in exchange for other things (e.g., the right to borrow OGC from other publishers and, if you also voluntarily enter into the D20STL, to use the D20 System logo on your products. Yes, the license goes beyond trademark and copyright law, which is just fine; if it didn't do something different than standard trademark and copyright law, there'd be no reason to have a license in the first place, since you could just resort to said trademark and copyright law. > If concepts are protectable, then whether or not they exist > outside of the OGL (and concepts will always exist outside of the OGL) will not > matter. Concepts in general, yes. But a specific concept that I came up with that nobody else has ever come up with before, no. Have I ever done so? Maybe, maybe not. But it's obvious that someone at sometime somewhere has come up with a novel concept or two, because if they haven't, then all concepts existed prior to the inception of the universe. Therefore, it's possible for someone to come up with a novel concept. That concept cannot be trademarked or copyrighted, and therefore it cannot be protected under those bodies of law. But it can be covered under the OGL, because the OGL is separate from copyright and trademark law; by voluntarily publishing a work under the OGL, you're agreeing to the proposition that concepts can be afforded some measure of protection as PI, but only insomuch as they don't already exist in valid OGC or in the pre-existing public domain (in which case I'd be able to use the former to show that your PI claim is invalid, or the latter to circumvent your PI claim). Has any d20 publisher claimed a concept as defendable PI? Not that I know of, but that doesn't mean that it's impossible for a situation to arise in which such a claim can be made. And *that* being the case, the inclusion in the license does nobody any harm, and can potentially benefit someone who makes proper use of it. Spike Y Jones _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
