I definitely think you and I see eye to eye on the "two possible interpretations..." the "white out" versus the "verboten list," I mean. We may not agree about which one is the *correct* interpretation, but the more I watch, the more I become convinced it must be the "white out" interpretation... because the "white out" interpretation leads to few if any contradictions within the terms of the license itself. The "verboten list" requires stepping outside of the license to ask, "how is the list derived?
From words within the last product in the chain? All products in the chain?All products of which you are aware? How does one prove/disprove awareness? How does one 'own' PI? How can you declare a concept? What happens if you do?" etc.
And perhaps this is where the protection would exist, but if so, again, it's not the PI portion of the license offering protection, but copyright law. PI would simply be a way to highlight things that aren't licensed, and the "you may not use PI" clause would be defanged.
If you subscribe to the white-out theory, yes, the PI clause would be considerably de-fanged... which is NOT, IMO, a bad thing... people have gone a little crazy with PI declarations anyway and anything that tells people, "look, PI really doesn't mean jack, if you REALLY want protection, you'll have to trademark it" is a good thing.
People are looking for PI to become stronger than Trademarks, Copyright Law, or anything else. I really doubt that can happen - and if it does, the effects are undesirable... so I would assume it has to go the other way - and make PI near-valueless... because the choice seems to be "make the terms of the OGL so onerous as to be impossible to comply with it because PI is too strong" or "make the OGL reasonably easy to comply with because PI is worthless." I'll take the latter, myself.
Whether or not I'm happy about that is another question. ;-)
--The Sigil
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