I will agree that PI may be of little to no protection to names and terms that are fairly generic, or commonplace. Your example being Hero Points. The problem with your method to circumvent PI comes in when you try to use names which only exist within an existing copyrighted work.
For example, it would be very difficult to circumvent the declaration of "Gray Waste of Hades", without your source being an infringement of an existing copyrighted work. As an example, I did a search for that phrase on Google, and the only links that come up are D&D related. Therefore you (or your friend) would be hard pressed to defend the short story as not being derivitive of WotC's copyright. Once it's been established that your source material for the name "Gray Waste of Hades" is in fact a derivitive work, it'd be very easy to prove that you intended to circumvent the PI declaration. The fact that the story was created after the release of the original work, and the only purpose for the story in the first place was to supply a name that was declared as PI, proves that you intended to use PI that you are restricted from using. The ability to use a source to use a name that has been claimed as PI in another work primarily depends on when that source was published. If your source was published 50 years before the work that has the PI declaration, you're pretty safe. If your source was published 2 years after the original work, and is essentially derivitive of that work, there is likely no chance that you would be successful. -- Scott Fantages Studios: http://www.fantages-studios.com Publisher of Wrestle, the Fantages Game System and The Rya'mier Campaign Setting _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
