-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>Ownership is one of the fundamental requirements for making a PI declaration. It's in black and white in the license. Yes, it is. Which is why you can have multiple products with "Thor" in them - all anyone can claim is ownership of a specific presentation of a discretely conceived and uniquely described interpretation of a being by that name. However, if you make that specific presentation PI (it is a character, and thus protectable under PI), another person cannot use that character without permission. They can create their own unique character, and call it "Thor", but it cannot be an identical creation, even if sourced from the public domain. An identical creation (and by that I mean the creation as a whole) which attempts to declare PI what you have already declared to be your PI, cannot be valid under the license, since the clear intent of the license is to protect the PI of the material's creator. Another publisher might say they created their presentation out of whole cloth, but if they are claiming ownership of a thing that is *identical* to something another person created and claimed earlier, their claim of whole cloth creation is a distinction without a difference. If their creation cannot be differentiated from yours, then they are trying to claim your work, no matter what they say the source is. Any interpretation which allows duplication of a work by another with no protection or recourse for the originator of the first work must be an incorrect interpretation, otherwise the license is meaningless and totally unenforceable. One point about interpreting things like this: the courts have no more guideline than the layman when it comes to such issues. For that reason, courts frequently look at what the clear intent of the license is. The intent of the d20 license, clearly, is to allow use of portions of an original creation while respecting the sovereign right of the creator to maintain control of the remainder of that creation. Bryan _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
