<<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. >>
If Ryan is correct, then I might buy that. There's just one problem I have with this interpretation. I can't envision how things like poses and themes are ever "owned" under copyright or trademark law, and so it raises the question as to whether the OGL definition of PI ownership goes beyond the definition in copyright and trademark law. That's unclear to me.
<<
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. >>
But to be PI it must be owned by him. Copyright ownership subsists in the work as a whole and in substantial parts of it, but not in individual words, names, or phrases.
So, do you disagree with Ryan D.'s interpretation of PI? He seems to say that if you have a character called "Thor" and declare the name as PI that it can be simply "sourced in" from the public domain. He may not have said that. I may have misunderstood, but that sounds like what he was saying.
I have said that I think there might be some very limited copyright granted to an uncopyrightable name paired with licensed text. The name in and of itself is not copyrightable, but the name paired with the text is. Once the character's textual description is licensed it's unclear what ownership and protection remain established over the name alone.
Clearly a character called "Thor" who is a very specific character with specific traits that you devised is copyrighted as a whole. No doubts. However, if you license the description of the character, do you have "ownership" over the part declared as PI if it is just a name? Unclear.
<<
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.
>>
And that's why I'm worried about this interpretation. It seems to grant PI almost no greater protections than the items already have under copyright and trademark law (if Ryan is correct and the "prohibited list" version is incorrect).
I think Ryan raised some interesting points, but his conclusion that you can just "source in" stuff from the public domain seems to blow out of the water all poses, themes, concepts, and other things that can't be copyrighted but which are on the PI list altogether.
If I could resolve that disparity I think matters which of several readings of the OGL to pick would be much clearer.
Lee
