> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf > Of Dallas Bolyard > Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2003 2:34 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: RE: [Ogf-l] huh? > > > Especially since the word "Official" doesn't appear anywhere > on the product page, purchase page or the press release > announcing the product.
I'll be interested to see how "official" this is, but I'm not able to purchase a copy to find out yet. It's conceivable that this really could be official: licensed by Wizards to Creative Mountain Games in some way outside the OGL. If that's the case -- and I've seen nothing on the d20Zines site, the RPGNow site, the CMG site or the Wizards site to indicate this, but I might have missed something -- then it's conceivable that the PDF is NOT OGC, but rather a separately licensed derivative work from the same source as the OGC SRD. But on the face of it, this work looks like an OGL-licensed work. And if such, it looks like it SHOULD be 100% OGC, since it's a reformatting of 100% OGC. Even though the indexing is new work, it's clearly derivative work. So I have to wonder: if it's 100% OGC, how will they defend against anyone simply redistributing it, as the OGL allows? I know a good index and a good reformatting takes time and work, so I would certainly pay for a copy if I wanted one. They deserve to profit from their work. But do they have any standing to stop someone from redistributing it? Now there are ways they can make it effectively non-redistributable. I'm just not sure how sound these would be legally: * Step 1 would be to set the PDF options that preclude extraction. So that way, there would be only three ways to redistribute it: copy the whole file, manually retype the content, or go back to the original source. Forcing them to manually retype may not make any friends, but it doesn't make it impossible to reuse. * Step 2 would be to add illustrations and other extras to the PDF, and explicitly declare those as NOT OGC. That would make copying the whole file a violation of the license. The material would still be reuasble by retyping and by going back to the original source; but anyone who wanted the indexing and such legally would have to buy a copy. Has anyone seen this product? I'd like to know what approach they took. Martin L. Shoemaker [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.TabletUML.com -- The UML tool you don't have to learn! _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
