As a publisher, you are responsible with respect to PI to your uplineThere is very little arugment to back this up. AFAIK--and I'm not a lawyer, so be prepared for my advice to be shot down by a lawyer on or off the list--PI is only an exclusion of OGC. Whatever is marked as PI is not OGC, but if you could use it without the OGL, as long as it's not a "trademark" (as defined in the license) used to "indicate compatability or co-adaptability" (defined by the courts), then you can use it even if your upstream marks it as PI.
only. That is anyone you are deriving your work from and anyone they
have derived work from. Anything they claim as PI is off limits, even
if it is Public Domain.
Of course, this is pretty vauge--in a nutshell, it's safter to make sure that you don't use anyone else's PI'd content in the same way that they do without permission.
Let's say that I make a mamoth RPG book, and stat-out the greek gods with their names as PI (naughty me, I know. Assume that I made a whole bunch of new mythologies, and alternate OGC names for the gods). I also include a Real Spiffy Hero system. You then take my Real Spiffy System, but not my god-stats, and include a whole new stat-block for the greek gods.
Sure, you've used something that I marked PI, but not as I marked it, and so there's little that I can do. If you were to take my greek god stats, and use their names, I could send you a C&D on the basis that you're "indicating compatability and co-adaptability." (I probably WOULDN'T, but I could.)
DM
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