However there is a third situation. Company B knows of Company A's material and really likes the place names and character names that Company A has created but does not like any of the new rules. So Company B does not need to include A in their section 15 but they still go ahead and use all the PI that Company A invented.
Now according to you that is perfectly valid as Company A and Company B do not have a contract between them! If anyone questioned them Company B could also fall back on the argument of 'I was not aware of Company A'. And according to you they are now doubly protected!
Well, that depends. PI *is* OGC, so if they reused some of the PI, they, by definition, reused some of the OGC, so they have to include the product in the Sec. 15. If none of the PI appears in OGC, it's not really OGC, and there's no need to designate it PI, and you're reduced to copyright/trademark for protection anyway--which probably isn't sufficient to prevent reuse of names.
Basically, it sounds like you're expecting PI to give you *greater* control over your IP than copyright does. I don't think this is possible, within the confines of the WotC OGL. PI can give you copyright-level control over stuff that you can't normally copyright, but i don't think it can give you any more control.
So to me the question comes down to this concept of independent creation. In the above example I think that a Judge would ask Company B to PROVE that they could not possibly have copied the work from Company A.
And Company B would respond that they don't have to, because simple terms, however unique, can't be protected by copyright. And, since they didn't cite the work in their Sec.15, they are not claiming the priveleges/restrictions inherent with the WotC OGL. So they can just bypass the whole mess and rely on "regular" IP laws to determine what they can and cannot reuse. I think if you are right, and there's someone who actually wants to do what you're suggesting (steal names, and maybe concepts, but not actual copyrightable expression), there's a powerful disincentive from using the WotC OGL, since they have greater access to the content by avoiding it.
Yes, i'm aware that this scenario directly contradicts what i said above. Partly, that's the perils of the WotC OGL: it's ambiguously worded in several dangerous ways, and i think it tries to apply concepts to a realm where they don't function (viralness to closed content). Partly that's because, IMHO, the only interpretation that gives you any chance at protecting single words is if only PI that you are aware of is verboten. If you have to avoid all PI, aware or not, there's a significant incentive to just forgo the WotC OGL entirely, and the originator loses all control. If it's only known PI, there's already a mechanism for enforcing restrictions, because PI is OGC, so they can't reuse it without citing in the Sec.15, so they have a harder time claiming lack of awareness. Add a chain of derivation to the WotC OGL (or the print equivalent of comments in code), and you'd pretty much have the problem licked.
-- woodelf <*> [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://webpages.charter.net/woodelph/
William Safire's Rules for Writers: Don't use no double negatives. _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
