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Lee,
Please will you explain how you can make your
interpretation that OGC is *obviously* everything in a product that contains an
OGL when your definition seems at odds with the word "portions" in the section 8
requirement to mark the "portions of your work".
This to me means that ONLY portions (and I believe
that in law a plural word like this can also mean zero or one portion) of the
work need to be OGC.
If we take this section 8 definition and slot it
into the earlier definition of OGC, the two come together (in my non-legal
mind) as:
Open Game Content means the portions of the work
that you are distributing that are clearly indicated as Open Game Content and
specifically excludes Product Identity.
I might be right and I might be wrong and it would
take a lawyer to explain why I was right or wrong, but I think that my logic is
a lot more of an obvious interpretation than your logic. I don't see where you
are joining the dots to get from portions of a work with and OGL being OGC to
everything except PI being OGC. I know you are not the only person to say this,
but I think your interpretation is wrong and that you are ignoring and or
dismissing things people say, that work against your interpretation without
fully justifying why their logic fails and yours does not.
Perhaps there is ambiguity here. Perhaps the other
people are wrong, but when someone says to you what othaherzog said about OGC
being: "all game mechanics plus all work covered by the license minus anything
declared as PI", don't just change the subject and talk about
magazines.
I think the real objection to "closed content" is
that people have given it a name. People have inferred things from this name,
they have inferred that this sort of content was implied all along when the
licence was made. Once they have made this leap the obvious question is: "why
didn't WotC put Closed Content" in its section 1 definitions? And the next
logical leap is to say that if they didn't put "Closed Content" in the OGL then
there is no "closed content".
However, these leaps are just that, leaps not
steps. What you will see if you take smaller steps is that the reason WotC don't
mention closed content is that they didn't invent the term. I'm sure it must be
a term invented by one of the people that used the licence or had to explain the
licence to another person. It is only really the fact that they have given it a
name similar in magnitude to Open Game Content, that people have associated
it with that term (as if it is as important legally as Open Game Content or
Product Identity).
The people who gave this other stuff the name
"closed content" have by using those words made people infer some sort of moral
judgment onto what it is. I think this is what the argument is caused by. Really
this is trivial, the OGL has no morals or judgments as it is just a lot of
words. Stuff that is not covered by the licence is just that; stuff not covered
by the licence. It isn't closed content or any other sort of content, just stuff
you can't use. Words in a copyrighted document that have *nothing*
whatsoever to do with the OGL. If under normal copyright laws you can copy some
of the other parts of a document that has an OGL in it then you can add those
things to your second generation product. I'm not talking about PI here just the
"other stuff", the stuff game producers rightly or wrongly call "closed
content". Lets get rid of the term closed content lets use
layman's terms and divide up a game product in the same way as a
publisher. The "work" is divided into three
parts:
* Open Game Content (any portions clearly defined
as such) [1]
* Product Identity (any portions that are excluded
from the OGC and also forbidden terms in sublicensed
documents)
* other stuff that isn't OGC or PI (things
that are neither Open Game Content or Product Identity - and are therefore
*nothing* to do with the OGL)
Once you take away the term "closed content". Once
you take away the inferred moral judgements that closed content was
part of the process of drafting the OGL (that people infer from this name). Once
you take away the leap of logic that questions why WotC "forgot" to define
"Closed Content" if they wanted the concept to exist. All that remains
is:
"Stuff that is in a work that has an OGL attached
to it but isn't licensed by the OGL"
I don't see anything in the OGL that forbids
someone from only covering half of their work (even without using PI). Let me
give you an analogy. Another licence that allows you to do something - a driving
licence.
This sort of licence is given by your local
government and allows you to get in a car and drive about (something that is
normally illegal without one in most countries). Now when someone gets a driving
licence it says "you are allowed to drive in our country". Does a driving
licence say anything about *not* driving? No. Does that mean that if you are
given a driving licence you have to drive at all times when it is in your
pocket? Is anyone with a driving licence that isn't driving breaching the terms
of their driving licence? Or have they inferred that the licence that empowers
them to drive also empowers them to not drive, when they chose not
to?
Please excuse the extreme example, but to me
this seems to be the same sort of logic you are using with the Open Game
Licence. You seem to be assuming that if someone uses a licence (from
WotC) that it must cover all of their words.
The people who talk about "closed content" seem to me to have assumed that they
can use their licence on *portions* of their document and turn off the OGL for
other portions (like a motorist who turns off his engine after driving to a
railway station and catches a train the rest of the way into a
city).
If I'm wrong about *portions* then show me I'm
wrong in nice small logical steps. Not with an example of a
magazine in sub sections. Use the example given to you a while back of the
alphabet. Othaherzog said to you:
Absolutely not true. If I have a work that consists of As far as I can tell this seems to be the one thing
that all the OGC statements I have seen in books have not contradicted. That A
to M is not offered for reuse under the terms of the OGL. Call it closed
content, call it non-OGC, call it whatever you want but I would say that unless
people are arguing that there are derivative work from other OGC further up
the chain that nobody would claim that the OGL lets you use A to M.
Tell me why you can use A to M and not be in breach
of copyright law. And tell me in plain English with references to the parts of
the licence that allow you to say that this is the only possible interpretation
of the OGL. Tell us why OGC is not *parts* of a work.
Tell us why you are convinced that section 8 which has actual words [2]
supporting the other side of the case does not count. And how you can say
everything that is not PI is OGC when that assertion is as implied from the
licence as closed content it.
You say "show me" to your verbal opponents, well
I'm saying it back to you Lee. Show me, show us, because I don't think anyone
that sits down and looks at all of the bits in detail agrees with you. Not on
this anyway. You'll probably have a nice debate if you talk about PI or crippled
content but I don't think there is anyone else out there that thinks the
OGL covers everything within the covers of a book that contains it unless you
come up with legalese to subdivide that product into several works.
If you do convince me, I shall be bulk mailing all
the publishers to demand that they publish their shopping lists as OGC: you
never know, they might have been leaning on one of their books when they wrote
it - that must count as OGC too! Come on guys, let us know how many potatoes you
bought last weekend and what size of tights your wife wears or I
might have to put my lawyer on you. ;-)
David S
PS Can anyone tell me what sort of content, real
and implied exists under the CC licence and other game licences out
there?
[1] I am for the purpose of this discussion
choosing to ignore the requirements to "make material derivative of OGC into
OGC" and "make all rules into OGC" that people on this list talk
about. I am assuming that *if* people are supposed to do that then they *have*
marked those bits as OGC and not (rightly or wrongly) crippled them or done
anything that other OGL users dispute.
[2] As opposed
to inferred concepts like "closed
content".
>> But you can publish game mechanics in a volume that contains an OGL'd work where the game mechanics aren't released as OGC. Consider that a magazine or other fanzines may have a single advertisement or article that is a covered work. The magazine as a whole is not a covered work. If the magazine has 10 articles, and only article 10 is a covered work, then the mechanics in articles 1 through 9 are not OGC, and they are not PI, since they do not appear in a covered work. Note also that it doesn't say that mechanics are OGC. It says mechanics (in the covered work, since this license only applies to the work it covers) are open if they don't embody PI. Insofar as they do embody PI then the rules could be closed. Since PI can cover concepts and language, but only insofar as those can be owned, I suspect you could make a strong argument that if you had patented rules and copyrighted their verbatim _expression_ you could claim some ownership rights in one form or another to the concepts and the language associated with those rules and have some PI claims associated with the rules. Lee
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