At 4/26/2004 11:32:00 -0700, Clark Peterson wrote: > Believe me, if there was some need to standardize this > amongst the "big kids" it would get done IMHO. Despite > differences, if there was a big problem, the industry > is small enough that a few phone calls could get > things resolved. That hasnt happened because there is > no need for it. All of the people who actually publish > as a business use the license similarly. You might not > agree with their designations.
I think the links to debates taking place elsewhere that have been posted to this thread suggest that there is a big problem facing the industry. Allow me to present the problem as a hypothetical limit case. Let's imagine that OCR technology advances to the point where a computer can read text from a printed page as quickly and accurately as a human. (If you'd rather run your thought experiments using a contemporary spycraft setting instead of a very-near-future cyberpunk one, imagine instead that crackers access the hard drives of each major publishers and steal the electronic text for that publisher's releases. I personally think that's goofier, but it's also possible, and it makes no difference to the license.) One morning you wake up and discover that independent utilizers have, one way or the other, created an enormous Omega SRD which takes all the open content that has ever been released using the OGL and makes it accessible for free on the Web. There's no way to tell who originally created what parts of this undifferentiated mass of OGC, given the thousands of copyrights that are listed in the Omega SRD's monolithic Section 15 declaration. Nor is there anything in the license or (arguably) in the law that will make the Omega SRD go away. Now, maybe this has been the ultimate vision all along; it sure seems to me like the logical endpoint of the OGL. With the archives down, it's hard for me to know what's already been said. But while this thread has generated many good insights and invaluable advice, for which I am truly grateful, no one has said that this eventuality has already been discussed to death and that there is an accepted plan for how to deal with it. One suggestion is that community standards will prevent people from releasing an Omega SRD. Public discussion of this issue has almost always focused on the role of publishers. I believe that this focus is misleading. It doesn't matter if every commercial publisher is bound by consensus practices or informal agreements, because the group that is most likely to make an Omega SRD and give it away for free are (to use the terminology I defined earlier in the thread) utilizers at the moneyless end of the scale. Such utilizers are a completely different beast, but they're valid users of the OGL too. Publishers have to be sensible business people (although the fact that we're all a weird, hairy, mutant strain may be our best hope for surviving the evolutionary catastrophe that's currently ravaging the record industry). We have our own money, and other people's, at stake. If utilizers aren't interested in making money, they can do things that would be financially suicidal for a publisher. Publishers and creators understandably and justifiably feel that what is good for them is good for the community. Utilizers have their own passionately held ideals about how the community is best served; they invest their time and effort into doing so without any expectation of getting paid. And, unless the community of gaming fans is essentially different from that of music fans, their position is similar to that of many consumers, who don' t have a problem with taking what they want and not paying for it if they can. One of the great strengths of the OGL is that it creates a distinction between the kinds of content that can be given away for free, and those that the copyright owner has the right to control and sell; relying on community standards to limit the valid uses of the license foregoes this strength. A publisher's position requires them to be very sensitive to community opinion; self-interest prevents any of us from getting the other kids in the sandbox really upset. Utilizers are much more independent agents; you can't reach them all with a few phone calls, and even figuring out who they really are and what country's laws they are governed by can be difficult. This makes it much harder to hold them back from doing anything the license allows. Viewed from their perspective, the OGL is a magnificent toy, a grand and exciting experiment in transforming the original fantastic medieval adventure to suit the wired millenium. There's arguably something noble about the efforts of volunteer utilizers to hack the OGL, pushing the possibilities of that experiment as far as they will go in a certain direction. Pressure from the community is as likely to provoke utilizers as it is to contain them. TSR's futile and aggressive reaction to the use of its real and imagined copyrights on the Web made many enemies. The Open Gaming License was, among other things, a brilliant stroke of reconciliation. But from a utilizer's viewpoint, the fact that prominent figures in the industry have implied that the spirit of the license is that open content is not, in fact, available to the user--that no one but publishers were ever actually intended to do things that are expressly permitted by the OGL--is likely to be seen as the first shot in the culture war that's raging everywhere else in our society over similar issues. Getting creators, publishers, and utilizers to agree on a delay period before OGC source code is made accessible on the Web seems much more feasible. However, if one accepts the argument that a strong reliance on immediate retail sales is unhealthy for the RPG industry, a delayed-release agreement is pandering to the symptoms of that illness. As we've seen in the case of UA, community pressure is already being tried as a solution. What are the other possible responses of the creators and publishers who have most to lose following the advent of the Omega SRD? The first would be to use the slop in the OGL to drastically expand the parts of each covered work that are declared as PI, perhaps going right up to the 95% limit and counting on the community lacking the funds or the will to sue them over the absurd declarations this would require. I think that this would be the true violation of the spirit of the open gaming movement, which is why one of the goals I've advocated is reducing the slop in the license. The second response would be to make sure that by the time the Omega SRD is a reality, the license has been modified (either by its owner or through the use of a meta-license) to ensure that when a creator's open content is redistributed via the Omega SRD or any other work, the user will always know how to reach that creator/publisher if they want to buy the PI that was originally developed to complement that OGC. I don't see this solution as being at all contradictory to the axiom that OGC sells books, and I'm willing to stake my own (relatively tiny) investment as a publisher on the proposition that making OGC freely and easily available will increase its ability to sell PI as long as the OGC and PI are appropriately designated and the link between them is not severed when the OGC is redistributed. --- Tavis Allison Editor in Chief, Masters and Minions www.behemoth3.com Information wants to be free. Money is not the most interesting form of information. _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
