It involves the definition of OGC.
"OGC... means any work covered by the license,... but specifically excludes Product Identity."
Contractual construction requires that you give effect to this if possible, even if it renders something else redundant. A poor attempt at contractual construction is one where you have to delete a portion of the contract for it to make sense when you read it.
The literal construction of this statement is that as soon as you cover a work with the license, it is all 100% OGC except those parts that are PI. You choose to define the "work" within the legal limits of such definition. You choose to cover it. But as soon as you have defined a work, and as soon as you cover it with the license, 100% of that covered work is OGC except the parts that are PI, per the above definition.
You must then clearly designate what is OGC and what is PI. OGC declaration has effect, but it is a redundant effect, since by declaring PI and covering a work with the license, everything that is not PI in the covered work is OGC. So, nominally if your PI declaration is clear, then the OGC is the covered work minus the parts that are PI.
The above statement explicitly says:
OGC = COVERED WORK - PI
OR
COVERED WORK = OGC + PI
Almost everything else in the OGC definition is valid, but redundant, because of the broad definition of OGC as "the covered work" minus the PI. This means that almost everything else in the OGC definition is a redundant subset of "any work covered" minus the PI.
Somebody posted something from Clark saying that this construction "conflicts" with other parts of the license. In fact, this interpretation does not "conflict" an iota with the rest of the license. If it did, it would be a poor attempt at contractual construction by me, because it would not be giving effect to all parts of the license. Reading other parts as redundant is not the same as reading in a "conflict".
The post I got that apparently came from Clark claimed that, by my logic, you could just rewrite the license to equate "covered work" with "OGC", which is not my logic. My logic is that the contract says: COVERED WORK = OGC + PI, so that COVERED WORK = OGC only for covered works with no PI.
I analyze statutes all the time, and they often have lots of redundancy built into them. That does not equate to a "conflict" of statute or, in the cases of contracts, "conflicting clauses in the contract".
Anyone care to give an alternate construction of the above sentence that does not read it out of existence? Lots of people seem to want to do two things:
a) pretend that the OGC declaration is all important, and
b) ignore the clause that says explicitly that "OGC... means any work covered by this license" except the parts that are PI
One reason why the OGC + PI declarations are important, is that they, together, tell you what the "covered work" is in the eyes of the OGL end user, and this is particularly important in compilations (like magazines, etc.) where the commercial unit and the "covered work" may not be 1:1 equivalent of each other (because you might cover a single article instead of the whole magazine).
Lee
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