Martin L. Shoemaker wrote on 6/23/00 12:51 am:
>From:
>owner-ogf-l@opengamingfo
>undation.org
>[mailto:owner-ogf-l@openga
>mingfoundation.org]On
>Behalf Of Doug Meerschaert
>Sent: Thursday, June 22,
>2000 5:30 PM
>To:
>ogf-l@opengamingfoundatio
>n.org
>Subject: RE: [Open_Gaming]
>The Spirit and the Letter
>
>
><< If the rules or content
>are "derivitive" of the
>previous rules, he has to
>open them or the OGL
>doesn't protect him from
>suits. >>
>
>Define "derivative". The
>courts struggle with this
>question often. I would like to
>see a way to deal with this
>without having to have ugly
>court battles.
>
>
><< Letting folk have the
>power to keep their original
>work to themselves takes
>away the fear of losing all
>their IP by using the OGL
>improperly. >>
>
>Absolutely! But I'm not yet
>convinced that the draft
>OGL meets that goal. If it
>does, I think it falls short on
>others.
I would be much happier if the license simply allowed a person to produce & sell
derivative works based on Open rules. I envision that an Open rule system would have a
core document that detailed the rules (I imagine the D20SRD will be an example of
this). The license would allow me to create a derivative work based on that core
document without requiring my derivative work to be Open in any way.
The way I (a non-lawyer) read the copyright laws, the original owner retains the
rights to the derivative parts of a derivative work while the author of the new,
original parts owns the rights to his work.
The license would require that the derivative work contain the copyright information
from the core document, and that the publisher of the derivative work make an
electronic version of the core document available for free.
The only thing lost is the assurance that new, innovative rules would also become
Open. Rules, though, can not be copyrighted. If good new rules appear in a derivative
work, there is nothing preventing the people who maintain the core document from
explaining those rules (in their own words) in a new version of the core document. So
the only thing lost is the right to freely copy the exact wording of a new rule in a
derivative work (the value of which is dubious in the first place because the wording
will probably be slanted toward a particular setting).
This is analogous (I think) to creating a variation of poker. You could include it in
your book of card games. If I wrote my own book of card games, I could also include
your poker variation so long as I explained it in my own words. Of course, I could
face problems if I created a book of card games which was identical to yours but in
which I changed the names of all the games and explained the rules with different
words.
-------------
For more information, please link to www.opengamingfoundation.org
