At 04:24 PM 8/22/00 GMT, "Faustus von Goethe" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>It would be difficult to establish that you were personally the holder of
>the copyright - one necessary component to having the authority to make
>something "open". Unfortunately, content like this will always exist in a
>"grey" area.
Most free RPGs I have seen included some kind of notice indicating
whether they are copyrighted, published under a license, or released into
the public domain.
Under U.S. law, if a free RPG was published without notice from March 1989
onward, it is considered to be protected by copyright. So the publisher's
permission would be required before it could be republished as open content.
If a free RPG was published without notice from January 1978 to March
1989, it is in the public domain unless the work was subsequently
registered with the U.S. Copyright Office within five years of
publication.
It used to be easy to create something that ended up in the public domain.
Since 1989, though, the only way to do it in the U.S. is to explicitly
place the material in the public domain.
Rogers Cadenhead
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Web: http://www.prefect.com
-------------
For more information, please link to www.opengamingfoundation.org
