[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> In a message dated 09/06/2000 1:35:47 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>
> > Actually, this is legal regardless of the OGL and D20STL.
> > There is a fairly direct case precedent of "Allen v. Academic Games".
> > There a company (Academic Games) ran tournaments using games copyright
> > by Robert Allen, selling players copies of the games and adding on
> > tournament rules. In fact, their tournament rules books even included
> > some of copyrighted rules in question. Still, the court found
> > against Robert Allen's suit for copyright infringement. You can
> > read the case results online at
> >
> > http://www.limbach.com/articles/allen.html
> >
> > - John
>
> So, if I read the judges ruling accurately, then the new D20 license will set
> up a new legal precedent with respect to games in general.... or, lol the
> first court case that it is involved in.
>
> The part I'm referring to:
>
> "Here, Allen has not shown that it is possible to distinguish the expression
> of the rules of his game manuals from the idea of the rules themselves. Thus,
> the doctrine of merger applies and although Allen may be entitled to
> copyright protection for the
> physical form of his games, he is not afforded protection for the premises or
> ideas underlying those games. To hold otherwise would give Allen a monopoly
> on such commonplace ideas as a simple rule on how youngsters should play
> their games."
My opinion, and IANAL, is that if a company really wanted to fight this,
and got a good lawyer and sympathetic judge, a different precedent could
be set. A skilled lawyer could demonstrate that an RPG is many times
more complex than games such as checkers or monopoly, and the the thing
as a whole could be protected even if individual subsystems could not.
For example, you cannot copyright a sentence, but you can copyright a
book. (I know the issue is trademark, not copyright, but this is the
principle.) FURTHER, a good lawyer would point to the dozens of
different game systems on the market as evidence there are MANY ways to
express the key ideas, such as how to create a character, how to resolve
skill use, etc, and, thus, any specific expression can be considered
protected.
Would a judge buy this? I dunno. It's not completely unreasonable. The
law does consider degrees as well as absolutes, and one could try to
float the argument that RPGs are sufficiently distinct from typical
boardgames that they merit different consideration. Precedents are
powerful, but they aren't Supreme Court rulings. A judge can ignore them
if he wants.
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