On Thu, 19 Oct 2000, Faustus von Goethe wrote:
> >And,
> >yes, there most certainly are winners in lawsuits besides the lawyers.
>
> Only to a lawyer's mind. The day ANY of the big gaming companies enter a
> lawsuit on this, you will see *nothing* but losers - long before the
> judgement is entered. The company will lose, the OGL will lose, the small
> game producers will lose, and the customers will lose.
Respectfully, I find this to be complete BS. And since it is completely
non-factual and purely opinion there's no reason we can't simply disagree
on this point. I fully expect there will be lawsuits over OGL issues and
the the OGL will survive quite easily. The winners will clearly be those
individuals who publish quality OGL products and protect their interests
in such products; the winners will be the consumers who desire quality
OGL products; and the winners will be the OGL community itself.
> >As
> >you are likely to become aware should you inadvertently use WW/SSS PI in
> >your database and refuse to comply with their request to fix the
> >error.
>
> Alec, respectfully, you are so literal that you so often don't get the
> point. I will comply immediately. The people *downstream* from me who have
> been using that content for the year or so it takes the original producer to
> notify me will not get the message until later.
Why exactly is it taking a year for the publisher to find out about your
violation of the OGL? And what's the problem with the people *downstream*
from you? As soon as they use the material you incorrectly put in your
database, they to are in violation of the OGL and must make the
corrections. Of course they may also have recourse against you for
violating the OGL in the first place. Nothing here provides an incentive
for the publisher to do your work for you in creating this database.
I'm not arguing against the database idea, Faust. My posts were about the
argument that some have put forth that Publishers should provided their
OGC content to database providers (assumingly in the format that database
publisher desires). If people want to make such OGC database (web-based
or otherwise) they need to do the work to develop that database. There
are a variety of ways they can do this work, one of which is directly
asking a publisher to provide OGC content. But whether or not a publisher
is willing to provide such content is purely at their discretion and there
is very little benefit for a publisher in directly helping such a
project. Perhaps there is even a negative incentive for publishers to
make it this easy for people to get the OGC content for free.
> >The PHB is not published under the OGL.
>
> Right - and they did it that way for a REASON.
And that reason is not the CONFUSION issue you claim. Your confusion
argument relies on the idea of the OGL preceding the PHB. Since this is
not the case, clearly WotC is not publishing the SRD just to avoid any
confusion over what in the PHB is OGC and what is not. Claiming that
people who now publish material under the OGL should also provide a
chopped down pure OGC version of that material because that is what WotC
has done with Dungeons & Dragons (since the SRD is more than just the
PHB) is a completely invalid argument.
alec
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