> Yes you can. Anything you write down is copyrighted automatically.
That is, unfortunately, not exactly correct.
I, unlike my wife and Clark, am not a lawyer.
I am not giving legal advice.
The following is not the official stance of Wizards of the Coast.
Ok?
If I write the line of text: "Roll a twenty-sided die and compare the
result to a target number.", I have not produced a copyrightable work. You
could reproduce that line of text in something you publish without my
permission and without giving me credit.
There is a minimum threshold that a work must rise above to be considered
copyrightable. A simple sentence that expresses a rule, a formula, or an
equation does not rise to meet that test and cannot be protected by a
copyright claim.
Again, this is an incredibly grey area with almost no guidance in Title 17;
parsing this kind of stuff is left up to the courts, and the courts seem to
have a hard time making any kind of consistent sense out of their copyright
rulings (mostly because they don't involve the same stuff. The copyright
law is filled with important cases that involve fish statues, architectual
drawings, software reverse-engineering, cartoon characters and
advertisements. There isn't a lot of fundamental case law about
transforming basic written works from one work to another.)
The Open Game License solves this conundrum by simply saying "here is
material, and here are the rights you get with it." As long as you follow
the OGL, it won't matter if the covered content is copyright, might be
copyright, or can't be copyright - you'll be in the safe harbor no matter
what.
Ryan
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