On Fri, 20 Apr 2001, Ryan S. Dancey wrote:
> WotC feels that if and when a tabletop RPG case is ever brought to trial,
> the court may be convinced to apply the concepts of character copyright,
> plus the concepts of copyright as they are being applied to software to
> carve out a huge protected class of work.
Well, like you I am not a lawyer. However, if you want to rely
on the concepts of software copyright, I think you will have to deal
with cases like Galoob vs Nintendo (1992) and Sega vs. Accolade (1993) --
where in both cases it was ruled that an unlicensed party was legally
able to make a compatible add-on to proprietary game software. Although
to be fair, Atari vs Nintendo (1991) did find copyright infringement in
a similar case.
cf. http://www.allrise.com/copyright/cases/964F2D965.html
http://www.law.seattleu.edu/chonm/Cases/sega.html
http://eon.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/DVD/cases/atarivnintendo.html
However, really that is besides the point. In practice, I
agree that small RPG companies just don't want to get into a legal
battle at all, so they mostly have steered clear of this. While
many people are confused about exactly what is "safe harbor" when
using the OGL, it is definitely safer using the OGL than not.
I just wanted to try to give what pointers I could given the
various questions that were asked.
- John
P.S. Character copyright as a concept was around before 1978, but
the Kroft ruling apparently reversed earlier decisions like
Warner Bros. Pictures v. Columbia Broad. Sys. (1954). In other
words, Sam Spade isn't copyrightable, but Hizzoner PuffNStuff is.
<shrug>
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