On Mon, 23 Apr 2001, Kal Lin wrote:
> On Sun, 22 Apr 2001, Alec A. Burkhardt wrote:
>
> > Actually, straight copyright law would work the same way. If I take
> > something that is public domain and make a derivative work from it, that
> > derivative work is now protected by my copyright. You can go derive your
> > own stuff from the same place I did, but you have no right to anything
> > interesting I did with the work.
>
> Completely agree.
>
> They are free to exert copyright on their derivative work and
> license that content under the OGL as they see fit.
>
> My point is they cannot prevent someone from using a public
> domain name to refer to a piece of open game content.
This is starting to sound like the completely ridiculous arguments some
once made about trademarking words. If a name is PIed, it is only PIed in
relation to the specific description that goes along with that name in the
specific product. That's why the definition of PI says "names of ..."
rather than just names. So if someone PIs King Arthur, you can't use the
name King Arthur to refer to their depiction of King Arthur. But they
can't use their PI claim to prevent you from refering to King Arthur of
legend and creating your own stats and descriptions of him. If their
description appears to be taken verbatim from public domain, you still
can't use their description even though they have breached the license by
claiming something as their own which wasn't. You can go back to the
original source and use the description without ever having to refer to
the work that was in breach of the license. At that point, you have
completely avoided their claim of the name King Arthur as PI.
For an example, the Creature Collection has PIed the name Halfling (since
all names of creatures in the book are PI). This refers to their
modifications to Halflings for the Scarred Lands setting. Obviously they
can't be claiming no one else can use the name Halfling. What they are
saying is no one else can use the name Halfling to refer to the creature
called Halfling in the Creature Collection, even though you can take the
stat block thru combat information (if I remember correctly on what was
designated open) and use it as OGC. You'd need to rename the creatures as
well as come up with new background descriptions if you want to use stuff
from the Creature Collection in published material. But you can certainly
use the name Halfling to refer to something other than what is in the
Creature Collection; for example as used in the SRD (once the Races
section is officially opened).
alec
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