-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Anyone have an opinion on where PI has to be declared? It must be clearly
>identified where it is presented, but can it be declared outside of work
>which has OGC and therefore the a copy of the OGL? Could you put up a web
>page that said "the following is PI:", even if it was not part of a product
>distribution?
Only if you had a pointer within the work itself. In a nutshell, you have
to be able to pull someone off the street, and expect them to be able to
find what's Prouduct Identity, what's Open Game Content, and what both mean.
>I feel it is easy to tell what is OGC because all OGC comes with the OGL.
Not true at all.
>But...
>How can you avoid accidental use of PI if you have no idea where it is? If
>you don't own all the products, and there is no required central location
or
>even notification procedure, what can you do? I realize that having more
>complex declarations of PI than a monster name goes a long way to avoiding
>likely infringements, but alec's interpretations aside regarding
derivation,
>how does one research this stuff?
Step 1: Read through all of the sources you're going to be using, looking
for a delcaration of PI. Don't use those.
Step 2: When someone sends you something and you don't have the original,
have them check it over and execute some legal shebang so they're
responsible for it being not PI. (Works best as a "grounds for termination"
thing, I'd bet.)
Step 3: When you recieve a letter saying "you're using my PI", go back and
check. Feel free to ask for more information. If there *isn't* a
declaration of PI, and chaning it would cost you a *significant* (i.e., more
than litigation) ammount of money, go to a lawyer.
Step 4: send hate mail to the producers who don't give a good declaraiton of
PI.
>Like I said you are likely to have documented references for OGC you are
>using but how can you be sure someone else hasn't made up something extreme
ly
>similar to yours and PI'ed it.
So what? In that case, you have a clear statement of havign made your work.
For example, I'm not worried about most of The Craft of the Mind--despite
its similarity to a part of the not-yet-SRD'd SW game, I'm not worried about
the original drafts--I wrote it before I ever saw the book.
> This would really suck if you had already
>gone to the printer or something. The problem would get worse as the
amount
>of material grows so whileit may not be much of a problem now, I can
>definitely see this happening somewhere down the line. Anyone, have a
>suggestion for this?
To fix sometihng that's gone to the printer, print something else.
Stickers, handouts, and the like are probably reasonable efforts to correct
good-faith violations of the OGL. (So would a black pen, if worst came to
worst.)
>Even if PI can only be declared in association with an OGC distribution (as
>opposed to a separate web page or such) who will be able to check
everywhere?
You don't need to check *everywhere*. You only need to check in the things
you derive from.
Copyright law isn't like patent law. If I write a book *exactly* like
yours, and I can prove to a jury that I've never read yours and I wrote the
book all by myself (for example, if I wrote the book in 1995, stuck in a
safe deposit box, and you wrote yours in 1996) I'm fine.
DM
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