All of the older D&D stuff would fall under your run of the mill copyright law. They cannot copyright Hercules or Zeus, but they can copyright the stats and descriptive text. It is pretty simple...if it is in print it is protected under both national and international copyright laws. If it is NOT marked as OGC then it isn't open. Did I miss anything here?
I would just ignore all the TSR books... Wasn't there an issue a while back when TSR tried to copyright or trademark the word "Nazi" when the picked up all the old SSI games? *snort* Richard Stewart Sanguine Productions Ltd. [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.sanguineproductions.com -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Lewis Stoddart Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2001 10:23 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Ogf-l] Legacy products and non-copyrightable material I'm curious about the place of the older TSR/WoTC products in this Open Gaming thing. Obviously, they're not going to go to the hassle of classifying everything specifically as open game content, but can they claim copyright on, say, the substats used in Player's Option? Also, the blurry line between game content and product identity is troubling me. I'm no lawyer, and while I THINK I know where the line falls, I really can't be sure. And then there are the hundreds of things which have been adopted by TSR/WoTC from fiction, mythology, real life, etc. Can this sort of thing be interpreted as Product Identity? For example, many of the deities used throughout TSR's older work are directly or indirectly copied from mythology. I'm sure we could still use the names, etc, but what of the TSR - manufactured mechanics such as bonuses and granted powers of specialty priesthoods, and so on? Can we begin to include these in publicly available OGC on the premise that they're now "obsolete", or must we tweak them a little around the edges, claim the adaptation as your own invention and release it that way? As someone who has been playing a homebake, frankenstein system made from a mix of 1st, 2nd, Player's Option and 3e D&D (among other things), I'm very interested in the boundaries. Cheers, Lewis Stoddart _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
