On Sun, 4 Nov 2001, Michael Cortez wrote: > >> ...which of course runs afoul of the licenses becasue > >> if the d20 mag isnt an open work then they violate the > >> license by taking open content and NOT providing it as > >> open content. > > >> The magazine violates the license any way you look at > >> it. > > IANAL, and don't pretend to be... But > > WoTC owns the SRD, and doesn't have to use the licenses to publish it. > > WoTC can contact the authors of derivative works and offer to publish them > in d20 Dragon. Then WoTC grants them a mini-license to use the SRD content, > outside of the OGL, sole for use in publishing in the d20 Dragon. Thus the > material used in the Article, is now derivative of the SRD, but not via the > OGL -- so it doesn't need to be "re-released under the OGL." > > Or do I have everything backwards again?
No, I think you've got it about right. As long as the material presented in the Dragon Annual is only derivative of material owned by Wizards and/or original material of the various publishers of the material in the article (and it appears as if the articles may even have been written by those publishers rather than anyone at Dragon), Dragon would not have violated any copyrights. Of course, this still makes the "OGC Tracker" boxes completely inaccurate and in fact misleading to the readers. Since the Dragon Annual was not released under the OGL or any other open gaming license, there is absolutely NO open gaming content within the magazine. Obviously someone at Dragon magazine doesn't understand the concept of open gaming very well. All in all, I found the Dragon Annual to be nothing more than a series of advertisements for various D20 products. Certainly not a great start for Wizards in producing a D20 magazine. Add in the botched job of identifying material as OGC which clearly isn't OGC and you've got a very poorly put together magazine. About the only usefully thing I got was that there's now in print Ryan's opinion of what the d20 system means at the most basic level: -characters defined by six basic attributes (str,int,wis,dex,con,cha) with scores ranging from 1 to infinity. -rolling higher is always better than rolling lower. -to see if a character's action is successful, rol a d20, add some modifiers, and compare to a target number. if the result is equal to or higher than the target number, the action was a success. alec _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
