I suppose some of you already had this discussion as much as two years ago but here goes anyway.
My particular concern when determining what to PI, what to mark as Open, and what to leave plain centers around making it difficult for someone to simply copy all my text, put some new artwork in, and publish pretty much the same book as me. However, I have little to no problem with 20 different publishers (or even the same publisher with 20 different publications) all using 20 different pieces of my book, even verbatim, in stuff they produce. I.e. I want to protect my book as a whole but no particular subset of my book and my suspicion is that at least some other publishers might feel similarly, or might feel that if they could do this after protecting certain specific items as PI they might be willing to simply make the whole text Open Content. Currently, in order to prevent someone from wholesale copying text while adding open content I need to use a rather convoluted system of designating Open Content, possibly backed up with PI. In a lot of cases this makes the open content one offers barely usable outside the book in which it's published. What would work better for me at least is if something like the following were part of the OGL: "A single source" is defined as: any single work cited in Section 15 of the OGL attached to the publication. 1) No more than 25% of a work released under the OGL may come wholly from *a single source*. 2) You may include no more than 25% of the material from *a single source* in a work released under the OGL. The numbers are just thrown out there. Anyway, point 1 is intended to prevent someone from simply copying 25 pages of your 100 page book and releasing those 25 pages as a small supplement, whether on paper or electronic; essentially, the publisher either has to include some original material or has to produce their work by combining elements from disparate works. For example, someone couldn't release a supplement solely consisting of the first 40 pages of the Creature Collection due to this rule. Point 2 is intended to prevent someone from taking your entire work and bundling it with 3 or more other works of the same size. Example: someone couldn't bundle the Freeport series together with one or two other pieces due to this rule. While someone could still cobble together something made up of a bit of the CC, a bit of Sovereign Stone, and a bit of several others I wouldn't be concerned as a publisher that this chimera would be able to compete with something I'm selling. I'd be completely comfortable releasing a wholly open content book under something like the above restrictions. And a publisher who wanted to protect certain names and storylines could do so using the standard PI designation yet leave the entire text as open content otherwise. I think this would make the designation of open content process a bit more easy, reduce the need for some of the more murky Open Content designations we see in a number of products, and make it much easier to use open content from a d20 source the way it was meant to be used. Publishers who want to include a few particularly good feats, classes, or rules from other sources in their mostly original work should be able to do so quite easily and I those are the sorts of books I'd like to see evolve out of the OGL. A bit longish but I'm curious about opinions regarding the above and honestly would like to see a version of the OGL that worked like that. Steven Palmer Peterson www.Second-World-Simulations.com _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
