Let me start with a couple of quick-hit responses... >>but the voice of the frustrated fan > >If you are just a fan why do you care. Play the games and don't worry >about it. The only people this applies to are publishers.
That sounded rather elitist, but that's okay - I don't expect a lot of people to be looking ahead. Just remember, that if you are a publisher, your boss *IS* the fan - we buy your books so you can pay your bills. If you don't listen to us, well, we'll "fire" you. ;-) While it *is* true that the people that this currently directly applies to are publishers, it applies to the fan in a very real (and scary) sense. If I want to create a fansite based on your material, you may be flattered - until I start posting stuff that is, by your perception, "derivative work" that you should be making money off of - or worse, I put up stuff that isn't OGC that is infringing on your copyright and sue me for lost income and punitive damages. The OGL is a "safe harbor" for the fans, too - it tells us PRECISELY what you can't sue us for if we put it on our website (with an appropriate link to the OGL). With the Web everywhere today, we are ALL publishers, whether you like it or not. Granted, while I doubt you would ever take an interest in my fan site, you MIGHT and DO have legal recourse available to shut it down. As a fan, I want as much protection as the "big boys" enjoy - and the OGL guarantees that I am on equal standing with you. ========== >When I designate OGC can I say things like , "everything in chapter 2: >Races is declared OGC"? Absolutely. Even a six-year old could highlight the OGC. Simple. This is good. ========== >There must be an *UNLIMITED* amount of PI a publisher may include in their >works, they need enough to cover the original work in the book. Again, not true. In reality, PI doesn't do a lot more than does copyright to protect your book. If you didn't designate it as OGC, it is by default "copyrighted material" and NOT OGC. In other words, you enjoy the same protection from somebody copying your stuff as you would if you published the material as a book, without the OGL or anything else - you have copyright protection. My point is: Save the PI designation for the REALLY important stuff. Don't dilute its value by frivolously designating everything as PI. ========== And now to the BIG portion of my rant... >No I didn't misunderstand. > >I have had this discussion too many times but for the new people, here it >is. It is unfair to expect designers and publishers who have put blood, >sweat, tears and in many cases lots of money into the creation of a unique >and interesting world, to open those up for all time. Once material is >open it stays open. So to say "open the whole spell" is to say "give up >ownership of the thing you have created." And I say, "you never really had ownership of it to begin with." This goes into the concept of "ownership" of ideas - one of the grossest misnomers of our time is "Intellectual Property." I apologize in advance for the heavy dose of social theory, but here goes... "Property" is something which, if I possess, nobody else can simultaneously possess. In other words, possession of property is exclusive. If I possess the car, you can't possess the car. (Joint ownership is the same type of thing - if 5 people jointly possess the car, everyone else in the world but those 5 people cannot possess the car.) An idea is *NOT* property (and I cannot emphasize this strongly enough) because it fails the possessive exclusivity test. Assume for a moment that you have an idea. You can write it down. You can say it. You can sit and admire how brilliant it is. You can do whatever you want with it - it is yours. Now assume I come along and take your idea and leave. You can still write it down. You can still say it. You can still sit and admire how brilliant it is. I have in no way diminished the value of your idea. And now I can write it down. I can say it. I can sit and admire how brilliant it is. Now assume the roles are reversed - I have an idea and you come along and take my idea and leave. Now each of us went through the effort of coming up with one idea, but we each have two. Your possession of my idea in no way diminishes the value and enjoyment I can get from it and vice versa. But instead of just one idea, we now each have two ideas to play with. Society is formed for the mutual benefit of its members. It stands to reason that if all the members can be benefitted, improved, and enriched by the sharing of an idea, society ought to foster the sharing of ideas. In fact, since sharing an idea impoverishes no one and enriches all, it is in the best interest of society to make all ideas common. However, admittedly, it DOES take blood, sweat, and tears to conceive of an idea, to write it down, and in general to translate it into a form where others may take it and benefit from it. In order to reward this effort, societies have created an incentive for people to do this. It is called "copyright." Copyright is your right to benefit for a short time from the work you put forth to translate the idea into a medium others can understand (NOT your right to benefit from the idea itself - please note the difference). In this manner, the society enriches all of its members by facilitating sharing of ideas and at the same time rewards the one who goes through the effort of making the idea widely available. Thus, copyright is the attempt society makes to bridge the gap between its goal of enriching all with your idea and your goal of being amply rewarded for the effort you went through to write it down. Society would like to have a copyright length of zero so that the idea is maximally available. You would like to have a copyright length of your lifetime so that you can continue to benefit from your work. So a reasonable amount of time is decided upon (7 years plus a 7 year extension, for example, was the original length of US copyrights, IIRC) that is somewhere between 0 and your life. This could be halfway between 0 and your life expectancy of say, 70 years for a 35 year copyright. This meets everyone's goals. The problem occurs when corporations are formed. Corporations have a natural life expectancy of infinity. Halfway between 0 and infinity is still infinity. So when corporations begin purchasing copyright from individuals, they push to have copyright extended... to infinity. In other words, the flow of ideas into society's common pot (which we will call "the Public Domain" since that is what it is called) is under enormous pressure to slow and/or stop entirely. This is what we see today, with nothing published since WWI having gone out of copyright. Media Companies have worked very hard to embed the term "Piracy" into our thought. In my own personal opinion, it is the Media Companies themselves who have committed *gross* piracy by pirating work from the public domain as they extend copyright terms towards infinity. In other words, their goals are at odds with the rest of society. As a society, we have a right to say "they are pirating that which should rightly belong to all" just as much as they claim that "society is pirating that which should rightly belong to us." Eventually, certain individuals (whom I feel have social consciences, but that is neither here nor there) in the software community came up with the idea of "copyleft." It is the closest thing they could get to re-establishing the public domain - they use copyleft to defeat copyright by making the work they release readily available to anyone. However, in order to "force" others to share in this social conscience and to continue to "grow the pot" of available work, they restrict its use in only one fashion - if you use this, anything you base on it must also essentially be added to the CopyLeft Public Domain (and in many instances also must give credit to the original author). In other words, they tried to "force the pendulum back the other way" by making more stuff easily available to society. To say that the OGL was merely a way for WotC to increase the sales of their Core Books *may* be true, but I would be lying if I said I didn't think that somewhere in the back of their minds, this "grow the pot" paradigm was rattling around. I'll have to let Ryan answer that one definitively. This is why it frustrates me to see publishing companies trying to dance around the OGL and release as little USEFUL OGC as possible. They are trying to defeat the spirit of "Open" stuff - and doing so completely in their own self-interest - which puts them at odds with society. As a member of society, I have the right and ethical responsibility to call them on it and say, "you are my enemy." I could publish this sentence under the OGL and say that all pronouns and prepositions are OGC. That would be a sentence of 17 words, of which 7 words are clearly OGC. Wow! That's what, over 40% OGC? But is it at all useful? No. I have complied with the letter but not the spirit. >And I say no. If you are a player it doesn't matter because OGL, OGC, PI, >d20 and all the rest doesn't apply. If you are a designer, write your own >world and stop complaining because no one will give you theirs for free. And I say, if I am a player/fan/member of society, I have every right to desire that these things be made accessible to me. If I am a designer, I don't want your world - I want your *game mechanic* ideas (NOT your culture or setting or characters) for mine so that if you came up with a cool idea for a Feat, I can use it too - and it's in your self-interest to do so because I will give you credit - and people will say, "well if this Feat was cool, I should get the book with all the Feats in it because it's probably got more cool stuff." Don't let your raw self-interest impede your enlightened self-interest! As a fan, I have as much right as anyone to speak up, and so speak up I will. There. I'm done for a while. Flame away. --The Sigil _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
