On Sun, 14 Apr 2002, Doug Meerschaert wrote: > I think it's pretty universal that this of twist to the OGL is a Good > Thing, and should be allowed. > > Aside from Necromancer Games promising in writing (i.e., giving > permission to infringe), though, is there any other way to extend the > safe harbor to this method? Would an alteration to Section 6 help in > this matter? If so, what language?
First, Necromancer is *not* giving permission to infringe. Necromancer is stating that if people follow Necromancer's instructions, Necromancer does not believe anyone would be violating the OGL and guaranteeing that Necromancer won't allege that anyone following instructions has violated the license. It may be a technical distinction, but it is important. As for creating language that could be added to the OGL itself, I can't readily think of any simple language that could do this. I think you need all of Clark's example and explanation to make what he's attempting to do work. I don't think anyone wants all of that in the OGL itself. But I do think that a decent legal argument can be made that what Clark has proposed does *not* violate the OGL. Of course no one can know for sure without a court decision. However, if the legal arguments can be laid out and the d20 industry can adopt some sort of standards itself (simply through general practice rather than a formal document) that could help in any future court actions in terms of explaining what the industry understands the OGL language to mean. No guarantee that a court would accept such an argument, but it's probably better than an argument based just on one person's opinion. That was one reason I asked Clark if he'd brought this language to WotC directly - they are probably the only other party that could bring suit if someone followed Necromancer's instructions. All legal documents have some element of interpretation in them; no matter how much "legalese" is included. I think you (DM) hit on an important part of the OGL with the fact that the OGL requires the copyright notice for the OGC rather than the product containing the OGC. Now the question is what does that really mean? Generally it's been treated as if there isn't any difference between the copyright notice for any specific piece of OGC and the copyright notice of the product in which that piece appears. But that's mostly because there has only been the single copyright notice in a product. The issue now is figuring out how to write a copyright notice for a complete product that somehow creates individual copyright notices for various parts of the product. Has Clark successfully done that? Is the former idea proposed by the netbooks (listing every single spell/feat/item in s.15) acceptable? Is there some other way that would be better yet? alec _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
