De : [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] De la part de Ciro Alessandro Sacco
Envoy� : jeudi 22 ao�t 2002 12:52
� : [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Objet : Re: [Ogf-l] Non-English SRD
The questions of Poil Brun are interesting for me, too and I'd appreciate very much if Anthony Valterra could give us some hint about this.The SRD and the OGL are in English and they represent the official documents concerning d20 publishing. I'm Italian however as Poil Brun is French. In Italy there is no official translation of SRD and OGL, only an 'amateur' one. There is of course an official D&D glossary by the Italian D&D publisher, shared with the various Italian publishers producing d20 books, but the legal texts (SRD and OGL) are in English. Any plans to 'officially' translate these? If not, what about this situation...
1) Let's suppose that an Italian publisher decides to produce a d20 book using as reference the unofficial' SRD and OGL in Italian, printing the OGL's Italian translation in the book.
3) Given to translations errors or ideological bias, the Italian unofficial version of SRD and the English one have significant enough differences to qualify some parts of the product released under #2 as 'copyright violations'.
4) The Italian publisher receives the 30 days notice and the 'cease or desist' letter from WotC. It answers that the product is compliant with the Italian SRD and OGL and that it didn't know that such translations were not official. So the matter goes to court, I suppose in Italuy because the product has been printed and released here.
5) WotC and the Italian publisher are in the Italian court: WotC uses as a proof the SRD and OGL in English, the Italian publisher uses the unofficial Italian SRD and OGL. Because, at the best of my knowledge, you can't use any foreign language materials in Italy unless you have a translation made by a court-approved translator, the lawsuit gest messy. If the translator is not proficient in gamespeak, the mess could be worse.
6) Let's suppose the translator does his job right: the court's translation and the amateur translations have big enough differences to convince the court of WotC good reasons. But, what about the compliance of the SRD and OGL with European laws, Italian laws and Universal Copyright Conventions? Has anybody at WotC looked in these things? The Italian publisher is sentenced to destroy its remainging inventory and that future products will have to be fully compliant with the SRD and OGl AS TRANSLATED BY THE COURT'S TRANSLATOR, lacking any official translation by WotC. Meanwhile, another publisher has picked up the idea of a d20 product and found on the Internet a copy of the amateur SRD and OGL Italian translations, so the nightmare starts again...
Of course these course of events is quite extreme, but it really could happen under certain circumstances. My opinion is that WotC and the publishers of the official D&D translations could consider officially translating the SRD and OGL in the various langiages, so to guarantee that a publisher could work with confidence on its products. Any ideas about this?
Poil Brun wrote:
1. There is no "French SRD". Can I publish anything in French that uses anything from it?2. If I decide to publish material derivative of the SRD, since there is no French SRD, how can I know the official translation of a game term? What happens if I use a translation in French of a game term (that I belive is the right translation of the term) but which is not the one published in the French translation of the books?
