<<B. The opinion was that the OGC should be clear when you come across it.
It should be in a box, in a different font, part of an Open chapter/section,
etc. >>
Were this a requirement you couldn't mix PI and OGC. The only way to detect the PI in an OGC chapter is to have a separate description (the OGC designation) in front of you, looking to see what is and is not PI.
<< Having to look somewhere else to see if any given bit of text was Open
was not clear enough. >>
Then almost any product that doesn't put it's PI in a different font, box, etc. would be in violation, because you are claiming that it's somehow not clear unless you can tell by reading the text "in line" as opposed to comparing it to a laundry list of items on a separate OGC declaration page.
<<The declaration should be all you have to read, and
it should be concise enough that you could reasonably remember it while
reading the book (not counting PI).
>>
The license requires that the OGC be clearly defined, not that said definition needs to be something that one could memorize or that it needs to be at all concise.
I'd think that OGC declarations could be "clear" and still be 2 pages long in legalese. As long as it was unambiguous so that, with sufficient time and a reasonable amount of effort, OGC could be sifted from PI, I don't think the OGL makes any specifications on how concise or how "user friendly" the OGC declaration has to be provided that it is "clear".
While the following sentence would be, per se "clear", I'd hate to read it: "The 1st through 14th words of the first paragraph on page 72 are open gaming content. The 21st through 29th words in that paragraph are also open gaming content. All other words in that paragraph are considered product identity."
If anything, an appendix or a CD-ROM that extracted the OGC content and sifted out the PI would be fantastically more user-friendly for the end user to use. I don't think I would argue that one is particularly unclear or in violation of the license for being unclear.
So I think there's a distinction between clarity (i.e., a lack of ambiguity), which the license does require, and a concise, user-friendly declaration (which the license doesn't require).
That doesn't mean that I consider OGC extraction to a CD-ROM to be wholly a clear cut issue. On the contrary. If I thought it was clear and without things to consider I wouldn't have asked the question.
But I don't agree that having a concise OGC designation that your customer can memorize is a requirement under the OGL.
Lee
