On Mon, Jan 20, 2003 at 06:21:50PM -0800, Ryan S. Dancey wrote: > > From: Bryant Durrell [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > > > Prior to the OGL, it wasn't considered a big deal to publish a variant > > article in a magazine, unless of course you were Palladium. > > That's not accurate. Prior to the advent of the OGL, all the major > publishers took it as an article of understood law that anyone seeking > to publish any content that was a derivative work based on their games > needed their advance permission. New/inexperienced publishers often > violated this "rule", and were quietly told the "proper procedure" to > follow in the future and did so.
Interesting revisionist history. http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html "The idea for a game is not protected by copyright. The same is true of the name or title given to the game and of the method or methods for playing it. "Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author�s expression in literary, artistic, or musical form. Copyright protection does not extend to any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in the development, merchandising, or playing of a game. Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles." I know it's an article of faith with you that the courts would rule that RPGs are special. While you may be right in the case of a rewrite of the PHB, I think it's highly unlikely that the article in question here would be found in violation. As I pointed out, the concept of subattributes is not even unique to D&D. -- Bryant Durrell [] http://www.innocence.com/~durrell [] 9/11/2001 [----------------------------------------------------------------------------] "Channeling is just bad ventriloquism. You use another voice, but people can see your lips moving." -- Penn Jillette _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
