tomBitonti
Adventurer
2. The License: This License applies to any Open Game Content that contains a notice indicating that the Open Game Content may only be Used under and in terms of this License. You must affix such a notice to any Open Game Content that you Use. No terms may be added to or subtracted from this License except as described by the License itself. No other terms or conditions may be applied to any Open Game Content distributed using this License.
3.Offer and Acceptance: By Using the Open Game Content You indicate Your acceptance of the terms of this License.
4. Grant and Consideration: In consideration for agreeing to use this License, the Contributors grant You a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive license with the exact terms of this License to Use, the Open Game Content.
Additional text omitted.
"Any" open content seems to make section 2 apply to specific Open Game Content which is present in a new product. Section 2 seems to be how new content becomes Open Game Content.
"The" Open Game Content, from section 3, parses badly. Use can be thought of as incremental (using specific parts of the overall Corpus of OGC), or can be thought of more coarsely. That is, use of any portion of the OGC is spoken of as a use of the OGC as a whole. For section 3, I don't think this matters: Whether you have used a specific part of the OGC, or have used "The OGC", either way of parsing reaches the same conclusion, which is to indicate your acceptance of the license.
(Note: I have a particular, independent problem with section 3, in that it seems unlikely that any simple "use" of OGC indicates anything with regards to legal / formal acceptance of the license. The definition of "Use" from section 1g doesn't add very much.)
For section 5, because of the text Contributors ... "grant you a" ... "license with the exact terms of this license" ... to use the Open Game Content, it would seem that the license is from all contributors to date, with the license applying to all current Open Game Content. I can see this could also mean that each contribute grants a license which applies to the subset which is their specific addition to the Open Game Content.
(Note: I have another, independent problem with section 5, which is that I don't understand the precise legal meaning of "license with the exact terms of this License". That seems to imply that there is a distinct license (although the terms are exactly the same). Then, how does withdrawing the initial license affect the distinct license granted by section 5? If the section 5 license is between all contributors to each new contributor, can one contributor withdraw that license? Can one contributor remove their contributed OGC?)
(Note also: The distinct license which is created by section 5 seems to have a direction problem: A license is created for each new contributor at the point in time that they use this license. There doesn't seem to be a license given to prior contributors to use the newly contributed OGC.)
TomB
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