searching the wizards site for Beholder cant find it spelling?

[DaveStebbins]

The beholder (as well as many of the other PI creatures) appeared in a pre-release version of the SRD which was released under a gentlemen's agreement that some material might not appear in the final "real" release SRD. The gentlemen's agreement was that publishers could use the pre-release SRD and WotC would not swat them if the final SRD was different. However, once the SRD was officially released the gentlemen's agreement stipulated that publishers would no longer use creatures or rules from the pre-release version. This whole thing came up because the SRD had not been finalized and approved by the WotC legal staff when 3.0 was ready to be released and, without some kind of gentlemen's agreement, third party publishers would not have been able to release and OGL or d20 material until well after the launch of 3E.

Some of the PI (non-OGL) creatures appeared in products shortly after 3E was released because publishers had been working on material from the pre-release SRD and WotC was good to their word not to cause problems. However, this late in the game, the ONLY SRD which can be used legally in any form is the actual, released, SRD.

-Dave

 

[dcollins]

The OGL is not the same thing as Public Domain -- specifically, one is licensed to publish Open Game Content in conjunction with the OGL. Note that no one is ever publishing under the OGL on these messageboards; that would require inclusion of the whole text of the OGL.

Therefore, if posting any statistics at all are allowed, it is under the "fair use" doctrine of copyright law. And that would be just as applicable to the Beholder as anything else. You still can't publish a work based on that property, however.