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What's All This About The OGL Going Away?
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<blockquote data-quote="see" data-source="post: 8832226" data-attributes="member: 10531"><p>Well, it would depend on exactly what you were doing.</p><p></p><p>At the absolutely safest, one could write an adventure in accordance with these suggestions made (by TSR) back in 1994:</p><p></p><p></p><p>Beyond that, there's a whole range of opinions about how much more compatible you can get without slipping into the infringing realm of "derivative work". The biggest trouble with these opinions is there's not much case law involving a pure copyright claim involving tabletop roleplaying games (<em>TSR v. Mayfair</em> involved contracts and trademark claims in addition to copyright), so even if you directly consult with top copyright lawyers, you'll get a best guess informed by analogy from creative works with distinctively different characteristics. </p><p></p><p>Further, of course, copyright law is different in different countries, and what counts as "fair use" in the US is not the same thing as "fair dealing" in Canada, and who knows what happens if you have to deal with a civil law system where "moral rights of the author" are taken seriously (like France). In the Internet Age, that's a potential vulnerability.</p><p></p><p>So, the OGL gives 3PPs a fairly well-defined set of rights with explicitly worldwide scope, which is valuable not so much for exactly what rights it grants, but for the <em>certainty</em> it gives.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="see, post: 8832226, member: 10531"] Well, it would depend on exactly what you were doing. At the absolutely safest, one could write an adventure in accordance with these suggestions made (by TSR) back in 1994: Beyond that, there's a whole range of opinions about how much more compatible you can get without slipping into the infringing realm of "derivative work". The biggest trouble with these opinions is there's not much case law involving a pure copyright claim involving tabletop roleplaying games ([I]TSR v. Mayfair[/I] involved contracts and trademark claims in addition to copyright), so even if you directly consult with top copyright lawyers, you'll get a best guess informed by analogy from creative works with distinctively different characteristics. Further, of course, copyright law is different in different countries, and what counts as "fair use" in the US is not the same thing as "fair dealing" in Canada, and who knows what happens if you have to deal with a civil law system where "moral rights of the author" are taken seriously (like France). In the Internet Age, that's a potential vulnerability. So, the OGL gives 3PPs a fairly well-defined set of rights with explicitly worldwide scope, which is valuable not so much for exactly what rights it grants, but for the [I]certainty[/I] it gives. [/QUOTE]
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