Recent content by Jerik

No, they're not, but I don't think that necessarily allows you to just use names from a copyrighted work willy-nilly. I'd think a case could still be made that you're creating a derivative work. For instance, according to a search I just did on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office website, the...

IANAL, and hopefully one of the people posting here who are lawyers will chime in and clarify, but it should be noted there are big differences between copyrights and trademarks. Trademarks can be lost if you don't defend them; copyrights can't. Also, copyrights are automatic (though there are...

I think that's the most recent version. I downloaded the Year Zero SRD from the Fria Ligan site a couple months ago, and the copy I have is copyrighted 2019 as well, so it's probably the same as that one, though I haven't actually compared them.

For whatever reason, TSR was far laxer in enforcing its IP in video games than in other media. The early Final Fantasies used loads of D&D monsters besides mind flayers; there were, for instance, also sahagin (just one letter missing from the sahuagin they were based on) and the ochu (in later...

The Porphyra RPG is an even starker example. I have a print copy of the core book. The Section 15 is six pages long. (It's in larger type than the Section 15s in most books, but not that much larger.) There's no possible way they could track down every single person and company they used...

PF2 will be ORC. (Or possibly PF2.5 or 3, if they determine scrubbing the last vestiges of WotC OGC constitutes a big enough change to warrant a new edition number.) PF1 won't be ORC. It can't be. There's too much stuff directly and obviously derived from the 3.5 SRD.

I'm not sure why you're still asking this, because it was already answered, by both me and Maxperson. Heck, look just two posts down from the post you quoted! But I'll try to answer again, more concisely and perhaps more clearly than I did yesterday: Even if you could reconstruct the 3E rules...

I didn't read this thread until today or I would have answered sooner. And I can answer not just with some invented hypothetical, but with something that I had actually planned to do that I cannot do without access to the earlier SRDs. Maxperson hit on this a few posts up, but the biggest...

Except that dndsrd.net also still has the d20 System logo up, right there in the upper left corner of the page. And also claims in the text of the home page to still be using it "according to the terms of the [long discontinued] d20 System License version 5.0." And d20srd.org also includes the...

OK, I thought it must have been addressed before somewhere; I just hadn't seen it. But as I said, I consulted several dictionaries (including the Oxford English Dictionary, which is pretty darn exhaustive) and none of them listed that meaning. Ah, that makes more sense. (Or rather, that makes...

Okay, this is a tangent, but something I just noticed: "Potation"? Doesn't that just mean "drinking"? I thought maybe it had a second meaning I was unaware of, but I checked several dictionaries, including the online Merriam-Webster dictionary, the Oxford English Dictionary, and Wiktionary...

Just saw in a post on RPG.net that Ulisses Spiele has announced it's planning on licensing its games through ORC, including TORG, Fading Suns, The Dark Eye, and even a few games that have only been released in German. (Unfortunately, I don't have a direct link to the original source of the...

Oh, absolutely it's not a foregone conclusion; I didn't mean to imply it was. I just thought saying lawyers here were split on the matter was a little misleading when only one lawyer here had said it was revocable. (Though yes, even the lawyers who argued that it was irrevocable admitted that...

Do they? Well, yes, lawyers here are technically split on that, but only in the sense that one lawyer posting in this thread said they could, and every other lawyer posting in the thread said that lawyer was wrong.

Paizo can't unilaterally update the license, if it's owned by a third party, no, but they could make some argument about being able to withdraw Pathfinder from the license, and say the license no longer applies to them, and that nobody can use the Pathfinder SRD with the ORC going forward...