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Yet another new person running these things, and they're still keeping a ban on the voting strategy I invented. I knew I should have taken over.

I note that a minimum copyright term of the "life of the author plus 50 years" is specified in the Berne Convention, and adherence to the Berne Convention is a condition of membership in the WTO system. So, as a practical matter, to change copyright terms to anything shorter, you'll need to get...

One of the things I worry about in these discussions is that people are way too quick to treat summary statements on copyright law (like "Copyright protects expression, not ideas" and "Copyright does not protect the idea for a game, its name or title, or the method or methods for playing it") as...

Hmm. If they are going to stick to their guns, a press release defending their plans would be fairly easy to write. Plant a flag defending Wizbro's rights to its IP, talk up how the OGL 1.1 still allows extensive 3PP participation, etc. It's not like the furor will be lessened by waiting for...

The OGL 1.0a is a lot like CC BY-SA insofar as material derivative of Open Game Content has to be (or at least is supposed to be) Open Game Content. Although the CC BY-SA does not have specific wording to make it easy to do so, at least in principle, you could, in a work, clearly mark various...

Lots of stories are darker than Supeman.

So, first thing first. The EFF statement has been updated in a quite important way that addresses my issue with their original statement. They are clarifying that there is a difference between a bare license without consideration, and a contract with obligations on both sides, and insofar as the...

Yes, that's what they're saying. Which would mean that there's a huge disaster looming over the software world and they're doing nothing about it. If the EFF truly believes the OGL can be revoked because it didn't use the magic word "irrevocable", then the EFF believes that the GPL 2 and the...

I understand your issue, I was pointing out that the specific argument you made was specious. Bad arguments in a good cause are still bad arguments. The core issue is that you're advocating for a measure inherently incompatible with the thread's purpose. A license that allows Hasbro the power...

The OGL 1.0a already explicitly prohibits them from saying "Compatible with D&D".

One thing I was disappointed by in this -- it simply said "Other open licenses like Creative Commons licenses and the GPL are clear that the rights they grant are irrevocable." This is true about the GPL version 3, yes. But it is not true about the GPL version 2, which is, for example, the...

I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here, so, let me try to be clearer. That the Pathfinder 2e Bestiary as it exists is a derivative work of WotC's copyrighted material is pretty certain. Setting aside the specific mechanics, a huge number of the monsters as "literary works" are very...

"Drow" is an alternate spelling in the Oxford English Dictionary for "trow", an Orkney and Shetland dialect word for "troll". "The Duergar" was the name of the story about a kind of dwarf in the 1944 story collection Folk Tales of the North Country. The problem, accordingly, is not the names...

Which, if Wizbro had any sense of history, should be taken as a particularly bad sign. Because that means this "OGL 1.1" is getting a worse reaction than the GSL, which Mongoose Publishing said some nice things about.

The game line most impacted by the original release of the OGL and SRD was Palladium, and that was because Palladium's system was such a close knockoff of D&D in the first place.

Dwarf, Hill 14 Elf, Wood 6 Half-Elf 13 Half-Orc 12 Halfling, Lightfoot 12

The big problem with this sort of approach is that copyright doesn't work on an atomic basis, but a holistic one, particularly when one is dealing with the question as to what counts as a "derivative work". This isn't the 1850s, where a translation of Uncle Tom's Cabin into German didn't...

Aasimar 6 Dragonborn, Gem 8 Dwarf, Hill 17 Elf, Wood 9 Gnome, Forest 5 Half-Elf 15 Half-Orc 18 Halfling, Lightfoot 11 Hobgoblin 5 Kobold 10

Contract law in the US is mostly state law, even when applied by the Federal courts; a legislative strategy should probably focus on state legislatures, not Congress.

Under the legal theory presented in the first post of the thread "Hello, I am lawyer with a PSA: almost everyone is wrong about the OGL and SRD. Clearing up confusion.", "unless the word 'irrevocable' appears in the license, the license can be revoked at any time, for any reason or for no...