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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Morrus" data-source="post: 101381" data-attributes="member: 1">AV has sent this along:-----------------------------Folks,I know that many of you assume that I am actually an evil corporate shill. Well, I want you all to know that while I may be evil, I am no corporate shill. But I do have a job to do and part of that job is protecting our corporate assets while still providing as free a playground as possible.So let’s go over this document one paragraph at a time:  This is the "if you want to use our toys in public then you gotta play by our rules" section, keeping in mind that what you do behind closed doors is your own business. I promise I will not come to your house and demand to know if you have converted one of our 1E or 2E products in your bedroom late at night. This is the, "yes, we have not yet addressed this area of consumer web content and now we are" section. It also address that we recognize that the OGL and d20 could be used in this regard. This is an important section. It says **why** we have to do this. By law if we do not defend our property the courts can declare it “open to the public”. This would be very harmful to our business and you can imagine what the reaction of the parent company would be. But it does open this door – if the properties are rightfully acknowledged with our permission, then no harm is done. This is also an important piece. Please note that it says, “Wizards shall be the sole source of the original materials, whether they have been obtained as ESDs, scanned, or otherwise procured.” You are not limited to ESDs for conversion. You may convert a paper piece that you own from 1E or 2E! Information to the contrary was in error. But it also says that you cannot give away the original product or duplicate the original product with your conversion. In other words, you cannot take an ESD or a scanned paper product and simply convert the state blocks and then put it up for download. We were seeing more and more of that kind of activity. That is a direct and egregious violation of copyright. If we continued to ignore it, we would be risking our ability to defend our copyrights in the future. Please note the word “CUSTOMARY”. No gun there. This is standard for all OGL and d20 products. You must use the SRD. Please note that the SRD currently includes the three core books and Psionics. As time goes on, it will continue to expand. This merely means that you cannot rewrite the adventure to your particular tastes. For example, if the finale of the adventure is an encounter with a black dragon, you can’t decide that a white dragon would have been so much cooler, or more logical, or whatever. This is a standard OGL rule and is not asking a great deal. For most conversions it means adding one page. This is added because the titles of adventures are copyrighted; some include trademarks and many use valuable IPs. But we can’t give permission on a case-by-case basis; that would take too much time. So we have given you a method of titling an adventure that protects our copyright but makes it easy to tell which adventure it is. This is the part where we grant you permission to us some of our property as long as you acknowledge that it is our property. Addition to most ESDs: two paragraphs. Okay, this is the part that is the most problematic for Morrus. But what are our choices? The author can remain anonymous so the distributor is whom we have to hold responsible. It  ** does **  mean that someone has to read conversions before they go online. But if we were to find a document that was in violation, we would simply tell the distributor which document is a problem, and they would have the choice of action (take it down or change it so that it complies). We would only have a problem if we notified someone of a problem document and they refused to take action. Remember “CUSTOMARY,” as in optional. Standard d20/OGL text, this will add a few sentences. This has been the policy all along, so it should not be a surprise. Okay, what the hell does this mean? It means we have to have a legal out. If copyright violation is so egregious and so common that we are spending all of our time dealing with that, then we cannot allow conversions to continue. This is not an evil plot anymore then d20/OGL was an evil plot (remember how everyone kept saying that we were going to pull a fast one on the industry??). Personally, now that we have spelled it, out I expect violations to drop down so low that they are below our radar. Which is just what we want. We want you guys to keep converting and for us to be able trust everyone to do so properly. Hopefully these guidelines will allow us to do just that.Anthony Valterra</blockquote>

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