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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MartyW" data-source="post: 7664389" data-attributes="member: 6776795">Yeah, actually I'm aware of the differentiation and I made the mistake of using the abbreviations in successive sentences which muddied my meaning.My intent was to state that if they made all of Basic open gaming content, that weakens the D&D intellectual property because you need to specifically call out parts consist of the Product Identity which remain protected. If you call out nothing, none of your intellectual property is protected.If you protect nothing, then anyone can take what you wrote and re-print it word for word and put it up for sale. This has actually happened in the OSR community recently. One of the publishers put their entire book out as open content. Another person came along and essentially changed nothing but the name of the rule book and republished it on RPGNow with a slightly lower price.While this is ethically the dirt-baggiest thing in the world to do, it was technically legal because the entire book was specified as open gaming content.WotC wouldn't want to make the same mistake (like they did in 3.x) in allowing the entire text of Basic to be re-used as is. If anything, one might consider a revised version of the OGL that stipulates that a straight-up reprint is not allowed, but sections may be re-used if, for example, the reused portion doesn't exceed a given percentage of the content of the new publication (just an example of a future state, not saying that is currently stipulated anywhere). Yeah, and this was what part of that article was expressing. There are a lot of thing that the OGL "allowed" in its text which were actually already allowed under regular copyright law. The OGL merely stipulated them in a way that allowed publishers to not require a gaggle of copyright lawyers in order to publish d20 content.In that we agree that a document that stipulates exactly what one can and can't reference is needed... but it doesn't have to be a new license like the OGL. We really only need a document that lists things like: "You are allowed to name monsters, but not reprint stat blocks as they are seen in the MM" or similar. Fortunately, some publishers like Goodman Games, already know what can and cannot be done in product and they are already doing so... but it would be nice for the rest of us to have that clarity.For example, I think I can put out an adventure with a "Red Dragon" for 5e with my own stat block (as long as the presentation differs from the MM), but I'm pretty sure I can't use "Beholder" since that name is specifically protected. I also am not sure if I can used the word "Advantage" in order to describe rolling 2d20's and taking the better result... Is the word "Advantage" protected? Or do I have to "create" a similarly named mechanic for use in my product? (such as calling it the "Plus Die" or "Minus Die" or some other silly shenanigan to be copyright legal).Has anyone compiled a list of do and do-nots along these lines?</blockquote>

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