Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 1458292" data-attributes="member: 10201">Well, the fact that people will buy a book like Backdrops or Seven Strongholds in preference to a book like City Book VII, when the latter is better content, but the former has a D20 System logo on the cover (and, in the case of Backdrops, there isn't a single game stat in the whole book) supports it. Talk to any game company that's been a round for a while, and they'll tell you that generic supplements don't sell. But repackage the same exact sort of content with D20 System stats, and it sells well enough to encourage more of them.We have different definitions of "same" and "different" in this context. IMHO, CoCD20, M&MM, D&D3E, OGL Horror, Grimm, Virtual, Deeds Not Words, and Stargate D20 all use "the same" ruleset. And so do the producers--the whole selling point of D20 System is "you don't need to learn the rules, because you already know them".Look at a broader sample than RPGNow--PDF sales are often skewed: things that'd never sell as hardcopy, or for $20 might sell like hotcakes for $8 as a PDF. Go to the local FLGS, and find out, and i bet that you'll mostly find very clearly D&D-compatible books in the topsellers. And, again, differences of definition: i'd consider D20 Modern and D&D3.5E "perfectly compatible"--i wouldn't even blink at grabbing one bit from one, one from the other, and running a game with no effort needed to merge them. And why exclude WotC products in the comparison? Actually, i'd argue that prior to 1999, it wasn't much of a risk, legally. Which is why there were so many companies doing it (like MGI's Role-Aids line, Judges Guild, and others). While it was far from a sure thing, what legal precedent there was looks to me [a non-lawyer] like it was in favor of the USPTO's circular saying that game rules can't be patented. It was precisely the monetary risk (of being buried under legal fees) that stopped it--specifically TSR successfully killing the Role-Aids line, despite a previous court case that had explicitly established that MGI's use of the AD&D trademark was within trademark usage guidelines, i'd wager. It's both. It *does* make the "rules" clear, so that everyone is playing by the same ones. And it clearly gives a lot of people what they want. And if it were in a vacuum, i wouldn't have a problem with it. But it's not. It establishes a precedent, and that's what i object to.The fact that everyone likes it doesn't necessarily mean it's good in all ways. Let's say there's a big kid at school who always has an entire bag of cookies in her lunch. You want one, and she says you can have one, if you let her punch you. You're "happy" with this solution, 'cause you get a cookie. But you're stilling getting punched everyday before lunch--because a cookie is worth more to you than not being punched. But what if the bully then beat you up one day, and used the cookie agreement to argue that you liked being hurt, and so you didn't suffer anything when you were beat up? Now, hopefully the teacher would see right through this. But, of course, an IP matter like whether or not RPG mechanics can be owned, is far less clear-cut, and far less tangible, so there's much more risk of a precedent being extended. I don't want IP to get beat up. [Also, i'm looking at this in the context of IP laws in general, such as copyright extensions, Disney arm-twisting Congress, the RIAA's actions, the DMCA, patenting of genomes, and other trends that're giving corporations ever more power, at the expense of the public good. So for me it's not just one license in isolation, it's part of a larger trend that i see as very bad.]Check the USPTO website circulars. Or check with an IP lawyer: the general rule of thumb is that common terms and pure descriptives can't be trademarks. That's why you see funny spellings (so it's not a common word) and bizarre seemingly-unrelated names, often using made-up words, for companies all the time. And the claim against MS is exactly the one i'm making against WotC: that the USPTO *shouldn't* have granted the Windows trademark, and that they did so because of ignorance of the state of the software industry at the time (or, more specifically, at the time the MS Windows trademark was first claimed).</blockquote>

Verification