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Message: <blockquote data-quote="afstanton" data-source="post: 857233" data-attributes="member: 10492">I find this a fairly interesting discussion, but the thought that crosses my mind is that if all content contained in this online system (database) is truly OGC, then there's no real way to stop someone from snagging the entire thing and setting up their own system that the general public can then get to for free.  This is true even if you establish an entry fee to access the original database, whether the fee is a contribution of cold hard cash.  Once the genie is out of the bottle, there's no good way to get it back in.There's really no way of stopping someone from buying product off the shelf at their local bookstore, OCR'ing it, removing all non-OGC stuff, and creating such a database with no permission from the publisher.  It would indeed be highly rude, but completely legal if they followed the OGL perfectly, as far as I can tell.Given that there's no way of preventing it, I'd suggest a responsible party be the first to actually do it.  What I'd personally think is a good way to do it is to come up with a human readable format for game content, preferably via an XML schema, and include a section for digital signatures.  The digital signature should only be used by an entity claiming ownership of the OGC, which would leave little room for doubt that they are indeed releasing specific work as OGC.This data could be uploaded to a server where it is verified against the entity's public key.  Once verified, the file is then parsed out and integrated into the master database.  Unverifiable files would be either rejected outright or put into a holding location.  Public keys from registered entities would be stored in the database as well.  Actual human interaction would be recommended during the step of accepting a public key.One interesting side effect of this is that if datasets use a standardized accepted format, programs such as PCGen, RPM, and CS (to name the 3 that I can immediately think of) could import them for creating characters.  Programs would certainly need to be written to generate these files, as well.  Also, the database could generate XML datasets as a result of a query, although those would be unsigned datasets - recall, signing data would be equivalent to claiming ownership in this system.Just my 2 cents, for what it's worth.  There are many people much more qualified than I am to consider the specific details of how to implement this kind of system, but that's what came to mind.Aaron</blockquote>

Verification