Yeah, sometimes it feels like music copyright is a law unto itself! I tend to emphasise to my students that in practice the courts take rather different approaches to the scope of copyright protection in different mediums, as you say. "Art" has the least scope & protection, "Music" & secondary copyright in Phonograms the most, and literary works are in between.
D&D General Frylock on the ‘Ineffectual OGL’
- Thread starter DM Magic
- Start date
Yeah, sometimes it feels like music copyright is a law unto itself! I tend to emphasise to my students that in practice the courts take rather different approaches to the scope of copyright protection in different mediums, as you say. "Art" has the least scope & protection, "Music" & secondary copyright in Phonograms the most, and literary works are in between.
Mistwell
Crusty Old Meatwad (he/him)
No he has not. Nor shall he, he said, as he stepped slowly away from train wreck.
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Yes. There is a point where plot details become creative content. As lowkey mentioned, there's a difficulty in discussing things that has so much depth of fiddly legal detail.
Beleriphon
Totally Awesome Pirate Brain
I was going to mention that. Akira Kurosawa wasn't happy with Sergio Leone over A Fist Full of Dollars. My understanding is that Leone ended up settling with Kurosawa over an undisclosed amount.
DM Magic
Adventurer
An addendum has been posted: Part 3.5: A Mild Retraction That Makes Matters Worse for #WotC #DnD #copyright #iplaw #ogl
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lowkey13
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He seems to be sticking with his weird misinterpretation of OGL clause 1(e) as automatically excluding all listed elements, rather than those elements when specifically designated as Product Identity. I am slightly surprised his team of high powered lawyers have not pointed this out to him.
Edit: Reading his comment thread responses to accurate criticisms in part 3, he seems to think 'Product Identity' is about 'withdrawing stuff from the Public Domain." No, it is about the consideration WoTC receives from the licensee in exchange for the consideration they grant the licensee. By the licence the licensee can't use PI at all, even nominatively. In exchange they receive a broad licence to use a bunch of material WoTC owns the copyright in. That WoTC receive consideration under the licence is what makes the OGL (afaict) a valid contract in Common-law legal systems, rather than a bare promise by them.
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lowkey13
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Xenonnonex
Hero
Legalities aside, the PR campaign isn’t strong
And he sounds like the most conceited blowhard, like he's ineffectual at life and has to excessively make up for it.
I don’t think namecalling makes anybody sound better.
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lowkey13
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GreyLord
Legend
Legalities aside, the PR campaign isn’t strong
He seriously said that!?
They ALL agree with him...
Hmmm....interesting....
His evidence that I've seen of that seems more anecdotal from his own end...
Even if WotC didn't really have anything more in relation to do with this...part of me now sort of just wants Hasbro to lay on the pain just on principle.
This guy doesn't seem to know when to stop...or maybe that's what he wants....
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Deleted member 7015506
Guest
Okay it took me a real while to translate some terms and trying to understand the context and deeper meaning of the whole affair. And very likely I am still wrong and misunderstood quite a deal of the whole affair. But after that rather time consuming effort, I got the following conclusions for me (and please correct me if I am wrong):
(As stated by others) Fyrlock thinks, that WotC is claiming copyrights/misusing copyrights for things they don´t have. May it be game rules, stats blocks, monsters, etc. based on whatever previous court decisions are there. So they, according to his thought model, can´t enforce something they don´t have nor have the rights to. Therefore the whole copyright claim by WotC is not justified in his view and his publication of those stat blocks don´t violate copyrights at all.
The OGL is worthless according to him, since it robs possible designers/publishers of rights they would have, since WotC is misusing the copyright laws by stating, that certain parts of their game are Intellectual Property (Or at least I get the impression). And he thinks this is a misuse of copyright laws.
I don´t understand, where the misuse is, when WotC says, you can publish material as long as you don´t include those IP parts. Now the only point he may have is, that perhaps certain monsters or other parts are at a small chance not the IP of WotC and therefore the "offering" of the OGL and SRD is not enforceable, since those parts (where he assumes WotC has no copyright on) of that "offering" is rendering the whole "offering" (perhaps called a contract) meaningless.
And now I wonder, if Fyrlock published one of his stat blocks for such IP considered monsters as the Githyanki, Mind Flayer, etc. The only question is, and perhaps that is what he is counting on in case the affair goes to court, if those IP "protected" monsters are really covered by some copyright or IP laws and are really the IP of WotC (thanks S´mon for the remark about that). And if they are not IP protected, would they make the OGL/SRD meaningless and their publication perhaps in a more dramatic escalation turn the whole D&D game into a kind of Public Domain material (=WotC own mistake in his assumption?)? I understand, that if this would be the case you can´t still simply paste and copy the rulebooks and publish them as their own.
To sum it up I simply get the impression, that Fyrlock is trying to prove, that if one part of a contract/offering is not valid under existing laws, than the whole contract/offering is not enforcable (which is usually the case in laws of my home country. Therefore a clause in every good contract here states, that if one part of a contract is wrong, the whole contract in itself is not nullified by that wrong part (literal translation)).
(As stated by others) Fyrlock thinks, that WotC is claiming copyrights/misusing copyrights for things they don´t have. May it be game rules, stats blocks, monsters, etc. based on whatever previous court decisions are there. So they, according to his thought model, can´t enforce something they don´t have nor have the rights to. Therefore the whole copyright claim by WotC is not justified in his view and his publication of those stat blocks don´t violate copyrights at all.
The OGL is worthless according to him, since it robs possible designers/publishers of rights they would have, since WotC is misusing the copyright laws by stating, that certain parts of their game are Intellectual Property (Or at least I get the impression). And he thinks this is a misuse of copyright laws.
I don´t understand, where the misuse is, when WotC says, you can publish material as long as you don´t include those IP parts. Now the only point he may have is, that perhaps certain monsters or other parts are at a small chance not the IP of WotC and therefore the "offering" of the OGL and SRD is not enforceable, since those parts (where he assumes WotC has no copyright on) of that "offering" is rendering the whole "offering" (perhaps called a contract) meaningless.
And now I wonder, if Fyrlock published one of his stat blocks for such IP considered monsters as the Githyanki, Mind Flayer, etc. The only question is, and perhaps that is what he is counting on in case the affair goes to court, if those IP "protected" monsters are really covered by some copyright or IP laws and are really the IP of WotC (thanks S´mon for the remark about that). And if they are not IP protected, would they make the OGL/SRD meaningless and their publication perhaps in a more dramatic escalation turn the whole D&D game into a kind of Public Domain material (=WotC own mistake in his assumption?)? I understand, that if this would be the case you can´t still simply paste and copy the rulebooks and publish them as their own.
To sum it up I simply get the impression, that Fyrlock is trying to prove, that if one part of a contract/offering is not valid under existing laws, than the whole contract/offering is not enforcable (which is usually the case in laws of my home country. Therefore a clause in every good contract here states, that if one part of a contract is wrong, the whole contract in itself is not nullified by that wrong part (literal translation)).
Xenonnonex
Hero
Well, call a spade a spade, and a tool a tool
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lowkey13
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Yeah.
I'm a bit reminded of one of the famous parody cases, 2 Live Crew's case over Pretty Woman, where the court eventually said "you did not make your case at all, but it happens that you're right, here's why". I think he's failed to make his case coherently, but there's an actual credible argument to be made. I actually got into a bit of a heated argument with Dancey about this on Usenet, back when OGL first showed up, because he was pushing very aggressively the idea that WotC owned the use of the word "Strength" to refer to character stats, and that if someone simply made an adventure that referred to the D&D rules, that might potentially be infringement, and thus they should sign up to the OGL and get permission to use that material in exchange for agreeing not to use the Product Identity stuff. My argument was similar-ish to Frylock's, but I actually tried to argue the case coherently. (Still not a lawyer, though.)
My basic stance is that, in terms of the intent of copyright law, it seems pretty clear that a module that uses the D&D terminology to refer to the D&D rules, but does not reproduce those rules, and does not use the Named Characters And Settings, is not actually infringing on anything, and is only "derivative" of the stuff that is absolutely not protected -- the rules-as-abstraction, not the text of the rules. And thus, there's no need for anyone to make a special agreement that "entitles" them to make such a thing, and the agreement exists only to fast-talk people into agreeing to arbitrary restrictions, some of which would not apply otherwise, some of which probably would.
That said: If I were gonna make modules, I'd probably go along with it, not because I think it's necessary, but because I think it's socially-desireable for them to say "hey we want to create an environment where people can unambiguously have agreement that they're allowed to do things". It's not about whether they would be right to sue, or would win the suit, or whether I think they would; having a clear agreement of "we think this is definitely okay and agree that you're allowed to do it" seems like a good thing.
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lowkey13
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I remember those days and I remember thinking that Dancey was being overly aggressive in his push for the OGL. But also I remembered how TSR would throw cease-and-desist orders around like they were kleenex before they went bankrupt and prevent people from publishing things on very similar claims just because they had lawyers and the smaller guys didn't. So it didn't seem outside the realm of possibility simultaneously that a) Dancey was wrong and b) nobody would ever be able to afford to litigate it.
The OGL was put out there as a "detente" with the Internet community - you agree to follow these minimal rules regarding our "Product Identity" (note that it was never trademarks or copyright that they asked people to respect - it was specifically a collection of assets that there is in fact some question of how much ownership they can claim over them) and we'll let you publish inside those rules freely. If you don't want to use the OGL okay, but then the spectre of a lawsuit is going to hang over you and if you cross a line Wizards doesn't like then they're likely to come after you and it'll be a potentially costly lawsuit.
(Are folks around here old enough generally to remember the bad old days of T$R on Usenet? These days I think people remember TSR fairly fondly, but the early-to-mid 90s TSR before it went bankrupt was not a cuddly company that people had good feelings for precisely because of how they treated fan works, let alone other publishers who they thought were creeping into "their" territory.)
