Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7787457" data-attributes="member: 42582">My undertstanding is that the dispute turned on particular images or story elements, like the near-reproduction of the cover of Action Comics no 1 on a Captain Marvel cover.If someone accepts the OGL, then s/he can publish SRD material that is licensed under the OGL. But Frylock is arguing that he can publish stat blocks without needing to be licensed because WotC enjoys no IP rights in respect of them.As I understand it, the argument is that deciding that a Cyclops has 138 rather than (say) 146 hp is (i) a decision about game rules and hence not something that generates copyright, and (ii) is not an artistic creation because as far as the story aspect is concerned it only affirms the age-old story that cyclops are tough. Maybe a stat block with a 1 hp cyclops would be different because it would be a story about a weak cyclops, although that might still leave argument (i) in place. (I don't know how US copyright law handles the game rules argument in the context of a game that also takes story elements as an input and produces them as an output.)He hasn't asserted that he can copy WotC's stuff with impunity. Just statblocks. And his grounds for this assertion is that WotC doesn't own anything in respect of its statblocks. That argument doesn't "fall apart" just because it issues in that conclusion. What's your counter-argument that WotC does own copyright in respect of its stablocks?I'm surprised by the number of confident assertions about the law in this thread by people who don't seem to really know what they're talking about. It may not be polite to call such people trolls, but I'm not sure their opinions need to be given much credence.Of the lawyers who post on this thread the one with whom I've had the most profitable discussions about IP is [USER=463]@S'mon[/USER]. If he has the time and inclination, I'd be curious to learn what he thinks about this.</blockquote>

Verification