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Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 8883816" data-attributes="member: 463">Looking at UK cases on non-literal infringement such as Herbert v Ravenscroft The Spear case and the Baigent & Leigh v Random House (Dan Brown) Da Vinci Code case, I'd be fairly confident in saying that in UK Copyright Law Torchbearer definitely falls on the Da Vinci Code side of the line, non-infringing, whereas the retro-clones fall on the Ravenscroft side, infringing. Worse, if they still contain any actual 3e SRD text then without the OGL they are literally infringing. It may well be possible to publish a mechanical clone of D&D in the fantasy genre without infringing copyrights, using only non-protected ideas & mechanics, but that's a distinctly tricky operation. For a start I think you'd want to do a kind of white room operation where the game was written without any copies of D&D on hand, to avoid literal infringement. Even then you could well take too much of the structure and expression of a D&D version. I think you really need to start with a kind of clean text describing a fantasy world/genre, no rules stuff, then add in rules mechanics at the end. As an academic it would be very interesting to see the court judgement on that! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> But far from ideal when you have the OGL & SRD.</blockquote>

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