Is it OK to distribute others' OGC for free?

[pennywiz]

Find the people that founded startups based on e-books and ask them where the market is going. Start at your local soup kitchen.

Name one. Also note that despite airline companies going out of business with a fair amount of frequency, no one has given up on air travel.

It will happen, no doubt. But there are serious technological hurdles that have to be overcome, and so far haven't. We're at least 10 years away from e-books even being common, and a lot more before they are ubiquitous. There's a lot of time yet for small publishers to make a living in the print world, or lose their shirts in the e-world.

Putting any kind of time frame on it is foolish, IMO. That's why I mentioned the article writers of the seventies. As far as the rpg industry is concerned, it is some of the small print publishers losing their shirts and the e-pubs who are gaining ground. You can't lose your shirt if you never use it as your ante.

And technological hurdles aside, there are legal and commercial realities. Some sort of consumer friendly DRM has to be worked out, for one thing, and that takes cooperation amongst a lot of folks. A format will have to be agreed on, international legalities hammered out. Just today there was an article on /. about the US and Australia wrangling over the Project Gutenberg and 'Gone with the Wind', since the copyright has expired down under and not here.

International legalities will get hammered out when the major players (tech providers or content providers) decide it is in their best interest.

Rampant piracy will make the content makers curl up in a little ball and refuse to play, and it will take a lot of nibbling away at their consumer base by the little guys before they will come back out and play.

Or it will spur people on to come up with an alternative.

Mindless obeisance to our corporate overlords isn't the answer, but this 'information wants to be free' crap isn't either.

I agree.

 

[Remathilis]

No offense, but you're not the primary future of the market. You represent part of the present, and almost all of the past, but as technology evolves and younger people grow up with that evolved technology, those people that require or even prefer a physically printed product will only decline. It's as inevitible as our declining dependance on fossil fuels. When all of the physical objections are removed, and the pricing and usage of tangible resources makes it ridiculous to own a physical respresentation or collection of ideas, electronic documents in one form or another will be the only sane alternative. Not today, not tomorrow, but far sooner than you think. Find the author of an early seventies article on the future of gaming or computers and just ask them.

I dunno. I love my computer. I've been using one for 13 years for both work, school and play. I'm 25 and "grew up" watching the internet explode. I just don't believe that for gaming material, we're looking in the short term future. When PDA's and micro computers become as common as cellphones, I'll being willing to accept PDF/electronic products as the primary method of delivering new gaming material.

Estimation: D&D 5.0 will be electronic, but I doubt it will be in the next 5 years.

 

[pennywiz]

When PDA's and micro computers become as common as cellphones, I'll being willing to accept PDF/electronic products as the primary method of delivering new gaming material.

As common? They're already wrapping them all up into a single unit. There are already DMs interupting their game momentarily to switch screens and see if they need to take an incoming call on their wireless, connected, handheld devices. The tech is already here, the materials are already coming in proper format, it's just the pricing (and the legal wrangling) that needs to adjust.

 

[Vigilance]

If I can summarize some of the basic themes of this thread as I have seen them, this is what I am hearing:

1. If you release a book 100% OGC you "deserve" to have that content offered freely since you "made your bed and should lie in it".

The people seeking free distribution argue that what they're doing is legal so don't feel bad when they do it.

BUT

2. If you cripple your OGC (make it harder to use in its entirety so that you might continue to sell your products that you sunk a lot of time and money into) customers will stop buying your products.

This is also legal under the OGC (most companies make far more of their material open than they have to and try not to cripple it). However, some involved in this thread have basically said they would "punish" writers for taking this course by either not buying their products or (in Cergorach's case) *actively* punishing them by stepping up efforts to provide whole products for free within days of release.

One writers conclusion:

Nice little catch 22 you guys have us in. If we ask you to not put 90% of a book out for free you cry that we're not playing fair, but then tell us not to try and protect our work within the rules of the license.

What I think people are missing is, that when most of us use OGC we're not just taking whole chunks of material and offering it under a different name, we're making alot of new rules of our own based on OGC.

In other words, when people say we want the OGC all to ourselves, using material but not wanting our material used in turn, I say hogwash. Blood and Fists contained no reprinted SRD material, even though it was based on the SRD. It instead made new rules (which happen to be OGC).

So I spent a lot of time and research making new rules, and people equate taking those rules and offering them for free as being equivalent to the fact that I based 70 pages of new material on the rules of the SRD?

Chuck

 

[scottdunphy]

BUT

2. If you cripple your OGC (make it harder to use in its entirety so that you might continue to sell your products that you sunk a lot of time and money into) customers will stop buying your products.

This is also legal under the OGC (most companies make far more of their material open than they have to and try not to cripple it). However, some involved in this thread have basically said they would "punish" writers for taking this course by either not buying their products or (in Cergorach's case) *actively* punishing them by stepping up efforts to provide whole products for free within days of release.

I don't think retribution is the point, but what parts of a product are OGC and how easy it is to use that OGC in a project are considerations that inform a buyers decision. I think Cergorach praised "The Book of the Righteous" for its OGC. Most of the book is not OGC, but the parts that are OGC are easy to use because they declared whole sections OGC. In their case, I think the electronic publishing of their OGC either by Green Ronin or by Cergorach can only help sell more copies, because the meat is in the background for their pantheon.

I have converted to 3.5 but I recently bought "The Book of the Righteous" for a project my group is working on. Right now we don't have plans to publish, but we want to make sure that if we decide to publish we build our world using materials we can reprint with the appropriate attribution. The way "The Book of the Righteous" handled OGC is one of the reasons we decided to buy it (3 copies for now) and use the OGC material in our world (the other reason is that it is a terrific book - far superior to any other pantheon out there).

So I hope publishers out there take a look at "The Book of the Righteous" and see how they did it.

 

[pennywiz]

If I can summarize some of the basic themes of this thread as I have seen them, this is what I am hearing:

1. If you release a book 100% OGC you "deserve" to have that content offered freely since you "made your bed and should lie in it".

"deserve"?

"made your bed and should lie in it"?

Who are you quoting? I don't think anyone said "deserve" in the way you are saying it, and it was Ranger REG who put forth the "bed" thing, which Cergorach reluctantly agreed applied to everyone, not just one side or another who might wish to portray themselves as martyrs in a struggle that has more than simple legal implications (if a line is truly being drawn). The OGL has provisions for releasing additional OGC, or retaining material as your own, and has additional provisions for how to deal with material that is based on previous OGC. It's not unclear.

Your spinning leaves a lot to be desired. You might be trying to convince yourself that there is an ethical right or wrong in this, but you won't sway anyone else with smoke and mirrors. Plenty enough people are quite happy to use the license(s) as written, without your biased ethical restrictions. You can quit trying to attach some sort of ethical stigma to it now.

If someone creates totally new material (that is in no way derived from other OGC) then there are mechanisms within the licensing to retain that material for their own private use AND they can take the material they retain for their own private use and license it out to only those they wish to allow accesss to it if that is their intention (as some seem to believe, as far as some sort of other-publishers-only type of deal).

Someone wants to release totally new material? Good for them. It's their call. Once it is released they have no ability to restrict it's proper legal use under the terms of the license. In fact, even suggesting that there is some ethical violation of contributed OGC, by the actual contributor, might be considered a violation of the license (OGL section 2 "No other terms or conditions may be applied to any Open Game Content distributed using this License.") How's that for a literal reading of the contract?

Plenty of other companies understand the license(s) and how to restrict material not required to be OGC, such as Green Ronin with the M&M link material. It's very clear how the licensing that governs OGC and the d20 trademark work, and if someone doesn't understand them then they should retain an attorney to assist them in those matters. Someone attempting to create a general feeling of sympathy within the community to shore up their lack of understanding of how to properly use the license(s) as they exist isn't going to work.

 

[Vigilance]

I don't think retribution is the point

You really need to read some of Cergorach's posts again, retribution was sure his point, when asked how he would feel if offering OGC for free would lead to publishers crippling that OGC he said "that would just make me go to the trouble to uncripple it and offer it for free within days of release".

My point is, publishers offer so much of their products for free as a courtesy. If that courtesy is abused by people claiming "we're not breaking the rules" by offering 90% of a book for free publishers will need to do something to protect their work.

Again we're not talking about people (by and large) who are regurgitating the work of others but people doing a lot of research and rules-smithing to create NEW crunch.

And when we take steps to protect our work, we can also say "we're not breaking the rules".

Again using one of my own books as an example instead of speaking for others, Blood and Guts involved about 200+ hours of research for its crunch.

If someone wants to base new rules off that work, THAT is the point of the license and I heartily commend them. If they just want to take my work and regurgitate it, what am I supposed to do?

Chuck

 

[Alan Shutko]

Nice little catch 22 you guys have us in. If we ask you to not put 90% of a book out for free you cry that we're not playing fair, but then tell us not to try and protect our work within the rules of the license.

You can ask all you want, but people don't have to agree with you.

Why are you using the OGL? You don't have to. There are still lots of RPG supplements not released under the SRD. The industry somehow managed to survive for years without it.

So why are you using it? It can only be that either you're an incompetant businessperson, or you're getting something from it. Maybe it's the ability to reference the SRD. Maybe it's some feeling of good will from the community. Whatever it is, there's no such thing as a free lunch. And the price for whatever you get is that any OGC you publish can be used by others, however they want, in compliance with the OGL. If you don't like the price, you can publish under other terms. That's your business decision.

The point of the OGL, and of the free software licenses on which it is based, is that while it may be nice to listen to the wishes of the author, it is better overall if people are not required to obey those wishes.

 

[Vigilance]

Your spinning leaves a lot to be desired. You might be trying to convince yourself that there is an ethical right or wrong in this, but you won't sway anyone else with smoke and mirrors. Plenty enough people are quite happy to use the license(s) as written, without your biased ethical restrictions. You can quit trying to attach some sort of ethical stigma to it now.

Im not the one attaching stigma.

What I am saying is, publishers offer a lot more than they have to as a courtesy. Abuse us and we will take the steps IN THE LICENSE AS WRITTEN to protect ourselves.

Chuck

 

[barsoomcore]

Everything gets very difficult when concepts like "deserve" get introduced. Like Clint Eastwood says, "Deserve ain't got nothin' to do with it."

People who work hard and create value "deserve" to get rewarded for their efforts. And if they choose a viable business model, they will. But you can work your heart out in some model that doesn't fly, and you just won't make any money.

Did you "deserve" to make it? Well, I guess that depends on how you define "deserve".

Some might say if you work hard you deserve to get rewarded. Some might say if you work hard but don't take precautions you deserve whatever you get. Neither statement is true or false -- they're matters of faith, not fact.

It's not that I'm unsympathetic. I just don't see a solution -- ergo, I don't see how the model is a healthy one.

That isn't likely to stop me from publishing a PDF or two -- but I'm not in it for the money, so I'll take piracy as flattery.

And I want to reiterate -- it seems certain to me that piracy is a MUCH bigger problem than OGC reproduction.