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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4006125" data-attributes="member: 42582">This has come up in a couple of other threads, and my view is the same as it was on them: the only difference I can see is that there will not be an SRD released under the OGL.Thus, with respect to any aspects of WoTC publications which were not in the SRD (and that's most of them) nothing will have changed. In particular, it will continue to be a breach of copyright to reproduce WoTC's published text. (Fair use rules might protect fans building their own PC generators which reproduce text of books they own, but my intuition is that this may not extend to distribution of those books to others who don't own those books, and certainly would not extend to any sort of commercial distribution.)There is one possible exception: the increased use of non-generic names ("Blackwood Dryad" was mentioned in another thread) may increase the scope of trademark protection. But this would not be relevant to any fan site. Whether a commercial publisher could avoid accusations of passing off, if they included a statement acknowledging WoTC's trademarks and making clear that they do not intend, by use of those trademarks, to pass themselves off as WoTC, I will leave for an IP lawyer to judge (I am an academic lawyer, but IP is not my field).As far as previews and web enhancements go, I'm with Cadfan.My own opinion that the existence of the SRD, with an open licence to reproduce its text, was a pretty unusual state of affairs for a commercial publisher. I think with the new OGL, which will point to those sections of the rules and those game elements that can be used, but not licence wholescale reproduction of the rules text, will generate all the network synergies that Ryan Dancey wanted, without allowing people to play the game without buying the rules.</blockquote>

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