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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wicht" data-source="post: 6190785" data-attributes="member: 221">No, that's not completely true. An IP has no value if people are not willing to pay you for it. Public goodwill, name brand recognition, and the like all have value, though they are harder to measure.I also think that you seem to be misunderstanding an important point concerning the OGL and games in general (I know that you are responding to a point about the GSL but your comment about "unlimited" seems to imply a conflation of the two licenses and the OGL is the license most of us would want, not the GSL ): rules are never truly off limits to anyone nor are they able to be trademarked. Rules, as such, have no real legal protection (which is part of the reason there are so many Monopoly clones), though the copyrighted presentation of them might. What the OGL does, and does well, is make rules and the application of those rules, open and available in a way that allows other companies to expand upon them freely, without having to worry about the finer points of treading the line of violating copyright. Companies can actually publish compatible game material without it, but its simply, imo, going to be a little more of a headache (Judges Guild used to do it for AD&D for instance without a license). The OGL does not make company Trademarks available and publishers are free (indeed obligated under section 8 of the OGL) to delineate which parts of a book are Closed and which are Open. If publishers want to utilize Trademark, section 7 of the OGL demands a separate license to do so.</blockquote>

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