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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5487568" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think a hypothetical Moocow's PHB is probably not infringing. But it probably wouldn't sell unless it included text like the introductory text to OSRIC, which points out how the game is intended as a replication of someone else's work. And this is where I get more doubtful. Again, I'm not enough of an IP lawyer to have a strong view, but I don't see the argument as fanciful. (Again - Clark Peterson, who is by all accounts an experienced commercial lawyer, thinks that OSRIC is infringing despite being published under the OGL.)I think it is key to WotC's conception (not necessarily its true, in-its-heart conception, but its legal conception) of its rulebooks that they are not instruction manuals, but more like works of fiction.For the classic instruction manual, the real product is the device, and the manual-writers are a necessary cost to the business in order to make the device saleable to customers.For WotC, there is no business but writing the manuals.I don't think WotC will have adopted the GSL for ideological reasons. I think that they saw the consequences of the OGL+SRD model as a commercial threat.You may be right that IP law will change in the 21st century. I think that the relationship between IP law and what passes now for folk culture is a pretty profound one, and it will be interesting to see how (if at all) that changes. My own view is that it is likely to become more commercial, not less, as time passes.But I don't think this helps WotC. WotC (as a publishing house) makes its money selling instruction manuals that don't need a machine to run them. If it can't protect those works via IP law, it may be that WotC (as a publishing house) is simply not commercially viable.Hence, perhaps, the move towards WotC the seller of rights to access privately-controlled online databases.</blockquote>

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