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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5495374" data-attributes="member: 42582">As I said upthread, I teach law - including private law - but am not an IP expert.I think that the boundary between permissibly restating rules, which cannot themselves be the subject of copyright and impermissibly producing a work which is derivative of some rules text published by WotC, is not a bright line.To give one example: the publishers of OSRIC are on record as saying that they believe their product to be legal. Clark Peterson, on the other hand - an experienced commercial lawyer who also runs Necromancer Games - is on record as saying that he believes OSRIC to be infringing and unethical. (I also understand that Kenzer has expressed similar views, although I haven't read them myself.)I'm not qualified to have a view either way on this particular question. But to step back into a little bit of asbstraction, part of what I think gives rise to the difficulty is that, if a clone is going to be a good enough clone to be fully recognisable for what it is (so it not only has the same rules, but has similar headings, a similar internal layout and logic, etc) then the claim that it is a different text that overlaps only in respect of the rules it expresses becomes less plausible, and the claim that it is in fact a copying or derivative text becomes more plausible. And I think that this plausibility will only be increased if - as is likely - the clone in question contains not only rules statments, but elements of fiction as well, such as what sorts of characters paladins or wizards are, or what sorts of personalities gnomes and halflings have.Matt James colleague Rob Bodine (who posts as Frylock) has expressed the view <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/5488458-post110.html" target="_blank">here</a> that a 3rd party could publish a non-infringing character builder. As Frylock is an American IP lawyer and I'm not even an Australian IP lawyer, I'm not going to question his professional opinion. But I do feel that it might be tricky to present this hypothetical character builder in a way that made it marketable to the customers (who would want it to plug easily into their existing knowledge of 4e and of 4e PC building) while being careful not to use any WotC copyrighted text, or misuse any WotC trademarks.It's actually an element both of contract and copyright, I think. As I indicated in my first post on this thread, part of the consideration given by a licensee under the GSL is a promise to forebear from doing certain stuff, including replication of text from 4e rulebooks. So there is a contractual obligation not to do that. But some of that text is also protected by copyright, so some of the obligation not to reproduce it also arises from copyright law rather than the contract. (In practical terms, the relevance of this in Australian law would pertain to the remedies available to WotC in the event of a breach. Because American contract law is, as I understand it, more willing to award wrongfully-made profits as part of the measure of contractual damages, the relevance in American law may well be less.)On the thread I linked to in my earlier post, this is being discussed in some detail. In general, the advice you give here is relevant only for those who want to market their works using WotC's trademarks - such as the 4e D&D logo. For those who want to publish adventures with 4e stats, but don't want to republish any of WotC's text (other perhaps than very prosaic rules text which contains no fiction and is therefore not going to attract copyright protection), then the GSL doesn't really add anything. For those who want to publish a clone, then the GSL is of course right out, and all the issues I referred to above come into play.</blockquote>

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