[OGL Questions] Is Dungeons and Dragons a game?

[Chaos Disciple]

From the United States Copyright Office website: http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html

"The idea for a game is not protected by copyright. The same is true of the name or title given to the game and of the method or methods for playing it.
Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author’s expression in literary, artistic, or musical form. Copyright protection does not extend to any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in the development, merchandising, or playing of a game. Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles."



If Dungeons and Dragons is a game and has no copyright protection then what is the purpose of an Open Gaming License?

Does the OGL promote or prevent the production and distrabution of similar game material by others?

Also, I have designed a game system that uses most of the rules found in D&D but does not use any legally copyrighted material and if "nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles." is it safe to believe there will be no legal action aginst me for publishing a game like this with out mentioning the OGL?


Any input from people involved in the RPG industry and who have experiance with the OGL is encouraged

 

[Fifth Element]

If Dungeons and Dragons is a game and has no copyright protection then what is the purpose of an Open Gaming License?

Does the OGL promote or prevent the production and distrabution of similar game material by others?

Also, I have designed a game system that uses most of the rules found in D&D but does not use any legally copyrighted material and as stated in the qoute above "nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles." is it safe to believe there will be no legal action aginst me for publishing a game like this with out mentioning the OGL?

First off, I am not a lawyer, and if you want real legal opinions on these questions you need to talk to a lawyer. You cannot rely on things people tell you on message boards.

I will respond to your question about the purpose of the OGL. The quote you provided gives the answer. The OGL allows you to use things that would otherwise be subject to copyright, such as the exact text of spell or skill descriptions. Arguably things such as which specific class abilities each class gets at each level, and the damage dealt by each weapon could be subject to copyright. With the OGL, no worries.

I would say, given the number of OGL/d20 products released in the last 7 years, the OGL definitely encourages the publication of similar material.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

From http://www.rpglibrary.org/articles/faqs/copyright.php

FAQ: Can I copyright my game? Are game rules protected by copyright?
Brandon Blackmoor
According to the U.S. Copyright Office, "the text matter describing the rules of the game" (from http://www.loc.gov/copyright/fls/fl108.pdf) may be protected by copyright, depending on the literary content and other factors. For example, a passage describing character creation for the Clans of the Sun and Moon, explaining their society and why they tend to have the skills they do, would probably be protected by copyright. A section merely describing the steps involved in rolling a number of dice or expending a number of points on X attributes would probably not be.

The Intellectual Property Section of the Virginia State Bar puts it this way: "To be copyrightable, the material must be original and possess a minimum level of creativity."

As general legal advice, this is solid, but if you want an opinion on a specific work that will hold up in court, you will need to pay an intellectual property lawyer for it. If you have money on the line, do not accept the word of anyone but a lawyer who specializes in intellectual property law.

 

[Chaos Disciple]

First off, I am not a lawyer, and if you want real legal opinions on these questions you need to talk to a lawyer. You cannot rely on things people tell you on message boards.

I will respond to your question about the purpose of the OGL. The quote you provided gives the answer. The OGL allows you to use things that would otherwise be subject to copyright, such as the exact text of spell or skill descriptions. Arguably things such as which specific class abilities each class gets at each level, and the damage dealt by each weapon could be subject to copyright. With the OGL, no worries.

I would say, given the number of OGL/d20 products released in the last 7 years, the OGL definitely encourages the publication of similar material.

I agree about speaking to lawyers, though I think the need to do so could be seen as the OGL preventing others from publishing compatible game material


Also I dont qoute any text in my game designs and what I use could be considered the systems and methods from D&D.

 

[Kaladhan]

It doesn't matter if you can win the court battle. The real question is if your bank account can endure the long battle to win.

 

[Chaos Disciple]

It doesn't matter if you can win the court battle. The real question is if your bank account can endure the long battle to win.

I might release the game Ive designed in a free pdf. with no author listed just to get it out to the community while avoiding legal trouble. Especially considering the fact I can not copyright the game Ive created. Also the incredible Copy/Distribution capability of a computer with pdf's its easier than paper publishing and unfortunatly its almost completly free anyway. So I know there is not alot of money to be made.

 

[Contrarian]

If Dungeons and Dragons is a game and has no copyright protection then what is the purpose of an Open Gaming License?

Does the OGL promote or prevent the production and distrabution of similar game material by others?

Also, I have designed a game system that uses most of the rules found in D&D but does not use any legally copyrighted material and if "nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles." is it safe to believe there will be no legal action aginst me for publishing a game like this with out mentioning the OGL?

There's a lot of fuzziness in the government's current position on copyright, especially the part about copyrighting "expression" -- it's really hard to create a game with same mechanics as D&D without using the same words. No matter how hard you try, there's a good chance you'll accidentally plagiarize something.

The OGL encourages compatible games by providing very clear definitions of what's safe to reproduce and what's not. (That seems to be something a lot of publishers were looking for.) It helps consumers, too, because it gives us a reference for what "OGL" and "d20 System" mean.

I don't know how old you are, Chaos Disciple, but those of us who remember the Good Old Days know that there were a lot of game products that were meant to be D&D-compatible, and showed varying degrees of nerve in saying so. (TSR showed varying degrees of effort to stop them.) It was confusing for everybody. Sometimes items that were blatantly D&D knockoffs didn't say so. Sometimes things that said they were D&D-compatible were barely usable with D&D. (TSR, oddly enough, was more likely to sue the latter, because trademarks battles are easier to fight than copyright battles.)

Take some time to read the FAQs at www.wizards.com/d20 -- they discuss the utility of a license with very clear definitions.

 

[Chaos Disciple]

There's a lot of fuzziness in the government's current position on copyright, especially the part about copyrighting "expression" -- it's really hard to create a game with same mechanics as D&D without using the same words. No matter how hard you try, there's a good chance you'll accidentally plagiarize something.

The OGL encourages compatible games by providing very clear definitions of what's safe to reproduce and what's not. (That seems to be something a lot of publishers were looking for.) It helps consumers, too, because it gives us a reference for what "OGL" and "d20 System" mean.

I don't know how old you are, Chaos Disciple, but those of us who remember the Good Old Days know that there were a lot of game products that were meant to be D&D-compatible, and showed varying degrees of nerve in saying so. (TSR showed varying degrees of effort to stop them.) It was confusing for everybody. Sometimes items that were blatantly D&D knockoffs didn't say so. Sometimes things that said they were D&D-compatible were barely usable with D&D. (TSR, oddly enough, was more likely to sue the latter, because trademarks battles are easier to fight than copyright battles.)

Take some time to read the FAQs at www.wizards.com/d20 -- they discuss the utility of a license with very clear definitions.

The OGL contains very little copyrigthed material. Most of it is explinations on how to play which are usable by others anyway.

Im also confident there is no plagiarized material or use of owned trademarks in my game.

 

[RyanD]

If Dungeons and Dragons is a game and has no copyright protection then what is the purpose of an Open Gaming License?

On first reading, the copyright office's opinion on how copyright law would be applied to a game appears to be quite definitive. The issue is much less clear cut than it first appears.

When the copyright office uses the term "game", they do so in an undefined manner. I suspect that this comment was written in response to people asking if copyright protected various board & card games. There is extensive litigation regarding Monopoly, for example, and Hasbro's attempts to keep competitive versions of that game out of the market.

Roleplaying games in particular represent a much more complex problem than just about any other material covered by the copyright laws. They blend mathematical formulae, tables of both algorythmically generated data, and human-generated data, fictional descriptions of people, places & things, and extensive written material describing all aspects of the game system and the game world. Furthermore, an RPG may incorporate licensed elements of some 3rd party's IP; either in the systems of the game, or in the people, places & things it depicts.

This creates a messy stew of rights, some of which are ironclad, some of which are debatable, and some of which are not defensible. So the question becomes "How will a court parse these rights".

You might think that a court would drill down into a given work and identify the bits and pieces which are protected by copyright and compare those bits to those in some other work which is claimed to be infringing. In the absolute strictest sense, that is possible.

However, in 'real life', this doesn't happen. Instead, what happens is that the court tends to examine a work AS A WHOLE to determine if it is copyright or not, and if a given 3rd party work infringes on it as an unauthorized derivative.

The courts have been steadily expanding the umbrella of rights under the copyright laws for the past three decades. Copyright holders today enjoy much greater protection than they did in the past. Specifically, the issue of computer software has expanded the ability of a copyright holder to assert copyright protection over materials that would previously have been considered unprotectable.

If a case involving a modern, fully developed RPG system were to be tried today, I believe that the courts would find that the work had many features in common with a software program, that the stew of rights within the work was essentially unparseable, and that the result was a fully copyrighted work which could be protected to the fullest extent of the law, regardless of the fact that it was marketed as "a game".

The question you (and your lawyer) have to determine is pretty simple: Would a court find your work to be an unauthorized derivative of D&D, or any other publisher's game? The more similar your game is to D&D (or some 3rd party's work), the more likely it would be found to be infringing. The key analysis is the selection, arrangement, and presentation of your materials. When you make choices (like which races to include, or which ability scores to model, or how many hit points a character gets at 5th level), the more like a pre-existing work your game is, the more likely it is to be considered infringing.

Clearly, there is a baseline below which the law cannot protect a work; otherwise Wizards of the Coast would act to stop the publication of all non-D&D games, or games not licensed by it. The trouble is, nobody can tell you where that line exactly is. In the opinion of some copyright holders, that line is "not even remotely like my game". In the opinion of some others, it may be "just don't copy my game verbatim". No matter what you think, and no matter what your lawyer thinks, in the end, the only way to resolve that issue for certain is to litigate and let a court settle the matter.

The OGL is a way out of this mess. The OGL gets rid of all the gray area, and replaces it with a set of affirmative rights. If you follow the OGL, and use it as designed, you will be operating with clarity rather than murk. Some material (Open Game Content) will be yours to use as you wish. Other content (everything else) will not. The OGL's effect in clarifying the rights of everyone involved lead directly to a significant amount of new material being created and used by publishers who may not otherwise have made the attempt for fear of being sued over copyright infringement.

Ryan

 

[TerraDave]

The OGL contains very little copyrigthed material. Most of it is explinations on how to play which are usable by others anyway.

Im also confident there is no plagiarized material or use of owned trademarks in my game.

You can use the concepts. You can use things that can't really be copyrighted (like elves, or spells) or on which copyright protection has expired (Chuthulu). You can even use more specific things that are now a sort of common property, like abilities called strength or wisdom, or hit points.

And many, many games have done exactly that. This includes not just RPGs but (especially) a vast number of computer and online games. To make a game like D&D is not a very original thing to do.

But, you cannot quote text verbatim. And you cannot use trademarks. The gray area is something like Yuan-Ti, Mordekainen, and so on. Actually, its probably not a gray area, they would probably sue over their references (if whatever you did got on their radar).

The genius of the OGL is that it does allow you to cut and paste text and avoids superficial differences put in just to get around copyright. The theory is that these differences actually raise the learning curve for playing, reduce compatability, and balkanize the market. On the other hand, producing products with the OGL actually gets 3rd party producers to effectively support D&D. Though they don't seem to be supporting it like they used to.