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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ry" data-source="post: 3875906" data-attributes="member: 8314">Well, releasing an SRD for your game appears to be sharing OGC.  Using a monster from that SRD is definitely taking advantage of that sharing.Taking someone else's 100% OGC product, putting it in a new wrapper, and re-releasing it so it looks basically the same as the original and selling it for say, half the price of the original is definitely poaching.  Unfortunately, nobody seems to agree where to draw the line between the two.  That makes it hard to use the OGL as a flag to say: "Hey everybody!  Come on in and use this however you like!  We want to see what you come up with!"Since most publishers aren't fond of saying that, and most of the discussion about the OGL is publisher-focused, this situation appears to be perfectly acceptable.  But I think it's bad for anyone who cares about an ecology of ideas, evolutionary design, and gaming as an effort with multiple kinds of participants all finding best practices and cool ways to mix things up.  What we have now with OGC starts to feel like a closed copyright culture again because in addition to the OGLs you have to figure out what a publisher's opinion of the OGL is or risk getting badmouthed in front of a fairly internet-savvy community.  So you're back to contacting each publisher that you use the ideas of, and being wary of using OGC.  In my opinion wariness about copyrights is a bad thing for a community with a lot of very talented nonprofessional writers, artists, and designers.</blockquote>

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