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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheFindus" data-source="post: 5454972" data-attributes="member: 75791">I had already given up on this thread, and I just wanted to write this note to respond. I find your post to be somewhat dishonest. You are jumping at the sentence “They gave away their IP” and then go on to lecture me on the fact that in most countries, the BCC has been adopted and that game rules are not subject to IP-protection.  Well, the text that describes the rules usually is subject to copyright. And copyright is a form of IP, of protecting the rights you have to that text. And that makes all the difference to the problem here. Now, the laws here in Germany in the Urheberrecht are a little bit different than the laws in the US. And the commentaries I have here are in german. But you might want to check this link here, to find out more about that, the site is in english:<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property</a> The WotC 3rd edition OGL content is vast and, with only small exceptions, provides 3rd party publishers with a lot of (usually) copyrighted (sp?) material they could not normally use, distribute, copy, edit, format, modify, translate, etc without risking litigation.You might want to check this site, to find a very good explanation of what the OGL-liscense contains and what it’s uses are:<a href="http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20/oglfaq/20040123d" target="_blank">http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20/oglfaq/20040123d</a> Now, I did not write: “They gave up their IP” or "They lost the copyright". I wrote “They gave away their IP”. And if you read my posts in this thread, you cannot honestly - in no way - come to the conclusion that with this sentence I am saying anything else but this: that WotC let other companies use a vast amount of (copyrighted) material, the basic stuff that 3rd edition is made out of in fact, without being able to stop them before introducing a new edition. Which is what they did. I was clearly talking about the practical implications of the OGL and what could have legally been done to provide an acceptable alternative back in 1999/2000.So, just in case you missed that point: it does not really matter if WotC has any rights to the text of the rules or the rules themselves, because the OGL lets anybody use that text in the 3rd edition OGL content for their own products. And if that is not “giving away” IP, I do not know what is.  But you either did not read this thread thoroughly enough or you were unable to understand the content of this thread. Or you are trying to pull a rhetorical rabbit out of your hat to prove some point. The point probably being, if I understand the rest of your post correctly, that we would have seen Pathfinder anyways, because Paizo would have gone the OSRIC route. Well, I do not agree with that as I do not think that the system you describe can be called “successful” in the sense it has to be for a company like WotC to operate properly. But I thank you for staying polite. The person who gave you XP for your post would have probably insulted me. I would have really been annoyed by that.</blockquote>

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