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Message: <blockquote data-quote="eyebeams" data-source="post: 1868252" data-attributes="member: 9225">Before hijinks ensued, this came up in a certain earlier thread, but I think it's important enough to bring up again.What, exactly is the ethical way for an average gamer (not a paid designer) to go about sharing open content? There's a variety of opinions, from "They shouldn't," to "Any way that's legal."Something in me squirms at the idea of somebody paying for open content that a third party took from somebody else to begin with without the average person being able to disseminate the same content for free. There are plenty of products out right now that compile other people's open content in an attractive package (feat compilations, the SRD, etc). There's nothing wrong with that, but since they didn't create it in the first place what consumers are really paying for is the publisher's organization and layout skills. I don't see anything wrong with legally providing the same service for nothing.But when it comes to original open content, I'm hesitant to encourage anybody to do the same thing. Yet that's what these third party repackagers are doing. What perogative do they have that ordinary folks don't? Following this train of thought, it looks like there's nothing wrong with doing it at all -- but I sense that this isn't right either.(Incidentally, "right" and "legal" are not to be considered synonyms for the purposes of this discussion. Many legal things aren't very nice. The reverse is true to, but not especially germaine to this discussion.As I alluded to in another thread, I think the solution here is to look at a product as a complete entity. This means its not just about the open content, but how it hangs together. So doing an OGL version of exactly the same open content as in a given book is probably stepping on the publisher's toes, but using that content with a distinct form of organization is not.So all the OGL content of Book X as its own entity is in rather poor taste. But all of the feats in book X along with feats from book Y and Z? Not so bad.I think another rule to follow might be a rule of vital incompleteness:Don't include all of the open content from one commercial release necessary to make use of that book as a distinct entity.The SRD is basically emblematic of this because it doesn't include chargen and level advancement. Similarly, it might be OK to distribute a chunk of a book that can be used for ideas, but not enough so that it is functionally the same as the book as a whole.This kind of hearkens back to the days when artisans put subtle flaws in their work to track copycats. I'm not 100% sure about these criteria. What to do?</blockquote>

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