Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pbrink" data-source="post: 4340827" data-attributes="member: 16457">WotC do have quite a few registered trademarks (in the US) but none of those has anything to do with the terms used in the game D&D. Which is no surprise, since the terms of a game cannot really be protected as trademarks. They are bound to be either generic or descriptive. What surprises me is that quite a lot of people seem to think that, even outside the scope of OGL/GSL,   they aren't able to use terms such as "Armour Class" or "Hit Dice" or other terms related to the rules of D&D (or other RPG:s) in their own publications. This is a highly exaggerated claim IMHO. The concept of "spider-goddess-worshiping elves who live underground with a matriarchal society" lacks copyright protection. The expression of that concept, as published by WotC, is copyright protected, but anyone can write their own version. Whether literary characters are protected, as such, is not settled yet.  In Germany, for example, such claims have been rejected. I must say that a lot of the discussions on this particular board (OGF/4eGSL-L) strikes me as rather odd at times. All IPR are first and foremost designed to maximize the interest of society as a whole. We offer copyrights and trademark rights because we want authors to create and be able to live of their creations and we want consumers to be able to accurately identify the source of goods and services. We don't need companies that tries to build fences around ideas, concepts, terms and methods, nor do we have any reason to accept that companies try to monopolize markets, claiming "ownership" over "their" consumers and tries to stop other companies from doing fair and free business. The RPG market is quite interesting in this perspective. It's an example of a market where consumers can effectively "compete" with the producers. I've seen fan-publications available for free on the net that outshines commercial products by miles. It's also a market where, I'm sad to say, companies makes wildly unfounded claims about their own rights and gets into conflicts with their own consumers over IPR:s. The producers of Palladium is a good example .From a consumer perspective I would think that it would be much more constructive to discuss what we can do with the contents of RPG:s and how to find arguments that knocks down useless (from the POW of the rest of society) assertions of IPR:s.</blockquote>

Verification