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Message: <blockquote data-quote="see" data-source="post: 8863320" data-attributes="member: 10531">His basic premise is that game mechanics are not protected by copyright. This is not unreasonable. Game rules are procedures, procedures per se are not subject to copyright, and the simplest way of describing a procedure in English often has no particular creative expressive content beyond the creativity in inventing the procedure and thus cannot be copyrighted.(Do not run out and freely reprint anything you happen to think is a procedure on the basis that I just wrote that. I am not a lawyer, that is not legal advice even in general, and it in particular is not specific legal advice for your specific situation.)But, then, he pushes it to the idea that pretty much all the specific expression of a set of mechanics, and any specific arrangements of those mechanics, can't be copyrighted because they are functional, and, well, no. I'm pretty sure he's jumped off a cliff with that one. (Either that, or he didn't quite understand that you can, in fact, use Open Game Content verbatim under the Open Game License. Based on my reading of him, I can't really tell.)Now, it's perfectly understandable how he jumped off that cliff; there is no easy bright line anywhere in the law that tells you when the combination of uncopyrightable elements crosses the line into creative expression. Start with the entirely true proposition that individual words can't be copyrighted, and add the the entirely true proposition that ideas can't be copyrighted, and it can seem like an obvious conclusion that it's legal to freely reprint and distribute the latest NYT bestseller because it's all uncopyrightable ideas expressed with uncopyrightable words.(For those who might be confused, no, it is not legal to do so. That's the fundamental activity that copyright law most strenuously prohibits.)If the situation is even slightly more ambiguous than that, it's obviously easier to convince oneself that what one wants to do is allowed by copyright law. And thus his assertion that the OGL gives no one any rights whatsoever to do anything they couldn't legally do anyway.Well. Like I mentioned, I'm not a lawyer. But I do have some not-actually-legal-just-common-sense advice for you; if you're going reprint, or sail close to reprinting, D&D text without adhering to the terms of the Open Game License, get the advice of a good copyright lawyer first, rather than trusting that guy's analysis.</blockquote>

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