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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="jmucchiello" data-source="post: 2415300" data-attributes="member: 813">Please leave the OGL out of this. Statements made about it above are generally wrong (or refer to the d20 license). It is an entirely different ball of wax.As for the character's owner, I'd say no one owns it. Because, an idea cannot be copyrighted (yet). Only works in a fixed medium can be copyrighted. If I tell you an idea, I don't own it. No one owns it. If I explain an idea in a book, I own that expression of the idea as written in that book. You can explain it yourself, in your own words, and then put it into a book with its own copyright. Now you have a copyrighted expression of my idea and unless I can prove that you derived your explanation from mine in a courtroom, I have no legal rights to your book.Now, your character sheet can be copyrighted (and in fact is as soon as you create it). But the character you create isn't. All that is copyright is the number and words that express that character. You might include a few personality traits or back history on your character sheet. But some one can create a similar character without deriving it from your work. Likewise, the "GM's world" is similarly unowned. His notes may constitute a "work". But the ideas, places and concepts of the world are generally unowned unless fixed in a medium.If you filmed your gaming session, the video of the performance would be copyrighted and owned by the "producer" of the film, not by the performers (unless they are also the producers). Still the character itself does not have an owner outside the film or character sheet. If you don't film the session, it is not copyrighted because it does not exist in a fixed medium. And thus the events of that session are not owned either.A storyhour is a fixed medium. The author of the storyhour (the person stringing the words together) owns the copyright to that work. Just because he/she writes it based on the uncopyrighted performance of the players and GM doesn't mean the work is derived from a copyrighted event. (Oh, and if you record the session for use to create the storyhour, you are the producer of the recording and thus still the only copyright holder.)That is the basic legal view. (Though of course IANAL.)As a social being, the GM should obey the golden rule and ask players for permission to mess with their ideas in future campaigns.</blockquote>

Verification