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Legal Eagle has entered the chat, about OGL 1.1

overgeeked

B/X Known World
Well he doesn't talk about the main thing that concerns us - purported revocation of OGL 1.0. He does give a reasonable presentation on the limits of copyright, making pretty clear that while you can potentially publish D&D adventures without a licence, you can't do something like Pathfinder 1e without a licence.
Words with Friends exists because you cannot copyright the rules to Scrabble. PlayDiplomacyOnline and Backstabbr are VTTs for Diplomacy, a Hasbro board game. They can exist because you cannot copyright the rules to Diplomacy.
 

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Steel_Wind

Legend
If you are looking for greater insight from such pieces than has been available on ENWorld for the past week, the expectations that will be met are low.

For one, this stuff is complicated, even for lawyers. It takes time and a fair bit of detail and effort to wade through it all.

For another, one of these threads has had ... 6... (7?) lawyers participate in the minutiae, ultimately rejecting the initial premise -- hailing from various common law jurisdictions: the UK, USA, Canada and Australia, coming from academia as well as practitioners over the past week. You won't find a more in-depth or complete discussion on this topic anywhere else on the internet than right here on ENworld. It took that group of lawyers probably 4 or 5 days before we seem to have arrived at a guarded consensus on the topic.

I know an 86 page thread is not easily digestible; still, the point to take away is that this stuff is complicated even for lawyers and that if you are looking for certainty and clarity, you are not likely to find it anywhere. We can speak only in terms of probabilities, not certainties. This sort of answer can be disappointing to some, but it's where we are, just the same.
 

mhd

Adventurer
Words with Friends exists because you cannot copyright the rules to Scrabble. PlayDiplomacyOnline and Backstabbr are VTTs for Diplomacy, a Hasbro board game. They can exist because you cannot copyright the rules to Diplomacy.
What I'm wondering is where things like stat blocks are in this spectrum. They collect rules terms, but in a rather specific manner. And being able to print NPC and monster stats exactly like people expect them is a huge benefit.
 


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