Nerun Posted July 14, 2023 Share Posted July 14, 2023 (edited) I was reading the official OpenQuest SRD page and it's moved out of the OGL and is now Creative Commons CC-BY. I'm not surprised because of crisis Wizards vs. OGL naturally. As a lawyer with interest in PI and copyright i have some doubts. I just want you to confirm what I think I know. As I understand ideas, systems, rules, methods, procedures are not protected by copyright: United States Code, Title 17, Chapter 1, §102. Subject matter of copyright: in general. Flyer n. 108, April, 2016. Games. U.S. Copyright Office. Circular n. 33, March, 2021. Works not protected by copyright. U.S. Copyright Office. "Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author’s expression in literary, artistic, or musical form. " (FLYER 108). So I imagine that D101 Games changed all the descriptive literary text that were a direct copy of other SRDs, in order to get rid of them. Notably Modern SRD, SRD 3.5 and Legend SRD (OpenQuest SRD v1.01). Swords & Wizardry did something similar. Since they have used just SRD 3.5 was easy to move to SRD 5.1 released under CC-BY 4.0. Essentially a "rebase". OpenQuest did something like a rebase when moved out of Mongoose's RuneQuest SRD 2006, since it's become illegal when they lost the right to use "RuneQuest" TM, then adopted Mongoose's Legend SRD. From Chaosium FAQ: Q: Can I rely on the Mongoose RQ SRD to publish material? A: No. Mongoose’s license for RuneQuest was terminated in April 2011. At that point, Mongoose lost all rights to continue using the RuneQuest trademark, or to create and publish material derivative from the previous copywritten material, or to issue any sublicenses based on that agreement. Since Mongoose no longer had any rights to RuneQuest, it has no ability to issue a third-party license to that material (which is all an OGL is). So this is my question. Is this what happened? Is my analysis right? Edited July 14, 2023 by Nerun url Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Newt Posted July 14, 2023 Share Posted July 14, 2023 Yes, with the added bonus that OQ never had any 3.5 or Modern SRD in it (those being D20 systems). 1 Quote Head Honcho of D101 GamesPublisher of Crypts and Things/Monkey/OpenQuest/River of HeavenThe Sorcerer Under the Mountain Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nerun Posted July 14, 2023 Author Share Posted July 14, 2023 Thank you very much! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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