LEGEND

[Guest Vile Traveller]

This would be no different than the 'Luxury MRQ1 SRD' which is one of the most popular files in the downloads section, except that the Legend text would be an easier read. However, I'm not sure who, other than an enthusiast, would want to do it. At $1 a pop for the original, not a lot of people are going to be waiting for a free no-art version. An editable document version might be handy, but who would pay for that? If you're going to write Legend Licence products, it's just as easy to extract the text yourself.

This is not something anyone needs to lose sleep over. Go forth and 3rd-party-publish instead.

[d10tavern]

If I do turn this into a text-only epub, I'd be happy to share.

[soltakss]

I bought the Arms of Legend for $11 through Drive Thru RPG. That's different to $1 or a free download. The original MRQ SRDs were available free of charge, so extracting the text and reformatting it is fine. However, doing the same for a paid-for product doesn't seem right to me.

I know that the OGL specifically permits it, but for me it contravenes the spirit of the OGL, if not the actual wording.

For me, the whole idea of the OGL is to allow publishers to produce material that can be used in other publications. So, if I wrote up a spell, magic item or race and included it as OGC then other publishers could that spell, magic item or race in their OGL products simply by including the Copyright notice and copying and pasting the description.

It isn't to allow someone to copy all the text and make it freely available, although that is a risk that publishers have to take.

I would be annoyed if, for example, someone republished Merrie England: Age of Eleanor as a Legend OGL document. I couldn't stop them from doing it, as long as they included the right statements, but I wouldn't be very happy about it at all.

[RosenMcStern]

For me, the whole idea of the OGL is to allow publishers to produce material that can be used in other publications. So, if I wrote up a spell, magic item or race and included it as OGC then other publishers could that spell, magic item or race in their OGL products simply by including the Copyright notice and copying and pasting the description.

It isn't to allow someone to copy all the text and make it freely available, although that is a risk that publishers have to take.

Simon, the OGL does not (and cannot, as no court would never endorse such an interpretation) differentiate between a publisher and a fan. Free is free. If it is OGC, anyone complying with the OGL can reproduce and distribute it. Be it Hasbro or Reverend Jones who has a photocopy machine in the church.

I would be annoyed if, for example, someone republished Merrie England: Age of Eleanor as a Legend OGL document. I couldn't stop them from doing it, as long as they included the right statements, but I wouldn't be very happy about it at all.

This was a choice we made in 2009. I did not make Stupor Mundi OGC, but you made Merrie England OGC, together with the chunks that included contributions by Pete Nash and me. Was it a correct decision? Did it really matter? I wish I had a crystal ball to advise me about such choices.

[wbcreighton]

I would be annoyed if, for example, someone republished Merrie England: Age of Eleanor as a Legend OGL document. I couldn't stop them from doing it, as long as they included the right statements, but I wouldn't be very happy about it at all.

I don't own ME:AoE but I bought ME:AoC in print ( I haven't read it yet, but it looks superb). The only way that someone could do what you are saying is if the OGL allowed for it or the owners of the copyright made it OGC. There should be a statement in the book designating what is OGC and what is not OGC.

I think that if Mongoose was worried about it, they would specify which sections of the document were OGC and which were not.

Someone mentioned that it seems ok to reproduce the rules on a web site. I actually don't see the difference between having the rules on a web site or having them in a file on my computer. The difference to me is that I don't make money when I check a rule in a file, whereas the web site owner may be making advertising money if I visit their site.

Having said that, I understand why you would feel the way you do.

According to Ryan Dancey one of the main ideas behind the OGL was to prevent the rules for DnD ever going into limbo because the owning company went bankrupt. Which is what almost happened before TSR was saved by Wizards of the Coast.

[RosenMcStern]

Even if a company goes bankrupt, someone can still buy the rights from the court - at least here in Italy. In fact, the rights for ALL the Italian BRP and Cthulhu books have been purchased by another company after the original Stratelibri went bankrupt. But the idea behing making it OGL "so that it does not die" is not stupid, not at all.

Good (no, SUPERB) forgie games like The Mountain Witch or The Riddle of Steel are now available only on ebay because of the stupid anti-publisher forgie prejudice. The author went the self-publishing way, then fell ill or something, and the book rights went to limbo. And this is something that can happen only if a person (not a company) holds the rights. TRoS is the only game that can actually match RQII in depth and realism, and - poof - RQII is now top seller, while you cannot get a legit copy of TRoS outside the black market.

[rust]

There are also a couple of excellent games which disappeared because a

publisher bought them with the intention to remove a competing product

from the market. A few of those games have been kept alive (well, more

like undead ...) by their original authors and fans, but without something

like the OGL/OGC this is often a borderline illegal thing.

[RosenMcStern]

Then let us have ALL games owned by a publisher and published as OGC.

[NickMiddleton]

...For me, the whole idea of the OGL is to allow publishers to produce material that can be used in other publications. So, if I wrote up a spell, magic item or race and included it as OGC then other publishers could that spell, magic item or race in their OGL products simply by including the Copyright notice and copying and pasting the description.

It isn't to allow someone to copy all the text and make it freely available, although that is a risk that publishers have to take.

Errr, that is exactly the intent and legal principle of the OGL: to define text that can be used verbatim under the terms of the license. One of the reasons being that copyright does NOT protect rules - so anyone can copy ANY rule from ANY RPG publication, provided they do not copy the exact text expressing the rule.

I would be annoyed if, for example, someone republished Merrie England: Age of Eleanor as a Legend OGL document. I couldn't stop them from doing it, as long as they included the right statements, but I wouldn't be very happy about it at all.

Then bluntly, you should have designated the bits you didn't want copying as closed content, or not written the book using the OGL. IF you designated the whole text as OGC then it's OGC and is freely available to anyone to use under the terms of the OGL.

Nick

[Prime Evil]

I've made a own personal copy of the Legend rules so that I can edit them with house rules. However, I am not sharing this online at the present time as I don't want to harm the sales of official Mongoose products by providing a "free" version. I suppose that may change down the track if I make enough changes for it to qualify as a new variant of the game. But it would have to constitute a major revision before this occurs. I'm not interested in providing freeloaders with a way to avoid paying for the official version - especially when the current pricing for the PDF is very reasonable.

Nonetheless, I am a big supporter of the OGL and prefer to buy game products that include some OGC that I can rework to incorporate it into my own personal "Frankenstein" game. As somebody who makes a living off open source software products, I also have a strong ideological bias towards open licensing schemes. The OGL isn't perfect, but it has widespread acceptance within the industry and it is unlikely to be displaced by an alternative license at this point. I probably have a slight preference towards buying OGL products over non-OGL products, but that isn't a hard and fast rule - I own plenty of both.

[begin rant]

I understand that many game companies don't want to open up all of their intellectual property for third-party reuse and that's cool. They are commercial enterprises and have a right to make a profit. But I don't understand the outright hostility that some folks have towards the OGL - even though they don't publish any products under the license themselves. If you don't like the OGL, don't use it - but don't publicly disparage those who choose to do so. As far as I can figure out, these publishers object to the viral nature of the licence, bemoan the fact that games published under the OGL have dominated the industry for the past decade, and feel that the industry is in decline as a direct consequence of the OGL - that argument goes that the existence of an open licensing scheme devalues the amount of work that publishers put into their products and encourages consumers to expect their products to be available for free. Needless to say, I disagree with all of these points. I respect the right of individuals to hold those views, but don't like it when they try to shove them down other people's throats.

And then there is the elitist criticism that products containing OGC must always be inferior to those produced under a closed license. The assumption is that material produced under the OGL is rushed out to make a quick profit while material produced under a closed license is always of always better quality because the people developing it actually care about their work (with the elitist implication that anybody who uses the OGL is a mere hack). I think that this criticism is demonstrably untrue - there are outstanding products that have been produced under the OGL and publishers who have flooded the market with poor-quality crap under a closed licence. I always think it is wise to remember Sturgeon's Law in these cases - basically, 90% of everything released will be crap, with the excellent products making up the remaining 10%.

[/end rant ]

Edited January 26, 2012 by Prime Evil

[rust]

I understand that many game companies don't want to open up all of their intellectual property for third-party reuse and that's cool. They are commercial enterprises and have a right to make a profit. But I don't understand the outright hostility that some folks have towards the OGL - even though they don't publish any products under the license themselves.

My impression is that much of the hostility comes from publishers who

fail to comprehend that (and why and how ...) it is possible to make a

profit with products published under the OGL, the entire concept goes

against their fundamental ideas of doing business (and quite often also

over their heads). Not long ago I had a discussion about the Baen Free

Library with a book publisher who proved absolutely unable to see how

this concept was meant to create a profit, the words "free" and "profit"

just did not go together in his mind.

[d10tavern]

I love the Baen Free Library. It's a good way to discover new authors, and thereby buy some of their other books.

[dmccoy1693]

Even if a company goes bankrupt, someone can still buy the rights from the court - at least here in Italy.

Not in the US. TSR was in debt up to their eyeballs. They leveraged the D&D name against their debts. Had TSR failed it would have been owned by a web of banks and private investors and no one would have been able to figure out who owned how much of the name or the system or the settings or what. It would have been a legal nightmare had the (very possible) worst case scenario happened.

[RosenMcStern]

Not in the US. TSR was in debt up to their eyeballs. They leveraged the D&D name against their debts. Had TSR failed it would have been owned by a web of banks and private investors and no one would have been able to figure out who owned how much of the name or the system or the settings or what. It would have been a legal nightmare had the (very possible) worst case scenario happened.

IANAL (and explicitly IANA(US)L), but I think that this "legal nightmare" would not, in any case, utterly prevent the purchase of the rights. There are only two cases:

a) someone owns the rights, or can represent the ones who own them, and can both sell them and sue anyone using them illegally

it is impossible to identify someone who owns the rights, but this also means that no one can initiate legal actions against third party use of the rights

Whoever can initiate legal action, can also sell the rights if a sufficiently high bid is made. I really cannot figure any situation in which a guy from a legal firm comes and tells us "Okay, you cannot buy the rights, whatever bid you make, but I will spend money to sue you if you try and use the TMed product name without our authorization." Now, that the sum needed to buy the rights from the banks could have amounted to several million dollars, given TSR debt status, is entirely another story. But I hope no one expects that the "D&D" franchise could be acquired at a cheap price.

It is exactly the situation that happened with some computer game franchises like X-Com and Master of Magic after Microprose went bankrupt. Atari is wasting them by keeping them inactive, but no independent game publisher has been able to pay what they asked for the rights (and I know of at lease one indie PC game producer that tried to acquire the "Master of Magic" name).

Note that this did not prevent Altar Games from making a lot of money from X-Com clones that do not bear the name X-Com. So, in the end, even an outcome where the name gets lost in the folds of the legal system is not necessarily a defeat for the players.

As for the OGL license, I could not be more in agreement than I am with what Prime Evil wrote. It was no rant. "Open" content is a strong, viable business model initiated by Linus Torvalds many, many years ago, and the software industry shows - in an irrefutable way - that in the end it will always win over the closed content business model, as long as what you are selling is the intellectual property of a procedure. After 25+ years of GPL, this is no longer a dream, it is a fact for computer industries. Every time, in my decade-long IT career, I did not bet on open source, I lost money.

I fail to see any difference in game systems: they are algorhythms (gaming procedures), so the same considerations that are valid for computer software apply. Open is better, it is a viable, solid business model.

Edited January 27, 2012 by RosenMcStern

[rust]

it is impossible to identify someone who owns the rights, but this also means that no one can initiate legal actions against third party use of the rights

This is a version of the "orphanware problem", intellectual property where it is

impossible to identify or locate the current owner of the rights, but where the-

re is always a risk that he suddenly turns up to claim his rights (and to demand

money). Quite a lot of interesting material is in this kind of "limbo", where only

few people are willing to touch the material because they are afraid of an un-

pleasant and expensive surprise.

There have been attempts to create laws which make such "orphanware" pub-

lic domain after a number of years without any identified owner of the rights,

but unfortunately this has led nowhere.

[RosenMcStern]

This is a version of the "orphanware problem", intellectual property where it is

impossible to identify or locate the current owner of the rights, but where the-

re is always a risk that he suddenly turns up to claim his rights (and to demand

money). Quite a lot of interesting material is in this kind of "limbo", where only

few people are willing to touch the material because they are afraid of an un-

pleasant and expensive surprise.

I have seen this addressed - for old novels - by simply printing "The Publisher was unable to locate any heir to the Author, but hereby states its will to pay the due rights to any rightful claimant if identified" on the book. This should be enough if a heir appears and, in good faith, wants his share of the revenue. It would not save you from the copyright version of "patent trolls" - entities that exist entirely to make unfair claims about patent infringement by companies that are too big to actually notice that a small piece of their products was patented. But I have never heard about "copyright trolls". Has anyone here?

In any case, I think that a simple insurance could solve the problem.

Edited January 27, 2012 by RosenMcStern

[rust]

But I have never heard about "copyright trolls". Has anyone here?

They are common enough to have a Wikipedia article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_troll

I have not yet seen a true copyright troll in the roleplaying games industry,

although there have been a few court cases which came rather close.

[RosenMcStern]

Ah, thank you, Rust. But the wiki article says that the most famous case ended up with the troll losing all the money gained from those who settled, in favour of those who resisted and won.

Frankly speaking, the possibility of _that_ kind of action would not scare me. And, yes, in fact one of my authors actually told me about a gaming company that would litigate even about acronyms, stating they are "product identity". Would not scare me, either.

[dmccoy1693]

In America, its not the ruling that is would prevent me from doing something like that. Its the process to get to the ruling. Say TSR hadn't been bought by wizards and someone else tried to buy it years later. They thought they untangled the web and got all the rights, but they missed someone that owned 1% of something that owned the company that owned the term Armor Class. They sue the company. The company tries to settle but the other party doesn't agree to anything reasonable. They want something crazy like being able to put the official D&D logo on their books without any royalties and no approvals. So you fight it. You end up spending years fighting it in court all the while you can do nothing with D&D that involves the words Armor Class. The company ends broke from paying laywer costs to fight this or it ends up with some crazy publisher putting your logo on stuff that may be no where near your level of quality.

That's not an extreme example either. That happened in Kenzer v. Wizards of the Coast. The only difference was it was the Knights of the Dinner Table comics that Wizards reprinted in the Dragon Compendium CD. The standard TSR license for Dragon material was that TSR owned it. But TSR negotiated a different agreement with Kenzer for Knights comics. That license allowed Kenzer to retain the comic's rights and did not allow TSR (or Wizards) to reprint those comics without a separate license. With all those Dragon and Dungeon licenses to go through, Wizards missed that one. In the end, Wizards was smart enough to realize that Kenzer was owned by a lawyer and could make some serious problems for the company and decided to let Kenzer use the official D&D logo on their books for what turned out to the whole run of D&D 3E and 3.5 on their Kingdoms of Kalamar line as well as let them use the AD&D system for Hackmaster and reprint all the 1E/2E modules for Hackmaster. The only stipulation on it was that Hackmaster had to be "funny."

Edited January 27, 2012 by dmccoy1693

[Mongoose_Matt]

These POD page limits are starting to worry me - the Legend book is 242 pages including covers. I hope I can fit everything I need into the full-on AEON book while keeping it a reasonable cost break-point ...

Don't worry too much about that - the _only_ reason we can do books this size for that price is because the material is already written (mostly) and paid for. New Legend books will be around the 128-140 page mark.

[Mongoose_Matt]

I would be annoyed if, for example, someone republished Merrie England: Age of Eleanor as a Legend OGL document. I couldn't stop them from doing it, as long as they included the right statements, but I wouldn't be very happy about it at all.

It is all Open Content? In that case, if I were you, I would release it for Legend pronto (even if only a PDF), because there is every chance someone else might. I would also point out that Mongoose has, in the past, scooped up vast portions of OGC and re-published them as compilations. Not saying we _would_ for Merrie England (we have absolutely no plans to), but we could, and we have form

[Guest Vile Traveller]

They thought they untangled the web and got all the rights, but they missed someone that owned 1% of something that owned the company that owned the term Armor Class. [...] You end up spending years fighting it in court all the while you can do nothing with D&D that involves the words Armor Class.

Actually, that could have turned out to be the best thing for D&D, ever.

[d10tavern]

Note that this did not prevent Altar Games from making a lot of money from X-Com clones that do not bear the name X-Com.

This is a good point. Even if official D&D had disappeared, someone could have made a D&D clone and everyone would have known that it was basically a D&D clone, and things would have continued from there.

In America, its not the ruling that is would prevent me from doing something like that. Its the process to get to the ruling. Say TSR hadn't been bought by wizards and someone else tried to buy it years later. They thought they untangled the web and got all the rights, but they missed someone that owned 1% of something that owned the company that owned the term Armor Class.

"Armor Class" is actually too short a phrase to copyright. It would have to be trademarked for TSR / Wizards to own the phrase, and I haven't seen any trademarking applied to it. However, your point is still a good one.

[rust]

"Armor Class" is actually too short a phrase to copyright.

True, but over here we had a court case where a publisher accused

another one of intellectual property theft with arguments like his ga-

me also used an Armbrust (= crossbow) as a weapon and also had a

skill named Reiten (= riding). The case was of course dismissed, but

the victim had several thousand Euro of legal costs, which most pro-

bably was the actual intention of the entire case, to spend some mo-

ney from the war chest to make the less wealthy competitor bleed dry.

[d10tavern]

True, but over here we had a court case where a publisher accused

another one of intellectual property theft with arguments like his ga-

me also used an Armbrust (= crossbow) as a weapon and also had a

skill named Reiten (= riding). The case was of course dismissed, but

the victim had several thousand Euro of legal costs, which most pro-

bably was the actual intention of the entire case, to spend some mo-

ney from the war chest to make the less wealthy competitor bleed dry.

Yeah, the games that some businesses play.

The defendant should have at least been reimbursed for costs. I'm guessing things work a little differently over there though.