apotheon’s last blog post..RPGs and Intellectual Protectionism

I do think that WotC missed the boat when they failed to include clauses for websites and other digital product in their GSL (or another license altogether). I think it was specifically for reasons of being able to selectively choose who to strong arm out of competition. For intance, if I made a free version of their character creator, that provided as much or more than their product, I bet they would attempt to convince me to remove it.

I laughed a bit when I read this, as your response was anything but heated. It is informed and reasoned. My short comment was a passing comment speculating that the most likely reason Ema was targeted was charging money for character creation. I was not saying the GSL applies to anything someone produces for 4e, not at all. The point is that WotC has laid out (poorly, still in need of a lot of work, but lets assume for our purposes here that the GSL as it exists is a reasonable document) the terms under which it finds using its IP for profit to be acceptable, making a statement of where the line is with which the company would feel the need to protect its IP.

“It should be noted that whether or not someone is earning money from an endeavor has absolutely no bearing on whether or not said endeavor is infringement.”

Legally, no. But from the companies standpoint it certainly does. From their viewpoint, when does something go from fan use, which most companies more than realize is great for their product, to something the company sees as a problem that needs action?

Why target Ema otherwise? There are dozens of very popular character sheet and character generators out there for free, WotC did not send out a post bag full of letters to target all the rivals to its Character Builder, they went after one guy who was reproducing their text verbatim and charging for it.

apotheon’s last blog post..Grappling: D&D 4E vs. D&D 3.5 vs. PRPG Beta

Oh and I see an “RSS feed for comments on this.” link in red right below the last comment, but I know how things work differently on different systems… oh, and I have a comment feed subscription for the entire blog at the bottom of the Recent Comments section in the sidebar.

If you are subscribed and it’s not working let me know, as I have tinkered with a lot of stuff behind the scenes (with Google and Feedburner merging) in the last two weeks and I just upgraded to WordPress 2.7.1 today.

But yeah… i think you and I are on athe same page.. people for some dumbarse reason think they NEED to sign the GSL to make 4E products. They do not. Plain and simple. They don’t even need the OGL. In fact, much like Kenzer & Co., you can make a D&D 4E product and even say “this is made for D&D 4E” so long as you indicate you are not WotC and you are careful with using their trademarked terms. This is what Kenzer & Co. did with their 4E version of Kingdoms of Kalimar.

and this is of course what I’m doing with the anthology.

BTW — there’s no way to have the option to subscribe to comments on your blog anymore; i just happened to check back here and noticed more comments were left. Is that by design?

jonathan’s last blog post..New 4E Ritual Feats

Two, the GSL could never have been applied to the website or to a character generator, because in section 5.5 it specifically states that “no Licensed Product will (a) include web sites, interactive products, miniatures, or character creators; (b) describe a process for creating a character or applying the effects of experience to a character.”

So I doubt he was using the GSL. With this fact in mind, I’d like to eliminate further discussion concerning any violations of the GSL, since Ema could have never been bound by it.

As far as fair use is concerned, a subscription service by itself does not infringe on anything by itself. However, Ema was using copyrighted images (which is the extent I can see from Archive.org) in the form of the D&D logo and the graphic design of the sheets themselves, and that is infringement with or without a subscription service.

I apologize if my response is a little heated, but I think there is a pervading sentiment that just because Wizards created the GSL for use with 4e, that it is automatically in effect on anything ever created for use with 4e. A publisher must willingly agree to the license.

I also think there is a myth that many activities are fair use as long as you don’t make any money off of it. It should be noted that whether or not someone is earning money from an endeavor has absolutely no bearing on whether or not said endeavor is infringement.