Greg Stolze's Refreshing '06 Hubris

[GregStolze]

If you swing on over to http://www.gregstolze.com you can see my latest ransom project on the front page.  It's atypical: It's a pair of articles that would, in a typical game release, be considered "boilerplate".  One is pretty much everything I know about being a gamer and why you'd want to be, boiled down for absolute beginners.  The other is the same approach, only for basic Game Mastering.

I'm selling these articles to get seed money to publish REIGN, the next iteration of the mechanics from GODLIKE.

Questions?  Comments?  Insults?  Suggestions?  Prophecies of doom?

-G.

[Veritas Games]

I think you'll get more contributions if you promise to release both of these as 100% OGC under the OGL at the end of the Ransom period so that people can include them in their own products easily.  That'd be lots more useful than just to have the articles online.

[GregStolze]

Your suggestion has been noted and, as you can see in the gregstolze.com forum, is being debated.  Though it seems that I could EITHER make it OGL or release it under Creative Commons, but probably not both.  All this copyright stuff makes my head spin, and probably would do so even if I could bring my full mental faculties to bear (which, what with the two young children in the house, I won't be able to do for several more years).  Which do you think would be more useful to me?  More useful to the game community?

-G.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Actually, there's nothing stopping you from publishing under both licences. It can MAYBE (the jury's still out on that one) even be done at the same time, but you'll get with the least bother by simply putting the text up separately under both licenses. Because you're the IP owner, you can licence your text multiple times if you feel like it.

[madelf]

For a really easy solution, you could just declare it public domain, with a request that those who use it give you credit. Then anyone could use it without worrying about licenses. (Of course that doesn't give you any means to make them credit you, or make them release their copy of text to others - so you'd have to decide how important those factors are to you)

Just a thought.

[Levi Kornelsen]

Actually, there's nothing stopping you from publishing under both licences. It can MAYBE (the jury's still out on that one) even be done at the same time, but you'll get with the least bother by simply putting the text up separately under both licenses. Because you're the IP owner, you can licence your text multiple times if you feel like it.

After a quick check, it looks like Eero is dead on the money here.

And it's a great idea.

[Veritas Games]

Your suggestion has been noted and, as you can see in the gregstolze.com forum, is being debated.  Though it seems that I could EITHER make it OGL or release it under Creative Commons, but probably not both.

Why is this?  You can't slap both licenses on the same instance of the work (the OGL prevents this), but you can release identical text twice, once under the OGL and once under Creative Commons.  That you can do.

[Veritas Games]

Actually, there's nothing stopping you from publishing under both licences. It can MAYBE (the jury's still out on that one) even be done at the same time

The jury isn't out.  If you slap the OGL on something you can have no other restrictions on the open content.  It's a clause of the OGL.  If the creative commons license requires you to distribute the content with that license, that's a restriction.  If it says you can't do X and Y with the licensed text, that's a restriction.

[Mike Sugarbaker]

If you slap the OGL on something you can have no other restrictions on the open content.  It's a clause of the OGL.  If the creative commons license requires you to distribute the content with that license, that's a restriction.

It's a restriction under an entirely separate license. To the user who licensed your work under OGL terms, other licenses don't apply.

[GregStolze]

If it gets ransomed, I'll release it with the rider "You can use it in print or .pdf for free as long as it's attributed to me and the text is unchanged."  That's pretty clear and commonsensical, I think.

Incidentally, for some reason the GM article ransom button is broken right now.  But if you're suddenly eager to ransom this puppy (perhaps because you want to use the text in your own game), feel free to contact me about it.  I'm hoping to have the button fixed soon.

-G.

[Veritas Games]

If you slap the OGL on something you can have no other restrictions on the open content.  It's a clause of the OGL.  If the creative commons license requires you to distribute the content with that license, that's a restriction.

It's a restriction under an entirely separate license. To the user who licensed your work under OGL terms, other licenses don't apply.

If you license two instances of the work under different licenses this is true.  This is also probably true if you note that you intend to license a single instance of the work under the licensee's choice of two different licenses, noting that in that case, only the terms of the selected license apply.

If you blythely attach both licenses to the work without any further explanation, then its possible to interpret the CC license as interfering with the rights granted by the OGL.