Interesting times. Mark Plemmons announces “4E-compatible Kingdoms of Kalamar setting released” and adds “we’re not using the GSL.” ¹ It took me a while to understand what that means. *Trask, The Last Tyromancer* mentions “Kenzerco’s president is a copyright lawyer in the real world. This could get interesting.” ² I agree. He also links to a blog post by Robertson Games ³ where Stuart Robertson explains how this works: Nominative use “by which a person may use the trademark of another as a reference to describe the other product, or to compare it to their own.”
All they need to watch out for is copyright violations, obviously. But they’re sidestepping the trademark licensing issue. According to Stuart Robertson, they use “for use with Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons®” on the cover. Unlike Paizo which keeps on using “compatible with the world’s most popular fantasy roleplaying game” – but then again Paizo is using the OGL in order to republish material from the SRD, and the OGL says: “You agree not to indicate compatibility or co-adaptability with any Trademark or Registered Trademark in conjunction with a work containing Open Game Content except as expressly licensed in another, independent Agreement with the owner of such Trademark or Registered Trademark.” In other words, by using the OGL they’ve traded off the right to say “Dungeons & Dragons” on their covers.
As Mark Plemmons says: “No one *has* to use the GSL. Using the GSL gives you the right to use some exclusive logos and such, but also comes with some restrictions […]” ⁴
Interesting times, indeed! 😄
Related: 2008-07-03 Good Bye PDF Economy, Hello PDF Piracy, where I argue that the termination clause in the d20 trademark license is causing a lot of unnecessary grief.
2008-07-03 Good Bye PDF Economy, Hello PDF Piracy
Via *Trask, The Last Tyromancer* ⁵, Jukka Särkijärvi ⁶ and *RPG Pundit* ⁷.
#RPG #Publishing #Copyright