From Tao Sun:


I got this from a poster on EN World. Please acknowledge receipt of this message to me, ok Jake?

Hello,

Congrats on your Beta release! I took a quick look and think you might want to adjust some of the legal text. The OGL is fine, along with the section fifteen, but you need an Open Game Content declaration and an Product Identity declaration to go along with that. Currently, it appear you are claiming all text as your own rather than acknowledging the OGC that you use and any OGC that you are adding into the vast pool of OGC that other OGL users can build upon.

I would humbly suggest that you remove the sentence directly claiming copyright to all text in favor of a copyright claim over the product as a whole (you'll want that copyright to be more general so it covers artwork and tradedress, at the least, but acknowledges that some OGC is clearly used (properly under the OGL) and is not being claimed as your own invention and copyright

For the OGC declaration, I would suggest something on the order of "All game mechanics and their direct explanations, either derivative of other OGC or of new invention are hearby declared as OGC that can be used under the terms of the OGL."

Then add a Product Identy declaration that says something like "All proper names of people, places or things, as well as [company name here], its logo, symbols, and other related expressions are product identity of [company name here]."

You can also add to the Product Identity declartion one of the following depending on who will hold the rights to illustrations, maps, and the like, "So, too, all artwork, tradedress, and other non-textual inclusions in this work are deemed Product Identity of [company name here] under the terms of the OGL." or "So, too, all artwork, tradedress, and other non-textual inclusions in this work are deemed product identity and under copyright of their individual creators [or includetheir names if you want to break it down]and/or [company name here] under theterms of the OGL."

You can open up most OGL products in see similar declarations to fine tune your own but the above is the gist of what the OGL requires of works using the OGL, more or less.

Congrats again and good luck moving forward!

All the best,
Mark
CreativeMountainGames.com

Hello again,

I would be remiss if I failed to mention that "d20" is a trademark of WotC and can't be used, under the terms of the OGL (and probably not otherwise without a legal battle, actually), so you'll probably want to remove that from the title of the work and within the text. They also claim it as Product Identity, which by using the OGL you acknowledge their right to do so even if you wanted to fight them on the trademark issue.

When I was assisting the Microlite gang on their OGL issues, they originally wanted to name their work d20 Microlite. The end around method we devised then was to rename the product Microlite 20 which keeps the idea and doesn't tread on the trademark and Product Identity of WotC. I would suggest something similar, like Legend 20 for your work. You can even come up with a logo that has some similar tie in like "L20" so folks get the gist of what you want to onvey without any legal entanglements (but be careful not to make the logo too much like the d20 logo or you still run afoul of the legal issues).

Again, best of luck and congrats!

All the best,
Mark
CreativeMountainGames.com