Never thought I'd be posting about plagiarism, but...

[atemu1234]

So I was following through on one of my old promises to my group, and updating the 'worthwhile' spells from the Book of Erotic Fantasy so that they can be used in Pathfinder without needing to look at the rather terrifying photoshop job therein. But of course, I wouldn't do it without seeing if Pathfinder already had similar spells...
And while searching spells on the PFSRD, I found just that - the spells had been updated to Pathfinder - in the Book of Divine Magic, from 4 Winds Publishing. With nary a mention of the writers of BoEF.
Thusfar, the spells I've noticed have been the easy-to-explain ones - stuff like Analyze Ancestry, Body to Body, Calm Weather, Depilatory, Ghost Touch, Healing Sphere... but they didn't even change the names or the spells themselves.
Does anyone have more information on whether one of the authors was writing under a pseudonym, or if it was just a straight copy/paste job?

[Saintheart]

So I was following through on one of my old promises to my group, and updating the 'worthwhile' spells from the Book of Erotic Fantasy so that they can be used in Pathfinder without needing to look at the rather terrifying photoshop job therein. But of course, I wouldn't do it without seeing if Pathfinder already had similar spells...
And while searching spells on the PFSRD, I found just that - the spells had been updated to Pathfinder - in the Book of Divine Magic, from 4 Winds Publishing. With nary a mention of the writers of BoEF.
Thusfar, the spells I've noticed have been the easy-to-explain ones - stuff like Analyze Ancestry, Body to Body, Calm Weather, Depilatory, Ghost Touch, Healing Sphere... but they didn't even change the names or the spells themselves.
Does anyone have more information on whether one of the authors was writing under a pseudonym, or if it was just a straight copy/paste job?

BoEF was published with two authors credited: Gwendolyn M. Kestrel, and Duncan Scott. The latter was indeed a pseudonym. Kestrel is still writing fiction and had a number of other book credits to 3.5, so congratulations, unless there's been a specific deal done on copyright with whoever Valar Project became, or unless 4 Winds Publishing is indeed into wholesale copyright breach (unlikely), your Internet sleuthing may have identified that one of BoDM's authors is Duncan Scott under his real name. Possibly. Does BoDM have anything interesting in its copyright information section?


EDIT: Oh, hang on.

When you look at BoEF's first page, it explicitly deems "all game mechanics and statistics" in the book to be Open Game Content, while still copyrighting characters, character names, and art to themselves. I guess they must consider that the spell name, mechanic, and statistics fall under OGC. Under the OGC provisions of the OGL 1.0a, basically all the mechanics could be republished in other texts without infringing copyright. BoDM probably did it because they could under the OGL. From memory OGC material doesn't require attribution as such. This is another reason why the SRD has Evard's Black Tentacles, Rary's Telepathic Bond, and the like.

[Darg]

You can't copyright game mechanics, in the US at least. Even if WotC didn't change Evard's Black Tentacles for the SRD to Black Tentacles, anyone could have legally copied the spell, name and all, as long as they removed the "Evard's" as that is the only copyright able portion as it is a copyrighted character.

[Chronos]

You can't copyright game mechanics, but you can copyright a specific description of game mechanics. A D&D player who casts [Evard's] Black Tentacles regularly could probably give a completely accurate description of the mechanics of the spell from memory, but their wording of it would almost certainly be different from the wording in the PHB. A book that consisted entirely of those same-rules-but-differently-worded spells would not be a copyright violation. It wouldn't even be a copyright violation to use the word "Evard", because there's a minimum length for something to be copyrightable, and while it's not entirely clear what that minimum length is, five letters is definitely below it. On the other hand, if someone just took the entire spells section of the PHB and reprinted it, just with the character names removed, without WotC's permission, that would be a copyright violation.

The Open Game License is a very weird sort of legal construct, drawing pieces from copyright, trademark, and contract law. Sites like d20srd.com (which is not owned by WotC) are legal, not because the material isn't copyrighted, but because WotC (the copyright owner) has given permission for it. What they did in creating the OGL is they said that everyone had permission to use certain parts of their copyrighted books, on the condition that they not use certain other parts (including some parts that aren't copyrightable, like the XP tables). Someone who hosted a site that had just the XP tables on it, for instance, and never hosts anything else, is legally in the clear, because a table of numbers isn't sufficiently creative to be copyrightable. But someone who hosts both the XP table and the SRD is not in the clear, because they're violating the license terms they agreed to with WotC, and without that agreement, they don't have the right to host the SRD.

[Ashtagon]

...

When you look at BoEF's first page, it explicitly deems "all game mechanics and statistics" in the book to be Open Game Content, while still copyrighting characters, character names, and art to themselves. I guess they must consider that the spell name, mechanic, and statistics fall under OGC. Under the OGC provisions of the OGL 1.0a, basically all the mechanics could be republished in other texts without infringing copyright. BoDM probably did it because they could under the OGL. From memory OGC material doesn't require attribution as such. This is another reason why the SRD has Evard's Black Tentacles, Rary's Telepathic Bond, and the like.

Doesn't that licence at least require the new product to name-drop all the previous product names that were used as source material?

[CactusAir]

Even if it's legal to copy, providing attribution is polite and ethical.

[Saintheart]

Doesn't that licence at least require the new product to name-drop all the previous product names that were used as source material?

Not that I can see, or at least it's not explicit. (https://www.d20srd.org/ogl.htm)


Even if it's legal to copy, providing attribution is polite and ethical.

Agreed.

[YellowJohn]

It wouldn't even be a copyright violation to use the word "Evard", because there's a minimum length for something to be copyrightable, and while it's not entirely clear what that minimum length is, five letters is definitely below it.

While the name Evard may not be copywritable, it is almost certainly Trademarked. Don't use it in a published work unless you have a good lawyer and deep pockets.

[Ashtagon]

Not that I can see, or at least it's not explicit. (https://www.d20srd.org/ogl.htm)



Agreed.

It's right there in item 6. The copyright notice portion referred to is better known as item 15 in the overall notice.


Notice of License Copyright: You must update the COPYRIGHT NOTICE portion of this License to include the exact text of the COPYRIGHT NOTICE of any Open Game Content You are copying, modifying or distributing, and You must add the title, the copyright date, and the copyright holder’s name to the COPYRIGHT NOTICE of any original Open Game Content you Distribute.

[Chronos]

Quoth YellowJohn:

While the name Evard may not be copywritable, it is almost certainly Trademarked. Don't use it in a published work unless you have a good lawyer and deep pockets.
I don't know if Evard is trademarked, but it could be, if WotC decided to use it as such. Mordenkainen definitely is used as such. But trademark doesn't mean that you can't use the word at all. It means that, first, Wizards of the Coast uses it to identify a particular product as their own (i.e., when you see a book titled "Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes", you know it's an official Wizards of the Coast product), and second, that therefore nobody else is allowed to use that mark to label any other product of the same sort, or which is likely to cause confusion. You are, however, allowed to use a trademark to refer to that company's products, or to refer to things completely unrelated to that company's products.

As a simpler example, there's a big computer company that owns a trademark on the word "Apple". I can refer to the fruit I ate at lunch today as an apple, and that's no problem, because Apple, Inc. isn't in the fruit business (and if they were, they wouldn't be allowed to use the "Apple" trademark for it, because for a fruit business, that's too generic). I can refer to my Macbook Pro as an Apple computer, and that's no problem, either, because it's true: It is, in fact, a computer made by the company that owns the "Apple" trademark. I can also use the word "Apple" to refer to the music company that owns most of the Beatles' catalog, because that company is in a completely different line of work than the computer company (well, vaguely connected, since the computer company also sells music, but they had to reach a settlement with the music company to be allowed to do that). I can't, however, make my own computer and call it an "Apple computer", because that would be misleading my customers into thinking that it's made by the Apple company. I also couldn't, for instance, make a calculator and call it an Apple calculator, because even though that's not a product made by Apple, it's similar enough that it would be likely to cause confusion.

To bring it back to the topic at hand, if I published an RPG sourcebook and titled it "Evard's Portal to the Unknown", or the like, then WotC would likely have a case against me, because I'm making it look like it was their publication. But if I come out with a line of frozen dinners and call it "Evard's Home Cooking", then WotC wouldn't be able to do anything about it, because it's a different domain than their trademark (if indeed they have one).

[Peelee]

The Mod on the Silver Mountain: This entire thread seems to have quickly gone outside the scope of allowable advice for this forum.