Closed dhouck closed 6 years ago
richardwilkes
commented
6 years ago No, I will not change this. It was approved many years ago by SJG and I've seen plenty of examples in the D&D world which do this (Wizards of the Coast's official character sheet, for example).
dhouck
commented
6 years ago The D&D and GURPS official sheets both have copyright notices, but those are distributed on blank sheets. The D&D official character creator uses the official character sheet in the "PDF Form" variant, so it's clear what is and is not covered by the copyright. The GCA default template has a copyright notice only in a box discussing the GCA and the unfilled sheet.
Unlike all of the above, GCS does not distinguish between items put on the sheet automatically, options chosen from the GCS library, and custom items put in by the user.
Seeing this copyright notice, and your response, is like if Eclipse put "Copyright © 2018 The Eclipse Foundation. All Rights Reserved." on GCS, and then refused to change that because Oracle had approved that text.
richardwilkes
commented
6 years ago I consulted with my legal counsel this morning regarding this and they have advised me to leave the copyright notice as-is and to make no changes.
In the footer of each character sheet is the text
This very much looks like the character sheet itself (including the character information on the sheet) is copyrighted by you, not just the page layout or creating program. I'm not a legal expert, but I'm fairly sure there is no legal framework that allows you to do that, and I'm almost certain the Mozilla Public License does not.
Could you please change the notice to something that does not imply you own your users' characters, such as:
(I think you're legally required to put that second line in anyway, but again I'm not a legal expert, and since I assume Steve Jackson Games is aware of GCS they could contact you if they care)