Robertson Games

Ryan Dancey, the former Brand Manager for Dungeons & Dragons at Wizards of the Coast, and I have been discussing copyright law and how it applies to RPGs. I’m cross-posting my answer to Ryan’s question about parallels to software development here, as I think other people may find them interesting.

“Let me ask you this Stuart - when you accept the terms of the GPL, and you create a work based on some other person’s computer software licensed to you with the GPL, are you creating a “derivative work” as that term is used in copyright law?” - Ryan Dancey

The GPL (GNU General Public License) is a popular copyleft license that requires derived works to be available under the same. A couple of examples of software licensed under the GPL are the Firefox web browser, and the Wordpress blogging system. I’ve written extensions for both, so I can speak to this from experience.

Creating a derivative work built from software licensed under the GPL means using the actual written code from the original application and then making some modifications to that code to produce a new piece of software. For example, the Flock web browser is built on the code base for Firefox, and is thus also available under the GPL public license.

This is contrasted with creating software that extends something released under the GPL. For example, you could write an extension for Firefox and release it under a different license. Even though it requires the GPL’d Firefox to run, it is not a derivative work and could use a different license (eg. Creative Commons). For example, here’s the Jiffy Firebug Extension — it’s under a CC license, not the GPL. It’s not a derivative work. Here’s an extension I wrote (also not derivative / GPL) — X-Ray, which has been downloaded from the Firefox Add-ons site 68,243 times to date (not counting downloads from my own site which exceed that number).

Let’s look at another example: Wordpress is also licensed under the GPL, so if you were to create a derivative work (say a new piece of software called RPGpress) then it would also need to be licensed in the same way. However you can create extensions (new rules) and themes (new settings) that add to Wordpress, but are not derivative works. You can release these under whatever license you choose. Wordpress extensions are much easier to write than ones for Firefox, so here’s an example you can actually cut-and-paste and upload to a blog running Wordpress.

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Ideas vs Code
Plugin URI: http://robertsongames.com/
Description: An example Wordpress Extension written for Ryan Dancey
Author: Stuart Robertson
Version: 1.0
Author URI: http://robertsongames.com/
*/

function ivc() {
echo “<p id=’ivc’>If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.<br /> — George Bernard Shaw</p>”;
}

add_action(’admin_footer’, ‘ivc’);

function ivccss() {
echo ”
<style type=’text/css’>
#ivc {
position: absolute;
top: 3em;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
right: 10px;
font-size: 9px;
color: #666666;
width: 400px;
}
</style>
“;
}

add_action(’admin_head’, ‘ivccss’);
?>

This code won’t do anything outside of Wordpress — it requires the original code to execute — but it is not a derivative work of the Firefox web browser, and rather than release it under the GPL I can choose to release it under some other license. In this case, let’s say this one: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/

The key factor in deciding whether something is a derivative work is whether or not you are using their code. The code is analogous to the “literary work” and this is what copyright coverage extends to. The idea of the software, and the design patterns used to create it are not covered by copyright. You could look at Firefox or Wordpress and decide to write your own software that does the exact same things. Here’s a tutorial on how to write some blogging software in PHP (just like Wordpress) to give you an example of how to get started doing that to create a non-derivative RPGpress if you like: Create a Blog in 20 Minutes. You could then release your new piece of software under whatever license you choose. As long as you are not using the original code from Wordpress, or copying the look-and-feel of that application (the pictorial expression in copyright terms) then you are not infringing the copyright of the creators of Wordpress.

It’s important to reiterate the point that ideas themselves can not be copyrighted. You can copyright computer code because it is a static written work. The written code for a program is directly and consistently executed on a machine to produce a result.

The rules of a tabletop game do not work in the same way. You can copyright the written text of a game, but that is not the “code” that is executed by the human mind — people interpret the written text to extract the ideas of how to play the game. These ideas are what that the human mind uses as “code” for how we as human machines operate, and in this specific example how a game is played. Humans do not extract ideas from a literary text in a consistent way, and how they interpret that text is influenced by a myriad of different things, including their personal experiences as well as other media (including games) they’ve been exposed to.

Ideas, processes, procedures, methods of operation — these are all things that are specifically excluded from copyright, and with good reason. Trying to control ideas themselves would create a dystopian society that none of us would want to live in.

Getting back to the specifics of creating tabletop games, if a game is built on copy-and-pasted text from another game, perhaps through using the OGL (Open Gaming License), then you could say it’s a derivative work and copyright laws would apply to it. It’s important to note this is true for not only the text, but also the graphical manner in which it’s presented. The specific visual presentation of a complex organization of data, such as a specific chart, table, or stat-block, as well as illustrations, fonts, page design and game boards would all fall under copyright protection as well.

The rules of a game, the ideas of how the game is played such as I might tell someone in my own words, are not copyrightable. Much like the ideas or design patterns for a web browser, blogging software, or other piece of software are not copyrightable either.

There are certainly some parallels between tabletop game development and software development, but there are also some fundamental differences. The text of computer code vs the text of a tabletop game book is one of those differences.