Open Gaming Licenses and Alternatives: How Roleplaying Games are Protecting Their Copyrights
From a legal standpoint, Creative Commons licenses present a stark trade-off for commercial tabletop ecosystems: enabling privatization of community-built derivatives, or effectively foreclosing creators’ ability to reserve proprietary storylines or monetizable supplements. Publishers have adopted bespoke open-gaming frameworks that calibrate grants, attribution, irrevocability, and registration mechanics to preserve downstream creativity while managing litigation risk and market incentives. The real question is whether these companies should be responsible for balancing these values without any guidance from a federal government that is constitutionally empowered to strike that balance fairly.
“Repatriating” Indigenous Digital Heritage: The Rise of TK Labels and Licenses
The indigenous communities worldwide treat their traditional knowledge as shared wisdom, know-how, skills, and fruits of intellectual exercises that pass down from generation to generation. On the flip side, Western intellectual property (IP) protection’s philosophical and legal basis emphasizes the proprietary right to exclude others from using owned knowledge. Such divergence corners the intangible cultural materials that belong to indigenous communities globally, putting them in a powerless position. However, there is a silver lining in harnessing more systematic, legal protections for traditional knowledge—through the Traditional Knowledge (TK) label and licensing.