3.5 Winter’s Oasis is a collaborative story-telling experience which involves many different contributors and ideas. In order to protect the rights of contributing artists, yet allow for derivative work that is not legally jeopardized and can even be used for profit, be it for Winter’s Oasis, or an individual or group entity making use of the work, the following subsections are given. The essence of these is giving any person with the desire to create a derivative work access to the universe and the ability to change it, but to restrict the ability to change the historical events involving specific characters without approval in their derivative works (if they wish to use these), so that no player’s character is used without their authorization but the ability to reference their actions in known historical events is left intact.
a. For the purposes of this agreement, the following additional definitions will be used:
I. ‘Event’ shall mean any contiguous section of role play activity on Winter’s Oasis.
II. ‘Extended Material’ shall be interpreted to mean the continuing history created by events in Winter’s Oasis, excepting events and details that become integral or create integral changes to the nature and operation of the game’s societal structure, religions, economies, cities, people groups, cultures and societies with their backgrounds.
IV. ‘Core Material’ shall be interpreted to mean the game’s collective societal structure, religions, economies, cities, people groups, cultures and societies with their backgrounds excepting that which is covered in Extended Material, and that which involves player characters but is not integral to the stated domains. Any characters that are listed as ‘open for interpretation’ on the files of Winter’s Oasis at the time of any derivative work’s inception are also included in the definition.
III. ‘Player Character Exclusivity’ shall be interpreted to mean the right of a player to the exclusive use, intellectual ownership and copyright of their character unless waived by inclusion in the list of characters ‘open for interpretation’ or otherwise explicitly licensed for this purpose. This definition includes the exclusive right to approve or deny inclusion of their character in any derivative or adapted work excepting any events or details covered under the definition of Extended Material or Core Material.
V. Winter’s Oasis is the copyright and intellectual property holder over Core Material and Extended Material, and any new material generated that fits under these categories shall also be copyright to and the intellectual property of Winter’s Oasis.
VI. Any derivative work that is agreed upon to be so by both Winter’s Oasis and the copyright and/or intellectual property holder can become either Winter’s Oasis Core Material or Winter’s Oasis Extended Material.
b. In order to foster a safe environment to collaborate and encourage creative growth, Core Material is licensed to you under a CC-BY 3.0 United States license, whose full text can be found at ‘help CC-BY’.
c. In order to allow for a sensible history in any derivative work while protecting the rights of individual character owners, Extended Material is licensed under a CC-BY-ND United States license, the full text of which can be found at ‘help CC-BY-ND’ with the following written agreement changes per section 8.d:
I. Because Extended Material is a series of events and facts, is meant to be included as part of larger works, and is not easily bound to a set of precise algorithmic reproduction, adaptations involving translation, reformatting, use as reference for a derivative work’s background or history, as well as interpretations and works based off those events which do not modify the factual content of them are permitted.
II. The licensee is not required to license their specific implementation of Winter’s Oasis historical canon under the same terms as original work, so long as they do not claim exclusive right to the source material.