Emiricol said:
Because there's some money involved. First of all, you don't need to be able to win to sue and settle. Second of all, WOTC itself laid out guidelines and then, it MIGHT be interpreted, selected a submission that violated its guidelines. Any of the people who tailored their submission to the guidelines presented could (conceivably) pursue damages, particularly punitive damages.
When you are talking about lawyers, whether the case is valid or nor, or winnable or not, is often not a primary consideration.
Anyway, it is all pretty far-fetched. Not like that one line was the focus of the post 
Just a comment.
Here are the guidelines WotC laid out:
"Wizards of the Coast, Inc. is searching for proposals for a new fantasy setting (“Fantasy Setting Search”). Such a setting may serve as a vehicle for novels, roleplaying games, card games, miniatures, and other entertainment products. In scope and flavor, your proposed fantasy setting should be similar to our existing settings, particularly Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance."
If a lawyer would take a case based on that, I suspect the primary consideration would be whether the client was paying up front.
I seem to remember Valterra making some comments directly addressing the issue of similarity to FR and Dragonlance, but the news page archives don't go back that far, and I can't find it at GamingReport. Perhaps someone here has them on file? As I remember it, he indicated that it was more that you'd have a tougher time making it if you went beyond the baselines of standard D&D rather than it being completely banned. My memory could very well be faulty, though, so I'd like to see the quotes again.
However, from what little we've seen -- particularly taking Gargoyle's comments into consideration -- this setting could well be within the vague guidelines given in the original press release.
There'll be a "first glimpse" of the setting in the next
Dragon, though they didn't give any info on what they mean by that.
I've been trying to formulate some more general comments, but I haven't figured out a way of doing it in any detail that wouldn't tend to make the arguments more personal than I like to get. So I'll just say that from the very tiny bit we've seen, it could well be interesting, and given that so-called standard D&D already has FR and Dragonlance lines being published, I think it's perfectly reasonable and possibly wiser (in principle, anyway) for Wizards to do something somewhat different...if it actually is really all that different. I don't think there's enough detail or certainty in the Gaming Report article to give an idea of the big picture, or to even remotely justify some of the assumptions being made about it, or the level of the negative reaction people are showing towards it.
