Elton Robb
Explorer
It's not "biting the hand that feeds you", it's more like owning a store and then deciding to give away all your products. It might me a nice thing to do, but it's likely going to make you broke.
Hasbro can make a lot more money by Mainstreaming D&D through Merchandising than by selling D&D books through Wizards of the Coast. D&D Figures, D&D board games (like D&D Clue), Dungeons and Dragons T-Shirts, Dungeons and Dragons art books, Dungeons and Dragons T.V. shows, and Dungeons and Dragons movies. Hasbro can make more money than printing the books themselves. Merchandising is the best way to make a lot of money on a brand that is worth more than the shared creative game itself.
Dungeons and Dragons is so mainstream in the public now that Hasbro can make a killing selling Dungeons and Dragons to people outside the Creative Thinking fans which we are. We make up only a small part of that market, Hasbro can now mainstream the brand and sell to the public which does not play and make a whole lot more money.
Freeing up the game and not locking it away is a small sacrifice to the bigger market potentials on the Brand itself. For instance, Hasbro made more money on the (sucky) Dungeons and Dragons movie than the sales of the books combined for the last 30 years. By working with filmmakers which have money and quality, they can make ten times as much money. Merchandising is the key to success in a Copyright Free world.
Even many OGL proponents wouldn't recommend using CC or Public Domain.
Because they haven't thought about what copyright actually favors. That is the publishing industry, not the artists or creators.
Economically, WoTC is in a good position, they are like Apple with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. What you are proposing makes it harder for them to win because you want to turn a market into what's called "perfect competition", which is the other end of a spectrum from a monopoly. Perfect competition has downsides, most importantly it prevents anybody from making any sort of profit.
MERCHANDISING. MERCHANDISING. MERCHANDISING.
I won't get into your anti-copyright stances, as I've said my opinions a lot on the subject, so I'll simply talk economics. The D&D game is not a monopoly since people can and do create other RPGs. The way to prevent it from becoming a monopoly is to support the alternatives. It's like Coke--Pepsi and other can compete but they can't copy the existing Coke formula.
No, it's not a monopoly, it's a brand. But WotC has an intellectual monopoly on the game rules themselves attached to that brand.
I think a lot of free culture advocates ignore economic costs (as well as social and other costs). There's a reason why we had a dot-com bubble, and there's a reason why a lot of newspapers are starting to charge for on-line access, and why the DRM and other debates are so important. I fear a lot of people ignore these equations when advocating their positions.
We don't. We are quite aware of the costs. Much of the costs economic costs are legal fees and legal transactions.
If you want the free culture to succeed, vote with your wallet and don't buy from the company. The moral stance should be to support games like Eclipse Phase if you believe that, and (most importantly) to make a sacrifice and go without. If WoTC see that people are support the competing game over theirs, if sales go down for WoTC AND there's evidence that piracy also goes down, then maybe it will have an impact. But I think there are too many people not willing to make the sacrifice.
Because they don't know any better. WotC can be making a lot of money by merchandising the brand out in the non-RPG playing public. Buy giving the game over to us and publishing it as a side show, younger people who can be interested in D&D will buy into D&D. How many kids became interested in Dungeons and Dragons through the Cartoon show of the mid-eighties? How many fans now are angry over WotC pulling the plug on PDFs and locking away a significant part of our gamer culture for the past 30 years?
You really think that by supporting Copyright Law your grandchildren will be able to play the historic games of the past? You are supporting an antiquated publishing model that has shown its age when a machine that is capable of copy and redistribution was invented in the late sixties early seventies. You are supporting an antiquated publishing model when the Internet came into common use. You are also supporting censorship in a very real, very powerful way.