Hello, I am lawyer with a PSA: almost everyone is wrong about the OGL and SRD. Clearing up confusion.

[AbdulAlhazred]

Trying to guess what terms WotC will actually insist on is commercial speculation, not legal speculation. From the legal point of view, they could do what you suggest, or they could make it a requirement of entering into the new licence that a party cease to distribue any work licensed under the current OGL. I don't see that either would pose any legal problem.

Right, this is BY FAR IMHO the most likely scenario, 1.1 will simply lack a 'or other version' clause, or it will be an 'or newer version' clause instead, and it will contain a 'you must cease to distribute under any content under other versions of the OGL' clause. WotC can absolutely do THAT. And they can then only ever release anything under the 1.1 OGL terms ever again, and utilize their Section 9 right to effectively stop letting people directly license from them under 1.0a even for 5e stuff. I just assert that doesn't destroy OTHER CONTRIBUTORS rights to still do so WRT to currently 1.0a OGL licensed material.

The problem with ANY ARGUMENT to the contrary is that the only value of the OGL is that WotC couldn't revoke it at a moment's notice. Without that surety the license never had any value whatsoever, it was simply a sham. The whole thing was a Potemkin Village of an 'agreement' in which one side would simply use the other side's reliance on it as a weapon against them! The THEORY was that WotC was also relying, but I know of no instance where they have ever distributed anything they didn't author themselves under OGL terms. They benefited from the good will and much enlarged D&D community that the license created, maybe, but in effect they seem to, at least now think, the license is simply a form of control they can exercise over the community. If that has been their intent, then the license is a sham. It purports to put everyone on an even footing so we can all distribute this content, but in effect if it is revocable then it merely served to dupe us all into putting on a slave collar!

 

[Greg Benage]

The 3.5 SRD has ability scores, races and classes, but not rules for character creation as such.

The 5e SRD seems pretty similar in these respects.

For character creation, I think you need to (i) write it without reference to WotC's copyrighted texts (or anyone else's, for that matter, if they're not licensed to you), and (ii) be sure that it's not infringing. You don't want to violate your authority to contribute; you also don't want to infringe someone else's copyright!

Agreed. It does seem that character creation rules are included in the Pathfinder Reference Document and are therefore designated as Open Game Content. Hopefully they were written from scratch with no Players Handbooks in the room and don't reproduce anything that a court would construe as expression.

 

[Enrahim2]

No one thinks the leaks are draft legal text, do they? They are a draft PowerPoint summary or similar.

Given how the leak and quotes were presented, I for one did think it was exerps from actual legal texts. And I am very surprised if I am alone. This might be good to be aware of when interacting with non-lawyers, if this indeed is obvious to a lawyer.

I will definitely defer to your assesment if we are assuming this leak is a very poorly restated version of an underlying legal document that us actually sound according to your understanding of the law. My main issue with that approach is that this approach seem to leave more mysteries than my atemt at understanding it from a reading of it as a corporate greed instructed legalese mistake. After all, wizards should be able to afford competent legal cunsil, but they also should be able to afford decent community management. And it seem obvious that at least one of this groups managed to screw this up big time.

So with your approach to the issue we are left with questions like why wizards would go trough the hoops of calling the new licence an ogl, rather than just making a new lisence outright? After all the positive pr that might be generated by the name is quite easy to se would be grossly outweighed by the negativity from the contrast. Or where could whoever actually writing the nonsensical "no longer an authorized" get the highly inflammatory ambigous, uncommon and poorly matching word "authorised" for describing what you as a lawyer managed to describe in much better and non-indlamatory terms.

With my legalese reading these mysteries has clear answers. And as to the mystery, where could wizards possibly have gotten such a terrible legalese draft from? I have a potential answer to that. Imagine wizards/hasbroo explicitely asked several lawyers if they could help draft a new version of the ogl that would allow them to use 1.0a material in it, but would disallow using material from the new edition in 1.1. How hard is it to imagine that they would come across someone incompetent (or geedy) enough to say yes? Even if they later realise their mistake, they might have gotten themselves in a situation that might make it hard for them to back out of the promise of delivering a draft with (apparently) this property..

 

[Greg Benage]

Given how the leak and quotes were presented, I for one did think it was exerps from actual legal texts.

The Gizmodo reporter claimed to have the actual text of the license. Even then, what we were actually seeing was, at best, her excerpts from the draft. And of course, it's possible that she misinterpreted what she was given as the actual text of the license.

It seems clear that some 3PP were given a package of materials or a presentation. That presentation definitely contained a summary of the new license terms, a Q&A, and some statement (I call it "propaganda") of Wizards' legal claims.

 

[overgeeked]

The Gizmodo reporter claimed to have the actual text of the license. Even then, what we were actually seeing was, at best, her excerpts from the draft. And of course, it's possible that she misinterpreted what she was given as the actual text of the license.

It seems clear that some 3PP were given a package of materials or a presentation. That presentation definitely contained a summary of the new license terms, a Q&A, and some statement (I call it "propaganda") of Wizards' legal claims.

She was specific in her article that they did consult lawyers before "printing" the article.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

@Greg Benage

The 3.5 SRD has ability scores, races and classes, but not rules for character creation as such.

The 5e SRD seems pretty similar in these respects.

For character creation, I think you need to (i) write it without reference to WotC's copyrighted texts (or anyone else's, for that matter, if they're not licensed to you), and (ii) be sure that it's not infringing. You don't want to violate your authority to contribute; you also don't want to infringe someone else's copyright!

Yeah, I always got the impression that what WotC focused on putting in the SRDs (and thus OGC) was more 'stuff that you need to use in play' vs other more supporting material. So parts of the DMGs that talk about how to play and whatnot, they're not OGC because, even if they can be construed in a sense as rules, they don't arise at the table in a direct way. Character creation is similar; you play with the character sheet you have and how it got filled out is more of a procedural issue and not a 'rule of play' in the same sense. How Fireball works is a rule, you invoke it in play, how you decide which ability scores you have on your sheet is a procedure, and subject to wide variation in actual practice. Few people change the definition of fireballs, but lots of them make up different character generation procedures, and how the character was generated has only the most indirect link to how a fireball works.

The upshot being, neither 3.x nor 5e can be PLAYED from the SRDs, as the SRD is not a structurally complete game system. It contains what is needed to utilize a D&D-style Fireball at the table (IE the text of the spell and at least implicitly definitions of things like hit points, etc.). This is fine in practice, as each game naturally will want to discuss 'how to play' and quite possibly incorporate significantly different overall play processes than what WotC's D&D utilizes. It is also fine from the perspective of "I want to just publish another list of spells and a class to use them" since that will just 'plug in' to the existing D&D rules structure, which need not be recapitulated, and all I might need to do is reprint a few existing spell/monster/item/class/feat descriptions. Or again if I want to just write a D&D adventure, I can recapitulate the monsters/treasures/spells that are required for play as a reference along with my material. WotC certainly never envisaged people simply republishing its books entire, or even nearly entire, and that was easily accomplished via the SRD mechanism. I think the original architects of this approach really did a pretty good job, WotC gave up very little that was really key to its success with D&D, while enabling a LOT of 3PPs to participate in the 'ecology' of the game, or make substantively different games that wouldn't generally cannibalize D&D (though PF1 certainly tested the limits of that).

 

[Sanji Himura]

The Gizmodo reporter claimed to have the actual text of the license. Even then, what we were actually seeing was, at best, her excerpts from the draft. And of course, it's possible that she misinterpreted what she was given as the actual text of the license.

It seems clear that some 3PP were given a package of materials or a presentation. That presentation definitely contained a summary of the new license terms, a Q&A, and some statement (I call it "propaganda") of Wizards' legal claims.

Actually, I have the section that everyone is fighting over (the revoke of 1.0a) as allegedly formatted by WotC. Not going to share it here, due to possible issues, but suffice it to say that I think that the document that was passed to the reporter was genuine to the best of my knowledge.

 

[Greg Benage]

She was specific in her article that they did consult lawyers before "printing" the article.

That's fine, but when the article states things like this...

According to the document procured by io9, the new agreements states that “the Open Game License was always intended to allow the community to help grow D&D and expand it creatively. It wasn’t intended to subsidize major competitors, especially now that PDF is by far the most common form of distribution.”

The article claims that "the new agreement states..." but then goes on to quote language that is clearly, even to this non-lawyer, not legal language from the license itself. This is not commentary that we should expect to appear in the text of the actual license.

 

[kenada]

Something I can see WoTC doing and being an ass about is "updating their Terms of service" of D&D beyond and such, which would mean that if you had an account there or any WoTC website, you would agree with 1.1 and then relinquish (?) your rights to use 1.0a.
Is that even possible?

This is why I put in a ticket ahead of time requesting my account be deleted. I do not trust WotC not to do something sneaky. I provided the information they requested on Thursday, but I have not heard back. I’m guessing account deletion is a manual process.

 

[Sanji Himura]

That's fine, but when the article states things like this...



The article claims that "the new agreement states..." but then goes on to quote language that is clearly, even to this non-lawyer, not legal language from the license itself. This is not commentary that we should expect to appear in the text of the actual license.

The lawyer was probably necessary to prevent legal backlash by WotC. It isn't a bad idea when considering that you just handed leaked content.