The Paranoid's Guide: Brief Thoughts on the Recent Timeline of the OGL

[Snarf Zagyg]

On the one hand, I think this is plausible as far as conspiracy theories go. On the other hand, while Paizo would have plenty of incentive to leak, I'm not sure why they'd leak to one of their publishing partners. I'd like to think their tradecraft is better than that.

Maybe!

But then again, the one thing that I have learned, over and over and over and over and over again throughout years of discovery in civil litigation is this ....

People. Be. Stupid.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Maybe!

But then again, the one thing that I have learned, over and over and over and over and over again throughout years of discovery in civil litigation is this ....

People. Be. Stupid.

Fun fact- in litigation there is usually going to be an email that says ...

Hey Chad. You know that terrible thing we did? The terrible thing we did, which I am going to explain in excruciating detail now? (Excruciating detail follows). We shouldn't talk about it over email, so call me!

 

[Scribe]

Fun fact- in litigation there is usually going to be an email that says ...

Hey Chad. You know that terrible thing we did? The terrible thing we did, which I am going to explain in excruciating detail now? (Excruciating detail follows). We shouldn't talk about it over email, so call me!

My company has updated its policy in the last few years regarding email retention, for pretty much this, I assume.

Around a decade ago we got sued for breach of contract (and we sued them for the same) and it became this months long thing of just digging through years worth of emails to get supporting documentation.

Easier if those documents just 'disappear' I guess.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

My company has updated its policy in the last few years regarding email retention, for pretty much this, I assume.

Around a decade ago we got sued for breach of contract (and we sued them for the same) and it became this months long thing of just digging through years worth of emails to get supporting documentation.

Easier if those documents just 'disappear' I guess.

Bingo. ESI (electronically stored information) is the bugbear of litigation. If you company doesn't have a document retention policy that involves regular deletion of emails after a certain time period by now, color me shocked.

 

[Scribe]

Bingo. ESI (electronically stored information) is the bugbear of litigation. If you company doesn't have a document retention policy that involves regular deletion of emails after a certain time period by now, color me shocked.

Note, we DID. It was just much too long of a period of time. Now its very short, too short really for some of our longer projects to the point where email cannot even be relied upon!

 

[Dausuul]

Maybe Paizo was completely blindsided by all of this and has decided to ride to the rescue of the hobby. Or perhaps they are seizing (and exploiting) the opportunity provided by Hasbro's poor decision making.**

I'll take "both" for 500, Alex.

 

[Justice and Rule]

I dunno, feels completely unnecessary to have any sort of conspiracy here. While Paizo probably had an idea that something was coming down the road, any and all studios would have stood to gain from leaking it to generate bad publicity as a way to attempt to stop or at least delay Wizards from implementing it. Given the contents of it, Paizo really wouldn't even need to engineer a leak because the terms were so outrageous that it would only be a matter of time for it to get out into the wild as the date set by the contract approached.

Do we even know how long the OGL 1.1 has been out there in people's hands? That seems like it'd be an important detail on how much of a controlled leak this could be. If they've had it for months, that's very different than if they got it mid-late December.

 

[Malmuria]

I don't really get why the "ORC" license is necessary for a ttrpg publisher. Why not just use creative commons? Doesn't that basically fulfill all the requirements of an open license?

Paizo sort of give me CD Projekt Red vibes--"we're the good guys." But whatever.

 

[The Stray]

I don't really get why the "ORC" license is necessary for a ttrpg publisher. Why not just use creative commons? Doesn't that basically fulfill all the requirements of an open license?

For the same reasons Ryan Dancey and Brian Lewis didn't use a CCL for the OGL to begin with -- there's a lot of Creative Commons Licenses, and some are more restrictive while others are more open. Using any of the alphabet soup licenses comes with the risk of misinterpretation (innocent or otherwise) that the license used is the least restrictive one. Couple this with the fact that CC Licenses aren't good for separating parts of work to protect as IP while allowing other parts of the work to be used as open content. There's a lot less give in a CC license if you're trying to use it with a valuable trademark.

 

[p_johnston]

I highly suspect that Paizo knew the OGL 1.1 was coming and what were seeing now is all the stuff they had prepared for that. Dont see why they would bother leaking it though. The backlash (from the public and 3pp) was gonna be terrible whether it was leaked or announced.
To my mind the most likely scenario is Paizo just had to speed up plans they've had in motion for a while.