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

[Justice and Rule]

What does ORC have to do with dropping the OGL stuff? Those are two different things. They can remove their OGL stuff in days or weeks if they want.

Are you kidding? Do you think that just taking out what you think is OGL is going to suddenly inoculate them? The whole point of ORC is that it is a greater future defense for them. But just walking away from the OGL right now, even if they think they got everything out of their books, is still very fraught, even moreso if they follow your concept of not defending the idea. There's no point to not keep every defense you have strong when you are fighting someone with more resources than you.

What part of, "They would wait until WotC comes after them." was I unclear about? Yes, if WotC comes after them for being "too close" they will have to fight. That will be a different fight than what the small creator is fighting, though. There's no incentive for Paizo to hand millions of dollars to a small company to fight a fight that isn't theirs.

What part of "Waiting for WotC to come after you directly weakens your position because you are allowing them to set the legal foundations of their case against you in precedent before it arrives in court" do you not understand?

So you think it's better to throw millions of dollars into a fight that isn't yours, rather than let that case settle out of court and then millions more to fight your own fight IF WotC comes after you?

I think that it's better to spend money to keep your legal defenses solid, rather than letting them weaken enough that you could potentially lose a case.

It's not the same case. Even if WotC goes to trial and wins, and it's very, very unlikely to make it to trial, that win won't really affect Paizo. Paizo isn't trying to use the OGL 1.0a, so a decision that OGL 1.0a is off limits doesn't mean much. WotC has to come after them for the different issue of being too close to OGL 1.0a.

I'm sorry, this is just an inherently dumb and dangerous position for Paizo to take if they did.

Firstly, why would WotC be going out there and spending money on these cases if it wasn't building to something bigger? You absolutely better believe it would be building up to cases against Paizo and other bigger publishers, otherwise why spend the money? This line of attack from Wizards doesn't make sense from your own view of not to spend money on stuff that doesn't get you anything: why spend money bullying little guys if you're not building up to hit the big guys?

Secondly, losing the OGL as a defense line would be big, because having the OGL there in place is a huge, immediate defense to anything Paizo and the others want to do. You don't cede that sort of ground without a fight, especially when you have such a strong argument to use against it. Given all the power that argument currently holds, it would be moronic to give that ground up to Wizards and thus empower their legal machine by giving up one of the strongest defenses you have.

 

[Deadmanshand]

The SRDs are released with a copy of the OGL attached. In that combination, the OGL is the bit that grants rights to reuse it. The SRD itself does not grant permission to use it.

The concept of "revoking the SRD" has no legal meaning, it'd be like me saying "I revoke oxygen", there's nothing to revoke, it grants no legal rights or obligations to anyone, it just exists as a copyrighted piece of work. They cannot delete copies of it from existence (other than the ones they themselves hold), because it's out there, in the wild, in multiple copies, all released under the OGL. They can remove it from their website, and I can just put it up on my website for everyone to reuse, because the OGL gives me the right to do so.

The only part of the SRD that has any legal basis is the OGL at the back of it, which is the thing that grants us the right to use the Open Game Content within.

To put it another way, if you take the SRD to a Judge during a trial over its usage, the only bit they cares about reading (other than to see if text from it was used) is the OGL pages at the back, as that's the only bit that has anything to dispute.

Yes, I think there may have been a 5.0, there was also a 3.5 and a 3.0, none of which are invalidated by later releases. If you want to go dig up the 3.0 SRD, the OGL at this moment in time still allows you to use that rather than 5.1

Ok. Thank you. I read the OGL recently, but not the SRD.

 

[Greg Benage]

They are a commercial competitor to WotC, so the OGL v 1.1 (as leaked) seems utterly unviable for them. Thus they always had to either (i) defend their rights under the existing OGL, (ii) abandon the OGL and defend their rights in a copyright suit, or (iii) reach some sort of new settlement with WotC. By going down the ORC path, at least to some extent, they are making themselves the centre of a new 3PP ecology, potentially weakening WotC (to the extent that it is true that WotC benefits from its 3PP ecology) all the while presenting themselves as community-loving rather than commercially motivated. And they still have (i) and (iii) available to them, should (ii) not work out.

I don't disagree with any of this, except perhaps about the timing. I don't expect it to be a problem, because I think Wizards is unlikely to release a final license that Paizo finds acceptable.

That said, if Wizards fully capitulated and released an OGL 1.0b that is exactly like OGL 1.0a except that it's explicitly irrevocable, then in my opinion, Paizo would be wiser to continue publishing their products under that license than whatever they plan to do with ORC. My concern is that it would be more difficult for them to take the wiser course now that they've rallied the passions of the Very Online with their ORC announcement. The loud voices with strong feelings but no stake in the matter would be disappointed, there would be charges of "selling out," and so forth, ad nauseum.

Again, I don't think this is terribly likely, but the risk isn't zero. And the only thing Paizo would have had to do to reduce the risk to zero is wait for Wizards to finally put their cards on the table first.

 

[Matt Thomason]

That said, if Wizards fully capitulated and released an OGL 1.0b that is exactly like OGL 1.0a except that it's explicitly irrevocable, then in my opinion, Paizo would be wiser to continue publishing their products under that license than whatever they plan to do with ORC. My concern is that it would be more difficult for them to take the wiser course now that they've rallied the passions of the Very Online with their ORC announcement. The loud voices with strong feelings but no stake in the matter would be disappointed, there would be charges of "selling out," and so forth, ad nauseum.

I would agree with this, except for 3PPs that do not do D&D-adjacent work (e.g anyone using ORC to use content from non-d20 games written by Chaosium, Green Ronin, etc) , who would probably be more comfortable using a license that is not copyrighted by WotC.

Now, if we could all go back to 2000 and insist custody of the OGL was handed to a neutral third party then, all of this could be fixed

 

[Greg Benage]

I would agree with this, except for 3PPs that do not do D&D-adjacent work (e.g anyone using ORC to use content from non-d20 games written by Chaosium, Green Ronin, etc) , who would probably be more comfortable using a license that is not copyrighted by WotC.

Yeah, for sure, a new license makes perfect sense for these publishers, but there's no legal jeopardy for them in any case as far as I can see.

 

[S'mon]

I think this thread should be linked here, since it has a lot of lawyer-talk - OGL - Hypothetical: I ignore OGL 1.x

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't disagree with any of this, except perhaps about the timing. I don't expect it to be a problem, because I think Wizards is unlikely to release a final license that Paizo finds acceptable.

That said, if Wizards fully capitulated and released an OGL 1.0b that is exactly like OGL 1.0a except that it's explicitly irrevocable, then in my opinion, Paizo would be wiser to continue publishing their products under that license than whatever they plan to do with ORC. My concern is that it would be more difficult for them to take the wiser course now that they've rallied the passions of the Very Online with their ORC announcement. The loud voices with strong feelings but no stake in the matter would be disappointed, there would be charges of "selling out," and so forth, ad nauseum.

Again, I don't think this is terribly likely, but the risk isn't zero. And the only thing Paizo would have had to do to reduce the risk to zero is wait for Wizards to finally put their cards on the table first.

If everybody had waited, WotC would have put their cards on the table with the new "OGL" yesterday and it would have been too late to do anything.

 

[Greg Benage]

If everybody had waited, WotC would have put their cards on the table with the new "OGL" yesterday and it would have been too late to do anything.

Huh? If WotC had done that, everybody would be even more pissed and Paizo et al could have done exactly what they did anyway, only with even more support.

 

[mamba]

I have a question for the lawyers here. The legality of de-authorising the OGL is in doubt, but what about revoking SRD 5.1? Can they choose to leave OGL 1.0(a) alone, but revoke SRD 5.1 and replace it with an extremely bare bones 5.2 that effectively revokes the OGL?

no, since the SRD 5.1 (or rather the OGC in it) is covered by the OGL, so you cannot walk one back without the other

 

[mamba]

I think it's perhaps more accurate to say that nothing about the situation has materially changed, but rather our perception of the current situation has.

That's like saying nothing has changed after I pull a gun on you while we are chatting in a bar