[I am not a lawyer and my opinion is not expert]
Let's roleplay through a little pretend scenario─that's kind of what we do around here right?
Let's pretend, just for fun, that OA was right. WoTC does in fact have the legal right to revoke the ogl by exploiting some fxxking bxxlshxt legal linguistic trap that the authors could never have anticipated. OK. Congratulations, WoTC, you legally voided the OGL. Give yourselves a great big public pat on the back. Doing so accomplishes.... what... exactly? Digging themselves deeper, or what? Ok, no one can publish game material under a license they never needed to begin with. I mean (and this is not good, mind you), the worst that would happen is that publishers would have to pulp inventory and get some projects out of the pipeline, but then it's business as usual because they just take that page out and keep doing what they were doing.
Let's pretend that they're right about game mechanics, which some say are uncopyrightable, and some are not. okay, actually I agree with OA on this one point. Don't get excited, folks, I'm not dousing my torchfork +2 of self righteousness or anything like that. But that law was written in reference to board games, mostly--like you can't say rolling one or more dice and moving that number of squares on a board is your intellectual property, because that would be preposterous (but hey, like, apparently that doesn't bother law folk sometimes...) OK. So. We're talking about a system of hundreds of variables and how they interact with one another between attributes, species, and occupations. And that is, I think, specific and unique enough to be protected.
But wait, that's a patent, not a copyright. And TSR nor WoTC ever patented any of that. But just for fun, let's pretend they did. 1000's of publishers used those mechanics in their own publications and sold it for decades (this was going on before OGL in the 70s, 80s, 90s, fyi, good to know history), pulling in all that sexy profit TSR/WoTC never saw. In the decades between 1976 and 2023, why was this never pursued? Why suddenly now?
I mean come on man. The fxxking balls. Everyone in the world has known what that license means for the past 22 years. And it's not like the authors of the document are gone or even staying silent. The people who wrote the OGL 1.0a are publicly and repeatedly proclaiming that the OGL was NOT and IS NOT revocable. It wasn't meant to subsidize competition... buuuut.... they didn't pursue Paizo in 2008 because.... why, exactly? Oh right, because they were high on crack the whole time, I forgot.
Yeah, maybe there is some horseshxt legal loophole to exploit in there, and WoTC can pretend that's a victory and pat themselves on the back for shutting it down, but, it would be a pyrrhic victory at best. I mean it's not like you can do much worse on PR--it's already incinerated, but that would torch it even further. And they're going to feel that in the wallet, which is the rub here. Even if they win their slimy legal victory, they damage public opinion even further, and that's fewer people buying their products, and more people buying someone else's products. So to that I say, whatever. ORC is already here, it's moot, and I would be really astonished to see this preposterous argument work in court anyway, at least not without paying off the judge. Oh yeah, right, this is WoTC, what was I thinking.
[I am not a lawyer and my opinion is not expert]
