EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
I'm specifically talking the open gaming content portions.Since IANAL, I can't comment on the specifics of the legality of any of this, concerning the bolded ...
Isn't this better in many ways for content providers? If someone wants to give away all their stuff, great. But if I put out Bob's Bean Booms with a list of spells with a theme of exploding beans, no one can copy it without my permission. I don't see this as a bad thing since I would assume (again IANAL) I can always grant rights to anyone who wants to copy just by saying so.
Hence why I said "containing new open game content" (emphasis in original.) Under OGL 1.0a, if you create something including new OGC, other people can use that OGC themselves. If I understand the legal termionlogy correctly, the license is "transferable." I believe that a transferable license is important--it means both (1) WotC is not the only one who can sample from everyone's pies, and (2) iterating on open content can occur, which encourages creators to make their non-open content as good as it can be while allowing baseline awesome ideas to proliferate across the ecosystem. (And that word is EXTREMELY important, it really does need to be baseline, concepts like the Escalation Die from 13A for example.)