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If we were talking about a closed license, you'd have a point. Closed licenses often have terms like forced arbitration. The OGL is an open license. Hasbro/WOTC is talking like they are keeping it open while including terms that make it closed. This whole situation is a trojan horse. They want...

The Mickey Mouse who appears in Steamboat Willie enters the public domain in one year (Jan. 1, 2024). https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/27/business/mickey-mouse-disney-public-domain.html I wouldn't bet on Disney getting the copyright term extended again, given what happened to the Reidy Creek...

There's no such thing as an open license that can be revoked at any time by an authority based on its own judgment -- which no one can even challenge in court. That's a closed license completely stacked in one party's favor. Putting "Open" in the name of that license is a joke.

The only way to live with that is if you don't care whether the license is open. Hasbro is trying legally dubious stunts to turn the OGL into any other closed license. When you see a new RPG has been produced under license for your favorite TV series or movie franchise, you know that the...

They're doing serious damage to competitors who did nothing wrong. Paizo published its OGL-licensed Pathfinder products under an agreement that all sides -- Hasbro, Paizo, other OGL licensees -- agree was valid at the time of publication. For 14 years, Paizo improved its rules through massive...

Revenue from D&D and MtG have become major contributors to Hasbro's revenue. In Q3 2022, Hasbro's net revenue was $1.1 billion from consumer products, $303 million from WOTC/digital gaming, and $211 million from film/TV...

There's no such thing as stealing from the public domain. Anyone can retell public domain stories. Disney's only IP in that situation is whatever unique they've introduced in their retelling. Which brings me back to the owlbear, which is just an owl-bear hybrid copied from a toy. There's very...

Hasbro can't do that because it would be changing the terms of OGL 1.0a, which is explicitly forbidden in Section 4 of that license: "No terms may be added to or subtracted from this License except as described by the License itself. No other terms or conditions may be applied to any Open Game...

It's ironic that people keep using the owlbear as something Hasbro is trying to lock down as its valuable IP. In the 1970s D&D ripped off the owlbear from a set of cheap plastic toys from Hong Kong that were UltraMan monster knockoffs. The pack also included what became the rust monster and...

Since Kobold Press is a corporation and Wolfgang Baur is a person, I don't see how Baur telling a joke could impact the use of this new non-open OGL. I suspect this hypothetical is moot because neither Kobold Press nor any other major publishers are going to jump into Hasbro's shiny new locked...

My concern is that to Hasbro/WOTC "always be licensed" does not mean "always be licensable."

Not if you think that a corporate apology is more credible if it comes from an identified person in a position of authority.

It was posted because people wanted to know if he was a real person at WOTC. He is and has a high-level position over D&D, so that should help people believe he's speaking credibly on behalf of the company.

I went looking on Hasbro's 13-members board of directors for anyone with experience relevant to D&D or gaming. Here's all I found: Chris Cocks was an executive at WOTC from 2016-21 before becoming Hasbro COO last February. Elizabeth Hamren is COO of Discord and a former vice president at...

Kyle Brink has been with WOTC since February 2021, according to his LinkedIn page. He was director of studio operations and is currently an executive producer of D&D. It also says of his current position that he "couldn't be happier or more in my element." I bet he could be happier than he is...

This will only be true if new works can be derived from existing works. If Hasbro/WOTC does not make that concession, it is not respecting the rights of everyone who published under OGL 1.0a, because part of the reason to do that is to enjoy the network effect of your work being reused in the...

I know there's a lot of clickbait on the OGL controversy, but as a former newspaper reporter I can recall times that we turned a big story into a multi-day series and teased what readers would find out if they kept reading tomorrow.

I own hundreds of OGL-licensed works and quite a few in the early days botched the license. As a practical matter, the answer to your hypothetical is no one enforces it because no one is harmed aside from the original publisher, which did such a bad job that it won't get the network effect of...

Under that logic, if a publisher of original content thinks a reuser is violating the OGL, it would have to convince Hasbro to take action instead of being able to take action on its own. That's not how open licenses work. Lawsuits filed over violations of the GPL are between the originator and...

I think every company that has been making a lot of money under the OGL is either going to leave the OGL as soon as possible or strike a non-open license deal with Hasbro. The former is more likely than the latter because customers angry over this aren't going to like it when publishers get into...