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That's not an obligation to Hasbro. It's an obligation to the creator of D6 Fantasy, the work they're reusing. Hasbro is not the entity that would be invoking the Termination clause because it did not license D6 Fantasy to others. There is no language in the Open Game License that makes Hasbro...

The best way to find out your true friends is to lose all your money.

In the situation we're discussing it has no involvement in the specific agreement between the parties (the originator and the reuser). Hasbro/WOTC is not bound by the terms of the OGL when someone reuses D6 Fantasy or any other original work contributed to open gaming under the OGL. The reuser...

Hasbro/WOTC's claim to the SRD is different than its claim to the license. There's no precedent for killing an open source license by forbidding the license itself from being copied. The publishers that used the OGL are entitled to continue to derive the benefits of its use. Publishers that...

This is like arguing that the Free Software Foundation could kill all existing rights under the GPL because it owns the copyright in the license. If Hasbro/WOTC took that position the most powerful entities in the open source software world would get involved because it would be a...

Hasbro/WOTC has no involvement in OGL-licensed works that did not use its SRDs. It isn't a part of those agreements. There are a lot of stunts Hasbro can pull in an attempt to kill the OGL, but attacking the right of unrelated parties to make agreements with each other would be the toughest to...

There's a lot of OGL-licensed work that does not derive from anything published by Hasbro/WOTC. For this reason there will likely to be new works produced under OGL 1.0a even if Hasbro jackhammers the foundation of everything derived from its SRDs.

While it was possible to publish something under the OGL and the d20 STL, the only license that applied to Open Game Content was the OGL because of this part of Section 2: "No other terms or conditions may be applied to any Open Game Content distributed using this License." Therefore a second...

I did not know Fate did that in order to use Creative Commons. It's very cool. https://www.faterpg.com/licensing/licensing-fate-cc-by/

Nobody needs to keep portions of a work outside of the OGL. The declarations of Open Game Content and Product Identity serve that purpose by delineating what portion can be shared. Creative Commons lacks a concept like Product Identity -- the ability to share a portion of a work while...

It would be a terrible injustice if games created using the SRD that both Hasbro/WOTC and the publisher considered legal at the time ever stopped being legal because Hasbro became insecure about the size of its revenue stream. Copyright in games is extremely complicated when there isn't a safe...

They were only stuck with the OGL on work they had previously published, though. WOTC was not required to keep publishing new versions of the SRD.

There's another use case to consider: Relicensing a work that has multiple works in its Section 15, not just the SRD. A publisher should have the right to continue to benefit from their work being reused in new products. Hasbro shouldn't be able to stop that.

OGL 1.0 is here: https://web.archive.org/web/20001008122128/https://opengamingfoundation.org/ogl.html When I compared it to OGL 1.0a with Diffchecker.Com, the only difference I found was in Section 7 where the reference to "any Trademark" changed to "any Trademark or Registered Trademark."

I wouldn't say that anyone has nothing to lose in a legal dispute. Being sued was the biggest challenge to my mental health that I've ever experienced in my life. And it took up a [bleep]-ton of time. And I gained 30 pounds in four months. And I got to know what it feels like to have a lawyer...

That makes sense. Nothing grinds work to a halt like needing permission from people several rungs up the corporate ladder. Or the lawyers.

When you've created a game derived from the SRD and licensed under the OGL, you can only publish it without the license by replacing everything protected by copyright that was derived from the SRD. Otherwise you're publishing something that you have already admitted is a derivative work without...

WOTC released a new SRD for version 5 in 2016 and updated it six months later to version 5.1. That's a lot more than an errata update. It would be interesting to find out what exec(s) made that happen.

Paizo describes Starfinder as being built on Pathfinder which was built on the SRD.

It is not required to put the System Reference Document in Section 15 of an OGL licensed work. The only reason to list the SRD there is to indicate that your work is derived from it. There are OGL-licensed games that do not include the WOTC SRD in Section 15. An example is D6 Fantasy: