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Bah! A sorcerer doesn't have special "magic genes", any more than a king has special "royal genes". The sorcerer has the power to tell reality what to do, whether inherited by bloodline or acquired by some other method (including "some otherworldly influence" and "exposure to unknown cosmic...

No, we fully expected that Hasbro-owned WotC might turn evil in the future. After all, Hasbro was a big company, and its shareholders wouldn't give a fig for us. What we thought was that the OGL that came out of the discussions wasn't vulnerable to Hasbro turning evil. To repost myself from a...

Look, sure, back in 1853, when a Philadelphia publisher translated Uncle Tom's Cabin into German, it didn't violate Harriet Beecher Stowe's copyright, because all translation is paraphrase, and paraphrase is automatically not a "word for word" copy. The legislative reaction to that sort of thing...

Yes, but that's not the same thing as it being easy to navigate. There's a whole area of copyright law on "derivative works" that does not simply go away just because you paraphrase, no matter how many times people repeat "Copyright protects expression, not ideas" like a mantra. Ideas per se...

Well, yes, but the stuff that the OGL says is always OGC is the stuff least protected by copyright, the raw rules and mechanics. Thus the statements by people like Legal Eagle, the EFF, Cory Doctrow, and many others that the OGL didn't really give people anything, based on their looking at what...

The biggest problem with "you don't need the OGL to be compatible" is that it leans heavily on what the OGL declares is always OGC, and not on the "any additional content clearly identified as Open Game Content by the Contributor". Yes, it is entirely possible to make things that are...

Well, for example, the EFF post on the OGL 1.0a originally said that, but then it was updated to change its position. This is because, per them, there's a legal difference between a unilateral license, and a contract with obligations on both sides. If the OGL 1.0a were the former, it'd be...

I agree entirely. As far as I am concerned, adding the "irrevocable" statements would do exactly two things. It would serve as symbol that WotC would not in the short term throw their weight around, and it would avoid a WotC of ten years from now having one of its lawyers say, in an internal...

So, my (not-a-lawyer) proposed language for an acceptable OGL 1.0b: 1. Definitions: a. "Authorized" means any version of this license that Wizards of the Coast, Inc., or its authorized agents have, at any time, represented as valid terms for the Use of any Open Game Content...

Advice -- don't assume that level of misunderstanding applies only to "our hobby".

Ooof. When your mistake makes the Financial Times, you're going to have to start explaining things to large shareholders.

I mean, yes, they did, but that isn't what got Role Aids ended. In 1982, TSR claimed Mayfair was improperly using the AD&D trademark, and sued; Mayfair and TSR then settled in 1984, with an agreement that allowed Mayfair to use the AD&D trademark in one very specific way to indicate...

I'm not a lawyer, but there's no way to automatically allow all Open Game Content released under the OGL to be used under a non-OGL license. The original copyright holders (WotC for the SRD/MSRD/RSRD/SRD5 and 3.5 Unearthed Arcana, Clark Peterson for the original Creature Collection, Sword &...

Well, we don't have ORC yet; it's just a plan, not a license. It's going to be months before ORC is actually ironed out. And even if WotC were to re-release their SRDs under ORC, that doesn't re-license all the 3PP released under the OGL over the last 23 years. A thoroughly-solid OGL 1.0b...

As someone who participated both in the Netscape/Mozilla Public License discussions (on a Netscape-hosted news server) and the OGL discussions (on the OGF listserv), I can tell you the reason the OGL didn't have it is the same as the reason the NPL and MPL didn't have it -- nobody ever even...

Right, but the comment that sparked my response was suggesting that even if Hasbro changed course and made the current OGL irrevocable, people would still boycott D&D. My position is that Hasbro can still recover by fixing things, not that Hasbro can just wait things out without fixing them.

Define "big" and "movement"? There was a lot of anger and declarations of eternal enmity, particularly in the period before Paizo announced its intentions for the Pathfinder RPG and people could just say "I'm leaving for that." I, um, may have been one of those voices.

The year 2016 is entirely my point. If Wizbro reverses course, people will cool down. People who declared eternal enmity to WotC over the GSL in 2008 did not hold on to that in 2016.

For example, I don't recall many people in 2016 saying they were going to continue boycotting WotC over the GSL.

If they make it super duper irrevocable, who needs trust? I mean, imagine a scenario (I don't claim it's likely) where they issue an OGL 1.0b that: is explicitly irrevocable, explicitly defines "authorized" in a way that de-authorization can't happen, explicitly declares that the offer is...