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It's way worse, actually. The CCA was formed by an association of publishers and distributors who agreed to a restrictive set of moral standards in response to the threat of lawmakers getting involved (it was a moral panic). The proposal here is a dictatorship ruled by a single company aiming...

I think there's a possible argument here that WotC can a) withdraw their standing offer to contract with future licensees directly but not b) withdraw an existing licensee's right to sublicense the same content to another. This is widespread and accepted practice in the open source programming...

Let me rephrase my question. Do you think we would have more 1b TTRPG publishers if it wasn't for the OGL? And what kind of games do you envision that these hypothetical game studios would be making?

Do you think this situation arose because of the OGL 1.0a? I've heard several people vaguely allude to this being the case, but they never really present a coherent reasoning. Nobody was forced to employ that license. And D&D was the biggest brand before 2000 too. Vampire the Masquerade had...

There are positive contract laws in many jurisdictions.

@Cergorach largely nails it here. Our only power to effect current business decisions is to generate bad PR and mobilize a consumer boycott. Our ability to do this is obviously limited. But killing the OGL 1.0(a) isn't just an innocuous business decision, it's illegal. So this can only end in...

Probably not. But they're very much welcome to.

I think that analysis is sound. And it is why I think the "playtest" scheme is disinginuous at best.

If they legally had this gun pointed to everyone's head the whole time, why didn't they pull the trigger when Pathfinder 1st edition first appeared? Even if their specific method might have forced them to let the initial slate of releases live, they could have killed support for the product and...

So your argument is that you can get away with essentially stealing the IP of anyone who doesn't have the money, capacity or awareness to sue you? I can sort of see your point. But I don't think this sounds like a great business plan either. :)

I have read it.

This isn't even WotC's argument. They're going with a declaration that the license is "deauthorized". Have any of the lawyers here actually argued for the legality of that specific method?

For some reason, they're specifically going for the owlbear and the spell magic missile, as mentioned in the blog post. I guess these figure heavily in the upcoming film? I won't pay to watch that by the way.

Well, it's not actually a good-faith negotiation. It's a "compliance technique". They're not actually going to give you anything. They have nothing to give, and if they do, they could have done so without illegally violating OGL 1.0(a) to begin with. It's all a distraction...

Yes. We are in agreement. I just tried to elaborate on the point for those who are not familiar with the distinction between copyright and trademarks. These get confused a lot.

It's not just the system, most of which probably isn't protected by any copyright anyway. It's much, much more (hello owlbear!). Besides, WotC can't legally place all the third-party OGL in a CC-license anyway.

I utterly refuse to accept that this attempted maneuver is in any way legal. The "deauthorization" nonsense is hogwash. You can of course personally agree to a new license that specifically supersedes the old one if you wish (rendering it unauthorized for you specifically), but I won't. And I...

A separate brand compatibility agreement would be a great boon! The original OGL was designed to be used in conjunction with such a license, the D20 System Trademark License. Paizo has a similar thing in it's Pathfinder compatible licenses. And these separate licenses should absolutely contain...

I don't personally care about any VTT stuff myself either, but this is dangerous rhetoric. We can't let them divide and conquer us, and so I won't even entertain the notion that I could sell out their interests in exchange for safeguarding my own in a new deal. The VTT folks should have the same...

Can we get the OGL tag removed from this thread please?