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I would only boycott Kickstarter if it stopped allowing new projects licensed under OGL 1.0a.

If Hasbro/WOTC carries out the legally dubious attempt to kill OGL 1.0a I'm done as a customer. I've enjoyed buying all the hardcovers and playing each new edition since 1979, but the company lying about the intent and purpose of the OGL to kill the open gaming commons is too much to abide.

Hasbro/WOTC could publicly abandon its plans to modify the OGL, ask Ryan Dancey to set up the Open Gaming Foundation as a real organization and give the copyright of the current OGL to the foundation.

When everybody stops using OGL 1.0a. That's not a likely outcome, since there will always be small, amateur or not-for-profit publishers producing TTRPGs and related content. If they find something in an OGL 1.0a-licensed work they want to extend, they'll be doing that even if everybody bigger...

With or without Melniboneans?

Was there ever a period when most players got their D&D books from gaming stores? Even in the 1980s when D&D was smaller there weren't that many stores selling RPG products. We had to look for them at bookstores, comic book stores, toy stores and even hobby stores like Michael's. The place I got...

I'd rather say that the benefits were mutual. Hasbro/WOTC shared a single document under the newly created OGL believing this would make the company more money and the idea wildly succeeded.

Hasbro/WOTC doesn't need to touch the OGL to win that battle. It just has to launch its own VTT and use its power as market leader to drive players to it. When Microsoft Teams launched in late 2016, Slack had 5 million users. By late 2020 Teams had 75 million and Slack had 12 million. The...

Anything that's in the public domain -- such as a wolf or the adventurer Allan Quatermain -- can be used in a Creative Commons-licensed work or any other copyrighted work. This wouldn't be enclosing the commons because other authors could still use them. The only things that would be protected...

The contributions of lawyers and legal experts are extremely valuable but there are aspects of what they say that are worth some pushback. This isn't just about the law. It's about what thousands of gamers believed about the OGL for 23 years, the actions taken because of the OGL and what we...

It is a commons in the same way that the GPL created a commons. Expensive lawyers at a giant entertainment corporation can try to spin a new reality into existence, but for 23 years we all believed the OGL was completely risk-free to rely on and we had good reason to believe it. Especially...

We don't know what Paizo would have done without the OGL offering a safe harbor that WOTC said repeatedly was written to be relied on forever. We do know that Paizo is exceptionally good at publishing and supporting a game compatible with D&D. It's reasonable to believe that it could've done...

There's also a moral argument for protecting the open gaming commons. If a person or company has contributed work to the commons under OGL 1.0a, they intended it to be shared forever under those terms. Some of those people and companies no longer exist. They won't be moving to another license...

WOTC is trying to unring a bell. Courts will do what they do, but it should be impossible to ever take OGL 1.0a-licensed content out of the commons after it was published. It would be like someone publishing a book under a CC-BY-SA license 20 years ago and announcing today "we are withdrawing...

Because it's surprisingly difficult to put something into the public domain worldwide, Creative Commons offers a license for that purpose: https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/

Austin Walker calls the OGL "an enclosure of the commons" in this article but there was no commons at all before the license was introduced in 2000. It would be more accurate to call Hasbro's actions today an attempt to enclose the commons.

Hasbro might, but it would be arguing "nobody can copy our license" at the same time it argues "everybody must copy our license." If a court had to rule on this, it might use the Reformation clause as justification to allow "You MUST include a copy of this License with every copy of the Open...

If Hasbro forbid the reproduction of OGL 1.0a and publishers started putting "This work is licensed under the terms of Open Game License 1.0a (not reprinted here) and has the following Section 15 and identification of Open Game Content and Product Identity," the only parties with standing to...

I'd like to hear what lawyers think about the Severability Clause in OGL 1.2. As an author I've signed a lot of contracts that had a Severability Clause. I've never seen one that also says "if any of this is held to be unenforceable we can choose to cancel the entire thing." That's the opposite...

Probably for the same reason that Disney stopped paying royalties to authors who wrote tie-in novels for Star Wars and its other franchises -- because the company is so big it thinks it can get away with it. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-05-11/disney-star-wars-writers-of-royalties