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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8896955" data-attributes="member: 42582">[USER=6777331]@Matt Thomason[/USER]I think a lot of the discussion around this issue, and around ORC, seems to be driven by some confusion about the legal issues.If X work is derivative of WotC's, then X is liable to a copyright infringement suit from WotC unless X has a licence. The only licence that seems relevant to me in this respect is the OGL v 1.0/1.0a.If X's work is not derivative of WotC's, then the opinion of WotC about whether or not they have a licence with X, in respect of WotC's copyright, is irrelevant. X can publish away. And if X wants to licence their work to Y on the terms of the OGL, the only risk in doing that is that WotC might complain that X and Y are reproducing WotC's copyrighted licence text.So the only reason for moving to ORC that I can see is to avoid reproducing WotC's copyrighted licence text. Whether that move is sensible depends on what the risks are of reproducing that text, compared to the costs of losing all the OGC under the OGL v 1.0a.Talk of "trust" in WotC is irrelevant, because WotC is irrelevant to X's private law relationships with Y. (Even if WotC, for whatever bizarre reason, opts to publish a new authorised licence within the meaning of section 9 of X's licence with Y, section9 permits X and Y to ignore that if they think it's silly.)None of the above is advice, and self-evidently its your prerogative to do what you want to do. But my general view is that decisions that are ostensibly motivated by legal concerns should be based on an accurate understanding of one's legal position, rather than the ludicrous amounts of misinformation that is being circulated at the moment, including many of the posts on this topic on these forums. With the exception of the posts by the lawyers on the "Lawyer PSA" thread that you have participated in, I would say that the majority of posts I've read expressing a view about the legal situation have been either wrong or just incoherent. And the most common cause of that is reasoning as if the OGL were a statute for which WotC is the legislator, rather than applying the correct analytical framework which is one of understanding the content and force of every private agreement that exists between every participant in a given OGC ecosystem. It seems to me that exactly the same flawed reasoning predominates in discussions of ORC also.</blockquote>

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