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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jer" data-source="post: 7797495" data-attributes="member: 19857">I remember those days and I remember thinking that Dancey was being overly aggressive in his push for the OGL.  But also I remembered how TSR would throw cease-and-desist orders around like they were kleenex before they went bankrupt and prevent people from publishing things on very similar claims just because they had lawyers and the smaller guys didn't.  So it didn't seem outside the realm of possibility simultaneously that a) Dancey was wrong and b) nobody would ever be able to afford to litigate it.The OGL was put out there as a "detente" with the Internet community - you agree to follow these minimal rules regarding our "Product Identity" (note that it was never trademarks or copyright that they asked people to respect - it was specifically a collection of assets that there is in fact some question of how much ownership they can claim over them) and we'll let you publish inside those rules freely.  If you don't want to use the OGL okay, but then the spectre of a lawsuit is going to hang over you and if you cross a line Wizards doesn't like then they're likely to come after you and it'll be a potentially costly lawsuit.(Are folks around here old enough generally to remember the bad old days of T$R on Usenet?  These days I think people remember TSR fairly fondly, but the early-to-mid 90s TSR before it went bankrupt was not a cuddly company that people had good feelings for precisely because of how they treated fan works, let alone other publishers who they thought were creeping into "their" territory.)</blockquote>

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