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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4334215" data-attributes="member: 42582">In most jurisdictions there probably are. But (to use some slightly arbitrary categories) these laws would be part of the law pertaining to banking transactions and consumer credit regulation. They would not have any applicability to intellectual property licences.As I said, I'm not enough of a contract lawyer in Australia, let alone the state of Washington, to offer a useful answer. And the one contract law book that I have on my shelf discusses only mutual variation, not unilateral variation. But I'd be surprised if there is no developed law on the issue.EDIT: There are a few additional complexities. Because the GSL is a licence, ultimately it is up to WoTC to determine on what terms it wants to license its IP. As it has no legal obligation to offer any licence, there is unlikely to be any particularly strong restrictions on the terms it can seek, other than the general prohibitions on contracts that are illegal or contrary to public policy (eg no requirements of slavery or prostitution in order to get access to WoTC's IP).But the GSL is (on my reading) not an entirely unilateral licence, it is a contract - because consideration is flowing in both directions (WoTC licenses the use of its IP, and the licencee agrees to forebear from certain otherwise lawful behaviour, such as reproducing any text from the 4e books, or printing OGL products containing the same content as a book published under the GSL).I suspect (but this is purely intuition, and not especially well-informed intution) that WoTC is precluded from varying the contractual terms in such a fashion as to render the promise given by the licencee completely worthless, or a promise to do a fundamentally different thing. That is, WoTC must continue to give something in return for having received those promises of forbearance from licencees.This means that variations which have effect into the future, but not retrospectively, might be in quite a different category of permissibility from those that are retrospective.A further complication relates not only to variation but termination: namely, in many jurisdictions (including, I suspect, the state of Washington) post-contractual representations, or other ways of generating assumptions on the part of a licencee, on which reliance is then made by a licencee, can in some circumstances generate obligations on the part of WoTC not to depart from those representations (in Australia and England this is called the doctrine of estoppel). Thus, what WoTC says in its FAQ, and in response to the queries of Clark and others, is (contrary to some assertions by some posters in some of these GSL threads) not meaningless and of no legal signficance.</blockquote>

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