Hello, I am lawyer with a PSA: almost everyone is wrong about the OGL and SRD. Clearing up confusion.

[mamba]

The reason for calling it OGL 1.1, as far as I can see, is purely rhetorical.

might be that too, as in 'the OGL is not going away'

I don't know what you mean by "a newer version revokes the old version" - that's not a concept that is part of the terms of the OGL as a licensing agreement.

wasn't the leak say something along the lines of 'this license revokes / de-authorizes the OGL 1.0a', to me saying something like that in an OGL 1.1 is more convincing than in a GSL 2.0

 

[mamba]

PF1 is a separate RPG from D&D. So is C&C, and arguably so are OSRIC, Swords & Wizardry, etc. But publishing any of them without a licence from WotC would (in my view) risk losing a claim to copyright infringement

I tend to agree, I was saying independent, not separate. Might not be a meaningful legal term though Think of Savage Worlds or something else clearly not D&D derived

I'm not expert enough to say how big the risk is, but clearly greater than - eg -the risk of Vincent Baker losing a claim to copyright infringement by Apocalypse World, and even than the chance of Luke Crane et al losing such a claim of infringement by Torchbearer.

I agree there is a gradient, no idea anyone knows where exactly the line is between something that violates WotC's copyright and something that no longer does. Would be great if this were less gray

If what you have in mind is, say, PF2 which - as per a recent post (or announcement?) Paizo are saying they could have published without a licence from WotC, then I still think the risk of keeping the OGL in their product is extremely low, as (i) they have a permission from WotC to reproduce it (conferred on them by their licensing agreement with WotC) and (ii) the worst possible outcome is a C&D from WotC in respect of it.

agreed, there isn't any legal harm in having the 1.0a in it, whether it is needed or not

 

[pemerton]

wasn't the leak say something along the lines of 'this license revokes / de-authorizes the OGL 1.0a', to me saying something like that in an OGL 1.1 is more convincing than in a GSL 2.0

The leak said that one of the terms (or, more likely I think, a summary of one of the terms) in the draft v 1.1 states that the OGL v 1.0a is no longer an authorised licence agreement. But to me that seems like it will be part of the terms of the new agreement. It is not a legislative act by WotC, or an attempt to "de-authorise" the OGL v 1.0a for existing parties whose licences remain on foot.

 

[mamba]

The leak said that one of the terms (or, more likely I think, a summary of one of the terms) in the draft v 1.1 states that the OGL v 1.0a is no longer an authorised licence agreement. But to me that seems like it will be part of the terms of the new agreement. It is not a legislative act by WotC, or an attempt to "de-authorise" the OGL v 1.0a for existing parties whose licences remain on foot.

I guess the answer is 'no one knows', but I am asking anyway What does de-authorize mean ? My interpretation is anything under 1.0 can / does remain under 1.0 and can continue to be published, but nothing new can use that license any more, even if the 3PP already published other OGL 1.0 products in the same line.

 

[pemerton]

I guess the answer is 'no one knows', but I am asking anyway What does de-authorize mean ? My interpretation is anything under 1.0 can / does remain under 1.0 and can continue to be published, but nothing new can use that license any more, even if the 3PP already published other OGL 1.0 products in the same line.

"De-authorise" doesn't mean anything in the abstract, and I would be very surprised if that phrase appears in v 1.1. (It is not part of the leak that I saw: We got an official leak of One D&D OGL 1.1! Watch Our Discussion And Reactions!).

If v 1.1 describes v 1.0/1.0a as not an authorised licence agreement, that will have meaning only in the context of the rest of the contract, which will explain the significance of a licence being authorised or not authorised.

Trying to guess what terms WotC will actually insist on is commercial speculation, not legal speculation. From the legal point of view, they could do what you suggest, or they could make it a requirement of entering into the new licence that a party cease to distribue any work licensed under the current OGL. I don't see that either would pose any legal problem.

 

[FrogReaver]

"De-authorise" doesn't mean anything in the abstract, and I would be very surprised if that phrase appears in v 1.1. (It is not part of the leak that I saw: We got an official leak of One D&D OGL 1.1! Watch Our Discussion And Reactions!).

If v 1.1 describes v 1.0/1.0a as not an authorised licence agreement, that will have meaning only in the context of the rest of the contract, which will explain the significance of a licence being authorised or not authorised.

Trying to guess what terms WotC will actually insist on is commercial speculation, not legal speculation. From the legal point of view, they could do what you suggest, or they could make it a requirement of entering into the new licence that a party cease to distribue any work licensed under the current OGL. I don't see that either would pose any legal problem.

I think the gizmodo article had fuller details.

Link below:
Dungeons & Dragons’ New License Tightens Its Grip on Competition

 

[mamba]

I think the gizmodo article had fuller details.

Link below:
Dungeons & Dragons’ New License Tightens Its Grip on Competition

this one was fine it had '1.0a is no longer an authorized version' right in the first sentence, which is what I referred to as de-authorized. The rest of the answer covered my question.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

take the idea and change it to update it. Make a creative commons OGL for things... but make sure Irrevocable is in there. But you have to keep it up to date every few years

As someone who's been around the FSF and OSS since it got its start, I beg to differ about the OGL. It is an utterly crap license. It is written poorly, and since it is with a trustworthy steward, it is unusable. It is barely a coherent legal document at all. Read the CC licenses sometime, When we share, everyone wins - Creative Commons Note how much more carefully they are constructed, by experts in the field of open licensing, not random corporate lawyers plus a gamer or two. OGL has unsolvable issues, which WotC is likely to start exploiting. I mean, the very fact that they think they can construe it to be terminable or revocable at all makes it virtually worthless as an agreement (I think think it was a reasonable success as a PR instrument which conveyed WotC's intent back in 2001 fairly well).

So it is absolutely time for everyone to roll on over to CC Org and license themselves up using CC-BY-SA, which provides very similar licensing to what OGL intended, but works!

 

[pemerton]

I think the gizmodo article had fuller details.

Link below:
Dungeons & Dragons’ New License Tightens Its Grip on Competition

I think this sentence in the article - "One of the biggest changes to the document is that it updates the previously available OGL 1.0 to state it is “no longer an authorized license agreement." - is a bit misleading from the point of view of addressing technical questions.

There won't be an update to the OGL v 1.0. OGL v 1.0 can't be updated in the literal sense - what section 9 permits is the use of alternative versions that are promulgated by WotC. This contrasts with (for instance) my contract with my bank, which the bank does have the authority to update while it remains the very same contract.

And the OGL v 1.0 will not state, of itself, that it is no longer an authorised licence agreement.

Rather, there will be a term in v 1.1 which says something to the effect that parties to the OGL v 1.1 agree not to use the v 1.0/1.0a licence; and if v 1.1 has an analogue of section 9, which to me seems likely given it will probably be a (quasi-)open copyright licence, that provision may expressly state that v 1.0/1.0a is not an authorised version for the purposes of that provision.

But no terms of v 1.1 can be binding on anyone who is not a party to it.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Does Creative Commons have anything like the product identity/open game split the OGL did? If someone wanted that, would they put a section at the end of online that was like an SRD excerpt that they would say was CC?

You could certainly create a work where you indicated which license applied to which pieces. So you could have NC-ND sections, and NC-SA sections, or purely SA sections, etc. I see no reason why that would not work fine. Wikimedia has a mixture of all sorts of stuff by the different licenses, they simply indicate for each 'thing' which way it is licensed. OGL allowed, practically required, that you indicate parts that were and were not PI and not covered, so its no different really.