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

[rcade]

And I would expect Warehouse 23 to get a cease and desist shortly after. This is Lawfare and it looks like Hasbro is not playing games.

Steve Jackson Games sued the Secret Service and won, a court fight that led to the creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It isn't going to stop selling legal PDFs because another RPG publisher wants to do a Thanos snap on 23 years of open games.

 

[Uta-napishti]

This is what happens when you put former Microsoft people in charge of something released under an open license. They have absolutely no understanding of how open licensing functions and consider it a virus to be wiped out from everything they were taught under Ballmer.

Bingo. Hope they enjoyed having their butts handed to them by the Open Source Software community because they are about to get the same pain, ignominy and scorn from the RPG ecosystem. Heck they may have actually left Microsoft BECAUSE it was learning it's lesson and opening up.

 

[Prime_Evil]

Here's a question. The OGL v.1.0 prohibits licensees from adding or subtracting anything from the terms of the licence:

No terms may be added to or subtracted from this License except as described by the License itself. No other terms or conditions may be applied to any Open Game Content distributed using this License.

This statement seems to apply only to Open Game Content and not Product Identity. Could a licensee designate most of a derivative work as Product Identity and then release the Product Identity under a different licence (say Creative Commons)? Would this provide any protection against revocation / termination of the parent licence since the Product Identity is embedded in a derivative work?

 

[Prime_Evil]

Invoking Iron Maiden is always a good strategy!

 

[Azzy]

This, folks, is what is known as Nuclear Lawfare. It's completely legal and is how larger corporations have been sticking it to smaller corporations for decades upon decades. If the smaller litigant has enough, it can become a mutually assured destruction scenario, but it requires a major amount of funding to get there.

It's disgusting how the law is the playground of the rich at the expense to the rest of us.

 

[overgeeked]

Steve Jackson Games sued the Secret Service and won, a court fight that led to the creation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It isn't going to stop selling legal PDFs because another RPG publisher wants to do a Thanos snap on 23 years of open games.

What percent of One Shelf's business can it lose before it's no longer viable as a business? What percent of One Shelf's business is due to WotC and its products? Unless that second number is drastically smaller than the first, One Shelf isn't going to fight. They'll roll over.

 

[GracefulBreath]

This is the bit that confuses me (as a non-lawyer).

The core part of the OGL is this:
4. Grant and Consideration: In consideration for agreeing to use this License, the Contributors grant You a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive license with the exact terms of this License to Use, the Open Game Content.

"Use" is defined in the OGL as "to use, Distribute, copy, edit, format, modify, translate and otherwise create Derivative Material of Open Game Content."

"Distribute" is further defined to mean "to reproduce, license, rent, lease, sell, broadcast, publicly display, transmit or otherwise distribute"

So, when Paizo released Pathfinder, they used the OGL, and were thus granted a perpetual license to license Open Game Content. So given the license's viral nature, I should be able to rely on e.g. Paizo's offer of the license instead of Wizards'. And there are a few places that have copies of the SRD published without any changes.

And this license is printed in quite a few books, as required by the license itself. That printed license promises me that I can use the Open Game Content in that book under the terms of the license. Again as a non-lawyer, this does not seem like a thing Wizards should be able to revoke.

also NAL, but i think that maybe any 3rd party content for Pathfinder counts as a derivative work for the purpose of what classifies as OGL content since Pathfinder itself is OGL content.

 

[S'mon]

What percent of One Shelf's business can it lose before it's no longer viable as a business? What percent of One Shelf's business is due to WotC and its products? Unless that second number is drastically smaller than the first, One Shelf isn't going to fight. They'll roll over.

I dunno. Rolling over seems akin to a Mafia takeover. If I were them I'd rather take the hit and lose WoTC business while staying independent. As opposed to becoming a client/vassal of an obvious bad actor. After all, WoTC is happy for me to go out of business and drive sales to their owned subsidiary D&D Beyond.

 

[rcade]

What percent of One Shelf's business can it lose before it's no longer viable as a business? What percent of One Shelf's business is due to WotC and its products? Unless that second number is drastically smaller than the first, One Shelf isn't going to fight. They'll roll over.

OneBookShelf may not be as willing to knuckle under as people think.

OneBookShelf is the top site for selling TTRPGs and wargames as PDFs, owning as much as 80-90% of that market. If Hasbro demands it stop selling legal PDFs that puts the company in a quandary. Rolling over for Hasbro and angering other publishers and customers might be an acceptable tradeoff while Hasbro is selling D&D products there, but what happens if Hasbro decides it can make more money by selling PDFs directly instead? It might be in OneBookShelf's best interest long-term to avoid helping Warehouse 23 cut into its market share by kicking legal PDFs off the site and sending their publishers to that storefront.

 

[Uta-napishti]

This is why I put in a ticket ahead of time requesting my account be deleted. I do not trust WotC not to do something sneaky. I provided the information they requested on Thursday, but I have not heard back. I’m guessing account deletion is a manual process.

It's manual, and yes, I also have put in an account deletion request.