And what supplies that context if it is something else other than what the terms of the license says.
Context can be pretty varied.
There might be a contract that refers to the licence. This contract might set out expressly, or establish by implication, circumstances in which the licence can be revoked or simply comes to an end.
There might be an established relationship within which the licence is granted, and that might inform the understanding of the rights of the licensor and licensee.
There might be established industry practices which were presupposed by the parties to the licence.
Etc.
So in software, when creating something that is called a subclass, it means that certain features and functionality are inherited from a parent class. As far as contracts goes, if I include an explicit termination clause is there some feature or functionality that the contract can "inherit" that can also affect termination under current jurisprudence?
The whole instrument has to be read and interpreted.
One upshot of that might be a recognition that a particular clause has been drafted a certain way in order to ensure it operates in the way that an earlier court case adjudicating the same drafting held the earlier clause would operate. But this won't always mean the new clause works the same way, because the overall content of the instrument might be different.
wouldn't the explicit Termination Clause in Section 13 override the implicit consequences of deauthorization? Just as the UK court held, that a explicit Termination Clause overridden the Perpetual license grant?
Overriding is not the right word, I think. Rather, the presence of the termination clause helps establish the meaning of the clause that refers to a "perpetual" licence.
I've posted a bit about section 13, including not too far upthread in reply to S'mon.
Section 13 does not expressly state that it is the sole basis for termination/revocation. So to interpret it in that fashion would require drawing an implication from its inclusion, and from the failure to include any other reference to revocation or termination, that it is the sole basis.
I agree with
@S'mon that in a thread like this it's not really feasible to canvass the arguments for drawing such an implication. We would need to consider in detail what exactly WotC licensed in its SRD, the full technical character of the powers granted to licensees under the licence, what industry understandings are about revocation of licensing contracts and how such revocation interacts with granted rights, etc. I think the OP overstates the case for revocability at will to quite an extent; but I want to be careful not to overstate the case in the other direction. I have an intuition that section 13 is the sole basis for termination, but an intuition isn't an argument!
After reading S'mon's and
@Steel_Wind's posts I'm more persuaded that the stronger argument is not a technical reading of section 13, but an estoppel-type argument based on WotC's encouragement, via its FAQ but also I think via individual communications from Ryan Dancey (which I think have more significance here) and also by its acquiescence for 20-odd years, of an understanding that it cannot unilaterally revoke the licensing agreements it has entered into.
CODA: Here's an idea I just had to strengthen the argument that there is no power of revocation outside section 13. Section 9 is labelled "updating the licence" but doesn't really deal with updates at all. Rather, it enables new variations of the licence to be issued by WotC, and gives parties a choice of which variant (including the original) to use. So if WotC has no power even to unilaterally update, does it make sense that it nevertheless has a power to unilaterally revoke? Furthermore, if parties could unilaterally revoke, that would render this conferral of a power on other parties to choose their licence potentially nugatory, as the exercise of that power could be thwarted by the OGC contributor simply revoking.
I don't think the above argument is anywhere close to a knock-down one: it's just something I came up with in the past 5 minutes or so. But hopefully it gives you (and others) an idea of how arguments about legal interpretation work, and the sorts of ideas that will figure in resolving any legal contest over the existence of a power to unilaterally revoke/terminate.
