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

[Ondath]

Wonder if they might have the same take as me earlier in this thread. The "no longer an authorised" quote without the update context, alongside the faq claim without the term it explained, making correct legal understanding impossible. Hence rilling up people over the completely false inference that wizard somehow intended to shut down the 1.0a ecosystem.

That might indeed explain wizards silence! They may have mapped out their thinking to Opening Arguments, having a third party both break the news, and wouch for their legal position. If they have done this right, and actually have the legalese on their side (that they might have had months, maybe even years of time intensly mapping out) - this might turn into a PR masterstroke!

Well if that were the case I'd say their current attitude is entirely foolish as it belies a false sense of confidence and a wrongly aggressive attitude.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

But he was talking specifically about the court upholding the intent of the parties to the contract. That is practically a 'rule', certainly in English law. He was not talking about contract law in general. He was talking about how a court interprets & applies the express & implied terms of a contract.

Ugh. No. Look, if you are talking about certain issues (for example, "consideration," "offer," "acceptance," "irrevocability,") then you have moved beyond simply the intent of the parties and into the area of contract law. These are words (jargon) that mean things. There are rules (common law, statutes, UCC, etc.) that matter!

Again, I prefaced that be saying that I appreciated his simplifications for purposes of explanation; but that particular passage suddenly made everything overly-simplified and misleading. It would be like someone saying, "Look, property law is nothing more than a historical battle between courts trying to get rid of dead head control, and clever people trying to ensure that their dead hands controlled property forever."

True, but also .... not helpful. When we are discussing revocation, it has specific meanings in contract law.

 

[Enrahim2]

and that the conclusions were mostly in line with the lawyers in the forums are saying.

Remember that the lawyers here mostly were first witnessing the ogl via her cherrypicking. With those cherries it appear the conclusion that they are trying to revert was basically obvious. By the time the full document leaked, the lawyers here mainly were in denial, was mainly interested in talking about how a revert claim could play out, or (likely wisely) tried to avoid talking about spesifics of this document.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Remember that the lawyers here mostly were first witnessing the ogl via her cherrypicking. With those cherries it appear the conclusion that they are trying to revert was basically obvious. By the time the full document leaked, the lawyers here mainly were in denial, was mainly interested in talking about how a revert claim could play out, or (likely wisely) tried to avoid talking about spesifics of this document.

Please don't misgender Linda. Their not her.

And that doesn't make any difference, dude. The OA people are also going off the article. They literally said so!

And it's dishonest to call it "cherrypicking" now we've seen the OGL, because Linda covered every major point. It's not like there are a bunch secret good points that Linda hid from us. In fact, I was in slight trepidation that the OGL might turn out to be reasonable after all. And it was NOT. If anything it was even worse.

 

[Ondath]

Remember that the lawyers here mostly were first witnessing the ogl via her cherrypicking. With those cherries it appear the conclusion that they are trying to revert was basically obvious. By the time the full document leaked, the lawyers here mainly were in denial, was mainly interested in talking about how a revert claim could play out, or (likely wisely) tried to avoid talking about spesifics of this document.

Except... No? We all have access to the full document now, and there WotC clearly says "Your only option in making OGL content after 13 January will be OGL v1.1-Commercial/Noncommercial". We know that WotC is trying to spin the update as unavoidable, so the conclusion Linda reached is still supported without cherrypicking.

Not to mention the fact that Linda said they received legal counsel before publishing this piece as well. It's not like they're a non-law person completely drawing their own conclusions. The article itself is informed by legal opinion. So OA's aggressive attitude seems really uncharitable to me.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

So OA's aggressive attitude seems really uncharitable to me.

It's worse than uncharitable, it's actively malicious. They both accuse the individual journalist of being intentionally deceptive (which is insane reach, if they are, all journalists, including them, are) and also literally encouraged people to attack the individual journalist. Not to say "Be skeptical of this publication" or the like - literally to attack the journalist.

 

[glass]

I think it's a mistake to believe that if the OGL had included the word "irrevocable" Hasbro/WOTC would not be trying to jackhammer the foundation underneath 23 years of open gaming. If Hasbro was going to come after the OGL it would've found another dubious legal pretense on which to base its attack.

It would not have made it impossible that they would try, but I feel like it would have made it less likely.

Now, if I want to integrate material from two third-party publishers, each of whom chose a different licensing mechanism for their use of the open content, that I don't know.

AIUI (IANAL), you have to comply with both licences. If you cannot do that, because complying with one makes it impossible to comply with the other and vice versa (as I believe is the case with CC and OGL), then you cannot combine the materials so licensed unless you can obtain a third licence that is compatible with one of the other two.

 

[Steel_Wind]

Wonder if they might have the same take as me earlier in this thread. The "no longer an authorised" quote without the update context, alongside the faq claim without the term it explained, making correct legal understanding impossible. Hence rilling up people over the completely false inference that wizard somehow intended to shut down the 1.0a ecosystem.

That might indeed explain wizards silence! They may have mapped out their thinking to Opening Arguments, having a third party both break the news, and wouch for their legal position. If they have done this right, and actually have the legalese on their side (that they might have had months, maybe even years of time intensly mapping out) - this might turn into a PR masterstroke!

When there are delays in speaking to commercial legal issues like this, you look to the following to cover most of it. This is a non-exhaustive "Occam's Razor" list of boring explanations:

1 - somebody who is charge of this PR rollout on it is unavailable, ill, bereavement, on vacation, etc..

Or, there is some other in-house legal concern involving some other aspect of their business which is time sensitive (D&D Movie, say, or sale of eOne) which is consuming people's attention right now and has delayed when they had expected to deal with this in PR terms by a few weeks.

It all sounds trivial, but this stuff routinely happens. It looks sinister from the outside, utterly banal from the inside.

2 - It seems evident that WotC has been planning this since at least April 2022, when they took down Dancey's comments on the OGL from their own website (Wayback machine confirms the timing). So their lawyers have had a while with this. Still "their lawyers" means in-House counsel and a maybe a partner and an associate (or two) in a retained firm to look at it and come up with a plan for something like this. These are relatively simple agreements to consider in terms of their length and scope (though not on their doctrinal basis and commercial impact - and that's before litigation prospects are evaluated (if they are)).

Sure, you'd think that among ~4 lawyers looking at it somewhat in depth that they would have their ducks in a row and a sufficient plan. And usually? That's true. But people miss things, group-think takes over and stuff just trundles down the road, oblivious to a potential legal pitfall and "bridge out" ahead. Then, the problem is seen and there are meetings, plans to re-draft and change, some guy is on Xmas vacay... it can happen.

And this thread should have twigged you to the fact that 4 or 5 lawyers can have quite a debate about things before they maybe get it ironed out. And that's coming at this from a variety of perspectives (and without hierarchy) to kick the tires and shake it vigorously to see if it all holds. WotC is unlikely to have that benefit.

My point: you can miss stuff. It happens more often than you'd think.

3- It's easy to see this through legal lenses, but this isn't really about a legal problem -- it's about a commercial business plan. And how contracting partners reacted may have surprised them and forced a re-consideration about this, that, and the other thing. It's commercial considerations which drives the train here, the legal stuff just has an important car (so much so that it may be one of the engines, sure), but commercial concerns always take precedence.

OF COURSE it can be more than these relatively banal and straight-forward explanations, no argument. Sill, it is more likely to be something like the above which explains the delay than not.

 

[Cadence]

2 - It seems evident that WotC has been planning this since at least April 2022, when they took down Dancey's comments on the OGL from their own website (Wayback machine confirms the timing).

WotC's web-site is pretty notorious for having things vanish whenever they reorganize something on it (Maro gets questions all the time on his blog about things for MtG side vanishing) - so I wouldn't be surprised if this were the case, but I also wouldn't be surprised if a lot of unrelated things went missing at the same time and it not being there was unrelated to their future plans.

 

[Knuffeldraak]

WotC IS a party to the contract, one of the main considerations that they recieve from the contract is that they are ALSO free to use anyone elses OGC in future book (just like everyone else who agrees to the contract.) They have done this twice, UA & MM3. The fact that they have chosen NOT to excercise this right doesn't make it non-existent.

They've also done this in 4th Edition, as well as on the MtG side in terms of Artwork for their cards.