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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8885020" data-attributes="member: 42582">Who is being defrauded? What financial advantage is WotC getting via dishonesty?As best I can tell, you have no idea what WotC has said to whom, what commitments have been made, and what the state of mind was behind each of those communications. The suggestion of fraud is utterly baseless.What seems to me to be happening is hardball commercial tactics in the context of a complex distribution of IP rights under a private law scheme. This is the reality of "private orderings" and commercial ownership of cultural content working itself out.Publishers who signed on to the OGL knew they were hitching their commercial wagon to WotC's copyrighted texts. They knew that WotC retained all its IP rights, and that as publishers their position depended upon the legal effectiveness of the licensing regime.If the regime is in fact effective - and I fully accept (as per [USER=13085]@Steel[/USER]-Wind's posts in particular) that 20 years of commercial conduct and relationships is part of the contractual regime - then publishers can stand on their rights.Conversely, if WotC has legal rights and powers that no one noticed up until now, that's how it is. I don't see why WotC is obliged, out of all the parties involved, to renounce its legal rights and powers as a matter of charity. Ryan Dancey certainly didn't present the OGL as a vehicle for charity - he argued quite forcefully that it was a commercial strategy for growing WotC's sales.If 3PPs thought that their legal position was only sound so long as they were buttressed by a presumed commercial or PR reality that WotC would would refrain from asserting its full rights, well now they're discovering that WotC see the commercial and PR reality differently. And it's not as if there is no precedent for this - a similar thing happened with the GSL.For my part, and building a little bit on [USER=93631]@Greg Benage[/USER] post not far upthread - without suggesting that he would endorse what I'm saying in this post - I don't have sympathy for the view that everyone is entitled to exercise their commercial and legal rights except for WotC which is obliged to act as a charity. And my own view is that 3PPS probably do have rights under the OGL, which they could then rely on for their defence.The issue of WotC potentially abusing its market power in relation to OBS is a separate thing altogether, and as I posted upthread seems to come closer to raising anti-trust/competition law issues (though my expertise on that is thin enough that I don't pretend to know how close it might actually come to the level of impermissible conduct).</blockquote>

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