Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Enrahim2" data-source="post: 8889544" data-attributes="member: 7039850">(IANAL) Well, here the tricky legalese legwork come in working come in. Section 1.0a section 9 doesn't specify that you need to accept the lisence the OGC was originally contributed under in order to publish it under 1.0a provided 1.0a is "authorized". Hence even if the 1.1 agreement spelled out that the lisencee agreed to not use OGL material in any 1.0a publications, an entity not bound by 1.1 would still be free to use any OGC that 1.1 compliant entity published under 1.1, citing the grant of 1.0a.However puting the statement the way they do in 1.1 creates some important legal ambiguities. For one thing it appear the action of stating something is "no longer an authorized lisence" is not having any well defined meaning in contract law. There is hence room for interpretation. <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">One interpretation is that it is meaningless nonsense, and should just be ignored.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Another is that it somehow is an very weird way of writing the much less ambigous "Which is hereby revoked", which seem like most consider an illegal claim and hence void.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The third interpretation I propose is that it adresses the "authorized" term in the update section of the license it claim to update. Hence asserting the notion that this "authorized" term that regulates which lisences can use material from which lisences can be specified in connection to the act of doing the update.</li> </ul>This third interpretation I still haven't seen any strong arguments for being fully invalid. Hence from an interpretation perspective it seem like this should at least be given some more consideration before being discarded in favor of one of the two likely void interpretations.With this way of formulating it, it bypasses the issue that a 1.0a licensee has not accepted 1.1, as it rather adresses the state of 1.1 relative to 1.0a section 9. For someone to claim use of the 1.1 material they must justify that they consider 1.1 a "version of this lisence". However the sentence justifying such an assertion in 1.1, also include the claim that 1.0a is not aithorized. So either the 1.0a lisensee cannot claim 1.1 to be an ogl lisence, under section 9, or he has to claim 1.0a is not authorised as well, hence admitting the section 9 do not grant them the right to publish the ogl 1.1 material under 1.0a.TL<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />R 1 the suggested formulation could have been claimed not accepted by someone using 1.1 material in 1.0a. This formulation is cleverly placed so the 1.0a cannot conduct such activity while not claiming acceptance of it.The problem: It was too clever, so noone not informed about the intended "plain language" interpretation might be prone to jump to the wrong interpretation, even if that was (obviously) legally invalid, unenforcable and cartonishly cruel if intended. The big mystery is why wizards didn't write this out as a comment? Maybe they didn't want to draw attention to how this creates a one way vacuum from all ogl material into an exlusive VTT platform? Maybe they intended to scare/trick people under NDA not immediately seeing the right interpretation into signing binding contracts, before releasing the document publicly with a comment explaining the proper understanding to the world? Maybe they were so blinded by the brilliance of their clever legal footwork  that they didn't realise it could be misinterpreted the way it did? This I guess we will never know for sure, but my guess is that they will claim the last in their next update..Unless they have taken the suggestions of people describing how they can exploit this situation to crush all competition to heart, and figured it actually might be a more profitable path forward than their original plan.</blockquote>

Verification