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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8898016" data-attributes="member: 42582">You've had a reply or two to this.I want to add: a lot of discussion proceeds on a confused view of how the OGL works, legally.When WotC (or anyone else) releases a publication (such as an SRD) "under" the OGL v 1.0/1.0a, what they are doing is offering to enter into a licence contract, on the terms of the OGL, with any party who agrees to those terms. And what the licence does is authorise the licensee to reproduce the licensor's copyrighted text, and to publish other work that might be an infringement of the licensor's copyright; and also to pass on to further parties a licence over the same text on the same terms. What makes it a contract is that the licensee also makes promises to the licensors (eg WotC): they promise not to reproduce product identity, and they  promise to make their own copyrighted OGC available on the same licence terms.The effect of this sort of approach to copyright licensing is to create a big, intricate network of contracts between all the parties who are using one another's OGC. You can see the links in this network expressed in the section 15 declaration in each publication that is published pursuant to these licences.There are three ways that the original licensor (eg WotC in respect of its SRDs) is different from all the other links in the chain:(a) It freely made the offer to license its SRD. Therefore it can retract that offer at any time. Whereas other parties have made a binding contractual promise to keep their offers open. The practical implication of WotC withdrawing its offer is small, because there are other parties who have already taken up the offer and so are contractually entitled to keep producing the SRD text and to sub-license it to others. (b) WotC has a power to publish variant licences under section 9 of the licence agreement. Because the same section allows downstream licensees to pick and choose from the published variants, the significance of this power is modest. (As the original OGL FAQ explained.) (c) WotC owns the copyright in the licence text itself. Because an important term of the licence is that licensees must reproduce it in their licensed publications, this means that they need permission from WotC to reproduce its copyrighted text. This permission has been either expressly granted (there were some notices from WotC to this effect back in the day, I believe) or implicitly granted as part of entering into the licence itself.In this thread, I think the only lawyer to defend the view that WotC can withdraw its licences, despite its contractual promise to grant them, is the OP. Even if that view is correct, which I think is doubtful, it would leave all the other contracts in the network, in respect of other parties' OGC, undisturbed - WotC has no power to terminate contracts that exist between (say) me and you, even if the terms of our contract are set out in text copyrighted by WotC.If, contrary to what I think is the better view, WotC was able to withdraw its licence, that would make the surviving contracts more complicated, because some of them might concern OGC which (in the absence of a licence from WotC) is infringing of WotC's copyright. But the contracts themselves would survive.</blockquote>

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