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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8898026" data-attributes="member: 42582">My point is that the whole idea of a safe harbour is to provide shelter from shenanigans. If people flee the harbour at the first sign of shenanigans, then either (i) they're confused or (ii) it was never a safe harbour at all!Anyone can send a C&D, or a claim for your money. You must get them all the time in your spam folder, just like the rest of us. That is not exercising control - it's just one party exaggerating it's legal rights. A safe harbour can't, and never could, stop that happening. The point of it is to actually create legal rights.For me, this gets to the heart of it: if no one is prepared to lean into the could not, because they were all relying on the would not, then the whole notion of a legal guaranteed safe harbour was a charade. It turns out the OGL, in practical terms, was no different from a reassurance, repeated by WotC from time to time, that they would be nice and let people play with their toys.To me this makes no real sense.WotC is now - it seems - purporting to unilaterally change the terms of its licence contracts. Paizo could do exactly the same thing in the future. A promise by Paizo now that it won't do that is worth no more or less than WotC's promise 20 or 10 or 2 years ago that it would not.This is what I mean by the legal stuff all turning out to have been an apparent waste of time. 3PPs got a robust legal agreement from WotC, but as soon as WotC huffs and puffs they run away - perhaps rationally so, given the costs of litigation, but their legal protection turns out to be worthless to them.So why does anyone think getting differently-worded legal protection from Paizo makes them any better off. As you note, a Paizo of the future could huff and puff as well, and the costs of litigation are unlikely to go down over time.This is, in a formal sense, no different from the existing state of affairs, where many publishers have their own SRDs licensed under the OGL or similar licences.In a practical sense, it seems to me that Paizo clearly wants 3PPs to cluster around it's games, so it can get the same benefits from 3PP licensing as Ryan Dancey wanted WotC to get. If they succeed, their commercial situation seems analogous to WotC's.EDITed to correct misattributed quote (with apologies to [USER=7039785]@Jerik[/USER] and [USER=7993]@Nikosandros[/USER]).</blockquote>

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