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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4569995" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm with those who don't really understand all the WoTC-directed hostility.The GSL has two main components: the bit that says that you may publish a product that uses the D&D trademark, and that such a product may refer to but not substantially reproduce or alter the text in the 4e rulebooks; and the bit that say that, if you do this, you have to drop publication of similar products that contain content derived from the SRD.The first bit is a pretty functional replication of the OGL for those publishers who wish to provide supplementary material for D&D (leaving aside details like the stat-block problem - I assume that this is the sort of thing the revision is intended to address). It is a functional departure from the OGL for those who want to exploit the market's familiarity with the D&D rules (as incorporated into the SRD) in order to produce RPG material that is not supplementary to D&D. I can see why WoTC have decided to withdraw support for this second sort of endeavour. They have decided that Dancey was wrong in thinking (i) that d20 will conquer the gaming world, and (ii) that this will always be to the financial benefit of WoTC. That's not an absurd conclusion to reach after nearly a decade of experience with the OGL.The second bit is an attempt to force publishers to choose between supporting 3E or non-D&D RPGs, or supporting 4e (at least on a per-product line basis). By the standards of a commercial licencing agreement that seems only very moderately aggressive to me, but then I'm not involved in the entertainment industry, so that is a purely outsider's perspective.Those who are defending WoTC by appealing to a libertarian theory of the contract I think are going to far - even those with a much more norm-governed notion of the contract (eg like Xechnao, I think, who seems to reflect something closer to the European notion of the contract) can still agree that it is entirely WoTC's prerogative to decide on what terms it wishes to licence D&D IP to other commercial entities. This is not a case of anti-competitive or otherwise anti-social behaviour, as far as I can tell. No one is being prohibited from participating in the RPG market.Those who think that WoTC has a moral duty to make the text of the 4e rulebooks reproduceable by other for free I think ought to explain why the 4e rulebooks are different in this respect from every other RPG ever published, or indeed from every other text ever published. Why is WoTC uniquely prohibited from enjoying the benefits that IP law confers on publishers? Why is WoTC uniquely precluded from determining the terms on which it licences the reproduction by others of its text or trademarks?</blockquote>

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