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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kwalish Kid" data-source="post: 4324387" data-attributes="member: 446">First, this is a pretty good post.However, it is also symptomatic of some of the posts in this thread that absolutely drive me crazy. Perhaps it's part of a greater political issue so this post will get trashed.Essentially, open licenses are an economic issue and it is plain that the average internet citizen has a woefully inadequate understanding of the basic economics that rule their existence. Copyright is the only way publishers can make money and open licenses are antithetical to copyright. This is why WOTC was very careful in their copyright restrictions in regards to the OGL and what elements of their intellectual property could and could not do. I am quite confident that Paizo is equally careful, though the scope of their copyright concerns may be slightly different.As it is, the current economic system in North America (where most of the action is) is extremely punishing to companies that are not careful with their copyright. The companies with the most profit-taking ability are the ones that will succeed and supplant other companies. Copyright is a form of government granted rent that allows publishers to gain rent regardless of the quality of the produced physical object. Essentially, this means that publishers can skimp out on the production value and rely on the strength of the intellectual content. If all the intellectual content of Paizo's Pathfinder system was freely available, they would be in serious trouble financially, as any publisher could compete with them in an unprotected market, thus drastically driving down the cost of their books. It is the same for any work. Thus it is a poor investment for a company to throw capital at a project guaranteed to drive down profitability by throwing away government granted subsidy.What this means is that every publisher, and everyone who wants to keep their employment with that publisher, has incentive to continue to reserve content as the sole intellectual property of the company. This is incentive to keep open content gaming far from being completely open. Every company that gets involved in open gaming has the incentive to impose tighter restrictions on their open content because it increases the scope of their intellectual property. Sometimes, this means that the company choses "closing" content because they see more benefit from that than from continuing to take part in open content. I'm not sure that I would call this "hijacking", but I can see the appeal of the term.If people really want open gaming, then they have to seriously organize something outside of the normal profit streams of traditional publishing. This may even require significant political action to change laws or even the economic system whereby reward is given for intellectual property.</blockquote>

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