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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Halivar" data-source="post: 1825326" data-attributes="member: 9327">You can't compare "WotC-a-subsidiary-of-Hasbro-MegaCorp-Intl., LLC" to "Philreed's PDF Shack" (no offense, just poking fun), because they run off of completely different business principles.  I'd say that releasing wholesale OGC is definitely a risk to you, and damages you most. Therefore, you should seriously consider "crippling" your work. I think you can and should do this, as should other small 3rd-party publishers. Why? Because the community loses less when you go the closed content route. 3rd-party publishers are known for creating aids and crunch for either their own campaign settings, or generic d20. Rarely have I have seen anyone use another 3rd-party publisher's content as the basis of their own. The goal for the 3rd-pary publisher, therefore, is to make the content easy to use at the dinner table and protecting meager sales, but not necessarily for other publishers to use the published content as the basis of their own.  WotC's a different story. WotC has less to lose by OGC'ing entire books and more to gain from marketshare it gains in the process. If everyone in RPG-land has all of your PDF's, but never bought a copy, "Philreed's PDF Shack" is going out of business. If every other American has the 3.5 SRD printed out and bound in a folder, WotC is going to start selling Frostburn in Wal-Mart; IOW, WotC will find a way to capitalize on the spread of their OGC content.  This is the very reason why OGC will never die at WotC. Every huge corporation that goes the "open" route finds out the same thing IBM and Novell found out with Open Source software: open can make you more money than closed. When you open your IP, your IP gets used; then it pervades, and soon your brand recognition is like gold. You can slap your trademark on a turd like Planar Handbook and folks like me will scarf it up for $30 a pop.  Ok, time to summarize. If you're worried about WotC as a result of a UA SRD, don't be. The very thing that costs you money make them money.</blockquote>

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