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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 8931303" data-attributes="member: 8461">Leaving aside that I'm not sure how "Product Identity" works under Creative Commons (i.e. I don't believe they use that term), I'm honestly not concerned about future WotC execs trying to revoke/de-authorize the OGL, because it's ultimately a "six of one, half-dozen of the other" situation.The practical impact of the OGL being revoked/de-authorized is that if WotC does that, they'll sue you for copyright infringement if you try to publish anything (that uses one of their SRDs) under it after the date they supposedly terminate the license. But as multiple lawyers here and elsewhere have noted, that's not a strategy that's likely to succeed, in terms of legal merit; anyone saying that they've committed no infringement because the OGL is still valid regardless of WotC says will probably succeed.And yet numerous publishers are still running away from the OGL, apparently under the belief that whether or not they could win in court is less important than the fact that they'd presumably never be able to afford the legal fees. In other words, that WotC doesn't need to win in order to make whoever they sue lose.But that idea, that WotC can sue you and bankrupt you via the process regardless of the legal merits (or lack thereof) of their arguments is an issue which works regardless of the license you use. There are plenty of instances of civil suits being filed over Creative Commons.Which is to say that this idea, that material released under Creative Commons guarantees that WotC won't revoke/de-authorize the OGL because doing so would be functionally irrelevant, strikes me as being hopeful (almost desperately so) rather than any sort of reliable guarantee of safety for publishers. Because unless one of WotC's SRDs is the only Open Game Content you've used, then you can't just transfer an existing OGL product line over to Creative Commons if WotC tries to terminate the OGL; every product that you cite in your Section 15 has to make the jump to CC also, and that's probably not going to be the case in a considerable number of instances.Plus, you know, the entire "parallel market" I mentioned before; while I foresee 3.5 SRD-derived Creative Commons products as being in the distinct minority (since they don't have twenty-three years' worth of products to draw upon), they're still going to create a distinct niche of games which operate in their own sphere of sharing, apart from the OGL, representing what I think is an unfortunate fragmentation of what was otherwise a fairly united open gaming market.For what it's worth, the same results (i.e. a shoring up of the "safe harbor") could have been made if WotC released a hypothetical OGL v1.0b – which added the word "irrevocable" and clarified what "authorized" meant – and then simply turned ownership of that version of the OGL over to the non-profit organization that Paizo and Azora Law are creating to safeguard their ORC license. But given that organization doesn't exist yet, I suppose that's a bit too pie in the sky.</blockquote>

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