Legal Discussion of OGL 1.2

[Darkholme]

[Deleted]

 

[Darkholme]

Did I do it right?

[Seems I did not].

Who knew I had so many ancient SRDs on my harddrive.

Let me know if anyone wants my backups of those SRDs to do their own thing with.

 

[Darkholme]

Yup!

Absolutely bonkers.
So much of what they're threatening to sue people over, they didn't even make.

 

[SoonRaccoon]

I expect clawing back the 5e SRD is the main thing they really care about right now. If a 3.5 derived game becomes the next hot thing, they may try to flex their legal muscles there, but that's not the current landscape. Any truly third party content released under 1.0a WotC likely doesn't give a second thought to.

 

[Saracenus]

I apologize if I've missed it, but I haven't seen lawyers discussing 9(b) of OGL 1.2 draft yet:

(b) Entire Agreement and Disclaimer of Reliance. This license governs your use of Our Licensed Content. This license consists only of the terms expressly included herein, and not any matter not expressly included herein. In accepting this license, you represent and warrant to us that you have relied only on the terms of the license and the advice of your own counsel, if any; you have not relied on anything that is not expressly a part of this license.

I have no idea if this is standard or not, but this seems to me to be intended to allow them to blatantly misrepresent the license in materials distributed with it, and say "oops" later, and provide insulation agains the type of representation they provided for 1.0a in their FAQ.

?

(Also, does 1.0a not having this type of clause and one being added now increase the weight of the old FAQ and other communications surrounding 1.0a, or is it completely irrelevant?)

See my post earlier in the thread linking a YouTube of Nerd Immersion (Ted) and Noah Downs, Esq. (AKA MyLawyerFriend):
OGL - Legal Discussion of OGL 1.2
They go over this section and in modern contracts this is, apparently, completely normal. In fact Noah had blogged before the release of 1.2 that is was bonkers that WotC's 1.1 "draft" didn't contain this section.

 

[pemerton]

Absolutely bonkers.
So much of what they're threatening to sue people over, they didn't even make.

I didn't know WotC had threatened to sue anyone.

 

[Justice and Rule]

I didn't know WotC had threatened to sue anyone.

I believe the threat is pretty implicit in what they've been doing.

 

[demoss]

See my post earlier in the thread linking a YouTube of Nerd Immersion (Ted) and Noah Downs, Esq. (AKA MyLawyerFriend):
OGL - Legal Discussion of OGL 1.2
They go over this section and in modern contracts this is, apparently, completely normal. In fact Noah had blogged before the release of 1.2 that is was bonkers that WotC's 1.1 "draft" didn't contain this section.

Thank you! That's a great video (ok, first half an hour is great, still watching). Anyone interested in the situation who is not lawyer should probably watch it.

 

[Staffan]

Did I do it right?

I'm not a lawyer, but to my untrained eye what you've done here is just repost the content, and haven't made it a separate work. What you should probably do is:

• Go over the files and make sure there's nothing in them that the original publisher has called out as product identity. For example, I understand that there's a spell in the 3.5e SRD that uses umber hulk blood as a component, and you probably want to get rid of that.
• Write your own legal statement with declarations of product identity and open game content. Look at the legal.rtf file in the 3.5e SRD for an example. You should almost certainly not copy their declaration verbatim, because in doing so you'd declare that the terms Dungeons & Dragons, Wizards of the Coast, Forgotten Realms, etc. are your product identity, and that seems like a big no-no.
• Update section 15 of the OGL in each of your publications.

That seems like a minimum you'd need to do, and I can't guarantee that that would be enough.

 

[mamba]

For those interested, esp. the first 1:30 minutes or so… better yet the first 4