Goobermunch
Explorer
mxyzplk said:
I'm a lawyer and I know how it works too. A non-compete is unlikely to be effective for these kinds of purposes. The reason is that many non-competes are unenforceable. There's a general public policy against restricting a worker's ability to use his or her skills in the market. While the specifics of the rule will vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, noncompetes have to pass tests on their reasonableness before a court will enforce them.
For example, using the jurisdiction with which I am most familiar, in Colorado, noncompetes are presumptively void unless they fall into one of four limited categories. Those categories are:
(a) Any contract for the purchase and sale of a business or the assets of a business;
(b) Any contract for the protection of trade secrets;
(c) Any contractual provision providing for recovery of the expense of educating and training an employee who has served an employer for a period of less than two years;
(d) Executive and management personnel and officers and employees who constitute professional staff to executive and management personnel.
None of these would apply to a freelancer working on 4e. A, C, and D are clearly inapplicable, as WotC will not be selling their business to the freelancer, nor providing training to the freelancer. Generally, executive and management personnel are folks within the corporation, not independent contractors.
As for the protection of trade secrets section, WotC would first have to show that the material a freelancer was provided with constituted a trade secret. Since the 4e SRD is going to refer to specific passages of the 4e PHB, DMG, and MM to define terms (rather than post the relevant rules in one place), they're going to have a hard time showing that anything is secret. Once they publish the rules for public consumption, it loses trade secret protection.
In addition, even assuming that a noncompete was held to be valid under the laws of the jurisdiction, generally, it still must be reasonably limited in time and geographic scope. There is an excellent argument that imposing a noncompete on a freelance writer for any significant period of time is categorically unreasonable. Unlike a typical employee, who enters into an employment contract with the expectation of retaining employment, a freelancer's reasonable expectation is to complete a project and start looking for new work. I would argue that a noncompete of longer than a month is objectively unreasonable under those circumstances.
Open Gaming is here to stay. And we have yet to see any actual evidence that WotC is declaring war on all Open Gaming. We have seen statements from Scott and Linnae that indicate that a publisher will have to chose between supporting 4e and 3.xe, but I'm not prepared to accept that the GSL will impose a choice between 4e and the OGL. Until we have the terms of the license in front of us, it is too early to make any kind of educated statement regarding its effects.
--G
