OGL and ORC; A Marriage made in Heaven?

[Ruin Explorer]

The revised GSL, released in early 2009, made no mention of the Open Game License whatsoever, as I recall.

Ahhh that must have been the reason for the revision and why we finally saw a trickle of 3PP material coming out.

Another great boneheaded self-own from WotC which they ended up backing down on.

 

[rcade]

Insofar as whether or not it's possible to publish a product under two difference licenses, we know that the answer to this is an unambiguous "yes." That's because we've seen it before, many times: during the d20 era, a lot of products were published under the Open Game License as well as the d20 Standard Trademark License (this latter license having the publishers agree to additional restrictions in exchange for being able to use the white-and-red d20 logo).

While it was possible to publish something under the OGL and the d20 STL, the only license that applied to Open Game Content was the OGL because of this part of Section 2: "No other terms or conditions may be applied to any Open Game Content distributed using this License."

Therefore a second license in an OGL-licensed work can only be applied to Product Identity or the parts of a work that are neither PI nor OGC.

 

[Voadam]

Didn't the GSL specifically forbid that lol or did the later GSL revision un-forbid it? Or did Kobold just give two fingers to the GSL?

The original gsl had a poison pull provision that would kill ogl use for a product line used under the gsl. The revised gsl did not have that provision. I assume kobold and Goodman and others only used the revised gsl.

Terms of the gsl are not in gsl products.

 

[rcade]

1.0a becomes a dead/legacy license. Old stuff that used it remains, but no new stuff comes from it.

There's a lot of OGL-licensed work that does not derive from anything published by Hasbro/WOTC. For this reason there will likely to be new works produced under OGL 1.0a even if Hasbro jackhammers the foundation of everything derived from its SRDs.

 

[Voadam]

There's a lot of OGL-licensed work that does not derive from anything published by Hasbro/WOTC. For this reason there will likely to be new works produced under OGL 1.0a even if Hasbro jackhammers the foundation of everything derived from its SRDs.

Wizard's position appears to be that the ogl is de-authorized so no new ogl stuff at all as the license is no longer operative and cannot be used to share ogc anymore. People can use their own original stuff but no longer share under the ogl. Even non srd based stuff.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Wizard's position appears to be that the ogl is de-authorized so new ogl stuff at all as the license is no longer operative and cannot be used to share ogc anymore. People can use their own original stuff but no longer share under the ogl. Even non srd based stuff.

Are they going to go to court over that, though? Seems like there's no upside to doing so.

 

[rcade]

Wizard's position appears to be that the ogl is de-authorized so new ogl stuff at all as the license is no longer operative and cannot be used to share ogc anymore. People can use their own original stuff but no longer share under the ogl. Even non srd based stuff.

Hasbro/WOTC has no involvement in OGL-licensed works that did not use its SRDs. It isn't a part of those agreements.

There are a lot of stunts Hasbro can pull in an attempt to kill the OGL, but attacking the right of unrelated parties to make agreements with each other would be the toughest to achieve. Games like OpenD6 Fantasy -- released by West End Games under the OGL to free the community to continue its development -- are going to still be reusable.

 

[Alzrius]

Are they going to go to court over that, though? Seems like there's no upside to doing so.

The upside would be if they go to court and win a judgment in their favor, presumably.

 

[Alzrius]

Hasbro/WOTC has no involvement in OGL-licensed works that did not use its SRDs. It isn't a part of those agreements.

Their position is that they are part of those agreements, because they own the OGL's copyright. Hence their purporting that they can revoke the license (though that remains iffy). In the event that they're right, they can refuse to let anyone else publish new material under the OGL v1.0a, whether it uses their SRDs or not.

If two companies want to create deals with each other outside of the OGL's framework, that's something that Hasbro has no say in.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The upside would be if they go to court and win a judgment in their favor, presumably.

No responsible lawyer would take that case. WotC has nothing meaningful to gain, and probably couldn't even claim damages. I'm not sure, at this point, WotC would even definitely have standing to bring that case in first place, in fact. That'd be the first battle there - proving you had standing to interfere in that.