Ryan Dancey -- Hasbro Cannot Deauthorize OGL

I reached out to the architect of the original Open Gaming License, former VP of Wizard of the Coast, Ryan Dancey, and asked his opinion about the current plan by WotC to 'deauthorize' the current OGL in favour of a new one.

He responded as follows:

Yeah my public opinion is that Hasbro does not have the power to deauthorize a version of the OGL. If that had been a power that we wanted to reserve for Hasbro, we would have enumerated it in the license. I am on record numerous places in email and blogs and interviews saying that the license could never be revoked.

Ryan also maintains the Open Gaming Foundation.

As has been noted previously, even WotC in its own OGL FAQ did not believe at the time that the licence could be revoked.

7. Can't Wizards of the Coast change the License in a way that I wouldn't like?

Yes, it could. However, the License already defines what will happen to content that has been previously distributed using an earlier version, in Section 9. As a result, even if Wizards made a change you disagreed with, you could continue to use an earlier, acceptable version at your option. In other words, there's no reason for Wizards to ever make a change that the community of people using the Open Gaming License would object to, because the community would just ignore the change anyway.

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[Clint_L]

I'm confused why people bring up CR, which has very carefully tread around WotC IP and only uses the OGL for Darrington Press

Because CR is monetizing D&D in ways that put Hasbro to shame.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

per·pet·u·al
/pərˈpeCH(əw)əl/
See definitions in:
All
Finance
Horticulture
adjective

Mod Note:

Could you please format this post into a more compact format? Thanks!

 

[ChaosOS]

Because CR is monetizing D&D in ways that put Hasbro to shame.

That doesn't answer the question regarding the OGL; Wizards of the Coast has no ability to claim royalty rights over the characters and world created for CR, which is where all that additional monetization comes from. Even under this draft they can only claim open gaming content, such as subclasses, but they don't automatically gain IP rights to Taldorei even if Darington Press published another book under this 1.1. In fact, I strongly suspect that Darrington Press is a 3PP that's least affected by these changes because they're not a high volume publisher; I would be shocked if their annual revenue was much over a million even in a release year, let alone the off years when it's just trickle sales that may not even cross the $750k royalty threshold.

These rights changes are MUCH more clearly pointed at competitor VTTs, especially upstart ones like Foundry and Talespire that don't have licensing agreements with WotC, in an attempt to clear the pathway for their eventual 1D&D VTT.

 

[sigfried]

Hasn't it been firmly established that game mechanics can not be copyrighted and are thus fair game? So as long as I am not publishing Elminster Goes To Waterdeep, how does this really affect me?

That is accurate, the mechanics are not, it is the expression (how you describe) the mechanics that are protected by copyright.

It affects people that use the OGL, which is a lot of publishers for various reasons.

 

[S'mon]

Please review Here: Hello, I am lawyer with a PSA: almost everyone is wrong about the OGL and SRD. Clearing up confusion.

Seems a lawyer says the legal definition of "perpetual" dos not mean the same as the dictionary. Seems he might be right, but I'm not enough of a legal expert to be sure.

Perpetual is not a legal term of art. The judge will consider what it means with all the context. In some cases judges have held it means 'indefinite', with the contract terminable on reasonable notice. In others it may mean irrevocable. AFAIK in this kind of open licence (eg open software), perpetual has indeed been held to mean irrevocable. And I think most lawyers looking at the OGL 1.0 would think that's what it was intended to mean, and was treated as meaning by all parties.

It's not 100% either way. In the eyes of the law, Perpetual does not always mean Irrevocable. But I think in this particular case that's the way to bet.

 

[S'mon]

contra proferentem There seems to be a principle that in take it or leave it agreements any ambiguity shall be held against the party who redacted the contract.

In English Law at least, contra proferentem is only reliably applied to exclusion clauses ("We're not liable if we don't do what we said we were going to do") - your Cornell link gives the example of insurers not compensating for water damage. Personally I think the principle makes sense to apply to all standard form contracts - certainly you should not be able to rely on an ambiguity in a contract you yourself wrote. But this would need to be argued. You can at least consider extrinsic evidence to resolve ambiguity; in the case of the OGL it seems clear what WoTC said it meant, what they intended it to mean, and what everyone thought it meant.

 

[Dias Ex Machina]

Another point to consider, back in 2008, when 4E released the GSL, few companies signed on, but one of the few that did was Goodman Games. I was working with them back then, and one of the stipulations about the GSL was a moratorium on releasing adventures. I think you couldn't release books until November of 2008. But Goodman, wanting to release product immediately, published a series of 4E-compatible adventures. I own all of these--NONE of them have any OGL dialogue at all within their pages. They just say 4E-Compatible, and that was it. Only one of three featured a copy of the original 2000 OGL within their pages.

 

[Xisiqomelir]

Hey look - this account still works!


<waves to all>

I love the historical parallels between M$ fruitlessly and ineffectually raging against the GPL as exposed in the Halloween docs

and ex-M$ hack Rawson's attempt to do the same to the OGL which will hopefully suffer the same ignominious end.

You are a hoopy frood Mr. Dancey!

 

[Staffan]

Not just that, so was WotC. It was still a privately owned gaming company owned by Peter Adkison. It was not the multibillion dollar juggernaut known as Hasbro.

Hasbro bought Wizards in 1999, the year before 3e and the OGL was released (and I'm not sure, but I think the OGL/SRD wasn't finalized until 2001, and previous stuff was done under a draft version and a "gentleman's agreement" that as long as 3PP fixed things up when finalized, the stuff done under the draft version was safe). However, Hasbro initially had a very "live and let live" attitude to Wizards: "You keep the money coming in, you can keep doing whatever it is you're doing."

Also, I'm pretty sure Peter Adkison never owned Wizards of the Coast – certainly never all of it and likely never even a majority. See, Peter wasn't very good at business when Wizards was formed, and his legal advisors were... questionable. So when Wizards was formed and could assign shares as seen fit, Peter wasn't assigned any shares at all. Instead, what ownership he eventually had came from "sweat equity" – basically, being paid shares as part of his compensation for his job.

Edit: I figure some people might want a source on that.

I was a bit surprised when the OGL was originally released so many years ago; I just couldn't wrap my head around how it could possibly be good for WotC. While it led to a glut of bad games/products, it provide publishers with an opportunity to produce a lot of very good games, many of which are sadly no longer in production. From my point of view, it always looked like WotC made it easier for other publishers to compete directly against them.

The idea was basically two-fold. The main idea was that core books are much, much more profitable than sourcebooks and particularly adventures. But sourcebooks and adventures have a secondary effect: they support the core books, essentially serving as marketing (IIRC, Ryan Dancey once described the entirety of the D&D product line as self-sustaining advertisements for the PHB). So if you can get other people to publish those sourcebooks, you can rake in the core book dough without spending as much on support material.

The second idea was that it was OK if people used d20 derivatives for their own games, because doing so would make the d20 system kind of a lingua franca. That would make it easier for people who had played, say, the d20-based Farscape RPG to move to D&D. A related issue is that if many people know d20, that means many people likely play d20, so it's easier to find a group playing d20, and once you're in that group you're more likely to buy d20 stuff which basically means the PHB.

And then there was of course the semi-secret third purpose, of future-proofing access to D&D.

 

[Bagpuss]

I just wish the word "irrevocable" appeared in the OGL v1.0!

Good news! It appears in OGL v1.1

Bad news! It appears in the bit about what WotC gets to do with content produced under the license.

WotC also gets the right to use any content that licensees create, whether commercial or non-commercial. Although this is couched in language to protect Wizards’ products from infringing on creators’ copyright, the document states that for any content created under the updated OGL, regardless of whether or not it is owned by the creator, Wizards will have a “nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, sub-licensable, royalty-free license to use that content for any purpose.”

And they get to use it for "any purpose" even pantomimes.