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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7028080" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, that's been a hypothesis, that WotC wanted to make it distinctive enough that a 4e clone or non-GSL 4e supporting product would run afoul of copyright, or at least fall into a grey area they can enforce. Its hard to say because nobody seems to have ever run into that issue. There are quite a few things that have no GSL on them that work with 4e, and WotC has generally only objected when it was software that leveraged DDI data, and that would likely never have been subsumed in any hypothetical 4e OGL anyway. I personally doubt they were driven by that logic in any significant way. It certainly doesn't apply to any setting or background material because none of that is covered by OGL anyway, and that's where a lot of the changes that seem fairly arbitrary from a "make a better D&D" standpoint are anyway. In other words, they didn't invent the World Axis to replace the Great Wheel, because the Great Wheel isn't GSL anyway, its product identity (aside from possibly some generic locations that could be construed to be drawn from actual mythology like perhaps the City of Brass, some elements of Hell/Baator, etc). The rest of 4e seems pretty self-coherent, and in any case has plenty of stuff in it that would scare away cloners in all likelihood anyway (like power names, block formats, etc).</blockquote>