When I was typing my last post, part of me started to wonder about whether one strand would unravel the entire blanket.
If WotC actually faced a challenge from a belligerent website creator refusing to pull down his D&D-themed information site, could they be in danger of losing not only some old 3.x copyrights, but 4E and the future as well? That would certainly explain their knee-jerk behavior a bit better on a financial basis.
Its always going to be case specific, but generally speaking, I don't think a goof in a legal struggle with a 3.X site, for instance, would cost WotC their 4Ed rights. But if they lose because of a certain error on their part that they repeated with 4Ed or other properties, then the precedent of losing a case in 3.X could, indeed, result in them losing rights associated with those other properties. (That's one reason why contracts get redrafted as opposed to copied and recycled...)
It still doesn't explain allowing CK and sites like it to exist for this long, however. And that length of time of not caring (such as the entire time 3.5 was actually still actively on sale) is what allows us to speculate, with a high degree of confidence, that this action smacks of pettiness or reprisal against those people who refuse to jump on the 4E bandwagon.
Your "confidence" is based on a misunderstanding of law and an absence of facts. The only timetable that matters is whether or not they chose to enforce their rights within the time set forth in law. If they had filed their first lawsuits against ten thousand infringers at 3:45PM the day before their rights expired,
the court wouldn't care. They'd check to see if they filed the documents properly and go on from there.
That lack of caring is, in the eyes of the law, evidence of nothing.
Don't get me wrong, I understand it's not based in fact ... but it sure as hell is based in logic. The timing makes absolutely no sense at all.
No its not logic. There are lots of reasons for doing it now- just because you don't know which one or ones it is doesn't change that. You're asserting a position based on a gut feeling, because the only fact you have is that it happened. For all you know, they could have been tossing this around their legal department, plotting strategy, identifying targets, and debating whether it was worth their time, energy and (most importantly) their money for years before greenlighting this.
Is it possible they're doing this out of spite? Sure. They also could have done it because of a message someone got on a Ouija board or some new hotshot in legal wanted to prove he's Courtroom Ace #1. Its far more likely than any of those scenarios, though, that with margins as tight as they probably are that Hasbro/WotC isn't going to spend $$$ on their legal departments initiating costly lawsuits or taking actions that could result in costly lawsuits without a valid business reason to do so.
Or to put it a different way, if WotC DID do this out of spite and generated a slew of cases because infringers X, Y and Z didn't feel like complying, they'd have to justify their actions to Hasbro. And then what are they going to say? "Almighty Hasbro, we thought our profit margins on 4Ed were a little tight, so we decided on a scorched earth policy against our previous product to drive the market towards it...which has unfortunately raised our legal fees 3000% this quarter."
That won't cut it. That's the kind of thing that gets people- management people, bosses, etc.- fired.
