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Yeah, the legal position is really not bad, it's just going to be a complicated case, and wotc have a lot of potential risks from getting an adverse judgment.
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Jan 13, 2023 00:57
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NinjaDebugger posted:They literally said they don't believe that the original OGL can be revoked and are prepared to go to court over it. Which puts them squarely in the path of Hasbro’s legal department and money tree. Again, good luck.
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Jan 13, 2023 00:59
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Paizo's site is down at the moment.
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Jan 13, 2023 01:01
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hyphz posted:I mean, it basically guarantees that Wizards will sue them at some point, so good luck to them, but they’ll need it. From the announcement, it sounds like the ORC will be an umbrella licence which individual companies can sign up to and put out SRDs under. Wizards would have no standing to sue unless they could point to something which they could hang a copyright infrngement case on... but if an infringement were found in any individual SRD under the ORC, that wouldn't touch the ORC itself. Wizards might be able to take out individual companies under the ORC umbrella, but they won't be able to nuke the ORC itself... and if they go after, say, the Pathfinder Orc Edition SRD as being the one which a) is closest to Paizo's business, and b) is conceptually closest to D&D, and lose, that really screws the pooch. Paizo's announcement also underscores that their key executives and their attorney were working at Wizards and participated in developing the OGL concept too - which is a particularly fun shot across the bows. It's basically saying "you can sue us if you like, but if it comes down to wrangling over what was intended by some ambiguous wording in the licence, we have witnesses whose word will carry a hell of a lot of weight - do you?"
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Jan 13, 2023 01:02
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Malek Deneith posted:Their entire drive is "D&D is undermonetized, in part because only DMs buy most of the product". Cutting out physical books and moving to all-digital/all-VTT walled garden would allow them to monetize everyone, and in ways they can't with books and imagination. It's a plan that makes a lot of sense... if you're coming from video games sector and have no idea how people actually play RPGs, which the current head honcho's apparently are. Granted it's all speculation, but "the whole plan is to go all digital" is an explanation that fits with what we know of 1.1 to a scary degree. Conspiracy theory: Just like Nokia before, Microsoft has sent an agent to take over, tank and own the company. It happened to Nokia remember. Just think of all the content Microsoft would now own for their gaming business without having to license it. Sure the Microsoft Phone died with Nokia, but they never thought that far ahead.
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Jan 13, 2023 01:04
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Leperflesh posted:The quote from Pixar specifically cites their legal department, and the one from Lionsgate indicates it's company policy. I can find more statements that specifically cite lawyers if you insist. But first, maybe you can explain: why do you think the lawyers working for major studios advise them to return unsolicited scripts unopened? All of them? dmed you to avoid a further derail
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Jan 13, 2023 01:04
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Warthur posted:To what end? "The Wizards won't be able to nuke the ORC" is such a loving amazing sentence and I hope you know that.
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Jan 13, 2023 01:07
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Comstar posted:
Microsoft owns an absolutely insane amount of gaming poo poo if you haven't been paying attention, they recently bought Zenimax studios and are in the process of buying Activision
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Jan 13, 2023 01:08
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hyphz posted:Which puts them squarely in the path of Hasbro’s legal department and money tree. Again, good luck. To clarify, they aren't saying "we don't think the OGL can be deauthorised, so gently caress you, we're going to keep using it in perpetuity", the announcement is "we don't think the OGL can be deauthorised, but we don't want to have to blow money fighting your lawyers over it, so we're going to make our own licence so we no longer have to depend on it". They do say they intend to bring out and sell OGL 1.0a products which are currently at the printer... but I think Wizards would actually be very nervous about bringing that case, because it feels like one where a judge could well say "You need to let them sell those books which they greenlit the printing of in good faith before you yanked the licence, or reimburse them for the wasted money". And if Wizards suffered an adverse ruling there, they'd likely have to put hand in pocket for a bunch of other folk as well. Screenshots of the announcement from before Paizo's site crashed: https://twitter.com/silentinfinity/status/1613682622994989057
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Jan 13, 2023 01:12
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Warthur posted:To clarify, they aren't saying "we don't think the OGL can be deauthorised, so gently caress you, we're going to keep using it in perpetuity", the announcement is "we don't think the OGL can be deauthorised, but we don't want to have to blow money fighting your lawyers over it, so we're going to make our own licence so we no longer have to depend on it". Yeah, that's a slam dunk case of estoppel. Wizards going into court to litigate any of this is going to be a high risk proposition for them and I think it will be an extremely martyr rich environment so they have burnt a lot of their ability to quietly lean on small publishers. Just an incredible pinpoint dickshot, wow
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Jan 13, 2023 01:17
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hyphz posted:Which puts them squarely in the path of Hasbro’s legal department and money tree. Again, good luck. I mean what is the alternative Paizo has? Burning their own building to the ground? Agreeing to OGL 2.0 makes everything completely unprofitable so they might as well pack up shop then anyway. It's clear going forward they and other publishers will use ORC for future systems/content. It seems nearly certain Paizo will do a cleanup pass of Pathfinder 2E (maybe make 2.5 or whatever) to be sure any d20SRD material is gone/non-infringing and release it under ORC. It's not clear what they intend to do about Pathfinder 1E material. Presumably see if Wizards actually wants to sue them over it. There are a lot of people involved in the creation of OGL who would be willing to testify to the intent of the license, but at some point Paizo would have to decide if the cost is worth the profit they're still making on 1E material (not sure how that affects the video games as they're 1E). I seriously doubt Wizards will chase small print operations. It still leaves little guys doing any kind of digital content under threat of endless DMCA harassment by Wizards, but it's not like they can sign OGL 1.1/2.0 and still make money anyway. It still leaves open questions about how survivable some of the tooling like the VTTs are without DND5E (depending on how OGL 1.0a holds up) or DND6E systems.
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Jan 13, 2023 01:18
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Paizo's site is down at the moment. Yeah but what else is new?
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Jan 13, 2023 01:18
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sebmojo posted:Yeah, that's a slam dunk case of estoppel. The OGL 1.0a versions of the books may well end up being collector's items too, because I imagine they will only have one print run before switching to an ORC version.
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Jan 13, 2023 01:19
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Rescue Toaster posted:It's not clear what they intend to do about Pathfinder 1E material. Presumably see if Wizards actually wants to sue them over it. There are a lot of people involved in the creation of OGL who would be willing to testify to the intent of the license, but at some point Paizo would have to decide if the cost is worth the profit they're still making on 1E material (not sure how that affects the video games as they're 1E).
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Jan 13, 2023 01:21
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:Microsoft owns an absolutely insane amount of gaming poo poo if you haven't been paying attention, they recently bought Zenimax studios and are in the process of buying Activision I would not think they would care. They can see how popular BG3 is even before it's come out. I'm sure Microsoft could afford to by Hasbro, and tanking Hasbro's biggest money earner in WOTC would do that. As I said, it's just a conspiracy theory. But we all had Nokia's at one stage.
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Jan 13, 2023 01:24
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:dmed you to avoid a further derail That's cool, but I'll just summarize a reply here by saying nothing you DMed me has changed my opinion, or the facts I cited to support it. Thanks though.
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Jan 13, 2023 01:25
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Comstar posted:I'm sure Microsoft could afford to buy Hasbro, 9b market value vs the 77b they are paying for activision, yeah.
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Jan 13, 2023 01:32
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My guess is by the end of this, the rule from either WotC themselves or a Judge is going to be something to the effect of "WotC is able to update the OGL and make the changes they want, however they are unable to retroactively enforce that on things published before *insert date here" under the 1.0 OGL I don't think any judge or legal proceedings would end in WotC being allowed to after the fact grasp control over the things released with the OGL, which is what happens if WotC is allowed to just publish changes like in that leaked document.
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Jan 13, 2023 01:34
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Dexo posted:My guess is by the end of this, the rule from either WotC themselves or a Judge is going to be something to the effect of The dream would be wizards taking it to court and losing a bunch of copyrighted material like GW did through some disaster of a trial
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Jan 13, 2023 01:37
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Yup. GW won the case against Chapterhouse, but had several things they claimed as trademark/trade dress declared by a court as definitively not trademark/trade dress.
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Jan 13, 2023 01:38
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Dexo posted:My guess is by the end of this, the rule from either WotC themselves or a Judge is going to be something to the effect of I think that's what they intended, it's not a retroactive grab it's just for stuff going forward, but with (as originally intended) a brutally short lead time.
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Jan 13, 2023 01:39
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So Paizo and Friends are teaming up to make a thing, WotC aside, what does that mean for creators who weren't part of that super-alliance? Like I only have passing familiarity with some of the company names mentioned but I assume most of those are at least somewhat unique systems right? What does it mean to publish something compatible with them if they're all different?
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Jan 13, 2023 01:40
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Countblanc posted:So Paizo and Friends are teaming up to make a thing, WotC aside, what does that mean for creators who weren't part of that super-alliance? Like I only have passing familiarity with some of the company names mentioned but I assume most of those are at least somewhat unique systems right? What does it mean to publish something compatible with them if they're all different? They aren't publishing a joint game together. They're just mutually agreeing to their own version of an OGL.
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Jan 13, 2023 01:40
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The Bee posted:They aren't publishing a joint game together. They're just mutually agreeing to their own version of an OGL. Right, but I was under the impression that the OGL per WotC was the thing that let you slap "you can use this adventure path with D&D 5e" on the cover. I take it that's wrong then?
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Jan 13, 2023 01:42
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You could use it for that, but you could also use it to publish your own games that might take a few mechanics/monsters/ etc. from other OGL games without the fear of being sued. Pathfinder 2e, for instance, is not compatible with 5e at all.
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Jan 13, 2023 01:44
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And this is effectively all of these systems saying "hey, we're cool with people doing that for our games", lobbied under one agreement instead of each needing to whip up their own separate license..
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Jan 13, 2023 01:46
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The Bee posted:Nothing short of a public cancellation and apology will be, tbh. And even that may well be too little, too late. If that is the case (and it may be, now), then I expect no apology and they will go through with the updated OGL. Whatever the anonymous employee believes (and their post reads like a D&D Beyond employee, not a WotC employee), there's an extremely narrow band between "this isn't bad enough that we need to do anything but ride it out" and "this is bad enough that we're taking the hit no matter what we do, so we may as well proceed as backing off and apologizing won't make a meaningful different." And nobody is in a position to guess where that dividing line will be. Absent some strong voices in a meeting to arrive at a decision, the WotC execs will proceed. If it looks like the plan will be an ongoing disaster, they jump ship to another corporation. The odds that their careers will be ruined by mishandling the situation are so close to zero that it won't be a factor in their process. Unless multiple people in the room push very hard for a big revision to the OGL, this will get spun as "a vocal minority on the Internet tried to stop our plan, and while *numbers* will go down for a while, we project that revenues will not be substantially hurt once the VTT goes live." Then they wait for a year or two and if things are looking bad for One or the VTT they can jump ship before the launch and their replacements will get blamed for the failure. So long as the execs need to please their superiors and "shareholders," and not their customers, there's no incentive for them to change their current attitude towards us. More to the point, we the Internet have even worse access to numbers than the execs do. How many Beyond subs got cancelled? How many will it take before the execs care? We have no idea. Will this hurt the D&D brand more than 4E's going off the OGL did? More than the glut of products during 3.5 or 2E? All they have to do is argue that it won't, with a side order of "we can't let a few Internet fanatics control our corporate decision making" and they'll have all the cover they need to proceed. At best, we collectively might provide ammunition for someone inside who wants to reverse this decision, but such a person would first need to exist. Leperflesh posted:Yeah the leaked draft 1.1 has explanatory language (which is weird) saying their "intent" is that since people might publish something similar to what they were already going to publish, they need to have it in the license that they can always publish anything that is a copy of what you published. This is all about the VTT, right? So this is a VTT-focused change. They don't care about 3rd party publishes adventure X. They care about their VTT graphics and assets. They have complete access to everything that every user posts there, and they're worried that this massively increases their exposure. "We didn't open the e-mail/letter and so there's no proof we ripped off the idea inside" is radically different from "yes, we can see every piece of data on the VTT, but we swear we didn't actually look."
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Jan 13, 2023 01:56
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sebmojo posted:I think that's what they intended, it's not a retroactive grab it's just for stuff going forward, but with (as originally intended) a brutally short lead time. The phrasing from the leaked version: quote:What if I don’t like these terms and don’t agree to the OGL: Commercial? That’s fine – it just means that you cannot earn income from any SRD-based D&D content you create on or after January 13, 2023, and you will need to either operate under the new OGL: NonCommercial or strike a custom direct deal with Wizards of the Coast for your project. But if you want to publish SRD-based content on or after January 13, 2023 and commercialize it, your only option is to agree to the OGL: Commercial.
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Jan 13, 2023 01:58
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Warthur posted:To clarify, they aren't saying "we don't think the OGL can be deauthorised, so gently caress you, we're going to keep using it in perpetuity", the announcement is "we don't think the OGL can be deauthorised, but we don't want to have to blow money fighting your lawyers over it, so we're going to make our own licence so we no longer have to depend on it". Except that they do have to depend on it if they're deemed to be using copyrightable content from the 3.5 SRD. That was the driven for the OGL in the first place. I mean, look, I can heartily hope that what happens is a judge rules that:
But I can also see it happening that a judge rules that:
And in IP lawsuits I've followed it's become clear that the judges do tend to rule in favor of the rich, successful, IP holders - partly because being rich and successful lets you tilt the court, and partly because that's the dream as described in the last point above. I mean, seriously, people are posting about Ryan Dancey as the "architect of the OGL" but he worked for Paizo. Likewise, they're going to "the lawyers who drafted the OGL" but I don't know if anyone has actually just straight up asked them, "why did you leave irrevocable out?" And that's without the outcomes like:
I don't want them to happen, but I mean, look at the state of the world, does something being a totally unreasonable thing that many people don't want to happen mean a drat at this point? What can Paizo do? I guess the safest option would be to buy or license a non-OGL fantasy game that's past the Statue of Limitations on Copyright and base Pathfinder 3e on that. hyphz fucked around with this message at 02:10 on Jan 13, 2023 |
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Jan 13, 2023 02:05
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The cut off date being, uh, today. So, sorry about that licence you thought you were developing your stuff under!
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Jan 13, 2023 02:07
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FishFood posted:You could use it for that, but you could also use it to publish your own games that might take a few mechanics/monsters/ etc. from other OGL games without the fear of being sued. Pathfinder 2e, for instance, is not compatible with 5e at all. You could mix them but the PF2E would quickly outscale the 5E elements and start wrecking everything.
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Jan 13, 2023 02:08
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https://twitter.com/vexwerewolf/status/1613701013331927040
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Jan 13, 2023 02:11
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hyphz posted:
It’s because twenty years ago when written that wasn’t a common legal term and all open source software didn’t use that word. It wasn’t till later that this became common and was updated into most updated open source licenses.
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Jan 13, 2023 02:11
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I'm probably going to buy the Pathfinder Legendary Bundle tbh. I've been wanting to drop DND for a while, especially because of the chud poo poo, Zak S, and everything else, but this is a quantifiable thing I can point at and be like "This is why we don't use DND, BUT."
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Jan 13, 2023 02:13
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Narsham posted:This is all about the VTT, right? So this is a VTT-focused change. They don't care about 3rd party publishes adventure X. They care about their VTT graphics and assets. They have complete access to everything that every user posts there, and they're worried that this massively increases their exposure. "We didn't open the e-mail/letter and so there's no proof we ripped off the idea inside" is radically different from "yes, we can see every piece of data on the VTT, but we swear we didn't actually look." That's a really good point and I agree. It's far more difficult for Wizards to show a clear chain of idea to publication that didn't swipe stuff from other works when they're effectively taking custody of other works, digitally, at a granular level. That said, I can't see that being the only factor. Just maybe the instigating one, and clearly a big deal.
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Jan 13, 2023 02:23
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hyphz posted:Except that they do have to depend on it if they're deemed to be using copyrightable content from the 3.5 SRD. That was the driven for the OGL in the first place.
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Jan 13, 2023 02:23
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Warthur posted:Yes, and their declared intent is to shift away from doing that, read their announcement. So are they actually going to clean-room a new Pathfinder?
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Jan 13, 2023 02:26
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It sounds like PF2E doesn't use much of anything from the OGL anyway. They just published it under the OGL to allow for derivative works based on it.
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Jan 13, 2023 02:28
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hyphz posted:So are they actually going to clean-room a new Pathfinder? Have we not been saying that all currently produced works would still work and not need to be retroactively thrown into a dumpster? And also it's been a week but yes, they're probably going to make the necessary but minimum legally-required edits to apply under the ORC and not the OGL, chill.
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Jan 13, 2023 02:31
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VikingofRock posted:Paizo just announced their plans: they are releasing a new license, the Open RPG Creative License ("ORC"), under which they will publish future work. They are working with other TTRPG makers to make this license, including Kobold Press, Chaosium, Legendary Games, Rogue Genius, and Green Ronin. This license will be owned by an organization which has a history of managing open licenses, and they floated the Linux foundation as a possibility. say, did Green Ronin ever produce that timeline that was supposed to make everything about their working with a sex pest(i think that's what it was?) make sense?
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