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Comment by WastingMyTime89 | Hacker News Reader

I think people are mostly worried about old material which will fall into a grey zone distribution-wise if Hasbro revokes the previous version of the OGL.

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Are they actually trying to revoke the previous version? I do not know, which is why I ask; honest question.

I observe that 1.0 contains the verbiage:

"Updating the License: Wizards or its designated Agents may publish updated versions of this License. You may use any authorized version of this License to copy, modify and Distribute any Open Game Content originally Distributed under any version of this License."

which at least to my open source license not-a-lawyer read says that they basically can't revoke it.

They can relicense stuff going forward under 1.1, and that may be bad, but I wonder if people are misunderstanding and treating it as apocolyptic when it's just bad. It seems like the worst case scenario is the community undergoes a de facto fork and you can stick to a 1.0 world if you want, not that all the 1.0 stuff goes away.

This smells to me like many similar panics in our community when some project goes to relicense and people don't generally understand that the relicense only applies going forward, because in general you can't retroactively relicense an open license. (There are nuances to that statement which I'm skipping over, but I'd say that's the most correct short summary. The thing that people think is happening is not what is happening.) Of course it is still valid to be upset about the relicensing going forward! It just may not be quite as much a kick in the teeth as people think.

The phrase "any authorized version" is what people are worried about here, because the 1.1 leak includes language indicating that 1.0 is no longer authorized.

Part of the leaked 1.1 states that 1.0a is explicitly no longer "authorized"

> Are they actually trying to revoke the previous version? I do not know, which is why I ask; honest question.

Apparently they are. There is some uncertainty about their right to do so. The few lawyers opinions I have read tend to say they probably don’t but it’s not entirely clear cut. Someone would have to go to court for it to be ascertained but I doubt anyone wants to fight Hasbro for some old content generating no revenue.

Not to mention that it is incredibly expensive in the U.S. to get a court case to a point where it creates binding precedent - and arguably there is no such thing in the modern political environment. So even if every single case is won or settled largely in favor of independent content creators, there will still be a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect on the entire scene, especially on creators whose works would require essentially-from-scratch rewrites to use a different system.

I guess the crux will be the meaning of the word "authorized". If Hasbro claims the OGL 1.0 is no longer authorized and can convince a court that this totally normal and OK, 3rd party vendors will have a problem.

They would also have to convince a court that Paragraph 9 is intended to be restrictive, rather than permissive. Nowhere does it say that only authorized licenses can be used, and it seems obviously wrong for a license to preclude its own use.

Unfortunately, it costs a lot of money to prove what is obvious in court. WOTC and Hasbro are counting on their money and lawyers to have a chilling effect.

FWIW Pazio would probably have enough money to bring this up for litigation. Still, a crappy position to be in.

Thank you, to you and the others. That makes this make a lot more sense.

> which at least to my open source license not-a-lawyer read says that they basically can't revoke it.

Its complicated.

The general law of gratuitous licenses (in the US) is that they are revocable at will; terms of the license do not overcome this. Whether the restrictions in a license like this are limitations on the permissions it grants (leaving it gratuitous) or consideration in exchange for permissions (making it a license contract) is not always an easy question.

Further, even if things for which the license has already been uses might be protected, the license text is an offer, and the offer can be withdrawn. This is important, because the OGL 1.0a isn’t sublicensable; every new user making a new work directly licenses all ancestor works under it, rather than sublicensing through the immediate parent.

But, even to the extent it is recovable, the doctrine of promissory estoppel may limit the effect on parties who have already reasonably relied on the promise of irrevocability.

Yeah, they explicitly had that FAQ on the OGL with stated that it was in WotC's best interest never to make a worse OGL since if they did that people would always be free to use a prior version, as explicitly stated in the license - that sure sounds like a promise. It also sounds like a description of their interpretation of the contract, which is also relevent.

The OGL does explicitly use the phrase "in consideration for", which you'd hope would make this non-gratuitous. Then again, IANAL.

They are going to "revoke" that license in the way that you will no longer be able to sell content with that license in the stores they control (which are all of the ones that matter).

Oh, so this is retroactively re-licensing existing stuff? That's bad.

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