Listening to old 78rpm music from the Internet Archive and reading OGL discussions.
Regarding the new license that Paizo seems to be working on: @SymbolicCity reminded me of the accusations of abusive management, the firing of two employees who reportedly were willing to push back against abuse.
Let’s see what the license brings. Remember what I hate about the Open Gaming License (OGL 1.0a): publishers often intermix the protected Product Identity and the Open Gaming Content (OGC) so that prying the two apart and actually making use of the OGC is nigh impossible.
When @gherhartd wondered why people were scrambling for the new license, @DanMaruschak argued that it helped preserve this exact mess:
Because OGL-based companies want the cachet of “open gaming” without actually opening up their genuinely copyrightable content, and want to preserve the ambiguity of what is or isn’t copyrightable with respect to rules text.
Yikes!
Better to use Creative Commons (CC) licenses!
@FredricT suggested to split books into CC parts and copyrighted ones. Everything would be explicit! I like that. @gherhartd said that this is how Evil Hat does it.
Publish the SRD under CC BY or CC BY-SA, depending on if you want others to be held to opening their work.
Sure, people will be able to just print the Systems Reference Document (SRD) and sell it. But my take would be: Isn’t that the whole point for people like me?
@bradjmurray says this:
… develop the game an publish under traditional copyright then develop the SRD and publish it under some completely open license. This protects the original from counterfeit and provides an explicit basis for derived works. It’s utterly clear and requires no new legal language.
Anyway, for the moment I’m still using CC0 for Knives and Halberts. Somewhere I remember reading that this wasn’t a good idea, but I can’t find the link any more.
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Links:
Paizo president Jeff Alvarez releases second statement following firing of customer service manager
Workers at Paizo unionize, a first for the tabletop role-playing game industry
#RPG #Copyright
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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Doing to same!
You see theMatt Finch Q&A? He said he does not like creative Commons and had some issues with it.
From a Comp science background what do you think of creative commons? Have you seen issues arise from it’s use or is it something specific to the tabletop space?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HMtk9SAjUI&t=1s For those who did not see it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HMtk9SAjUI&t=1s
– Oliver 2023-01-13 16:20 UTC
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I am as always super reluctant to look at videos. So even though I’ve seen that link before, I haven’t looked at the video itself.
As for the CC part: I’ve been interested in licenses for a long time. It’s a love-hate relationship.
I like the CC licenses because they are solid. The Non-Commercial license is problematic because I think anything where you earn money should count, and that includes displaying ads on your website, for example, which would make most non-commercial uses impossible while going against what most people intuitively understand under commercial activity.
The benefit of the GPL is that people have a right to get the source files for the software. Do you think you want the source files for the RPG projects? I’m not sure how useful this would be. So the GPL is not required.
The benefit of the GPLv3 is that it also handles patents. Patents are granted for technical innovations (and in the US for other stuff, booooh!) – which makes me think that they don’t concern me. The GPL really is not required.
The benefit of the Affero license is that people hosting a software for you need to give you access to the source files. At this point, I still think of role-playing games as games that don’t need software. As time goes on, I might be wrong in that. For the moment, I feel the Affero license is not required.
– Alex 2023-01-13 16:38 UTC
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Oha! Have you heard about Paizos Power Move: They want to create an Open RPG Creative Licence (ORC) 🙂 with a lot of Ex-3pp for 5e and Chaosium(!), wich allows you as a publisher to use with your own srd. And - they don’t want to own it and end goal is to give it to an open source organisation. Linux Foundation was in their statement as an example... Wow. Directly after DnD canceled their planed Stream on Twitch... https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6si7v
https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6si7v
– Rorschachhamster 2023-01-13 21:32 UTC
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I saw the announcement but haven’t seen an actual license. It’s too early.
– Alex 2023-01-13 23:02 UTC
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CC FTW!
– Sandra 2023-01-14 10:55 UTC
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I’m still using CC0 for Knives and Halberts. Somewhere I remember reading that this wasn’t a good idea, but I can’t find the link any more.
CC0 is “public domain”. It means that anybody can publish and sell Knives and Halberts without even writing your name on it.
A better one would be CC BY, which means they have to give proper credits to you.
– Erik 2023-01-16 14:40 UTC
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Yeah, for the moment I’m not too concerned about that. Cultural norms still require you to cite your sources, and I’m not going to go after license violators anyway. The bad guys go unpunished!
I think I remember now what my misgivings were: they were related to patents and don’t apply in the role-playing game context:
In other words, while the creator may be willing to give up the copyright to whatever has been licensed under CC0, they are still free to patent it. More troubling, they still reserve the right to leverage that patent however they see fit. Theoretically, that means the developer who originally released a piece of source code under CC0 could later claim that anyone who used the code was infringing on their patent, and potentially demand royalties. – Why Fedora Decided To Give CC0 Licensed Code The Boot
Why Fedora Decided To Give CC0 Licensed Code The Boot
– Alex 2023-01-16 17:12 UTC
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Thank you for this response! It makes sense that license for software and code would have some tricky bits as applying to rpgs.
CC seems to be more used in art and thus more applicable to rpgs
Rob at batintheattic said wotcs use of cc is hurtful as they are trying to tie dnd mechanics to the IP
– Oliver 2023-01-20 20:10 UTC
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I don’t know to what statement of Rob’s you’re referring to. In his blog post about the new OGL ¹ he notes that “Classes, Spells, Monsters, and Magic Items are not [part of the CC-BY content they plan to release]” – this, too me, doesn’t say anything about the use of the license. It just tells me that so little is covered that enough legal risk remains for me to be better of not mentioning them at all. I’ve been contributing to Alrik, the German AD&D 1st ed project. “Classes, Spells, Monsters, and Magic Items” are the most important part!
Therefore, as long as they go ahead with their plans to “unauthorize” the OGL 1.0a, I hate and despise them for it, and even if they crawl back and eat chalk, my trust in them is shattered and all my worst suspicions of their corporate greed is confirmed.
I hope their company fails and their IP lies fallow for a hundred years, worthless and unnecessary, as new role-playing games using Creative Common licenses take it all.
– Alex 2023-01-20 20:34 UTC