The report set off a shitstorm among #DandD fans and the broader #TTRPG community - not just because it was evidence of yet more #enshittification of D&D by a faceless corporate monopolist, but because Hasbro was seemingly poised to take back the #commons that RPG players and designers had built over decades, having taken #WOTC and the #OGL at their word.

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#Gamers were right to be worried. Giant companies love to #rugpull their fans, tempting them into a commons with lofty promises of a system that we will all have a stake in, using the fans for unpaid creative labor, then #enclosing the fans' work and selling it back to them. It's a tale as old as #CDDB and #Disgracenote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDDB#History

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(Disclosure: I am a long-serving volunteer board-member for MetaBrainz, which maintains MusicBrainz, a free, open, community-managed and transparent alternative to Gracenote, explicitly designed to resist the kind of commons-stealing enclosure that led to the CDDB debacle.)

https://musicbrainz.org/

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Free/open licenses were invented specifically to prevent this kind of fuckery. First there was the #GPL and its successor software licenses, then Creative Commons and its own successors. One important factor in these licenses: they contain the word "irrevocable." That means that if you build on licensed content, you don't have to worry about having the license yanked out from under you later. It's #rugproof.

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Now, the OGL does *not* contain the word "irrevocable." Rather, the OGL is "perpetual." To a layperson, these two terms may seem interchangeable, but this is one of those fine lawerly distinctions that trip up normies all the time.

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In lawyerspeak, a "perpetual" license is one whose revocation doesn't come automatically after a certain time (unlike, say, a one-year car-lease, which automatically terminates at the end of the year). Unless a license is "irrevocable," the licensor can terminate it whenever they want to.

This is exactly the kind of thing that trips up people who roll their own licenses, and people who trust those licenses.

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The OGL predates the #CreativeCommons licenses, but it neatly illustrates the problem with letting corporate lawyers - rather than public-interest nonprofits - unleash "open" licenses on an unsuspecting, legally unsophisticated audience.

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The perpetual/irrevocable switcheroo is the least of the problems with the OGL. As [email protected] - an actual lawyer, as well as a #DiceLawyer - wrote back in 2019, the OGL is a grossly defective instrument that is significantly worse than useless.

https://gsllcblog.com/2019/08/26/part3ogl/

The issue lies with what the OGL actually *licenses*.

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Decades of #CopyrightMaximalism has convinced millions of people that anything you can imagine is #IntellectualProperty, and that this is indistinguishable from real property, which means that no one can use it without your permission.

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The #copyrightpilling of the world sets people up for all kinds of scams, because #copyright just doesn't work like that. This wholly erroneous view of copyright grooms normies to be suckers for every sharp grifter who comes along promising that everything imaginable is property-in-waiting (remember #SpiceDAO?):

https://onezero.medium.com/crypto-copyright-bdf24f48bf99

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Copyright is a lot more complex than "anything you can imagine is your property and that means no one else can use it." For starters, copyright draws a fundamental distinction between *ideas* and *expression*. Copyright does *not* apply to ideas - the idea, say, of elves and dwarves and such running around a dungeon, killing monsters. That is emphatically *not* copyrightable.

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Copyright also doesn't cover abstract systems or methods - like, say, a game whose dice-tables follow well-established mathematical formulae to create a "balanced" system for combat and adventuring. Anyone can make one of these, including by copying, improving or modifying an existing one that someone else made. That's what "uncopyrightable" means.

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Finally, there are the #ExceptionsAndLimitations to copyright - things that you are allowed to do with copyrighted work, without first seeking permission from the creator or copyright's proprietor. The best-known exception is US law is #FairUse, a complex doctrine that is often incorrectly characterized as turning on "four factors" that determine whether a use is fair or not.

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In reality, the four factors are a starting point that courts are allowed and encouraged to consider when determining the fairness of a use, but some of the most consequential fair use cases in Supreme Court history flunk one, several, or even *all* of the four factors (for example, the #Betamax decision that legalized VCRs in 1984, which fails all four).

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Beyond fair use, there are other exceptions and limitations, like the *di minimis* exemption that allows for incidental uses of tiny fragments of copyrighted work without permission, even if those uses are not fair use. Copyright, in other words, is #FactIntensive, and there are many ways you can legally use a copyrighted work without a license.

Which brings me back to the OGL, and what, specifically, it licenses.

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The OGL is a license that only grants you permission to use the things that WOTC *can't* copyright - "the game mechanic [including] the methods, procedures, processes and routines." In other words, the OGL gives you permission to use things *you don't need permission to use*.

But maybe the OGL grants you permission to use *more* things, beyond those things you're allowed to use anyway? Nope. The OGL specifically exempts:

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