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Good riddance to the Open Gaming License
Last week, Gizmodo’s Linda Codega caught a fantastic scoop — a leaked report of Hasbro’s plan to revoke the decades-old Open Gaming License, which subsidiary Wizards Of the Coast promulgated as an allegedly open sandbox for people seeking to extend, remix or improve Dungeons and Dragons:
https://gizmodo.com/dnd-wizards-of-the-coast-ogl-1-1-open-gaming-license-1849950634
The report set off a shitstorm among D&D 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.
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
(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/
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.
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. 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. The OGL predates the Creative Commons 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.
The perpetual/irrevocable switcheroo is the least of the problems with the OGL. As Rob Bodine— an actual lawyer, as well as a dice lawyer — 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. Decades of copyright maximalism has convinced millions of people that anything you can imagine is “intellectual property,” and that this is indistinguishable from real property, which means that no one can use it without your permission.
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
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.
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.
Finally, there are the exceptions and limitations 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 fair use, a complex doctrine that is often incorrectly characterized as turning on “four factors” that determine whether a use is fair or not.
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).
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 “fact-intensive,” 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. 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:
Product and product line names, logos and identifying marks including trade dress; artifacts; creatures characters; stories, storylines, plots, thematic elements, dialogue, incidents, language, artwork, symbols, designs, depictions, likenesses, formats, poses, concepts, themes and graphic, photographic and other visual or audio representations; names and descriptions of characters, spells, enchantments, personalities, teams, personas, likenesses and special abilities; places, locations, environments, creatures, equipment, magical or supernatural abilities or effects, logos, symbols, or graphic designs; and any other trademark or registered trademark…
Now, there are places where the uncopyrightable parts of D&D mingle with the copyrightable parts, and there’s a legal term for this: merger. Merger came up for gamers in 2018, when the provocateur Robert Hovden got the US Copyright Office to certify copyright in a Magic: The Gathering deck:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/14/angels-and-demons/#owning-culture
If you want to learn more about merger, you need to study up on Kregos and Eckes, which are beautifully explained in the “Open Intellectual Property Casebook,” a free resource created by Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle:
https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/openip/#q01
Jenkins and Boyle explicitly created their open casebook as an answer to another act of enclosure: a greedy textbook publisher cornered the market on IP textbook and charged every law student — and everyone curious about the law — $200 to learn about merger and other doctrines.
As EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kit Walsh writes in her must-read analysis of the OGL, this means “the only benefit that OGL offers, legally, is that you can copy verbatim some descriptions of some elements that otherwise might arguably rise to the level of copyrightability.”
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/01/beware-gifts-dragons-how-dds-open-gaming-license-may-have-become-trap-creators
But like I said, it’s not just that the OGL fails to give you rights — it actually takes away rights you already have to D&D. That’s because — as Walsh points out — fair use and the other copyright limitations and exceptions give you rights to use D&D content, but the OGL is a contract whereby you surrender those rights, promising only to use D&D stuff according to WOTC’s explicit wishes.
“For example, absent this agreement, you have a legal right to create a work using noncopyrightable elements of D&D or making fair use of copyrightable elements and to say that that work is compatible with Dungeons and Dragons. In many contexts you also have the right to use the logo to name the game (something called “nominative fair use” in trademark law). You can certainly use some of the language, concepts, themes, descriptions, and so forth. Accepting this license almost certainly means signing away rights to use these elements. Like Sauron’s rings of power, the gift of the OGL came with strings attached.”
And here’s where it starts to get interesting. Since the OGL launched in 2000, a huge proportion of game designers have agreed to its terms, tricked into signing away their rights. If Hasbro does go through with canceling the OGL, it will release those game designers from the shitty, deceptive OGL.
According to the leaks, the new OGL is even worse than the original versions — but you don’t have to take those terms! Notwithstanding the fact that the OGL says that “using…Open Game Content” means that you accede to the license terms, that is just not how contracts work.
Walsh: “Contracts require an offer, acceptance, and some kind of value in exchange, called ‘consideration.’ If you sell a game, you are inviting the reader to play it, full stop. Any additional obligations require more than a rote assertion.”
“For someone who wants to make a game that is similar mechanically to Dungeons and Dragons, and even announce that the game is compatible with Dungeons and Dragons, it has always been more advantageous as a matter of law to ignore the OGL.”
Walsh finishes her analysis by pointing to some good licenses, like the GPL and Creative Commons, “written to serve the interests of creative communities, rather than a corporation.” Many open communities — like the programmers who created GNU/Linux, or the music fans who created Musicbrainz, were formed after outrageous acts of enclosure by greedy corporations.
If you’re a game designer who was pissed off because the OGL was getting ganked — and if you’re even more pissed off now that you’ve discovered that the OGL was a piece of shit all along — there’s a lesson there. The OGL tricked a generation of designers into thinking they were building on a commons. They weren’t — but they could.
This is a great moment to start — or contribute to — real open gaming content, licensed under standard, universal licenses like Creative Commons. Rolling your own license has always been a bad idea, comparable to rolling your own encryption in the annals of ways-to-fuck-up-your-own-life-and-the-lives-of-many-others. There is an opportunity here — Hasbro unintentionally proved that gamers want to collaborate on shared gaming systems.
That’s the true lesson here: if you want a commons, you’re not alone. You’ve got company, like Kit Walsh herself, who happens to be a brilliant game-designer who won a Nebula Award for her game “Thirsty Sword Lesbians”:
https://evilhat.com/product/thirsty-sword-lesbians/
[Image ID: A remixed version of David Trampier’s ‘Eye of Moloch,’ the cover of the first edition of the AD&D Player’s Handbook. It has been altered so the title reads ‘Advanced Copyright Fuckery. Unclear on the Concept. That’s Just Not How Licenses Work. No, Seriously.’ The eyes of the idol have been replaced by D20s displaying a critical fail '1.’ Its chest bears another D20 whose showing face is a copyright symbol.]
HOLY SHIT, IT WAS THE ORIGINAL ONE
MAKE A WISH
the first post ever on tumblr
I WAS EXPECTING IT TO BE A REMAKE OF SOME SORT HOLY FUCK
WHO THE FUCK KEEPS BRINGING THIS BACK
reblog this because it shows up every blue moon
REBLOGREBLOGREBLOG
(◡‿◡✿)
(ʘ‿ʘ✿) “what you say ‘bout me”
(ʘ‿ʘ)ノ✿ “hold my flower”
✿\(。-_-。) “Kick his ass, baby. I got yo flower.”
i found it
the original post
i found it
this should have the opportunity to be on everyone’s blog.
I hope you guys are happy. You have no idea about the lengths I went to to find this post and get it on my blog.
Everyone on this post is deactivated, this is like finding a fossil
World Heritage Post
the human eye has evolved to be able to detect more shades of green than any other color! that's because there are so many fucking leafs
#that's... actually pretty close?#it's more like #Primates who could see red were better at getting berries and reading social cues and were thus VERY sexy#and thusly had MONDO BABIES. so now nearly all humans see red. #but being able to see red makes you be able to distinguish more types of green#counter intuitive as it may seem#anyway we can see so many fucking leafs because our ancestors discovered a life hack for getting mad pussy
Hasselbacked Croque Monsieur Bagels Recipe
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Is this how you roll?
Hot Chocolate Brownie Crinkle Cookies
Oh they’re going to need salvation.
Not just making it illegal, but making being gay punishable with death.
This is one of the many reasons why I walk by every single red bucket in the run-up to Christmas. They’re not getting my money, I don’t care how nice the people ringing bells are.
Ever since the time they threatened to close all their soup kitchens in NYC if a law that did something as simple as allow companies to extend spousal benefits to their employee’s same-sex domestic partners I have refused to buy from them or donate to them.
It’s that time of year again! In case people don’t know… the Salvation Army is shitty peoples.
Also, the married women are not paid (and therefore can’t qualify for assistance if they should ever divorce, etc). And worth “of course” less than a man.
“ In the Army’s case, the agreement for compensation is that the officer allowance be paid jointly to the husband—the check is written in his name. Officially, the wife is a “worker without expectation of remuneration,” and her husband receives 40 percent more of an allowance as a married man than he would as a single man. “
source
hey since that season is coming up again!
To my American followers. Don’t support Salvation Army. Not only are they homophobic as shit, but I’ve also heard that they abuse a lot f homeless people. They only care about money, please don’t donate to them and give your money to charities that actually help people
Never don’t reblog.
To be clear: this is specific to America. It is not necessarily going to be true for all countries. Please don’t boycott your own salvos without proper investigation: in many countries they do good work.
Sorry but no, the Salvation Army was founded in the UK and even there still are homophobic as hell, to the point that they still refuse to let out gay people hold positions of power in the organisation. This is a callout for the whole group, not just the US. - Purple
AND Canadian salvation army is just as bad! the whole organization is rotten from the core! Canadians are not immune to bad organizations!
Reblog to continue the violent hate against the Salvation Army.
Y'all forgetting the OG
The above post is not the OG.
The original, as seen below, was posted on Facebook by a guy in Cincinnati. Someone else saw it and thought they would have more luck propagating it if they changed the city to “Detroit,” because in the American popular consciousness, Detroit is a more infamously blighted city than Cincinnati. And indeed, that version was the one that proliferated, because it resonated more with the people who saw it. The original poster and the original city were forgotten.
Does this really matter to anyone (besides Joshua Cromwell)? Perhaps not. But sometimes people do this with things that are more important than porches…
someone stole our fucking meme! can’t have shit in Cincinnati
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
Look buddy, i’m just trying to make it to Friday.
reblog if its friday and you made it
The yearly curse has lifted
this book is worth more than a dozen restaurants that grow their own microgreens on the roof
ACCESSIBLE GARDENING FOR PEOPLE WITH PHYSICAL DISABILITIES
Some ideas for halloween costumes from my new book REVENGE OF THE LIBRARIANS. Details at tomgauld.com
saw a post urging people to cull any invasive house sparrows they come across and like if its a male maybe sure but the amount of even experienced birders who have difficulty with sparrow ID do you REALLY think average joe will be able to tell the difference??
one of these sparrows are invasive, the other five are protected native species.
[id: photo showing six images of small brown sparrows that look very similar.]
Seriously!!! Leave the culling to the professionals please and thank you. The average citizen will not know how to identify which sparrow is invasive and which sparrow is a protected native species, and if you accidentally cull a bunch of native protected females, that’s a huge blow to the population. Additionally, even invasive species that need to be culled deserve humane euthanasia, and I don’t trust the average joe to know how to humanely cull a bird or how to properly dispose of it, because hey there’s epidemics of avian diseases all the fucking time that effect songbirds, and you’re not helping anyone if you unknowingly increase the risk of epidemic among native songbirds.
This is a female House Sparrow:
And this is the highly endangered Florida Grasshopper Sparrow:
One is invasive, the other is critically endangered at only 120 individuals.
Are you a qualified ornithologist? No? Then don’t try to lead your own culling project.
Sparrows aren’t an easily identifiable species like the invasive Spotted Lanternfly insect, you can’t just go around thinking you can identify every sparrow and play an amateur ecologist.