What would an incontrovertible irrevocable OGL 2.0 look like?

[Yaarel]

and I am uninterested in giving the gaming space of a new OGL over to people who use slurs.

I want compassionate representation of human diversity.

I want to avoid rules that can easily become dysfunctional and backfire against the innocent.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I want compassionate representation of human diversity.

I want to avoid rules that can easily become dysfunctional and backfire against the innocent.

and i want guard rails put on

 

[see]

I'm sorry but do you not understand my issue is with someone having to be 'open' enough for hate speech not the exact terms on the spine

I understand your issue, I was pointing out that the specific argument you made was specious. Bad arguments in a good cause are still bad arguments.

The core issue is that you're advocating for a measure inherently incompatible with the thread's purpose. A license that allows Hasbro the power to cancel it isn't a license that can't be cancelled by Hasbro. "Only in case of hate speech" means "whenever Hasbro feels like justifying the cancellation as being about hate speech". Given Hasbro's current behavior, no sane 3PP would agree to the term.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Yeah, no thanks. We have enough of that going around right now.

yeah, I don't think we do.

 

[Scribe]

yeah, I don't think we do.

And yet, as reasonable people, we disagree.

Putting things into an open license, that have no need to be there, defeats the purpose.

We have laws for a reason.

 

[Kinematics]

Morality clauses should absolutely not be in any open license. An open license is usable by anyone for any content, and the point is to share that content with other people, for any purpose.

This is both an onerous tax on the licensees, with the massive uncertainty about what some other person in some other company (who is likely to change over time) might judge as a violation, but by including it in the license you are imposing an extra burden on all publishers, in that they now have to police every single other person who uses their content.

And failing to do so (or at least failing to do so to the most extreme individual's standards; is it discriminatory practice to show women without hijabs to Muslims?) opens up new legal risks. For example, failing to comply with the requirement might be a breach of contract, which leads to termination; but who loses rights to the content in that case? Does the publisher lose his rights?

It's absolutely nightmarish just on a logistics and risk level, never mind the question of whether you should allow such control in the first place (which I also disagree with).

 

[GMforPowergamers]

The core issue is that you're advocating for a measure inherently incompatible with the thread's purpose.

I thought the thread was about theoretical better ogl...

A license that allows Hasbro the power to cancel it isn't a license that can't be cancelled by Hasbro. "Only in case of hate speech" means "whenever Hasbro feels like justifying the cancellation as being about hate speech". Given Hasbro's current behavior, no sane 3PP would agree to the term.

fine

 

[Kinematics]

Public domain.

Unfortunately, the public domain is fraught with uncertainty. There are legal arguments that you can't voluntarily put something into the public domain, if you hold the copyright for it.

Part of the point of licenses like the GPL is to bypass that uncertainty by using the existing copyright laws to force the provided content to be, and remain, as free as possible.


I had written up a bunch of ideas, but going over them piece-by-piece leads me to believe that a Creative Commons (CC) license might be entirely sufficient.

One of the key differences of the OGL vs other open licenses was that it allows you to only share part of your copyrighted content, and reserve rights to other parts. That felt distinct enough that I thought it might be worth having its own license for.

But then I realized that what publishers have shared have generally been SRDs — curated collections of the original copyrighted work that include only and exactly what's being shared as open content. And ultimately, that's the only thing you have to share. So, rather than saying, "D&D is open content; this is the portion we will allow you to use.", you just say, "This curated document is being shared as open content. It happens to be the core rules that D&D uses."

In other words, you don't need the license to define the split in open content; you just need to separate that out into its own document, and share that document normally as CC content.

CC then has variations on the basic license, so that you can say that users of the content must share their remixes, may not share their remixes, or are free to share or not share their remixes; and do so in either a commercial or non-commercial fashion. That covers pretty much everything. All other issues, such as irrevocability or non-partisan stewardship are already handled.

 

[Yaarel]

Those of you familiar with the Creative Commons contracts, which CC matches the OGL 1.0a most closely?

The OGL allows a nonexclusive right to use, modify, and commercialize the Open Gaming Content that others have contributed, while simultaneously protecting the Product Identity content that creators kept exclusive.

 

[Yaarel]

and i want guard rails put on

So far. OGL is vulnerable to hatespeech, but does prevent hatespeakers from hijacking your own Product Identity.

Part of the fiasco of NuTSR was hijacking D&D identity via its historical trademarks. OGL prevents such.