The Business: So They Chose Death

Wankers By The Beach recently had a change in management. The new leaders come from outside the tabletop RPG business, from big corporations like Microsoft, and they're out to upend a stable and mutually-satisfactory status quo because Mammon Gotta Mammon.

Alexander Macris is taking this as a serious threat and has consulted his lawyer. To summarize: WOTC's management presumes that they can bury opposition under court costs and be able to bully other platforms into kicking OGL content off, so they don't care that their legal case is weaker than wet tissue paper.

The problem is that (a) there are other parties that are going to be affected by this because (b) this breaking of the Open Game License is a direct attack on Open Source as a concept. That means that Open Source software is on the chopping block, so big legal hitters like the Electronic Frontier Foundation--no strangers to tabletop RPGs; they beat the FBI when they defended SJ Games back in the day over GURPS Cyberpunk--can and should be approached to come on-side against Wankers.

There is one other major change since 2000, when Dancey--who, again, is on record stating that WOTC is wrong about all of this--and that is the ease by which business can go international now. Pundit, remember, lives in Uruguay and publishes with a company outside of his country of residence; international trade and commerce is affected by this, and that fact cannot be ignored.

The hurdle is going to be the financial cost. That's why I mention the EFF; getting them on side--and mentioning the threat to Open Source that breaking the OGL presents will do that--solves that problem. After that point, what you do is get Dancey before the judge; this can be in person, where he testifies under oath, or in writing where he explains that (a) he's the creator of the OGL and (b) the intent--by design--is that it is irrevocable and perpetual and that (c) WOTC has heretofore acknowledged this in writing for over 20 years.

Then you show the judge Section 9 of v1.0a, and move to summary judgement in your favor and against WOTC. When you win, you demand that WOTC permanently foreswear future attempts to do this sort of thing and you get WOTC to disavow any deplatforming of OGL content by any actor- that preempts "independent" actions by other parties against OGL content. Serve notice on DriveThru, Amazon, et. al. of this judgement in your favor.

This is already bad Public Relations for WOTC. It would not take much for it to turn into a bad legal problem; you people just need to have the balls to (a) contact some folks with the guns needed and (b) actually show up to fight. Despair is a sin for a reason.