Given that you quoted me, that's not my concern. My concern is that I've been told any number of times on this list that rules, etc. can't be PI'd and that every major publisher agrees. They clearly don't. I'm not chastising Chris Pramas or Monte Cook an iota for wanting to PI things, provided that they can do so clearly an unambiguously (and I'm not always sure that the latter has always been done). I didn't mean to imply that you were chastising
Chris Pramas or Monte Cook for wanting to PI things. I was mainly directing
this point further up the chain (to the people that were arguing the issue with
you). You are not the only person on this list that likes to play devils
advocate. ;-)
As
I said above I don't think you are moaning (at least not about what I was
writting about ;-) ). I've even agreed that people had the right to cripple
their product myself.
Maybe they don't want to admit that there is disagreement
about the interpretation of the OGL in case that admission can later be used in
court to allow a court to make an interpretation.
Under section 14 this might enable a court to "reform" the
licence. If lawyers managed to get the licence reformed, it wouldn't be the same
as a new version of the licence, which people say is optional, but might affect
all the existing licences.
If this happened (which I am not saying is a certainty) all
the parties concerned would loose the ability to say "we believe the OGL
means..." and things would be forced onto them by that precedent in the courts.
While this might please you (a person who is interested in common agreement) and
it might please people who already have the interpretation that the court
decision favoured the other people would loose out. As nobody actually knows
exactly what the OGL means legally, until this happens. People can not tell who
would loose out. For a company that has a lot of money involved in role playing
products, I can't see any reason why they would want to force the
issue.
As for a new version of the OGL, people have already said that
the OGL allows you to use any version. WotC is already known to want to use PI
to protect certain words that other people say are not part of OGC and can not
be PIed. So unless the new OGL gives away something that can not be used unless
you renounce older OGLs people will still use the older versions that are
not agreed upon if they think might support their position on
PI/OGC in a potential court case [1].
Even if the next OGL clears up all *future* ambiguity, I am
fairly sure that a lawyer could say: "WotC actually changed what the OGL meant.
It used to mean A, B and C. My clients used the earlier versions in good faith,
and when this legally different licence came out they chose to stick with the
one with the *correct* interpretation."
So unless there is a court case to "reform" the existing
licences, I can not see that getting people to agree that they don't agree, will
make them start to agree in the future. WotC will only be able to force people
to change via the d20stl and if publishers are convinced that the interpretation
not supported by the hypothetical next licence is good for them then they could
just drop the "d20 System" logo and maintain their brand loyalty via their
existing reputation. If six or more publishers dropped the
"d20 System" logo at the same time, they might even throw all their PR behind
promoting a rival "compatibility" logo either Prometheus or something else
agreed upon by them collectively.
David S
[1] Allegedly ;-)
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