I think the links to debates taking place elsewhere that have been posted to
this thread suggest that there is a big problem facing the industry.
Not necessarily. I don't think it's been demonstrated that electronic "piracy" - defined as broadly as possible here to include any electronic reproduction the publisher really wishes weren't happening - actually harms the sales of any product that sells in significant numbers at all. (A working definition of "significant" here is high three figures and up.) The evidence suggests quite strongly that it isn't an economic drawback in other fields, and I don't see any particular sign that the cultures of either hard-core pirate-scans collectors or casual/occasional browsers and borrowers in gaming differ significantly from their counterparts elsewhere.
At least some of us feel that publishers ought to provide the text of open content in game books as automatically and conveniently as open-source software publishers do with source code, or failing that, ought to have no objection to others making their own collections and distributions. This is of course very much a minority outlook in gaming, and the arguments on all sides within business rely on fairly unobvious perspectives on what our specific audiences are doing. But in any event, I don't think that the prospect of some people making careful transcriptions of open content, properly acknowledging derivations and all that other good OGL stuff, constitute a problem to the industry. It's activity that some publishers may wish not to have, but that's gonna be true of anything.
One morning you wake up and discover that independent utilizers have, one
way or the other, created an enormous Omega SRD which takes all the open
content that has ever been released using the OGL and makes it accessible
for free on the Web. There's no way to tell who originally created what
parts of this undifferentiated mass of OGC, given the thousands of
copyrights that are listed in the Omega SRD's monolithic Section 15
declaration. Nor is there anything in the license or (arguably) in the law
that will make the Omega SRD go away.
Okay, let's suppose.
The first thing that happens is that half the d20 publishers in existence, and a fair number of the non-d20 OGL publishers, go searching for their respect content, and if _anything_ is out of order, they get the thing shut down pronto. They make every demand for verification you can imagine, and some you can't.
This keeps happening until the second thing happens, and that's one of two possibilities:
a) The compilers of the Omega SRD end up deciding it's not worth the ongoing hassle and shut it down, or,
b) The compilers realize that they're going to need to cover themselves and footnote the entire thing in accordance with rigorous standards of bibliographic detail, so that they've built in an answer to anyone who objects. They refuse to accept contributions that lack this attribution. Thereafter, all objections founder. Some publishers think it's a very handy resource, some hate it, and arguments continue ad infinitum.
_If_ the Omega SRD is sufficiently careful assembled, it can withstand challenges. If not, it'll go down in flames. It's possible that publishers with sufficiently strong objections would end up deciding not to release further open content, or go for more thoroughly obfuscated declarations, but then those things happen anyway.
Publishers have to be sensible business people (although the fact that we're
all a weird, hairy, mutant strain may be our best hope for surviving the
evolutionary catastrophe that's currently ravaging the record industry).
They do? The fact is that they generally aren't, not in genre and hobby fields. They tend to be stubborn and obsessive. Actual business expertise and understanding of their audiences are purely optional.
contain them. TSR's futile and aggressive reaction to the use of its real
and imagined copyrights on the Web made many enemies.
...who had _no_ effect on sales, at all. The same is true of other efforts to censure publishers. If anything, the most documentable consequences of efforts at organized boycotts are, um, sales boosts, thanks to folks curious what the shouting is about. In many cases, a thoroughly rabid enemy is a good thing to have, winning the target sympathy and interest.
I have no real idea how many people are doing anything with open content that isn't covered by sensible readings of fair use. But I feel very confident in saying that it is not a large fraction of gamers. It's probably not more than a few times the number of folks who are in some sense publishers. There's a lot more hullabaloo about what one might conceivably do with open content than actual action, so nearly as I can tell. And the gaming field has a long history of dealing with populations like that, to be frank.
One of the things we've collectively learned is that demands that X or Y be done or it's DOOM FOR US ALL never pan out. If requests and discussion get you nowhere, threats _really_ won't get you anywhere you'd like to go. An actually existing Omega SRD would be interesting; speculation about it is not. And if it existed, I'd bet hard currency on the outcome possibilities I described above.
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