SmiteWorks OGL 1.2 Discussion

[celestian]

KloOge (the VTT I used for 18+ years before FG) had macros for the DM to set up random movement for NPCs etc.

I thought myself and JPG were the only ones that knew what Klooge was

Sorry to derail, carry on!

[Voctor]

It is absolutely true what you say.

It is also true that WotC has way more money to spend on lawyers than you do.

Anyone who thinks "being in the legal right" is sufficient protection where Wizards is involved is invited to investigate the sad story of Hex: Shards of Fate.

To be fair, Hex pushed the limits to an absurd degree. There were cards that had the same mana cost, stats, abilities, and had everything laid out in the same way on the card. If all they did was have a game with the extremely similar rules they may have been fine, but they fully cloned specific designs. WoTC can't copyright the rules of the game, but they can copyright the expression of those rules and Hex's designs were close enough to those expressions that they could be argued to be derivative works.

If you're going to copy Monopoly, don't go so far as to make the playing pieces a shoe, car, and battleship.

[Khoros]

It is absolutely true what you say.

It is also true that WotC has way more money to spend on lawyers than you do.

True, and that's the crux with this whole thing, isn't it. WOTC absolutely have the money to sue the competition into oblivion, even if they're not legally in the right here. The details of this judicial campaign will be determined by specialised litigation and IP lawyers, mostly in the US I suspect. But it seems pretty obvious that they're fully expecting to have to sue some of their competitors into compliance.
IMO they won't immediately go after the big names like Paizo or Kobold.Too difficult and too costly, since those guys do have the means to respond in kind. They'll probably go after smaller third party publishers first who don't have the financial means to defend themselves. They'll try to create legal precedent and then start negotiating with the bigger competitors after that on the basis of that precedent in order to have a better argument for a deal. I could be wrong, but at least that's my experience of how American lawyers tend to act.
As for the vtts I don't think they'll go after FG or roll20 at first if those companies still have deals in force with WOTC. They might target Foundry, though, if they do indeed run ogl games without any separate license agreement. Again, that would be to set legal precedent in order to have a better bargaining position in contract negotiations with FG and roll20 when their contracts have to be renewed.
Or they could just go all out and refuse to negotiate with all vtts, which would be the worst case scenario. That would mean they'd try to sue all the vtts into bankruptcy in order to create a monopoly in the vtt space. I don't think that's their actual goal though. That would be a bit extreme even for them and it would mean shooting themselves in the foot in a major way. But given their recent behaviour with ogl 1.0a it's a possibility you'll have to take into account IMO.

Come to think of it I wonder if the companies that signed up for ORC could set up a common defense fund in order to coordinate and finance the defense against potential WOTC lawsuits. Not sure about that, but that's something the lawyers at Azura might be looking into as well.

[Atarsamak]

This is not the first time I read about the fact that the outcome of a lawsuit is strictly related to the financial and economical power of one of the competitors. I do not live on the Moon and I understand tht, of course, being able to pay the best lawyers increases your chances of success, expecially when you are in a grey-zone area. At the same time, I think (hope) that this is not the main factor. I hope that what, nevertheless, who is right or who is wrong (or anything in between) is still dependent mostly on the rules,, laws and facts.
Otherwise it would mean that the American law system is broken.

[Khoros]

This is a tough question, and I'm not an American lawyer, so I wouldn't be able to answer your question definitively. I can only speak from the rather limited experience I had with American lawyers when I was practising in Europe myself (a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away ;-)).

You have to understand that the continental European legal and court systems are fundamentally different from the American ones because the US have a common law system that relies mainly on case law and precedent, and most continental European systems are civil law systems that mainly rely on written laws, not on precedent so much. That makes quite a difference because that means that in the US you can win a lawsuit and thereby already make a "law" that suits you, in a manner of speaking. You can then apply that "law" to other, similar cases and win them, too, because you can invoke the precedent. So one specialised litigation attorney can make a whole lot of difference if they get you that first win that can then serve as precedent. And law firms with good, specialised litigation attorneys aren't exactly cheap.

This is a very simplistic explanation, and I'm sure there'll be a thousand American legal eagles along shortly to explain why I'm wrong, but it's the best I can manage. So IMO no, the American system isn't broken, but you have to know your way around it. One way being that you band together to finance your defense against deep-pocket businesses like Hasbro and WOTC. As in a class action (just in case you were wondering why WOTC wants to exclude those) or in a common defense fund.

[Atarsamak]

Thank you for your contribution. I'm aware of the intrinsic differences in the court systems and, just to clarify, I was not making any comparison and I was not specifically accusing the American system. I was addressing the American one just because, in this case, it's the one involved. My commen was meant to be more general. So please let me rephrase my sentence. If, in any country, the outcome of a lawsuit is strongly related to the financial power of the two sides, then thesre is something wrong with the court system of that country.
But I'm probably going out of topic and, for sure, I do not want to start a tread war on this subject. It was just a sad comment on the problem.
I hope there will be no need at all to go to a court to settle the OGL issue.

[Khoros]

I hope there will be no need at all to go to a court to settle the OGL issue.

And you're certainly not the only one. Crossing fingers it won't come to that. Time will tell, I suppose.

[ddavison]

FG's future ability to deliver 5E or 6E content depends upon our contract auto-renewing each year in March (but with a 60-day notice requirement). We pay them 60% royalties on all products we sell for them, and it costs them almost nothing to support us. They don't perform quality control on our products, customer support, hosting, distribution, or development. Any costs they paid for the original writing and imagery would have already been paid when they created the print product and the version for D&D Beyond. The revenue that we provide them goes directly to the bottom line for Wizards of the Coast as profit. When you contrast this versus book sales where they have production fees and distribution fees, then I think we are much better for their business. If you compare us with sales on D&D Beyond, you could argue that they would get 100% of the revenue if they sold it on D&D Beyond instead of Fantasy Grounds. That would be true; however, we know that a fair percentage of our users purchased it on D&D Beyond and on Fantasy Grounds and then you are comparing 160% revenue to 60% revenue for those sales. The balance of which is probably demonstrably greater than the 100% by itself. They can decide not to renew our contract for an upcoming year. I don't think that it is in their best interest financially. If you pair this up with the negative backlash they would receive from our community (and similarly from Roll20's larger community), then I think a cancellation is very unlikely to happen.

We would still be able to keep all existing copies on our system for customers to use, reinstall, etc. even if the worst-case scenario happens, and they did cancel our license to produce and sell D&D content. We would just be unable to sell any of those going forward. What we are allowed to do with OGL based content matters a lot more to us at this point. That is why it is important for us to weigh in now. Aside from this, we currently include SRD content with our demo for free.

I would love for the whole OGL update to be dropped. I just don't realistically think that is going to happen. I want to at least help steer Wizards of the Coast towards an update that is as fair as it can be.

[Atua]

Doug, how do you make any profit on Steam for 5e products outside of sale volume when Hasbro takes 60%, steam takes 30%. 10% is razor thin...

Edit: I feel like I need to buy another dice pack from the FGU store 🤣

[ddavison]

Thankfully we pay out royalties in the Net amount after Steam’s cut. We often pay external community developers to convert products for us unless we use our in-house employees and that comes out of our share. Doing this allowed us to release around 500 products last year, so that is mostly thanks to our community development program.