[od-discuss] Getting the Open Game License accepted under the Open Definition

[Chris Sakkas]

Hi folks,

In 2000 the world's most popular tabletop roleplaying game, *Dungeons &
Dragons, *had its third edition released. A large chunk of the game—most of
its rules and some descriptive text—was released under the Open Game
License (OGL), a share-alike public copyright licence.

To my knowledge, that was the first time that a market leader adopted a
public copyright licence. The OGL was hugely influential within the
tabletop roleplaying game industry: many products continue to be released
under the OGL, there are databases of OGL content, and D&D's main
competitor—*Pathfinder*—is also under the OGL.

The OGL is also interesting as one of the few examples of a public
copyright licence drafted by a private company rather than a government
organisation, activist group or individual.

Next year the fifth edition of *D&D *will be released. The fourth edition
of *D&D **wasn't *released under the OGL, and is widely considered to have
done more poorly than *D&D *third edition. Given there are current
discussions about whether the fifth edition should come under the OGL, it
seems appropriate to discuss whether the OGL is an open knowledge licence.

You can download the OGL as an RTF
here<http://www.wizards.com/d20/files/OGLv1.0a.rtf>or view it
online <http://www.opengamingfoundation.org/ogl.html>.

I already approached the FSF about having the OGL accepted as a free
documentation license. A volunteer said that the FSF didn't have the
resources to look at the OGL (which is fair enough) and pointed out that in
his personal opinion the OGL's restriction on 'indicating compatibility'
with other works would 'probably be considered a non-permissive,
GPL-incompatible further restriction under section 7 of GPLv3 and perhaps
also as a non-free restriction as well'. (See Section 7 of the OGL).

There are a few other things worth considering about the OGL:

   - Whereas the Creative Commons licences make it clear that they do not
   remove any existing rights under copyright (like fair use, etc.), the OGL
   does not. In fact the OGL isn't explicitly a copyright licence at all, it
   just governs under what circumstances you can use certain text.
   - Section 11 of the OGL says "You may not market or advertise the Open
   Game Content using the name of any Contributor unless You have written
   permission from the Contributor to do so." Even if you normally would be
   legally able to do so!

Someone I was talking to about this with on the free culture mailing list
suggested that the OGL could be treated like the FDL: whether or not it
counts as open knowledge depends on whether certain aspects of the licence
are engaged. With the FDL, I believe that would be the invariant sections.
With the OGL, that would be Product Identity.

My wiki has a page on the OGL
<http://fossilbank.wikidot.com/licence:ogl>which you might be
interested in.

I would be very interested to hear your opinions on whether the OGL could
be considered an open knowledge licence. I consider it a libre licence
myself, but I can see that Sections 7 and 11 raise problems that might be
unresolvable. It's a historically significant licence that's still in wide
use today, so I think it's worth discussing.

Cheers,

Chris

*Chris Sakkas
**Admin of the FOSsil Bank wiki <http://fossilbank.wikidot.com/> and the Living
Libre blog <http://www.livinglibre.com> and Twitter
feed<https://twitter.com/#%21/living_libre>
.*
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