Thread by @JohnNephew

Another thing to remember about the #OGL is how I think it was shaped by two events of the 1990s.

First was the start of Wizards of the Coast. The Primal Order, their first product, resulted in a lawsuit from Palladium Games because they included conversion appendixes for a

variety of RPG systems. (TPO was a "capsystem" product meant to be added on your game of choice.) This is exactly the sort of thing that people are now claiming is obviously fair use. It was not so obvious, as Wizards well knew!

The threat was so grave and existential that a new corporation, Garfield Games, was formed just to publish Magic: The Gathering, so that it could get investment that would not be threatened by the possibility of the whole company being destroyed by the Primal Order litigation.

After the TPO suit was settled out of court, Garfield Games was merged into Wizards of the Coast. The people who ran WotC in 2000, such as Peter Adkison, know personally how much water the "this is fair use!" argument held in actual pragmatic fact for a publisher. All it took was

one game company to decide they disagreed that it was fair and were willing to file suit over it.

The second event was the near bankruptcy of TSR. Again, key people (such as @rsdancey) involved in rescuing D&D from the implosion of TSR by facilitating its sale to WotC, had that

experience to inform the creation of the OGL. It was not impossible to imagine D&D being owned by some corporate entity that did not care about it; or that failed, leaving its intellectual property assets in limbo. Remember we're talking about the time frame of the Sonny Bono

Copyright Term Extension Act. Anything entering the public domain had been kicked down the road by decades, and plenty of folks figured Disney would just kick it down again when the time came. All kinds of 20th century works were orphans -- their copyrights had been automatically

extended for decades, but it was not clear who owned them if a creator had died, or business owning work for hire had unwound, or no one had saved a paper trail of rights ownership/transfer. (Can you tell if it's work for hire?) As with fair use and game rules, there was a big

difference between theorizing about the legal status of some work and putting your financial well being on the line by seeing if anyone will step forward and assert a right to sue you about it.

The OGL was a way to ensure that core RPG mechanics of D&D would be available to future generations -- regardless of whether they already are via fair use (yet to be tested in court), and regardless of what may be the future ownership of related copyrights. Stop the uncertainty.

Make games. Create things. Share them. Know that when you are hit by a bus, your asshole cousin who inherits your copyright will not have grounds to sue the guy who added your novel Prestige Class to his game world for sale as a PDF on DTRPG.

Our industry could not get congress to rewrite copyright law to suit our needs, the way Disney etc. could. The OGL (and other similar licenses that people started using) was a way to do it ourselves by mutual agreement.

Also, the OGL and d20 coincided with the rise of digital publishing and online sharing of RPG material. Suddenly the field of potential publishers was orders of magnitude larger in 2000 than it was in 1990. Questions that were arcane in the 80s and early 90s were now urgent.

BTW, I started my career as a freelance writer (DRAGON and DUNGEON Magazines!), so if any outlet is looking to commmission a longer and more coherent essay about the creation of the OGL from one of its earliest third-party users, hit me up. :)