4 ms·

Perpetual doesn't imply anything about revocability (thats irrevocable). The law doesn't operate in this stupid vacuum like software engineers believe it does.

londons_explore 4y ago
But from a logistical point of view, is it possible to revoke a license from a person that you don't know the name and address of, and have no way to find it? I think you'd be hard pressed to tell a court that you want to sue an unnamed person for following the terms of a license that you granted to them, then revoked but haven't told them you revoked, and that you don't know their name or address...
- patmcc 4y ago
  The law doesn't care all that much about logistics, for one. More importantly a license like this only practically matters for published work, and published work is generally not completely anonymous; WOTC doesn't know everyone who has published something under the OGL but they certainly know of Paizo, Roll20, Critical Role, etc. and fundamentally those are the ones they care about. If Jim your local DM keeps writing homebrew they won't know, but it's also not who they're aiming at (yet).
ajross 4y ago
That's true, but it also adheres closely to ideas like "common sense". It's hard to imagine how to interpret the use of "perpetual" in the original OGL that doesn't imply "irrevocable"; certainly nothing else in a blanket license like this is going to be time-limited. I dunno, but I'd want to see someone cite some case law where a "perpetual" license was allowed to be revoked like this. It certainly smells off to me. Obviously WotC isn't obligated to license any new content under an older OGL, it can use whatever terms it wants. But as for existing OGL content, I think they're on some very "innovative" ground here, legally.
- tptacek 4y ago
  From the reading I've done, I don't think there's much controversy about this: perpetual licenses aren't automatically irrevocable; they're separate concepts. A perpetual license is just a license without an expiration date. There are other reason I've read that 1.0 could be effectively irrevocable, but the word "perpetual" isn't, I don't think, one of them? https://assets.fenwick.com/legacy/FenwickDocuments/Technology_Licensing.pdf https://assets.fenwick.com/legacy/FenwickDocuments/Technolog... "Perpetual means a string of infinite length; irrevocable means a string, of any length, that cannot be cut."
  - ajross 4y ago
    That still seems like an extremely narrow reading of a license that has been in regular use in an industry selling real products for 20 years. Literally everyone, including WotC, has gone on behaving as if this was "irrevocable". And only now it's not, because of a technical reading of the text of the license? That's not really the spirit of this kind of thing, and courts aren't computers. FWIW: I'll also note that the GPLv2 doesn't contain the word "irrevocable". Do we really believe that software authors of critical societal infrastructure should be empowered to do this kind of rug pull?
    - tptacek 4y ago
      Karen Sandler and Heather Meeker on why GPL2 is irrevocable: https://www.zdnet.com/article/no-you-cant-take-open-source-code-back/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/no-you-cant-take-open-source-c...
      - ajross 4y ago
        Sure, but that's just an estoppel argument, which is exactly the kind of "common sense" thing I'm talking about. You don't get to walk around for two decades with one understanding of a license and then suddenly decide it means something different.
        4y ago

londons_explore 4y ago

But from a logistical point of view, is it possible to revoke a license from a person that you don't know the name and address of, and have no way to find it? I think you'd be hard pressed to tell a court that you want to sue an unnamed person for following the terms of a license that you granted to them, then revoked but haven't told them you revoked, and that you don't know their name or address...

patmcc 4y ago
The law doesn't care all that much about logistics, for one. More importantly a license like this only practically matters for published work, and published work is generally not completely anonymous; WOTC doesn't know everyone who has published something under the OGL but they certainly know of Paizo, Roll20, Critical Role, etc. and fundamentally those are the ones they care about. If Jim your local DM keeps writing homebrew they won't know, but it's also not who they're aiming at (yet).

ajross 4y ago

That's true, but it also adheres closely to ideas like "common sense". It's hard to imagine how to interpret the use of "perpetual" in the original OGL that doesn't imply "irrevocable"; certainly nothing else in a blanket license like this is going to be time-limited. I dunno, but I'd want to see someone cite some case law where a "perpetual" license was allowed to be revoked like this. It certainly smells off to me. Obviously WotC isn't obligated to license any new content under an older OGL, it can use whatever terms it wants. But as for existing OGL content, I think they're on some very "innovative" ground here, legally.

tptacek 4y ago
From the reading I've done, I don't think there's much controversy about this: perpetual licenses aren't automatically irrevocable; they're separate concepts. A perpetual license is just a license without an expiration date. There are other reason I've read that 1.0 could be effectively irrevocable, but the word "perpetual" isn't, I don't think, one of them? https://assets.fenwick.com/legacy/FenwickDocuments/Technology_Licensing.pdf https://assets.fenwick.com/legacy/FenwickDocuments/Technolog... "Perpetual means a string of infinite length; irrevocable means a string, of any length, that cannot be cut."
- ajross 4y ago
  That still seems like an extremely narrow reading of a license that has been in regular use in an industry selling real products for 20 years. Literally everyone, including WotC, has gone on behaving as if this was "irrevocable". And only now it's not, because of a technical reading of the text of the license? That's not really the spirit of this kind of thing, and courts aren't computers. FWIW: I'll also note that the GPLv2 doesn't contain the word "irrevocable". Do we really believe that software authors of critical societal infrastructure should be empowered to do this kind of rug pull?
  - tptacek 4y ago
    Karen Sandler and Heather Meeker on why GPL2 is irrevocable: https://www.zdnet.com/article/no-you-cant-take-open-source-code-back/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/no-you-cant-take-open-source-c...
    - ajross 4y ago
      Sure, but that's just an estoppel argument, which is exactly the kind of "common sense" thing I'm talking about. You don't get to walk around for two decades with one understanding of a license and then suddenly decide it means something different.
      - 4y ago