Open Gaming License

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The Open Gaming License (also Open Game License or OGL) is an open content license designed for role-playing games. It was published by Wizards of the Coast in 2000 to license their Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition game as the System Reference Document, or SRD, in a move spear-headed by Ryan Dancey. It is commonly used with the d20 license to allow individuals, amateur and professional companies and groups to publish the SRD and derivative works under the d20 System trademark. It has also been used to license content unrelated to the d20 System and/or the SRD.

Those individuals, groups and publishing companies that license their works under the OGL are sometimes collectively referred to as the "open gaming movement".

1 Terms
2 Criticism
3 See also
4 References
5 Footnotes
6 External links

[edit] Terms

The full text of the OGL is available from Wizards of the Coast^[1]. In many respects, the OGL resembles any other open source license. This section deals primarily with the OGL's differences with standard, open source licenses.

The OGL describes two forms of content: Open Gaming Content (or OGC) and non-OGC content - that is content protected by normal copyright, commonly referred to as "closed content". The OGL permits the inclusion of both OGC - or "open content" - and closed content within a single work. Publishers are required to "clearly indicate" those parts of a work that are OGC.

The OGL also defines the concept of Product Identity (or PI). PI is defined as:

...product and product line names, logos and identifying marks including trade dress; artifacts; creatures characters; stories, storylines, plots, thematic elements, dialogue, incidents, language, artwork, symbols, designs, depictions, likenesses, formats, poses, concepts, themes and graphic, photographic and other visual or audio representations; names and descriptions of characters, spells, enchantments, personalities, teams, personas, likenesses and special abilities; places, locations, environments, creatures, equipment, magical or supernatural abilities or effects, logos, symbols, or graphic designs; and any other trademark or registered trademark...

PI must be clearly defined by the publisher and, by using the OGL, licensees are prevented from distributing, copying or modifying PI and claiming "compatibility or co-adaptability" with PI trademarks unless permission is acquired through a separate license or agreement with the holders of the PI.

Finally, the OGL requires attribution be maintained by the copying of all copyright notices from OGC a licensee is copying, modifying or distributing. Unlike other open source licenses, this requires that the license notice itself must be altered by adding all copyright notices to the Section 15 part of the license.

[edit] Criticism

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The OGL has been criticised by various individual gamers and gamer groups who dissent from the so-called corporate, 'WotC-inspired' open gaming movement, on the grounds that WotC's dominant position in the RPG market is negative and that the OGL would contribute to this negativity by expanding WotC's influence in the market.

Initial criticism was not actually against the OGL, but against the d20 license which permits non-trademark holders to use the d20 trademark. Many often confuse the d20 License with the OGL even though they are two separate legal documents. See d20 System for more information on criticism of the d20 license.

Criticisms of the OGL itself tend to focus on three issues: the definition of Product Identity, the ability to mix Open Gaming Content, or OGC, and non-OGC or closed content, and the lack of a "source" requirement.

The issue of Product Identity, or PI, is probably the most hotly contested. Critics consider PI, as it is defined in the OGL, to onerously and unfairly increase the legal ground covered by traditional intellectual property laws, such as trademarks and copyright. Since it is possible in reality, although against the terms of the Open Gaming Licence itself, that OGC and PI can be combined without making clear distinction between the two, they also contend that by mixing the two without clearly distinguishing them one can prevent downstream licensees from re-using OGC.

Similarly, by mixing open and closed content without clearly distinguishing the two they contend that upstream users can similarly prevent re-use of OGC, thereby eliminating the point of having OGC in the first place. While the OGL does make provision that PI and OGC must be clearly indicated, it gives no specific mechanism by which this may be done and critics consider the terms of the OGL to be vague on how well they may be distinguished. They cite as example the practice common to many d20 and OGL publishers of simply indicating which parts of a work are OGC by simply stating "all rules are Open Gaming Content, the rest is closed" or something similar. These leaves considerable confusion as to which portions of a work are OGC and which are not, which critics often claim is a ploy to prevent re-use of OGC.

The OGL itself is often publicised as a strong copyleft license. However, the ability to mix open and closed content brings into question whether or not it can be considered a strong copyleft license, or whether it can be considered a copyleft license at all.

Finally, criticism is levelled at the lack of a "source" requirement within the OGL - that is, a requirement that the source files used to compose the document into the format it is published be distributed with the document. Such a requirement would, for example, prevent the distribution of open content in encrypted PDF content which would make it non-trivial and even illegal to extract open content from for the purposes of re-use.^[2] Such a strategy digresses however with WotC's formal opinion about the purpose of the OGL, that is to allow third-party publishers to produce commercially viable products in order to support its own products.

Various suggestions have been made for alternative licenses by critics, including the GNU Free Documentation License, the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license and even the GNU General Public License, as well as other open content and free content licenses. See open gaming for more information.