| To my understanding CC was a consultant on the earliest OGL 1.0 development cycles. There's a bunch of complex interplays of different IP protections in tabletop roleplaying and so CC recommended building something from scratch for the same reason CC tries to remind people that CC is not an open source code license and you should use open source code licenses for software code. Some specific troubles: - Most game mechanics cannot be copyrighted they can only be patented. I believe CC recommended the OGL contain a patent grant similar to the one in the (software license) Apache License 2.0, though one directly as such did not make the final OGL. (There is something of an implied grant, but no specific clause and definitely not as well spelled out as Apache License 2.0.) - Many elements are more subject to trademark laws than copyright laws. Things like the names of spells or skills or things like that. A TTRPG has to explicitly define which "vocabulary" is subject to trademark enforcement in a way that doesn't turn the trademarks into generics that puts them at risk of loss in a court case. - The very nature of splitting an SRD from other game materials is somewhat unique to this TTRPG model. A lot of the OGL is legally trying to explain what an SRD even is and how it differs from any other book in the "same" RPG (so that it can then limit the scope of most things back to "just the SRD is open"). That said, there's a unique community of CC licensed games on itch.io especially and it certainly seems to work well when the entire game is licensed that way. Most of those authors and companies don't have a lot of trademarks to defend. I could still see a usefulness in that community for some sort of easy to apply patent-grant license, though. (I was debating the other day if a dual-license situation where you did something like CC-BY/Apache License 2.0 could work if you have some way to add the legal language equivalent of "where and as these systems/rules define algorithms, those algorithms are considered to be open source under the Apache License 2.0" to try to broadly apply a patent grant.) I'm curious to see what Paizo does with ORC as maybe that's something their lawyers might help them address in a reusable way even for small RPGs. |