Remember the big splash when the d20 System first came out? Even Salon Magazine wrote about it! Methinks that both the marketing and legal team - and particularly the copyright agent - at WotC are gearing up for the big launch of 4th Edition D&D and that the new edition is not going to be so OGL friendly as the past. What do I base this on?

Two things.

First, the new structure of the Wizards D&D site (which I find poorly designed and wholly unusable even on my broadband connection) and Gleemax forums that require registering, and thus explicitly agreeing to their terms of use which have been the topic of much debate lately.

Secondly, and perhaps more to the point, is reflected in my own sitemeter statistics. Today I was visited by someone browsing from the US Patent and Trademark Office. Not so special in and of itself, but when I looked into their origination link (Critical-Hits) and the link they exited on (The chatty DM), I noticed a pattern (can you spot it?). See, those sites, as well as this one, all base their names on a term that WotC considers Intellectual Property and ‘Product Identity’ under the terms of the d20 System License and the OGL. So, while this may prove to be nothing, and merely the coincidental browsing of a government employee slacking off at work, it may also prove to be part of a power play strategy by Hasbro/WotC to take back a little of the territory they have been very lenient in defending in the past. Lets not forget how aggressive TSR was back in the days before the OGL and d20 System SRD. If this turns out to be more than paranoid speculation then it could be the beginning of the end for a whole new crop of bloggers and I think that could really undermine much of the success that the d20 System in general has had over the past eight years. We shall see… In the meantime, I guess I’ll clean up my own act a little bit and stop jacking Wizard’s bandwidth (and copyrights!) by linking to their artworks in this blog.