Who Owns the Rules? The OGL Crisis and the Return of the Author
“In January of 2023, Wizards of the Coast took a little more than three weeks to attempt to clarify, backtrack, apologize for, and eventually abandon a piece of legal text that none of their own customers had ever bothered to read. The document was called the Open Game License, and the crisis generated around it has generally been considered from a strictly business perspective: as an issue of licensing, PR, and poor fan management. And this isn’t entirely incorrect. It ignores, however, what makes the OGL crisis interesting from the point of view of anyone concerned with adaptation and authorship, and that is the fact that it was ultimately a struggle over who can lay claim to authorship of a text that had been written by everybody for twenty-three years.“
