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IP itself is a government creation. So the question is not "does WOTC have a right", the question is "are we happy with the government giving them this right". I'm not happy with it.
I suppose my question is why? Part of a companies brand and therefore value can be the moral values it upholds (or is seen to uphold at least). A trad right wing RPG company should be able to pick and choose who it licenses to and not license to communists or whatever. Thats a business decision. People who don't like it can suck it up and use it anyway. Or go elsewhere.
A company should be able to be openly political if it likes. If Elon owned Twitter wants to ban everyone to the left of Kevin Sorbo he should be allowed to. It's his platform now. We can then respond by not using it. It isn't necessary, it's not a requirement to live or take part in society. Even less so with WOTC.
I don't pick the companies I use due to their values but many people do and companies should be allowed to take advantage of those preferences if they like. If they think one of their license holders being outed as a rapist or a liberal or jaywalker is bad for PR then they should be allowed to write their license for the future to include severability. And then customers can either like that, not like it or not care and act accordingly. Forcing companies to be viewpoint neutral is a disservice to them and to the engine of capitalism. It's ok for them to be biased and have a political lean if they want. It's also ok for them not to be. More choice, more freedom, more dynamism.
Social media site for centrists only? Go for it. High heel shoes only for right wingers? Rock on. Rugby boots for anarcho-syndicalists? Kick away. You'll probably fail horribly but you should be allowed to try. If you want to try and spread your values and earn money that should be allowed. It gives people more opportunities for work where it is for something other than just a pay cheque, which is i think one of the most soul destroying things we do. Woke capitalism is the model of the future. Many people it turns out like to work for a company that (they believe) is also doing good.
Exceptions for utilities, phone, internet access and the like as they are requirements on the modern world. But it should be a light touch beyond that.
I'm not suggesting they be arrested for not wanting right-wingers to use D&D. I'm just pointing out that IP isn't naturally property; it's not a right which the government merely recognizes like the right to actual property or to your body. IP is a government-granted monopoly and the government shouldn't be granting monopolies that are against the interests of the populace in general.
They shouldn't be allowed to have a license for that at all. It's IP, it isn't something that they naturally own such that it can only be used by others if they license it out. It's not a car, or an apartment. It's a deal where we say "we pretend you own it and we'll shoot people who don't agree, as long as you use it for everyone's benefit".
I don't think the "use it for everyone's benefit" is part of the deal. It more like "so you can monetize it therefore incentivizing people to come up with new ideas in the future, which can also be monetized and thus taxed"
There is absolutely no requirement for everyone to benefit because that would mean giving your IP away. The restrictions specifically mean NOT everyone will benefit, thats the point. Only certain people will. I'm not benefitting from Brandon Sanderson owning his product, he is. Which makes sense as he spent time and effort making it up. I can enter into a transaction to enjoy his product by buying his books. But i would benefit more by getting them free. But he wouldn't.
There is a meta view that encouraging people to create by allowing them ownership so they can make money off it, then benefits society over all. But that doesn't mean every single person or group has to get that benefit for every single IP. Just that IP laws protect the trad right RPG maker as they do the communist left RPG maker. The key factor is that they then retain the right to decide what to do with their work. They can sell it on, destroy it, refuse to license it for any reason.
There are writers who refuse to license their works to be made into movies because they think the message will be destroyed or their vision perverted. But more people will benefit from their work when it is more widely spread so accepting your logic, they should not be able to refuse? Alan Moore must license his works so that more people can benefit? That would seem to be the end point of your argument.
If Alan Moore held 80% of the market, such that making a derivative of anyone else's work than Moore's was difficult merely because of the size of the market, it would be fair to not let him use copyright to keep people from making derivatives. Think of something like public accommodation laws, except that there's no issue of "the government telling me what to do with my property" because copyrights are not actually property.
I can't imagine how such a thing would even come up for Alan Moore. It would be impossible for one person to produce enough literature such that creating literature that didn't use it was orders of magnitude less practical than using it. Even Watchmen or Harry Potter aren't 80% of the literature market. D&D's position in the gaming market doesn't compare to anything else that's copyrighted except software, and I'd certainly object if Microsoft said "anyone can link to Windows libraries, except Trump supporters".
DnD makes up about 53% to 55% of the market as near as i can tell. So it isn't anywhere near a monoply though. And even if it were 80% there are plenty of alternatives, so it would quickly lose market share. As indeed seems to be happening right now.
There are feedback mechanisms to punish companies who overreach without government intervention. And if their consumer base like the overreach, then it was not overreach but a savvy business move.
I am more sympathetic to your Microsoft example. So its not that i think the base idea is without merit. Monopolies that lock people out of using most computers (vital for the modern world) seem something worth tackling.
But DnD is just a game. They don't have to be politically inclusive if they don't want to be. Even if Fox news had 80% share i still think they should be allowed to be as partisan as they want. After all that is part of how they would have got to 80% market share so hobbling their strategy doesn't seem warranted. Its ok for entertainment and "news" and so on to be partisan. People are partisan and in general companies should be able to appeal to that as much or as little as they want to.
And its not as though a conservative can't hold their nose and play DnD anyway. WOTC can't tell, the only thing they are targetting are people they license. Its more like Fox News saying they can fire a host who comes out as a communiat or gets into a scandal. Thats the default position I think.
Googling figures, if you add Pathfinder, Starfinder, and D&D 3.5 you get somewhat over 60%. Which is less than I expected, but big enough that keeping someone from using it is not like saying they can't use something by Alan Moore.
... if most of the market were occupied by Fox News and this automatically made you lose out on 60% of the jobs. And even that's a bad comparison because Fox News hiring someone means that Fox is spending money that they actually own, not things that we've created a fake ownership structure around.
But those are owned by Paizo who are a competitor of WOTC and are indeed taking advantage of this misfire to set up their ORC licensing system. So I don't think you can add those in to WOTC figures for this purpose.
If we really want to get down to the nitty gritty all ownership is constructed. Before governments enforced it, you owned something until someone who could take it, took it off you. I am unconvinced that IP is much different than any other ownership pragmatically. The government puts in artificial rules, but that applies to land as well.
Disney can choose to license their IP to Google for a billion dollars, or they can choose to license it to nobody or to Bob Smith who they really like for 3 dollars and a donut, but not to Jeff Bezos who they hate even for 10 billion dollars. Having the government decide what the neutral business decision is each time, stops them from making their choices for whatever reason they please. Notably though publicly traded companies already have a mechanism to enforce this. Shareholders can take action where they think company management is not acting in the fiduciary interests of the company. A private company however should be able to burn their IP, burn all their money, spend it on hookers and blow in Amsterdam, license it to the government for a penny, license it to Cuba for some rum and cigars, donate it to Trump to use as NFTs or whatever. That's the point of having a privately owned company.
Unless it is in a few sectors that people need (utilities, internet etc), there is no point in pretending that consumers are not often partisan. If my left wing RPG company tanks because I refuse to license right wingers, but the centrist one that licenses everyone outcompetes me, then the solution already exists. If it doesn't and enough people WANT a company that has a specific viewpoint to keep me in business then they should be able to have the desire fulfilled in exchange for cash money. Sure, if I get 90% market share that sucks for people I won't license, but if I have 90% market share then my product (part of which is my partisan viewpoints) is clearly preferred. Making me not able to have that viewpoint as soon as I hit some level of dominance is just punishing companies for being successful at giving their audience what they want.
If there was no government, and you created something using Mickey Mouse, Disney could send agents to shoot you, but they could do that no matter what you did, such as open a competing amusement park across the street or create a rival cartoon character that's purely original, all acts that are legal under copyright with a government. Unlike, say, your toothbrush, the fact that one person uses it doesn't automatically keep someone else from using it.
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I have a problem with an open source style license ever being changed in a way that restricts use of material that had been open source. If you develop something newer and better that's fine, but you shouldn't be able to ever make an existing open source license more restrictive.
I agree with that. If they want to add a caveat or two going forward, i think that is their right (albeit probably stupid given the reaction.) But only for material licensed after that change.
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I am fundamentally against companies upholding moral values. I think it's a societal declaration of bankruptcy and corrosive to democracy, and I think it should be outlawed. I want my companies to be amoral profit-maximizers. This idea we have that we can tame companies when we already have a nice, central mechanism for arbitrating moral questions (elections, rule of law) just ends up recreating democracy but worse in every way: less equal, less regulated, less principled, less consistent, more corrupt, more vulnerable to extremism, and so on.
Companies are just people, and people have moral values. There's no getting around that point.
This is also why I don't take the defense that they're just pandering seriously. No, they are staffed by true believers, and those true believers have shifted the balance of power into their favor.
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There is no such thing as amoral profit maximizers involving people. Your idea means both Chik Fil A and the mom and pop restaurant who donate food to the needy are ruled out. You're ruling out Fox news, Red State, MSNBC, Twitter, any company that chooses to use American labor for patriotic reasons. Any company that donates to charity.
Choosing profit and nothing else is already a moral stance after all.
I'll take that trade. Companies should preferentially use American labor due to a law passed by Congress (or a state legislature or a local ordnance), if at all.
So when (which ever side is not yours) is in power and does the opposite of what you like, affecting every company in the nation, that is better than companies making their own choices and rising or falling based upon them?
When the neo-liberal wing is ascendant they force companies to out source, when the woke wing is ascendant they force companies to support Planned Parenthood or Trans rights? Evangelicals force companies to put up crosses? Once the government gets to decide what moral stances are acceotable for companies in general that can be used by every government.
I think it would likely be unconstitutional in any event but it seems like a very bad idea.
Companies are democratic in that they only survive if consumers use their products or services, we can easily choose not to, and if enough people agree either their stances change or they go out of business.
I believe in the ability of government to deadlock itself on contentious issues. That aside, this is how things used to work - labor regulation, health and safety, disabled access etc. That's the sort of world I want to go back to.
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