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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.
Yup, but as you point out they can stop you using the IP by killing you, burning down your opposing park etc. Sure you can have 8 different Mickey Mouse parks in theory with no overlap but in practice without government intervention thats going to devolve pretty quickly. Thats why I said pragmatically its much the same even if it isn't in theory, at least in the scales we are looking at.
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