wizards of the coast – Techdirt (original) (raw)

from the whoopsie dept

D&D and Magic: The Gathering publisher, Wizards of the Coast (WotC), has certainly been pissing folks off as of late. Between its attempt to change its OGL license for D&D both in the future and retroactively last year combined with sending the literal Pinkerton Agency after someone who received some unreleased Magic cards in error, the company appears to have taken a draconian turn in recent years. Then, over the summer, there was a bunch of backlash when WotC was found to have included art from one of its artists that had been partially generated using AI generative art in one of its books. After that whole fiasco, WotC publicly swore off using any art in its products that was not 100% human created.

And it’s important to note that this is a huge thing in the D&D and Magic worlds. The books, cards, and associated items that players and fans buy from these games have always been revered in part for the fantastic art that has come along with them. And the artists contributing to them have been equally celebrated.

So, when sharp-eyed observers of recent promotional art that came out for Magic pointed out it sure looked like the images around the cards showed signs of having been generated by AI, well, WotC came out with a very strong denial.

“We understand confusion by fans given the style being different than card art, but we stand by our previous statement,” the company tweeted. “This art was created by humans and not AI.”

And even as many sleuths on social media and elsewhere kept up the pushback insisting with example after example within the images themselves that, no, this had all the telltale signs of being AI generated, even that PC Gamer article was referring to all of this as an unfortunate “false positive” resulting from a hyper-sensitivity to the intrusion of AI in art and image generation.

But, no, it turns out that the images around the cards was in fact generated in part using AI, as admitted later on by WotC itself.

After sharp-eyed Magic: The Gathering fans cried foul over a recent promotional image’s seeming use of generative AI, Wizards of the Coast initially asserted that it was fully human-made. However, just two days on Wizards has deleted the offending marketing post and acknowledged that generative tools were used in the image.

On Twitter, Wizards of the Coast stated that the image background was sourced from a third-party vendor, and claimed that “It looks like some AI components that are now popping up in industry standard tools like Photoshop crept into our marketing creative, even if a human did the work to create the overall image.”

You can go read the company’s additional full statement on its website as well. And, as statements about such things go, it’s a fairly good one. It points out that this wasn’t done intentionally or with knowledge by the company, that the company would be working with its 3rd party vendors to make it clear that human-made art is a requirement, and it promised transparency moving forward when it came to this sort of thing.

But the real lesson here is that companies have to be very careful with this sort of thing. The internet has enough well-trained Sherlocks out there who are holding companies to their word, looking for anywhere where AI generated content is being snuck in to replace human-made content that, as the technology stands today, there’s a good chance any such uses will be found out. They might as well save themselves the trouble and just make sure the humans are doing the work.

Filed Under: ai, marketing, promos
Companies: wizards of the coast, wotc

Wizards Of The Coast Sends Pinkerton Agency To Person That Bought Unreleased ‘Magic’ Cards In Error

from the pink-slip dept

Wizards of the Coast (WotC), the company behind both Dungeons & Dragons and Magic The Gathering has been on our pages recently and not for good reasons. Most recently, the company kicked up a completely unnecessary shitstorm for itself by changing the OGL license under which it released D&D Fifth Edition in such a way that it essentially kneecapped the wider community’s ability to create off of the base content, as the community had for years and years. The public response to that change was almost universally negative.

But if that was bad, imagine what the response will be to WotC sending the literal Pinkerton Agency after a YouTuber who revealed a bunch of Magic The Gathering cards he bought, all because a distributor sent him unreleased cards by mistake.

As you would expect in a story about Magic cards being revealed on YouTube, our story begins in the 1800s. That’s when The Pinkerton Agency was chiefly used as a private police force by union busters, acting as a private police force for various government entities looking to tamp down labor issues and to break strikes. We last talked about them when the Pinkertons, which still somehow exist today, sued Take 2 Interactive over the agency’s appearance in Red Dead Redemption 2.

In this case, the Pinkertons went after YouTuber oldschoolmtg, otherwise known as Dan Cannon, for the crime of unboxing Magic cards he had bought legitimately, but which were unreleased cards under embargo sent to him in error.

Over the past week or so, a YouTuber known as oldschoolmtg has been uploading videos of himself opening packs of the new, unreleased Magic: The Gathering set: March of the Machine: The Aftermath. He uploaded three videos, which were widely shared on Reddit and MTG communities, even making headlines on IGN and other sites. He alleged to have 22 boxes, and uploaded multiple videos last week. It’s estimated that oldschoolmtg leaked about 75% of the entire set, or about 36 of the set’s 50 cards. The set is scheduled to be released in just a few weeks on May 12, with “official” reveals set to begin at the start of the month.

And then on Sunday, April 23, oldschoolmtg uploaded a video titled “The Aftermath of The Aftermath … Everything Is Gone!” He described how Pinkerton agents allegedly showed up at his door that morning, demanding the return of the Magic cards. According to his YouTube video, the Pinkertons allegedly asked oldschoolmtg to turn over the “stolen product”—which is, in this case, Magic cards. They collected the cards, the boxes they came in, and even foil that the booster sets are wrapped in. He stated that the agents counted the cards to make sure they retrieved all of them. In the video, oldschoolmtg said that the agents also mentioned “jail time” while they were speaking to him and his wife. The agents gave oldschoolmtg a name and number at Wizards of the Coast, allegedly told him to delete the videos he posted onto YouTube, and left.

You can imagine this must have been a harrowing experience, particularly considering this man never had any intention of doing anything wrong. Here’s what appears to have happened: the unreleased cards he got are part of an expansion pack for a card set that was originally released earlier this month. Those base cards are no longer under embargo. The cards he revealed, similarly named, very much are. In other words, the person he bought them from sent him cards from the wrong set.

Whoever’s fault that is, it most certainly wasn’t Cannon’s. Several publications have been reaching out not just to him, but to WotC. Lest you think that all of this Pinkerton talk is wild speculation, I will note here that in all of the company’s public response to all of this, not once have I seen the company say it did not send the Pinkerton’s to this man’s home. And the company can apologize all it likes, but if that apology doesn’t also come with a promise to never use the agency again, then it’s nothing more than empty words. Especially given the full context of how the Pinkerton’s behaved.

“[The Pinkerton agents] cited several statutes about copyright infringement and some other things threatening 1-10 years in jail and up to $200,000 in fines if I failed to cooperate,” Dan Cannon told Kotaku over an email. “They also said if I didn’t hand over the product, they would call the county sheriff and detain us until they arrived to arrest us and search my house for the product and that they would most likely force us to show receipts for every magic card in the house (which is literally over a million cards).”

If the Pinkertons claimed that they were going to account for over a million cards, that’s really diligent of them. It’s little wonder that corporations have relied on them to responsibly bust unions and to surveil workers. Kotaku reached out to Pinkerton to ask whether or not this procedure is typical of their investigations, but did not receive a response by the time of publication.

So yeah, strong-arming stormtroopers that are almost entirely full of shit. And here’s the really fun question: given that these cards were bought in good faith, are we all 100% sure that what WotC did using the Pinkertons isn’t theft of property on some level?

Either way, it would be about time to see Wizards do some actual damage control here, preferably in the form of an apology and, again, a promise to never use the Pinkertons again. Because this is absolutely ridiculous.

Filed Under: copyright, dan cannon, intimidation, leaks, magic the gathering, oldschoolmtg, unboxing
Companies: pinkerton, wizards of the coast

WotC Makes Major Changes To D&D OGL License, Sends Community Into A Frenzy

from the d-and-don't dept

If you go back and review Techdirt stories about Dungeons & Dragons, the beloved tabletop fantasy roleplaying game, you will see that most of them focus on the stupidity of moral panics, in which D&D is often swept up. This post is decidedly different. Wizards of the Coast (WotC) recently announced there would be changes to its Open Gaming License (OGL) licensing agreement for creators making content around D&D’s core ruleset. And we’ll absolutely get into that. But first: a history lesson.

The current Open Gaming License in place for D&D dates back over two decades. The purpose of that license is very clear: let creators in general use D&D’s core rules and lore to create new content, but disallow the use of certain copyrighted and/or trademarked content. Why would WotC have opened the game up like that? For the most obvious of reasons: because it was profitable to do so.

In a 2002 interview, then-WotC VP and OGL architect Ryan Dancey said the OGL was “essentially exposing the standard D&D mechanics, classes, races, spells, and monsters to the Open Gaming community. Anyone could use that material to develop a product using that information essentially without restrictions, including the lack of a royalty or a fee paid to Wizards of the Coast.”

The idea, Dancey said at the time, was directly inspired by Richard Stallman’s GNU General Public License. And this wasn’t just altruism on WotC’s part; Dancey said the license would encourage the kind of network externalities that would make the D&D rules system more popular, thus increasing sales of the game’s core rulebook and allowing others to profit off of content based on that system.

Dancey might as well have been a Techdirt reader from back in the day, but this sounds of that logic. Open things up with a generous license, get people to create their own content, and it will all lead to more purchases of the core content that WotC sells in the first place. It was simply good business, in other words. This license continues to be in use all the way up to present.

But as I mentioned, that’s about to change. WotC announced a couple of months ago that the OGL would be updated to version 1.1 and that the changes would reflect a desire to not “subsidize” large corporations that were releasing commercial content utilizing D&D core content. That led many to speculate just what the hell would be in OGL 1.1. Thanks to a leaked draft of the new licensing agreement, the public got its first look at OGL 1.1 a week or so ago. The top-line changes are certainly different, though many in the D&D community looked at these specifics with only mild irritation.

The leaked license document sets up a 25 percent royalty for any revenues a company makes beyond $750,000 in a single year. That new royalty reflects WotC’s position that the original OGL was “always intended to allow the community to help grow D&D and expand it creatively” and “wasn’t intended to subsidize major competitors,” according to the leaked document.

That lines up with WotC’s December statement, which says the license update is partly intended to prevent “large businesses [from] exploit[ing] our intellectual property.” And while the royalty in the leaked license only applies to companies with relatively large revenues, the new OGL reportedly lets WotC “modify or terminate this agreement for any reason whatsoever, provided we give thirty (30) days’ notice.”

The number of folks hitting that top tier number in the 10s of people, so we’re not talking about a ton of creators. And, while many have noted that the 25% royalty is on gross revenue rather than profit, you should also note that this is a progressive system, so the royalties only begin to be applied once you’ve made your first dollar over 750,000inasingleyear.MuchoftheirritationinsteadcenteredontherequirementtosharerevenuedatawithWotCifacreatormakesmorethan750,000 in a single year. Much of the irritation instead centered on the requirement to share revenue data with WotC if a creator makes more than 750,000inasingleyear.MuchoftheirritationinsteadcenteredontherequirementtosharerevenuedatawithWotCifacreatormakesmorethan50k in a year in revenue.

Are these changes going to massively effect the wider community? Not these ones, no. I’d argue they’re still counterproductive, however. After all, in the last two decades, D&D has seen a massive uptick in popularity and gameplay, much of it corresponding to creator content, such as Critical Role and the like.

But those aren’t the only and, arguably, most important changes. The new OGL also purports to replace and nullify the original OGL.

Rights and royalties aside, the most controversial part of the new OGL version 1.1 could be its potential effect on the original, decades-old OGL. The new version reportedly calls itself “an update to the previously available OGL 1.0(a), which is no longer an authorized license agreement [emphasis added].”

That wording came as a surprise to many in the community because the original OGL granted “a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive license” to the Open Game Content it described. But while that license was explicitly perpetual, the EFF points out that it was not explicitly irrevocable, meaning WotC retained the legal right to cancel the original agreement at any time, as it seems to be attempting with this updated version.

That just plain sucks. A metric ton of content has been created under the old OGL which was pitched as a perpetual license. To have that license suddenly nullified is a huge betrayal. And, frankly, additional language in the original OGL is likely to create some significant legal headaches for WotC if it wants to enforce its new restrictions in court.

For instance, there is a clause in OGL 1.0a that reads:

Even if Wizards made a change [to the license] you disagreed with, you could continue to use an earlier, acceptable version at your option. In other words, there’s no reason for Wizards to ever make a change that the community of people using the Open Gaming License would object to, because the community would just ignore the change anyway.

But the new OGL, which creators have yet to agree to, says the opposite. It says that the old OGL is nullified and no longer an option for creators. The previously quoted Dancey actually helped create the old OGL. Asked for comment on what that clause means, well…

Yeah, my public opinion is that Hasbro [WotC’s parent company] does not have the power to deauthorize a version of the OGL. If that had been a power that we wanted to reserve for Hasbro, we would have enumerated it in the license. I am on record numerous places in email and blogs and interviews saying that the license could never be revoked.

The result? Well, there are about 40k signees of an open letter to WotC stating that they will refuse to sign up under the new OGL, that the old one is still in effect per the terms within it, and that the community insists the old OGL be an option for new content moving forward.

“From what we’ve seen, OGL 1.1 is not an open license,” the group wrote. “It is a restricted license. WotC can change it at any time to create even more restrictive terms. They can remove anyone’s right to use it for any reason. It is a joke. It is a betrayal.”

This is an amazing example of a company shooting itself in the foot with the worst imaginable timing. D&D likely has never been more popular, or played/watched by more people, than it is right now. Purely because WotC decided it wanted more control, and money, from the creative community its open policies helped create, well, now that community is up in arms, angry at what it sees as a massive betrayal.

Which will lead to two things. First, a chilling effect on creators afraid to create for D&D now. Second, a community with a sizable and very loud megaphone that is very, very angry at the moment when WotC should be riding the crest of the popularity wave it helped foster.

A failed charisma check, in other words.

Filed Under: copyright, license, ogl, ogl 1.1, open gaming license, open licensing
Companies: hasbro, wizards of the coast

Wizards Of The Coast Kills Popular Kickstarter Project Based On Questionable Trademark Claim

from the kaiju? dept

Wizards of the Coast doesn’t necessarily have the greatest reputation when it comes to intellectual property battles, and the latest one seems particularly silly. The company forced the “Kaiju Combat” Kickstarter campaign offline, claiming it was trademark infringement.

Kaiju Combat is a monster fighting game from Sunstone Games. Wizards of the Coast is claiming that this infringes the trademark on KAIJUDO, which is a card game they offer. While they have secured the Kaijudo trademark for video game rights as well, “kaiju” is an ordinary Japanese word meaning “strange beast” or “monster” and commonly is used to refer to the genre of Japanese monster movies like Godzilla. It would be ridiculous to claim that a neologism based on that common word would magically grant the trademark holder control over the original common word as well.

WotC had apparently contacted Sunstone earlier about their claims, and Sunstone had their lawyer explain the nature of trademark law and the fact that Kaiju is a common word… and they heard nothing else. Apparently, they assumed that the situation was settled, though I would think that confirming that before launching the Kickstarter might have been a reasonable move. Simon Strange, the owner of Sunstone, told GamePolitics (link above) that he understands the nature of trademark law, and the fact that you’re supposed to protect your marks, but he figured that it could be settled between discussions with lawyers, rather than suddenly having his Kickstarter project taken down and all its backers informed of the dispute. And, now, he’s worried about legal costs:

“Obviously we can’t afford to spend our very limited development budget, which was provided by our backers on Kickstarter, on fighting over a name,”” He says. “But at the same time it would really make me sad if we’re forced to change our name just because we can’t afford to defend ourselves. I’m still hopeful that it won’t come to that.”

Maybe Kickstarter should automatically populate projects that are taken down like this with a special “legal fund” Kickstarter while they wait for details to be worked out.

Filed Under: crowdfunding, kaiju, kaiju combat, monsters, trademark, video games
Companies: sunstone games, wizards of the coast

Wizards Of The Coast Learning That Pissing Off Geeks Isn't Such A Good Idea…

from the be-careful... dept

If there’s one group online that it’s useful to avoid pissing off, it’s “the geeks.” And one thing that plenty of geeks love is Dungeons and Dragons. Yet, D&D publisher, Wizards of the Coast, has fans of the game up in arms over the decision to stop a bunch of online retailers from selling PDF versions of its games and books, while also filing eight lawsuits claiming infringement for unauthorized distribution…. and I have to admit, I can’t recall a story ever getting this many submissions from readers here (perhaps there’s a bit of overlap in our audiences). In some cases, the demand to retailers to remove these PDFs has caused those who legitimately bought them (but hadn’t downloaded them yet) to not be able to get the product they had purchased. On top of this, Wizards is apparently also looking at employing some sort of DRM for any future digital releases, which also has plenty of people angry.

What’s amazing to watch is the pushback from the games’ biggest fans. They’re wondering why Wizards is limiting legitimate sales of its products, and looking to make the overall product worse by limiting it with annoying DRM. As people keep pointing out, piracy is going to happen one way or the other — but rather than trying to lock stuff down (and, one other aspect of this is requiring all resellers to become “authorized internet resellers”), why not focus on ways to use that content to build bigger and better business models that don’t require treating all your fans and customers as criminals?

Filed Under: copyright, downloads, dungeons and dragons, files, pdfs, sales
Companies: wizards of the coast