Member-only story
This article represents some thoughts on how copy-left and permissive licences create value. It uses the story of Bioware and it’s use of the D&D™ and Forgotten Realms™ games & mythos as an example. There are two recent news items that make this current: that the community repository for Neverwinter Nights has just shut, and that Wizards of the Coast have just released Dungeons & Dragons V5 rules as a free to use .pdf, a small but significant step to a freemium business model. The story shows how an initially traditional author-publisher business model, leveraged a pre-made community, grew it and latterly enabled it. The point of this story is the way in which community and value grew, becoming significant author contributors and the way in which Bioware responded and learnt although some might say not as quickly or as generously as they might.
Another motivation is that I included a version of this story in a professional presentation on intellectual property law, open source and collaboration and it didn’t fit; it took up too much time. I used this story to explore the alternatives to All Rights Reserved, and looked at how they did and didn’t use licence engineering to build community and leverage their fans and customers to create market value. Arguably, it became one of the first games as a platform even if accidentally.
