Could a company such as Paizo for set up a new RPG company owned by say Paizo to publish 4th ed stuff and that wouldn't violate the no going back cause of the GSL?
No, that falls under affiliates I think.
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Could a company such as Paizo for set up a new RPG company owned by say Paizo to publish 4th ed stuff and that wouldn't violate the no going back cause of the GSL?
I'm 99% sure it mentions that you'll be in violation if an affiliate uses your converted material under OGL as well, might find the exact wording when I've got the time to go ferreting through the document again. So yeah, you could do something like that, but you couldn't own the new company directly as that would make it an affiliate. You'd have to do enough finagling to disassociate the two companies (plus that's going to hurt your marketing, if the companies aren't recognised as working together) that it probably isn't worth the bother, especially considering WotC could just terminate your GSL anyway if they think you're trying to pull a fast one.
I'm very sure that courts could still hold you responsible, as the company would just be a "fake", created exclusively for the purpose of trying to evade obligations.
1) The GSL contemplates it already. Specifically, it already deals with affiliates and licensees, making this difficult.
2) Courts won't like it. There are things you can do with separation to make it more acceptable, but they're going to be skeptical to start.
3) Even if you manage to work around both of those problems with technicalities, Wizards can still stop you. They can terminate the GSL with respect to any entity at-will, and they can refuse to enter into the license with any entity.
True Enough.
If you don't sign it, all they can do is ask you to stop (and then the burden is on them to prove you actually did anything wrong, which can open up a whole new can-O-worms for them).
If you do sign it, they can take their pound of flesh.
Could a company such as Paizo for set up a new RPG company owned by say Paizo to publish 4th ed stuff and that wouldn't violate the no going back cause of the GSL?
Even if you did and it didn't violate the GSL, Wizards could change the GSL so that it did violate the GSL. They allow themselves to change it at any time with no notice.
Will pathfinder rpg still count as OGL as it is its own entirely seperate game that happens to be backwards compatable with 3.5. Will it still need to use the ogl for example?
Of course, under the OGL, I could theoretically take all of Paizo's open gaming content to date, republish it under my own "Pie-Zone" pdf lines ("Roadlocator" and "Amusement Conquest"), then, under the GSL, update those to 4e without Paizo's involvement.
Even better, I could created a "line" called "2008" and republish all of Paizo's 2008 open gaming content, then convert that line to 4e under the GSL and start a new OGL-compatible line called "2009" . . .
. . . then get called by WotC for shenanigans ;).
Everything in the core rulebok is considered OGL, except for the deities.
Technically, it looks like the language about "third-party affiliates" only applies to electronic versions of the OGL products. But that certainly wasn't WotC's intent, and they would certainly update the license to close that loophole. Oh, and you would have until midnight that day to stop publishing or be sued for violating the GSL.
As for Pathfinder and the OGL: Anything that's a modification of the core content would probably have to be distributed as OGC, since the OGL kicks in the second you read the covered material, unlike the GSL.
(Insert obligatory "I am not a lawyer" disclaimer for everything above, especially the second paragraph).
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These are Hasbro lawyers. they're very good about copyrights, product identity and all that stuff. Anything you bright folks can think of, they've probably already got a strategy for it.
They don't need a strategy. If you do something they don't like, they just say "You can't do that," and they're right. "You can't do that" isn't a strategy, it's absolute power.
Which, as we all know is..."kinda neat."