>And third, we wanted to ensure that the OGL is for the content creator, the homebrewer, the aspiring designer, our players, and the community—not major corporations to use for their own commercial and promotional purpose.

"Corporate needs you to find the difference between these two pictures."

"They are the same picture."

There is no legal difference between "fans playing in your sandbox" and "major corporations using your work for their commercial purposes". Under current copyright law, fans are just really unscrupulous thieves, and writing a legal distinction between the two that won't immediately be run roughshod by Hollywood, book publishers, or the music industry is extremely difficult if not impossible.

If you want a license that turns off major corporations, pick CC-BY-SA.

Yes, I know CC-BY-NC-SA exists. That sounds like it'd do what WotC would want: draw a line cleanly between fans and corporations. However, the notion of commercial use in the law is so broad as to cover basically everything. The only two cases in which I'd say CC-BY-NC-SA[0] confers any rights is either...

- You are an individual sharing the work on a filesharing network

- You can categorically prove to a judge that you had no "commercial advantage or private monetary compensation"

The latter category excludes literally all fan works. Even if you just drew them yourself and posted them online, that still gives you social capital: likes, reshares, and algorithmic attention. That is a commercial advantage for you. Even if you exclude that, the platform you posted the works on is still getting a commercial advantage from you being on there, so they have violated the license that you sublicensed to them. That's why the NonCommercial clause in that license has to say "filesharing is not commercial", because existing case law already says the opposite. If it's a draw, it's commercial.

Copyleft & ShareAlike clauses don't have this problem, because they ride atop established legal definitions rather than murky notions people have of being able to infringe copyright a little. All they say is "if copyright law says you made a derivative, then you have to also license it back to the commons you took from". Quick, simple, and most importantly, court-tested[1]. And no profit-seeking corporation will play ball. The standard practice of negotiating a license in exchange for royalties is so lucrative that it starves other forms of funding creative work. For the same reason, you don't see people making big-budget SCP films[2], because you can't window a release that you are legally allowed to CAM[4].

Of course, Wizards doesn't want that either, because... well, they also can't negotiate a license in exchange for royalties in that scenario. The market for exception selling is actually not that big. Even if it does serve to separate fans from large corporations now... what stops the corporations from just buying or hiring the fans later on once they figure out a viable business model under CC-BY-SA? The circle that Wizards is trying to square is that they want a license that is functionally worthless, so that when the corporations jump in to buy out the fans, they can pull the coin out of the vending machine and steal the surplus that those other corporations wanted.

[0] Or it's even weirder cousin, CC-BY-NC-ND, which is basically just a fancy covenant not to sue BitTorrent users

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group,_Inc._v._Internation...

[2] There are plenty of indie films out there, of course, and they do largely play ball with CC-BY-SA, Andrey Duksin[3] notwithstanding.

[3] A Russian SCP creator that trademarked the SCP logo and tried to extract monetary demands from the SCP Wiki's Russian language branch. Their shenaniganery has largely been forgotten due to the ongoing situation of Russia being a genocidal ethnofascist death cult.

[4] Movie piracy scene term for "point a camcorder at a screen and press record". Prohibited by many state laws but I'm pretty sure you couldn't enforce it on a CC-BY-SA work.