So, Paizo just released their updated Compatibility License for Pathfinder Second Edition! What does it look like? Well, a lot like the Compatibility License for first edition. But it's not the same, and you can't use the first edition license for second edition products. You need to agree to the new license if you want to produce Pathfinder Second Edition products. But it's so much legalese! Is there anyone who can put these side-by-side and let an overworked third party publisher know what's different? 

Yes! I can! Here are the changes, based on my own review:

  • The new license includes a Pathfinder-Icons font publishers can use. That’s nice to have, so abilities and magic items and such use the same symbolic language as Pathfinder Second Edition. There are some restrictions, though. To quote the new license: “You may use the Font only within Products and in advertisements and websites directly promoting those Products. You may not redistribute the font file, though you may embed it in a digital file (such as a PDF) produced under this License, for display and/or printing. No other license may be applied to it.” That seems reasonable to me.
  • “Products” wasn’t defined before, and may have been a bit ambiguous. Now “Products” covered by the license are defined as “printed books, electronic books, and freely available websites.” That is, they aren’t apps or electronic files. This is good for clarity, even though it was previously there, just buried in a later provision. And perhaps Paizo can stop clarifying every now and then that this license isn’t applicable to those things!
  • You can’t use the Compatibility Logo or Font unless your Product is fully compatible with Pathfinder Second Edition. Makes sense.
  • You used to be able to use the Compatibility Logo to indicate your product is compatible with the Pathfinder RPG. Now, you can use it “only on Products and in advertisements and websites directly promoting those Products.” That’s a little more limiting.
  • You formerly couldn’t design your products to look like Paizo’s products. You still can’t, but now you also can’t design your advertisements to look like Paizo’s advertisements. I wonder why this was something Paizo felt it had to add. I’m also concerned because there are only so many ways to advertise an RPG, I feel, and Paizo has staked their claim over some of those.
  • No product can be released under this license until August 1, 2019.
  • There’s some renumbering of sections. Don't let that scare you; content is very much the same (except, of course, as I'm listing here).
  • You used to only be able to reference specific books that were permitted. That’s still the rule, but now you “you may not reference them in your title, on your front cover, in your website domain name, or in advertisements.” I also wonder whether they had a problem with people calling their products “Ultimate Magic Expansion” or something like that. This is a more limiting.
  • They clarified something, which I suppose is technically an expansion. If a Paizo product name includes “Product Identity” as defined in the OGL, you are permitted to use it only to reference the title. I suppose if Paizo produced a “Rovagug’s Guide to Kicking Sarenrae’s Butt” it would be useful to say your product has lots of expanded butt-kicking powers to add to that. I think this is realistically designed to protect Paizo’s “Lost Omens” campaign setting name, since they’re including that in a lot of their product titles.
  • Huh. I just noticed that both the old license and the new license both award legal costs in a dispute to the prevailing party. That’s un-American. Really, that’s not a euphemism. It’s the “English Rule” of dividing such fees; the “American Rule” is that each party pays their own fees. A provision like Paizo included is specifically and intentionally designed to discourage action against them. 
  • A minor, sneaky change: previously, if Paizo updated the exhibits, they said “we will send notice to the contact information you supplied” but now it’s “we will attempt to send notice to the email address you supplied.” They also can send notices by email now. That lets them try less hard. Huh. I wonder if this was a problem before now for them.
  • Paizo doesn’t want your ads! Paizo previously required sending copies of any book, electronic book, or freely available websites” to their license manager. Now they just want copies of books and electronic books. Perhaps no one was sending website links to their license manager anyway.
  • If your Product is a website, you now have slightly different text to apply and you have to put the Compatibility Logo on your website’s main page. I know it’s hard to actually say what a “main page” is for this purpose (the Pathfinder section of a big game company with multiple systems? Or their home page?), and I wonder whether there are going to be issues with this.
  • You must now put the logo on any advertising; before, it was just print advertising that required the logo.
  • Of course, there is updated text to be added to your title page, copyright notice, and OGL. I’ll let you grab that updated text from the license text rather than reproduce it here; it’s updated about like you’d expect. The only change is you have to use a slightly longer block of text on a website than you had to use before. (Before, you needed longer text for a book or electronic book and a shorter text for ads and websites. Now you need the longer text for books, e-books, and websites and the shorter text solely for ads.)