This answer states that Margaret Weis "owns" Dragonlance, and that she "won the rights to Dragonlance in a court battle." Is this accurate? I could not find any details of such a court battle, or indeed anything corroborating the assertion that Weis owns Dragonlance, from searching the Internet. Or does Wizards of the Coast still own Dragonlance?
Note that a license to produce products using an IP, and the IP itself, are two different things.
As to your first question, about who owns the Dragonlance intellectual property, that appears to have always been Wizards of the Coast. According to a Q&A on the website of Tracy Hickman, the co-author of the core trilogy:
We were not unique in this: everyone working at the company at the time was under similar constrictions. We were being paid to create and play games and it was a condition of that employment that we hand over our rights to our creations. Those rights were sold as part of the purchase of TSR, Inc. by Wizards of the Coast and then subsequently owned by Hasbro when they acquired the company as a subsidiary.
As to your second question, regarding a court battle between Weis and WotC, I was unable to find any mention of such a case. The closest I found was the following paragraph from this article on Dragonlance on WotC's D&D website:
Wizards continued to publish Dragonlance novels throughout the ‘00s, but they opted not to release additional gaming books. Instead, they licensed those rights out to Weis’s own company, Margaret Weis Productions (originally: Sovereign Press). The result was the most prolific period of Dragonlance publication since the early ‘90s.
According to this archived post by Jamie Chambers on Dragonlance.com from January 31, 2008, those licensing rights reverted to Wizards of the Coast in 2008.
Update: As V2Blast points out in a comment below, it does appear that Hickman and Weis sued Wizards of the Coast for breach of contract by denying to give contractually obligated feedback. The filing can be read on document cloud and scribd. In December of 2020, they dismissed their lawsuit. In January of 2021, a new trilogy of classic Dragonlance novels was announced.
Update 2: In April of 2022, WotC announced a new Dragonlance adventure book. Margaret Weis has said on social media that she was not involved.
In a post on her personal profile on Facebook (reported also on the Dragonlance Nexus group) she says that neither she nor Tracy Hickman owned the rights: TSR once and now WoTC have always owned the rights to the Dragonlance.
To clarify, Tracy Hickman created Dragonlance while he was an employee for TSR. We wrote the novels while we were employees of TSR. TSR and, later, WoTC, have always owned the rights to the Dragonlance. Tracy and I did not give them away, sell them, or lose them in a poker game.
Here one can find the original post on Facebook or on Twitter .
