General RPG DiscussionDiscussion of all RPGs and non-system-specific topics. DM/GM/player issues, settings, etc. Rules discussion belongs in one the forums below.
Did you know that many printers come with a "watermark", too. Each page is imprinted with it - invisibly to the naked eye, but if you print out something, it could be traced back to the buyer of the printer.
How so? It's not like you have to show ID when you buy a printer or a scanner.
1. Wizards has stopped PDF sales DESPITE the fact that the existing security process allowed them to identify the sources of the pirated materials... um, so that they can have time to come up with a security system that would let them, um, identify the source of pirated materials.
2. This relates to fewer than 3,000 copies. The legal fees alone would have already exceeded the total revenue (and not profit) of 3,000 sales at MRRP!
3. For the sake of 3,000 copies that probably had no impact on Wizards' revenues (or profits), Wizards has unleashed an Epic-level spell of nerdrageacross the internet doing untold damage to the brand with those of us who actually buy their products.
No business should be run by its lawyers. And I say that as someone who likes lawyers, who has close friends and business partners who are lawyers, but that doesn't mean that I let them run the commercial side of my businesses (just as I don't run the legal side of my businesses).
However, I do wish I was a lawyer for Wizards and/or Hasbro because I can see now that they would be an easy mark for squeezing out some ridiculous fees to fund multiple tilts at multiple small windmills.
If Wizards has a CEO who is worth his pay he should be stepping in right now and providing some real leadership.
I really don't get the outrage. An alleged copyright infringer has been found and is being prosecuted. Pretty standard. Wizards has stopped selling PDFs. It's a pity, but clearly there isn't sufficient profit in it for them. Maybe the legal fees for this case have brought it home to them. It's a business decision. Big deal. I mean, we managed before pdfs, didn't we?
How so? It's not like you have to show ID when you buy a printer or a scanner.
Still narrows things down considerably. They will know at least at which shop they were sold, which means they have to cross-check "only" the list of customers in the area of that shop with other data.
Even if they can't find you with it, they can later use it as evidence against you, because one you are caught, checking your printer or scanner can be enough.
Thoughts of the Arch Chancellor - My weblog on EN World - containing game related material, like: house rules, design theories, reviews, play reports, adventure ideas
Secret Member of <Think we would just hide our secret with a spoiler tag, eh?>
Still narrows things down considerably. They will know at least at which shop they were sold, which means they have to cross-check "only" the list of customers in the area of that shop with other data.
Even if they can't find you with it, they can later use it as evidence against you, because one you are caught, checking your printer or scanner can be enough.
Ahh, this is way too optimistic IMO. I doubt shop inventory identifies individual physical products (only in some food fields -such as wine bottles have I seen this).
Moreover even if there was shop ID and you found out the shop that sold it you would need lots of luck to make something out of it. Even more I am not sure that the shop should cooperate due to privacy reasons.
There is no jail time possible for civil cases. For jail to be a possibility the "state" (local/state/federal) would have to file a criminal case and the likelyhood of that is as close to zero as to make it meaningless.
After they win a civil case on the people, HOW difficult will it be for the "State" to go after them for a criminal case? They have already proved them guilty in case. That is basically an automatic conviction if you don't mess it up.
Still narrows things down considerably. They will know at least at which shop they were sold, which means they have to cross-check "only" the list of customers in the area of that shop with other data.
Even if they can't find you with it, they can later use it as evidence against you, because one you are caught, checking your printer or scanner can be enough.
Well, the definition of area can be rather vague. I bought my last HP printer at a big store on the outskirts of Rome, rather far from my home. It's a popular place and the list of potential customers is several millions...
On the other hand, this conversation gave me a disturbing thought. What if in the future, all printers and scanners will have this kind of watermarks and you will always be required to identify yourself when you buy one? After all, that's what happens with sim cards for cell phones currently...
How so? It's not like you have to show ID when you buy a printer or a scanner.
Very true, I can confirm this as my partner works on 'Question Documents' as her daily grind in a Police forensics lab. To answer the question, it only takes a forensic scientist to poinpoint the watermark with the printer in question, which is then tied to the manuafacturer, then the store it was shipped to, then to who it was sold if payed by credit or POS. If by cash, that can be traced to the time of sale and a marriage of surveillance cameras. Of course, this process only works in a perfect scenario; real world physics always throws up extenuating circumstance or five to make it harder. Just remember, it is well within the realms of possiblity to trace it to at least the time and place the printer was initially sold. Extenuating circumstances just make the trail longer.
After they win a civil case on the people, HOW difficult will it be for the "State" to go after them for a criminal case? They have already proved them guilty in case. That is basically an automatic conviction if you don't mess it up.
Although the US Congress has created a law which might apply here, the usual (and almost worldwide) situation is that copyright infringement is a tort, i.e. a civil wrong, and not a crime. This action, pursuing those who infringed copyright in civil court for damages, is the appropriate and most usual course of action.
Criminal offences relating to copyright infringement tend to be linked to cases of organised copyright infringement for the pursuit of profit. I'm not an expert on US law (obviously!) and discussions on this previously have suggested that the US Act was amended to include criminal liability if the losses reach a certain level, even if the infringement wasn't for commercial reasons, but this is unusual. This is why many of us with some legal understanding disagree with the 'piracy is theft' argument: while taking a penny from someone else without their permission is theft as well as being a tort, it's not always or generally the case that other civil wrongs also lead to criminal liability. Just because something could cause another person a loss which the courts would seek to remedy does not mean that the criminal law has been breached (see, by analogy, breaches of contract, or - more explicitly - remedies for negligently causing injury).
Finally (!!) the burden of proof in civil cases is 'on the balance of probabilities' or 'on the preponderance of the evidence' - a far lower standard than 'beyond a reasonable doubt'. While a judgment on the civil case might help a prosecutor (and bring more information to light) it isn't a 'slam dunk'.
Very true, I can confirm this as my partner works on 'Question Documents' as her daily grind in a Police forensics lab. To answer the question, it only takes a forensic scientist to poinpoint the watermark with the printer in question, which is then tied to the manuafacturer, then the store it was shipped to, then to who it was sold if payed by credit or POS. If by cash, that can be traced to the time of sale and a marriage of surveillance cameras. Of course, this process only works in a perfect scenario; real world physics always throws up extenuating circumstance or five to make it harder. Just remember, it is well within the realms of possiblity to trace it to at least the time and place the printer was initially sold. Extenuating circumstances just make the trail longer.
I'm not disputing that this works in Australia, but I'm fairly certain that in Italy this would be currently impossible. I sincerely doubt that electronic shop keep a database that correlates customer data with inventory data of sold items. As for surveillance cameras, the recordings must be destroyed after a fixed time, IIRC.
wow... between the three cases they are estimating that 2993 people downloaded the PHB2 in the span of a few days...
With a cover price of 35 dollars that means that wizards lost 104755 dollars...
Not exactly. Of those 2,993 people, what percentage would buy the PDF instead of the actual book? Also- what percentage of those would NEVER buy either one? That last group is not paying customers....so their dollars wouldn't count in that equation.
Finally (!!) the burden of proof in civil cases is 'on the balance of probabilities' or 'on the preponderance of the evidence' - a far lower standard than 'beyond a reasonable doubt'. While a judgment on the civil case might help a prosecutor (and bring more information to light) it isn't a 'slam dunk'.
No, no it isn't. The STANDARD of proof is balance of probabilities as opposed to beyond reasonable doubt.
The BURDEN refers to who is required to prove the particular issue.
Since people are mentioning foreign countries, I wonder if WoTC might decide on a strategy to not allow PDF sales outside the US and Canada, either stopping sales in the EU or at lease delaying sales to those people until a few months have passed.
That's another possibility why they've pulled PDFs. If they can't control the foreign piracy, they might want to keep it to the countries that allow them to prosecute--at least for a little while, to minimize "Day Zero" piracy.
__________________
Forum FYI:
Kask is not the famous Tim Kask of the early days of TSR
I am that weird guy you see buried deep down in the credits section on many of EGGs later products.
Since people are mentioning foreign countries, I wonder if WoTC might decide on a strategy to not allow PDF sales outside the US and Canada, either stopping sales in the EU or at lease delaying sales to those people until a few months have passed.
That's another possibility why they've pulled PDFs. If they can't control the foreign piracy, they might want to keep it to the countries that allow them to prosecute--at least for a little while, to minimize "Day Zero" piracy.
We were actually drifting on a tangent related to printers and scanners, but I guess that you might be right. Amazon, just to cite an example, doesn't sell digital downloads to customers abroad.
And since these lawsuits are specifically about pirating of PH2, it may be hard to determine how much money they lost, when by all accounts, PH2 is SOLD OUT!
But yeah, as others have mentioned, of those @3000 or less downloads, how many were done by folks that already had bought a physical copy?
No, no it isn't. The STANDARD of proof is balance of probabilities as opposed to beyond reasonable doubt.
The BURDEN refers to who is required to prove the particular issue.
Oops.
Yeah, one of the problems with teaching law at a pre-professional (undergrad) level is that we don't cover the procedural stuff as well as we might. Still, an inexcusable slip-up!
Pixels of each page are more than 6 millions. Are PCs robust enough for this? Assuming software exists for the job.
Each pixel would be at least a byte*, right, so are the all-image pages of your pdfs really 6 MB a page or more (even with medium compression, that's 1.2 MB a page)? Your monitor can't display that many pixels anyhow and although print quality is different, the pdfs they sell aren't print quality, surely? How many of us have a top-quality printer anyhow, that it'd be worth selling them, with all the extra hassle and cost that'd entail?
However, the pages aren't all images; it must be more efficient for text.
Anyhow, even if they are using 6 million pixels per page (and they could be; I don't know anything about pdf or publishing or even images, really, other than as binary files; I'm a coder) I don't think that it's a computationally tricky problem to find the differences between two of the files. However, if they are (and I assume they do) changing the location of the naughty pixel, the number of different copies you'd need to be confident, assuming they are being clever and throwing in some other random naughty pixels, is perhaps too large to organise or buy that many copies. That's a different issue.
Quote:
Originally Posted by NMcCoy
Given the software, detecting a single-pixel difference between PDFs could be done in a trivial amount of time. Consider the fact that your computer needs to process all those pixels anyway in order to put them on the screen, after all.
However: Even if this particular system can be circumvented easily (and that may not necessarily be the case), I'm sure there are several possible ways to have a steganographic watermarking system that's quite robust - there's a pretty major field of research dedicated to this very sort of thing, after all.
You can, according to a paper I read a while back, encode the watermark in the Fourier ampiltudes; you make a spatial fourier transform of the image, doctor some of the amplitudes a tiny bit, then transform back. This can be undetectable to the naked eye because it turns out that Fourier phases are more important to us, visually. You can then get that information back, should the image turn up somewhere illicitly, by comparing a Fourier transform of the evildoer's image with a Fourier transform of the original.
I am sure that's more hassle than it's worth, mind.
Ironically, I looked into this only after one of my legitimate pdfs ended up somewhere it shouldn't have.
*The pixel storing the customer number would have to be the same size, and you'd need more than a byte to store an appropriate number of customer numbers; of course, you could combine the number stored with the location and that would be big enough for all customer numbers, in combination.
__________________ In my bedroom in those ugly new houses
I danced my legs down to the knees
Linear Mode
And yet another word from our sponsors
