A) You cannot stop digital piracy, piracy cannot be stopped short of draconian evil.
Digital piracy is not theft, it can't be theft, no one is breaking into your home and robbing you or worse.
It's UNAUTHORIZED COPYING, completely different, and should be seen as such.
Digital items cannot be stolen, only copied, real items have ot have prices based off rare materials etc used to make them, they are "limited" material items and are *real*: you cannot copy them onto a CD or the Net, but digital copies can be almost unlimited, distributed to everyone on Earth in seconds if they have a net connection, and cannot be worn out!! They should thus be dirt cheap.
yes it can hurt folk, mostly if some git claims they made an item someone else worked hard on, but financially, it's not as simple as companies want you to think.
Why?
because if the product had been sold, at a price the user likes, with all the things the user likes, they'd have bought it!
Piracy is the competition and thus it's good for the industry, because industries always try to form monoploies and price fix things. Ironic but true.
Governments are useless at stopping price fixing and monopolies in the digital era.
Someone with an unauthorized copy is not a thief, they are a potential buyer who has not been enticed to buy...think about it a minute.
Do you want to get them to buy, or, your "pound of flesh" and alienate more folk?
better lots of sales cheap, and a massive happy user base, than being a moron who cuts away his own foundations.
While folk like things for free, most *real users*, as opposed to "magpies", preffer real items and pay for them, to support creators, to get new updates and content etc.
Seen this stuff a lot in digital art, and piracy forced the greedy monopolies ot change a fair bit (still not enough though IMHO).
Doesn't mean I like artists losing money, just that it's not as simple as the RIAA etc want you to believe (IMHO, they are much worse criminals than the P2P folk, see the way recordign artists were paid/treated versus profit made from them)
if WOTC is going down that road, like TSR they will die out as they've lost the plot.
This is no longer the 19th century. totally new ways of looking at things are needed, includign companies NOT being run as the personal fiefdom of folk who don't understand how things really work.
b) Corporations are immortal, non-real entities with almost no responsibilities or limitations and enough power to bend the law/makers.
Few folk appreicate how damn dangerous that makes them..some are gettign the point now though (see RIAA and other companies grotesquely immoral law suits and recent mayhem in business).
c) D&D thrives on user loyalty...but this on top of other decisions is way too much even for me,
WOTC management needs excoriated. there needs ot be heads on the block of their maganement to appease the fans, but not Scott or the designers, this is due to bad higher management, of not running things smoothly between the company's various parts, and critically, it's users.
When many very bad decisions have occured to offend folk, you find who was responsible and didn't stop it, and fire their butts in a very public way with a very public apology.
People are utterly fed up with being treated like victims by big business, we demand respect.
That's not vitriol, it's common sense.
Or better yet, get WOTC/D&D out of Hasborg, and into the hands of folk who care for it, again.
I love D&D, I do not love WOTC.
I love 4th ed and think the DDi stuff is good, others disagree.
But there's no excuse for WOTC to be so grossly out of step with it's user base, who keep them in employment!
