$125,000 in fines for D&D pirates? Help me do the math...

[ggroy]

Well, hypothetically, if wizard (and any other company) is able to charge a few random people in court and settle for large sums of money, then it really doesn't matter to them if piracy flourishes or not, doesn't it?

If anything, it seems more profitable to find well-to-do people who pirate your stuff and then sue them.

Maybe WotC and White Wolf can pull off something like that. Probably the same can't be said about 3PP companies, and other companies that produce less popular tabletop rpgs.

 

[delericho]

I'm glad WotC stood up to these pirates and taught them an expensive lesson.

Honestly, it's all bogus. Just like the RIAA getting like 500,000 or whatever from that woman for downloading like 6 songs. Copyright laws really need to be changed because this is utterly ridiculous.

I agree with both of these. It is a good thing that WotC were able to defend their IP. Hopefully, doing so will have had the desired effect.

At the same time, IP laws have really gotten out of hand. They really haven't adapted to the internet, are no longer doing everything they're intended to do, and are badly in need of revision.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

One thing that appears to me: Whatever the sum is, it is not just about giving back money you owe because you pirated/helped pirating something? Is it not also intended as a type of punishment?

If someone steals 500 $ from you, gets caught a while after and then you get the 500 $ back, are you fine with the thief going free? Or should he be punished by law?

 

[georgegad]

I think the obvious thing to learn from this article is that is cheaper to not respond to these type of legal threats than it is to fight them.

 

[Runestar]

If someone steals 500 $ from you, gets caught a while after and then you get the 500 $ back, are you fine with the thief going free? Or should he be punished by law?

Considering that time and resources need to be expended to track down and capture the thief, it does not make sense that he gets away simply by returning your $500.

But I think the punishment is meant to be a deterrent (now I remember the word!!!), in that it is geared towards discouraging people from committing the crime in the first place, and less so to punish them after the crime has been carried out. After all, the thief being jailed won't compensate me for any inconveniences caused by me not having my wallet for that period of time. It may even cost me more inconveniences if I have to go down to the station to give my statement and identify him.

Conversely, I would argue that in the case of wotc suing software pirates, they should only be collecting the amount equal to the value of sales lost, nothing more. Any extra and it would be more than what they would have earned in terms of book sales.

How did they arrive at that sum again? And are they expecting the accused to just cough up that sum somehow?

 

[Starbuck_II]

You sound like an attorney, so I've got to call this out. Punitive, sure. But "a warning to others". Really? Is that an official legal concept in the US? Sounds unconstitutional to me, as I just said a minute ago in another post.

So does captial punishment which isn't unconstitutional (Texas still does it), but isn't done in all 50 states as much do to certain court rulings.
CP is both a warning to others and punishment to the individual.

 

[tomlib]

Solution

I agree with the earlier post that most of the arguments being debated here are rehash of what has already been said in piracy threads. That being the case. I pose this question:

What is the solution?

First, the problem:

Intellectual Property in digital format will always present a problem for the owner as they cannot distribute it in a way that is completely secure. Therefore it can be assumed that there will always be piracy.

So, how does an individual or company with legitimate ownership of a product get a fair share of the sales.

I would suggest a reasonable price point as being tried by Pathfinder for starters. This would cut down on the illegal downloads although certainly not eliminate them.

I would also suggest a robust patch mechanism for legal versions of material. Again, this is not perfect with pirates finding methods around it but still would encourage legitimate sales.

Another possibility is to have extra online material available to those who legitimately purchased the material and enter a license number.

The solution being tried by the RIAA and WotC is to sue in the hopes it will discourage others from downloading. I'm not convinced this is an effective method but it is an attempt.

Another solution is to simply eliminate all electronic versions although this is futile to my way of thinking. It results in $0.00 in legitimate sales and in no way slows down piracy as scanning technology is easily available.

Any other thoughts, solutions?

Happy Gaming,

Tom

 

[roguerouge]

If it's theft, why is it not prosecuted by the authorities? Why do we leave enforcement up to the copyright holder? We don't expect businesses to track down burglars, why do we expect record labels to do so?

This strikes me as unfair to both copyright holders and to consumers. Consumers get a patently uneven enforcement of the law and uneven penalties, while copyright holders get to bear the costs of tracking them down.

It just strikes me that we talk about it using the metaphor of theft, but we don't act on it in that manner. And if we don't actually behave like it's theft, then the other competing metaphor of sharing becomes much more powerful. (Certainly, this band of thieves gets absolutely nothing for "fencing" their loot on the internet, making this metaphor a bit more difficult to hold up.)

And that's why people respond to the copyright "pirates"--because punishing sharing because it's genuinely efficient and effective is truly perverse.

And, as always with these things, I encourage any authors here to investigate "copyleft" at creativecommons.org, where you can protect your work and set the conditions on how people can share it, rather than be forced to choose.

 

[Dausuul]

In this case they haven't actually multiplied the downloads/views but divided them by a factor of four.

Howzat? If I add up all the judgements and divide by $39.95, I get in excess of 6,000.

 

[wayne62682]

Because it's not theft, and people keep using that comparison to justify why "downloading music is bad, m'kay". An intangible thing like a piece of software or a virtual file that doesn't really exist cannot be "stolen" in the same sense as a tangible thing like a car, or computer, or bicycle, and the value lost to the company is nonexistent because they can just make another copy of it at no cost to themselves.

If I create a PDF and sell it, then the cost of making another PDF doesn't exist since it's just a collection of 1s and 0s that a computer translates to pretty images and text. If somebody downloads my PDF, then they aren't "stealing" it. Now there may be issues with IP (which is another can of worms in and of itself) but calling it theft is a just a petty attempt to demonize the people who do it (e.g. "These people are thieves, and thieves are criminals") and make the person doing the suing seem justified and the "good guys" when in most cases it's the reverse (i.e. people standing up to big greedy corporations who overcharge out of their executives desire to line their pockets; not necessarily lumping WotC into that group however).

WotC may be justified, but I'm betting this is going to hurt them more and cause more people to pirate PDFs (especially seeing as there is no legal way to buy them at this point, and when there was it was highway robbery since the PDF cost roughly the same as a the hardcore book despite there being absolutely $0 cost to WotC to produce them since the PDF was used to print the books, so they were making money off of the hardback sales to cover the printing costs. Those PDFs should have been maybe $10 at most, and probably less than that, since 100% of the revenue generated from it is profit since the creator has no expenses for a PDF). They should have instead taken a stance like Microsoft did back in the early days and turn a blind eye - after all if people pirate D&D PDFs it means that they're using them and not a competing system. Eventually they'll buy your stuff; that's how Microsoft got to where it is today, by publicly decrying piracy but doing nothing to enforce it because hey, you've got them locked in to your products now.