Torrent throwdown on the Wizards board

[The Sword 88]

pdfs suck as game books. At best, you can preview a book with an illege pdf before ordering it online, but pdfs suck as game books and I can't imagine using one.

The previewing is the primary advantage. I always buy a book I want and only play with stuff out of books that I or one of the guys in my group owns but I do like to look through a book first to see if it has anything I want in it that way I don't end up throwing away money on a book that I will never use.

 

[billd91]

It is many people's views, including mine, that the intellectual property laws in America are very unjust. They exist to enslave the creators, inventors, musicians and artists, exploit the consumer and protect the rights of the distributors. The creator doesn't own the property created, the company that distributes the property owns it. The creator has to actually give up their rights to it to the company that has print facilities and a distribution network. Ideas, information and art should belong to everyone, not to the distribution companies.

I do not believe this is a problem with IP law. This is a problem with contracts and corporate capitalism. The only way to see any significant and lucrative distribution of your work is to sell off the bulk of the profit to a corporation with the capacity to produce, distribute, and promote it.
Not all corporations work or have to work like this, but you'll generally find the ones that work more equitably with their talent are a heck of a lot smaller and personal and less profitable.

 

[Westwind]

Let's ASSUME that the 25% is caused, enterily, by downloading. Isn't it weird that the country with the most (we compare USA with Europe now) restrictive laws is the one suffering more from free downloading?

USA is also facing an economical crisis...and that affects it. But it's easier to blame "internet thieves".
I really need to go. I would love to keep discussing it, since civil discussion is great for idea reviewing and so on.

Creative Commons is the way to go. Future will prove me, and over 150 million people, right.

I'd like to think I'm balanced on this issue--and I'll happily concede that piracy isn't responsible for even half that decline. And obvious, any consumer industry is going to get hurt when disposable income declines, although the record industry's decline predates America's economic woes. I haven't found any study (probably since the control group is so small) but I'd be very interested to see the market-specific impact of piracy. If 5.5% (getting that number from the Edison study) of lost record sales are due to piracy, it's a big hit but one a healthy record industry could absorb and, with creative marketing, adapt to--all that's lacking at the moment is a healthy record industry. However, the book market is a very different animal than the media market in terms of margins, etc. On top of that, the role-playing market is not huge, so it's less able to absorb any sort of hit.

Here's a somewhat extreme example to illustrate the point:

Author A writes a book called "Trains." Nice pictures, good book. It gets pirated. I'm willing to bet that it won't make a huge dent in overall train book sales since there are a ton of books in the marketplace about trains and, within the category of trains, a lot of people have different tastes.

Author B writes a book called "Great Finnish Holiday Food." It gets pirated. Now, before this book was written there was no such thing as great Finnish holiday food (I should know, I'm a Finn--I have a recipe that involves putting a whole fish inside a loaf of bread, no joke) so if you want to know anything about this topic, you're essentially forced to buy the book. As soon as this is pirated, you're going to see a much bigger decline in the genre's sales in relative terms than you would with Author A's book.

The RPG market is not a big one and I'm inclined to believe it would be more vulnerable to revenue loss than, say, historical fiction. On a purely anecdotal level, I also believe any market populated by tech-savvy geeks is more vulnerable to piracy simply because they posses means and opportunity out of the box and only need motive.

 

[LowSpine]

I am not going into moral issues. Companies only care about moral issues when they are using them to sue in court. Companies only care about money and sales so that is the theme of my arguments.

Companies get funny about illegal downloads because they think that if those downloads did not exist their sales would increase and they would get more money(it is nothing to do with the moral issues.)

This is true to a tiny extent. There is a very small minority of people so tight fisted that they will now not buy a legal copy purely because they have a free pdf.

These are the kind of people who would write out the rules on the back of used envelopes and wrapping paper rather than spend a penny if they did not have to. These people are very very few.

Most of the people who have a pdf and are not going to buy the books were not going to buy the books anyway - pdf or not. They only have the game because it is free and if it wasn't they would just shrug and do something else. (These people are not reducing sales but are creating more players or DMs potentially improving sales)

Some with the pdf will not buy the books because they have decided they do not like the game. This is only the same as checking out a friend's book or a book in the shop and putting it back. These people will probably just delete the pdf anyway. (Not reducing sales much - a little because someone has not wasted their money on something they were going to put in the bin or give to someone else.)

Some people with the pdf that will not buy the books wont purely because they cannot afford to. Maybe in the future they will. Either way - no money - no buyey. (No sales loss.)

Some people will look at the pdfs and think 'Oh nice - I didn't know I would think this was so cool. I'll have to buy these.' (Sales increase.)

3.5 had loads of pdfs and sold very very well. If the companies made out any different it was because they wanted even more, unless they were some of those splat books that were only good enough for toilet paper - in which case boo hoo.

My point is IMHO the sales will not be affected much. The core 3 definitely not. Everyone who really cares about D&D really wants those books and stuff an eye bleeding pdf that would cost 10 times normal cost to print out a really crap pile of wrinkly, smudged, one sided A4s.

Later books will depend on the quality - but that is their problem. Put the work in to something worth owning and they will buy them.

*I'd just like to say I have pdfs of the Wizard's Presents books. I also bought the Wizard's presents books for the sake of physical and digital collecting purposes. These are the most pointless books ever but I got a little out of them and had enough money to not mind paying for them. The same will happen with the new books when amazon pulls their finger out.

 

[billd91]

This is horribly off-topic, but a fair number of legal problems were created by the Courts ruling that Corporations counted as "individuals" (including all the rights thereof) for legal purposes.

Corporations, which have no natural expiration date (unlike, say people), aren't subject to many of the "controls" that govern individual property, like inheritance tax and the like. However, they benefit from all the rights. This creates a skewed situation in many areas, not just intellectual property law.

Whether (or when) this will be altered, I have no idea.

You're preachin' to the choir, man. I'm definitely with you on that score.

Hence, anyone who really feels the need to engage in real civil disobedience against an unjust law should abuse the heck out of Mickey Mouse since the Sonny Bono Act IS is unjust! Viva la revoluccion!

 

[Transit]

On a purely anecdotal level, I also believe any market populated by tech-savvy geeks is more vulnerable to piracy simply because they posses means and opportunity out of the box and only need motive.

I think this is a very good point. You can't really compare the pirating of "normal" books by people who just want to read them, with RPG rule books where the ability to cut and paste the text into other documents and spreadsheets is actually a big incentive to download the pirated file.

 

[Novem5er]

The number of people who would pay to create and distribute information for free is pretty small. The quality of the vast majority of the work would be amateur when compared to the quality of work people actually pay for. Go to any free art website and you'll see dozens of poor artists for each good artist.

I think you misunderstand my point. I'm not saying that people should create things for free. I'm saying that it's ridiculous to require everyone who accesses that creation to pay for it.

I think it's fair to make people pay to use art/material/information if they intend to make direct profit from it.

But when was the last time you paid to see a Norman Rockwell painting? Not an actual painting, but a copy thereof. I bet you could do an internet search for Norman Rockwell, find images of his paintings, right-click and Save Image As, and then have access to that image for free for the rest of your life.

Thief? Criminal?

Artists have to get paid or there will be little art going around. But everyone who experiences that art does not have to pay for that experience.

 

[The Little Raven]

So lets say for the sake of argument that an industry was colluding to fix prices. Lets say on some staple like bread. At what point am I justified in stealing? Is it at any point before I die of starvation?

Ridiculously strawman situation, and completely irrelevant. We're discussing an entertainment product being illegally distributed and acquired, not a necessity being unattainable due to collusion.

I would also have to ask you if I have the books and I make PDF's for my own personal use and never distribute them am I still in the wrong? The RIAA says yes if you pay for a CD you get the CD, not anything else for any reason, broke your CD with no copies to bad buy a new one.

In the wrong, as far as ethically speaking, no. In the wrong, as far as legally speaking, I have no idea. IANAL. The RIAA could very well be right. It's for a court to decide (and appeal), not me.

The MPAA says that everyone in a room watching a movie should own a copy of the movie in order to legally be able to watch it. Wanna get the finding Nemo for your kids? Better buy one copy for each kid, one for yourself and one for your wife.

WotC is not asking everyone playing the game to own a copy, merely that every copy acquired is by legal means.

Your entire post seems to be full of overly contrived strawmen that have no application in the current situation.

 

[JohnSnow]

JohnSnow, I accept your opinion and I always value your posts. No hard feelings, on my part, for any of this.

That said, I think you're arguing against yourself now. You say it's okay to copy a couple pages or to let a few people benefit without having paid for it . . . because it's not hurting anyone? But you're saying that 9,000 downloads is NOT okay because . . . it surely IS hurting someone? You put that burden of proof on me, but isn't it the prosecution's job to provide evidence of guilt?

The distinction I'm drawing has nothing to do with "someone being hurt." It has everything to do with the doctrine of "fair use." What constitutes "fair use" is well-established in the United States (and the U.S. has a pretty liberal viewpoint on the subject, I might add).

It's okay to copy a couple pages for your own use because, well, it's your book. It's okay to share it with a few other people (especially if they're members of your gaming group), as long as you don't make any money, because, again, you've paid for the book and have the right to "use it." All these things constitute YOU using the book - "fair use" as it were. (Moderately off-topic, this is why the RIAA's arguments are total crap. Making a digital copy of your CD is fair use. Making 10 digital copies of your CD is probably still "fair use." Somewhere between there and 100, we definitely leave the bounds of "fair use.")

By the time you're distributing copies over the internet free to people you don't even no, you're no longer talking about "fair use" of the book (or whatever). Because at this point, you're not using it, but rather "distributing it." And, beyond passing on the physical copy (and, by the way, not keeping a digital one), you just don't have any right to do that. The rights to the content go along with the physical book. The only grey area here is if by accident or theft, you lose your physical copy, but I digress.

Clearly, this totally ignores things like "what a person can memorize." Obviously, if you can memorize a book, you can "use it" as long as you want. This is because (at least now) no control can be maintained over what people think. "Thought police" (so far, at least) remains just a joke.

No, if you read my other posts, I'm not claiming that we just spread free RPG books around the net, nor any other form of knowledge. What I'm saying is that any source of knowledge HAS to be financially supported, but by far fewer people than the number that actually benefit from that knowledge.

I know you aren't claiming that. However, I just wanted to clarify that my position has nothing to do with any theory about "harm" and everything with the distinction between what constitutes "fair use" and what qualifies as "distribution."

 

[The Little Raven]

In defense of the "Info should be free" claim, the constitution is clear that it should be free.... eventually. Copyright is supposed to exist only for a limited time to give the creator a chance to make a buck then open it up so that someone else can build upon the idea.

And I totally agree with that. Copyright law in the US is rather ridiculous in some areas. Just like plenty of other laws.