Torrent throwdown on the Wizards board

[The Little Raven]

The decision to honor copyright law was an easy one for me to make. I can wait another week and a half.

You are a good and virtuous man, patience being a virtue and all that.

Oh, boy, does THAT explain a lot...

It's kinda cool to see us on the same side of a debate.

 

[Vorhaart]

My opinion is that making the content available when the publisher definitely does not want it to be so at a certain time is immoral. However, I feel that once the genie has been let out of the bottle, that item has just become public domain, whether the laws say it is or not. Should an end user feel bad for accessing that public domain? For me, that's where things get cloudy.

Exactly. In this case, I think it is less an issue of "Is this right or wrong?" and more an issue of "What can we learn from this?" Shrieking at each other about whether this is fair use or theft should really be secondary to trying to determine (a) how to prevent this from happening in the future, and (b) determining what the market itself is trying to tell us. The horse has already left the barn; arguing over who didn't lock the door is really secondary to trying to catch the horse.

If a person has the books on pre-order and then they get a sneak peak at it, I don't consider it as bad as when a person had no intention of buying the books and then gets them for free. If the latter person then goes on to use the material and still does not buy the material, then I think that a moral line has been crossed.

Definitely. If you don't pay, you shouldn't play. Simple as that.

In this case I would like to think that most people who are downloading the books are just taking an unauthorized sneak peak, but are still planning to buy them.

Or have already bought them, and are just waiting for them.

At any rate, someone on another messageboard pointed me to a location where the books could be downloaded. This wasn't a torrent site, but an actual download site where one click gets you everything in its entirety. I forwarded the links to WotC so they can try and get them taken down. The decision to honor copyright law was an easy one for me to make. I can wait another week and a half.

Well done, no arguments here. Although, there is little difference between a torrent and an http download; both can be easily exploited for the purposes of illegally obtaining material to which you have no rights. The problem is not how the material is obtained from a technical standpoint, rather a more complex legal one. The law is ultimately concerned only whether or not the burglar broke the law, not whether he used a Stanley or a Craftsman crowbar to jimmy the door.

 

[Thasmodious]

This is getting a bit personal no? And a bit paranoid. There are a few caste cultures in the world, but this isnt one of them. People may be wrong from your point of view, but in the end, just be civil.

Dude calls me a slaver and a liar and I'm the one who needs to be civil? How exactly does that work?

And when you are as well known as the above people then you cant say who is wrong or not

That's why I mentioned Nietschze and Russell. They do a fine job of trashing Kant and Plato for me. Just because some guy said something 2000 years ago doesn't mean he was right. Humanity was barely walking upright then, least of all figuring out the answers to life, the universe and everything. I have some other updates for you, though, if you are stuck in that time period - the world is round, not flat; the earth moves around the sun, not the sun across the sky; and sorcery isn't real.

 

[Scribble]

and sorcery isn't real.

until the new power source comes out next year!

 

[SSquirrel]

My pre-order is still on at Amazon, I just want to be able to tweak the LotS pregens for this weekend cuz some of them (Dragonborn Paladin) could have a much better stat allotment

 

[warlockwannabe]

*looks thru the thread and created and chaos he has wrought*
Yup, im evil, and its fun.
Come to the darkside all, we have all the fun!

 

[Fifth Element]

To make the issue of digital ownership more fuzzy, how many of you here that venomously against piracy have ever used an avatar that you did not create (cropping the image or addeding text does not count)

I'm against piracy, though perhaps not 'venomously'. I did not create my own avatar.

(My brother did. Based on an image in the public domain.)

 

[Scribble]

all Ihave to say is... the latest swimsuits are VERY nice.

 

[BoGGiT]

What I think is the most important thing to realise with this issue is that there is no point in discussing ethics here. Illegal spread of copyrighted material will not go away, just because people win debates on forums. A productive discussion would be on how our hobby can make sure not to be hurt by this.

I think including miniatures, tiles and big folded maps in adventures and sourcebooks is a good way. I think that making sure that more than a few pages per splatbook are interesting to most consumers is another. I think that free pdfs given out with setting fluff for campaign worlds is good business. And I think the problems with Gleemax and DDI are way more important than any pdf leaks, because in DDI WotC has a potential product that is safe from the "Internet pirates".

This!

I can't understand why people still, after all these years, still think it's relevant at all to discuss whether or not online piracy is "right" or "wrong". Trying to convince people to stop downloading torrents is like trying to convince people to stop masturbating. You can do it with the gravitas of Henry the fifth, with rhetorics that would make Cicero himself green with envy. You can do it in a speech in front of hundreds of thousands of people. Guess what? People would still masturbate.

Oh, warlockwannabe asked for stuff produced in Spain and then exported. To be quite honest, I can't really think of much except for that horrible, horrible song they made all the rest of Europe listen to during the Eurovision Song Contest finals last weekend. Oh, there is something though, a novel written centuries ago about a guy fighting windmills...

Ironically enough, it's public domain and available for download here:
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/996

 

[mlund]

Your failure to grasp the point does not constitute dishonesty on my end.

No, your failure to frame your assertions and opinions in an honest fashion constitutes dishonesty on your end.

Your back-peddling to semantic arguments and claims that everyone who does not both infer from the aether and then accept as valid your paradigm that rejects common understandings of property rights simply puts the nail in the coffin.

And if they ever want to make a profit from it, they have little choice but to sell it, and their rights, off to some corporation for meager restitution. And just because some rock band sees a lot more money than you do doesn't mean the restitution isn't meager.

Again, don't just pass off your opinions are logical conclusions or established facts. I have a lot of choices in life. If I want to maximize my monetary profit while minimizing my effort I may very well end up deciding to sell my intellectual property to a corporation. If I want to put in more effort I may self promote. If I want more creative control I may settle for less monetary profit.

The important ration isn't how much they make compared to a cashier but how much they make compared to how much the company makes off their work.

"Important ration," only in your mind, I'm afraid.

You simply have a personal abhorrence for "the company" that you keep interjecting as if it has any relevance to anyone but yourself.

I disagree that 'right to property' is a fundamental or necessary right at all.

There we have a fundamental disagreement. Most people I'd deal with on a regular basis, however, accept the assertion of "life, liberty, and estate" asserted by Locke in one form or another.

You just can't please the Communists or the Anarchists though, so I don't bother trying.

go argue with constitutional law, which makes (well, originally, until corporations lobbied until they got their way) patents, trademarks, copyrights all things that expire. Because people have a right to seek profit, but society also has a right to enjoy innovation and information and progress from it. It is, after all, the existence of that society that allowed for such innovations or labor to occur at all in the first place.

Those rules are A.) derived from the consent of the governed, B.) mutable thanks to legislation, and C.) set an expiration on exclusive rights after a period in which it is presumed that the creator's free exercise of his rights has generally run its course.

- Marty Lund