WotC puts a stop to online sales of PDFs

[avin]

Trevor is talking:

Wizards Community - View Single Post - WotC halts sales/downloads from rpgnow.com

Steve Jackson Games is talking:

"BTW, to prevent people from sharing their books, SJG will no longer print books. All rules will be whispered to authorized customers."

Twitter / Steve Jackson Games: BTW, to prevent people fro ...

lol

 

[coyote6]

I don't think that this statement accurately represents what happened. To me it seems that Paizo correctly understood wizard's request, informed their customers and orderly removed all the files after a short grace period. And made a killing in the process.

I don't know the exact timing involved -- when WotC told the vendors whatever -- so I can't really say how correctly anyone understood anyone else. I was merely offering an alternative interpretation of the (few) facts that are known.

I do know that the email I got from Paizo was timestamped 8:24pm Monday, which would have left 3.5 hours for me to buy new stuff, and left 15.5 hours to download old stuff. However, I had signed off the 'net by then, so I didn't see the email until I was at work the next day -- where I can't access Paizo's website. So, for me, there was no effective period of notice from either vendor.

The quote from Wieck on the ENWorld news page says they were informed sometime Monday; it seems like the total time given was at best 24 hours, which isn't very long to send notices to people, people to get said notices, read them, and act on them.

Compare with the end of Pelgrane Press's the Dying Earth RPG -- first, notice was given six months ago, apparently; I got an email a week or two ago from a couple of PDF vendors, mentioning that the DERPG PDFs would be going away soon -- several days in advance of the date. And then the expiration date was extended an extra month. Plenty of time for fans or just the curious to pick stuff up.

Granted, if WotC's purpose was anti-piracy, weeks of notice might not have suited that purpose; but 5 days or a week or so would have been better than <24 hours, and ought to have been less prone to "break the Interwebs in half".

(Well, probably not; I suspect anything mildly controversial that WotC does at this point will trigger loud paroxysms. But at least WotC wouldn't have seemed to me to have fumbled the PR ball. And it's really all about me, right? )

 

[SteveC]

Not really.

It would not have been appropriate for WotC to communicate with the general public before they discussed things with the vendors, and given the vendors time to get their ducks in a row for the inevitable questions. A vendor reacted before WotC could then communicate with the public. Even if WotC had planned this level of communication, they weren't allowed it. WotC management probably heard about the action after we did - such is the nature of news on the internet.

This is true, but a huge part of how you communicate with your vendors is to plan how the information is going to be disseminated. Once the vendor decided to break the news early, you need to quickly get in touch with them and get things corrected, and then make a statement calming the situation down. None of that happened, which makes me think that the regular PR people haven't been allowed to do their jobs for some reason or another.

Perhaps the lawsuit is the reason for the silence. Okay, that's not a problem: I have a good friend who is an attorney, and has to craft basic statements about how company X can't say anything more because of pending legal action...the verbiage is boilerplate. We didn't even see something as basic as that.

So, WotC has probably been playing catch-up. And, it if wasn't WotC's action that caused the problem, it makes seven kinds of sense (and is far more professional) for them to not talk until the vendor spoke first.

Even so, I'm shocked that WotC wasn't aware of this possibility, and once it occurred, couldn't get something basic put together to react to it. Again, you don't have to give us the full story, but saying, well, anything is better than letting all the rumors fly like they did. Saying nothing made this situation 10x worse. I have seen posters who are usually the first people to defend WotC come out strongly against what's happened here. That's never a good thing.

And beyond that, this whole situation has put the Mod community here into a real bind, and made their (and your) life stressful over something that will likely prove to be a simple mistake in the long run. It's as if there's no one steering the ship away from the iceberg, or even worse: there's the thought that if they can just pick up enough speed, they'll punch right through it!

I don't envy your jobs at all at the moment...perhaps we should put together a "buy an ENWorld Mod a <beverage of their choice> campaign." I know I'd be in for that...

--Steve

 

[Wayside]

Since that time there have been no (to my knowledge) 'releases' of any Paizo products to the pirating community. The new system can't be cracked by the old methods, and it requires too many seperately purchased copies of a product to do a side-by-side comparison and ensure that all of the watermarks and identifying features have been removed....Pathfinder has managed to be successful in preventing the piracy of their products, without stopping sales of their .pdf or filing any lawsuits.

This is completely untrue. PDFs of all Paizo and other 3PP products are widely available to anyone who knows where to look. Paizo has been no more successful in this regard than WotC.

 

[aboyd]

During this action, we are suspending sales of all PDF based books. Wizards of the Coast understands that this action unfairly punishes legal customers. For our customers, we are continuing legal downloading of previously purchased products until noon tomorrow (pacific time). As soon as we are able to, we will be bringing back PDFs to sell and we will make every effort to make those previously purchased products available for download without any additional cost. Until that time, we urge all our customers to only use legal products and not illegally produce or download copies. "Piracy hurts the industry as a whole and we can no longer take a passive role in combatting it. We are choosing to instead take bold action, even if that does require all of us to sacrifice together during this time." said president Greg Leeds.
​

Personally, I'd see Wizards as more of a hero than as the villian of this tale.

I'm going to agree with wedgeski on this one -- your proposed "better approach" would have resulted in the same outcry. Specifically, your better way still includes a VERY limited window to download existing purchases. That hits people in the pocketbook -- they thought they paid for a re-download service and they're not getting it. All the people on vacations or offline due to sickness or family matters will simply miss the window and become irate. You can't mess with people's purchases without making them very angry.

Having said that, I think your approach would work with modification. For example if I read this from WotC:

"Due to rampant piracy, we are exiting the PDF market. For our customers, we will allow dowloads of previously purchased products for the next 30 days. Please work with vendors such as rpgnow.com to ensure that your purchases are secured and backed up offline before this deadline. Thank you."

...I would take the time to download my backups, and I wouldn't feel ripped off at all. So, no hard feelings. I'd probably still laugh at WotC about trying to combat piracy by making piracy the only option (c'mon, you have to admit that's a hilariously inept solution), but there would be no anger or vitriol to it. I'd just feel amusement, which would peter out quickly. Everyone would probably wander off to other topics to keep doing what they're doing.

 

[Scribble]

It "may have something to do with" the conspiracy to deny Stephen Colbert his name's rightful place on a space-station urine-recycling node. Given that nobody seems, so far, to be able to explain how pulling PDFs "may have something to do with the legal case," suggesting the urine-node conspiracy "explanation" is about as useful. Probably more so, since it's funnier and more easily recognized as bogus.

Jeff, I'm not a lawyer but since you seem to be, maybe you can answer if this has any validity?

Could it be that in a case like this, (a corporation vrs a private individual) you need to show that the action was harmfull enough to cause damage, and therefore to do so you need to show that you've taken action to prevent it from happening in the future?

IE taking it down removes questions like: If it was that harmful to your company then why haven't you taken steps to fix the problem?

Again I'm not a lawyer, so I don't really know the answer.

I agree though with Charles that this issue isn't caused by WoTC suddenly becoming aware of piracy. I think like he says, the thing that changed is that WoTC started offering high quality PDFs on day one of release.

A lot of the pirating I think in this case might simply be more of the "casual" pirate crowd. IE they want the new and shiney, and will buy it sure, but if it's the new and shiney and available for free immediatly?

I doubt they have any intention of stopping piracy of their books. They just want to make sure they're not practically promoting it. (Kind of like leaving your car unlocked, and turned on in the ghetto.)

 

[Harlekin]

The note about Pathfinder is of interest here.

The .pdfs of 4E D&D books (and DDI subscription content) have had their watermarks removed within an hour or so of the book releases on RPGNow and been up on torrents and rapidshare for distribution.

For the first year or so of Pathfinder (and for Dungeon/Dragon before that) this was pretty much the case with Paizo's .pdfs as well. About half a year ago (I think after the the release of Pathfinder beta, but I'm not really positive as this is second-hand information and I don't play Pathfinder) in one fell swoop, Paizo banned the accounts and credit cards of a number of users they had determined were pirating their material, and changed their watermarking system.

Since that time there have been no (to my knowledge) 'releases' of any Paizo products to the pirating community. The new system can't be cracked by the old methods, and it requires too many seperately purchased copies of a product to do a side-by-side comparison and ensure that all of the watermarks and identifying features have been removed.

To add to that, Paizo has been fairly quick about issuing Cease and Desist orders to the uploaders of .torrents of their products, keeping those .pdfs released before the watermarking change out of easy distribution.

Now, Pathfinder is a bit of a niche product, so it may be that the pirating community isn't devoting as much attention to cracking Paizo's protection.

Accepting that caveat, though, Pathfinder has managed to be successful in preventing the piracy of their products, without stopping sales of their .pdf or filing any lawsuits.

Doesn't this suggest that going after a few miscreants can help? Together with beefing up security of course.

 

[Nymrohd]

It could be that pirated copies of the electronic forms, being of quite superior quality, have increased the traffic of those products. By making high quality pirated products inaccessible maybe that traffic will also subside? Just a theory.

 

[jasonbostwick]

This is completely untrue. PDFs of all Paizo and other 3PP products are widely available to anyone who knows where to look. Paizo has been no more successful in this regard than WotC.

Obviously this isn't the place for a challenge over who is better at finding illegally pirated material, and I can't give evidence for this, but I'll stand by what I said.
The protection used by Paizo is a significant hurdle for the most prolific pirating communities.
I'd be very impressed if you could find pirated copies of the last two issues of Second Darkness, for example. You would have to delve very deep indeed to find them, and the files would likely still have identifiers of the purchaser attached.

I didn't mention anything about other 3PP - most of them use the RPGNow watermarking, and their products are just as available as 4E .pdfs are.

 

[gribble]

You keep saying this but haven't given any evidence - only speculation.

Actually, we have plenty of evidence:

The lawsuits allege that the defendants illegally distributed the Player¹s Handbook 2 via free file-sharing websites and that these illicit uploads resulted in a substantial number of lost sales and lost revenue to Wizards of the Coast.

How can you prove lost sales/revenue? WotC certainly can't prove that people who downloaded the book from a filesharing site would have purchased either the PDF or print copy of the book (or at least, if that is their argument then I'd expect any half decent defence lawyer would rip them to shreds).
They must be basing this claim - at least in part - on revenue projections based on previous sales. So clearly the actual revenue earned from recent books is below those projections, or else they wouldn't be able to demonstrate that lost revenue.

At least that's my read of the situation. As a non-lawyer and all.