Brown Jenkin
First Post
You don't lose copyright, but if you don't prosecute known violations, it might make your case weaker if you sue another party later. They can argue you knew about it but didn't sue. This is why they enter lawsuits against the foreign citizens as well as the domestic.
There is a statute of limitations on bringing a civil case for copyright infringement, so if you wait to long you will get nothing. Within that statute of limitations though your copyright rights are impervious. You can passively allow someone to make and distribute 1 million copies of your work for free and decide the next day that they must stop. Unless they have written (or maybe oral) permission you can still sue for damages. There can be no dilution of copyright no matter what.
The whole PR mess is the pulling of existing PDFs. If this was just about the lawsuits I doubt it would make as much of a stink. Although I'm going to wait and see what happens before I judge.
I will agree on this part. It is the pulling of the PDFs that is the problem. WotC made things worse by tying piracy to that decision. Just the PDFs would have riled feathers. Just the Lawsuits would have been quickly forgotten. Doing what they did though makes them look like complete fools.
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