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

[Storm Raven]

Poland and the Phillipines are NOT "Third World" countries. Read up about them on Wikipedia. Technically the term "third world" is outdated with the fall of the Soviet Union. But both nations have thriving economies and are not centers of rampant poverty.

One could also point out that even if the defendants lived in third world countries, given that they apparently have enough money to have access to a computer, the internet, and a scanner, they would probably be amoung the privileged elite in such a country, and I wouldn't be shedding many tears for them.

 

[Voadam]

The entire argument isn't very sympathetic either: it suggests that the guy is simply allowed to set a high price because he's that good.

A better argument would be simply to work them through the breakdown of "I'm a professional with 40 years of experience and I am talented in my area. To that end, a yearly wage of <blah> is reasonable. The costs of materials is <blah>. The cost of wage insurance is <blah>. I have to factor in the cost of having this conversation with you, which effectively adds another 15 minutes to it's production time" etc etc.

It's pretty easy to see that the supposedly exhorbitant price of the artwork is actually quite modest.

Nah, the better argument is "You are not paying me for drawing it, you are paying for the picture I am offering for sale. You are not obliged to buy it and I am not obliged to justify my price to you. What is relevant is whether it is worth $100 to you."

 

[Storm Raven]

Nah, the better argument is "You are not paying me for drawing it, you are paying for the picture I am offering for sale. You are not obliged to buy it and I am not obliged to justify my price to you. What is relevant is whether it is worth $100 to you."

It is amazing how many people drop right into the labor theory of value isn't it?

 

[ProfessorCirno]

Remember this was not a lawsuit against some random downloader.
These guys where the ones that actually offered the product for (illegal) download in the first place. Without them, they would have not been available illegally at all, since all other filesharers relied on these specific copies to be available.

Of course, someone else might jump in. But now that "someone else" might hear of this case and might think "If they got caught, I might too. Since I already have the product for myself, is it really worth the risk to provide it to random dudes on the Internet?"

That's odd, I can go onto a torrent site and find the latest 4e books. And yet, according to this, I wouldn't be able to do so.

Looks like that answers that.

Umm, what 3rd world countries? Poland? Singapore? or America? Just curious.

Or are you just referring to people in general and not the specifics of this case?

Whether or not you or I think that lawsuits deter piracy is besides the point. WOTC absolutely had the right to sue here. I cannot believe that they're being painted as the bad guys in this in any way.

They didn't sue some random downloader, they sued the initial feeders. They caught them pretty much red handed because of the watermarks on the pdf's. THESE are the guys that violated copyright. Going after them is not a bad thing, IMO, at all.

How can going after the actual pirates be a bad thing? The RIAA get's a rightfully bad reputation because they keep suing mostly random people. These aren't some random sampling of torrent users. Their bloody names are ON the documents.

It just boggles my mind that anyone is going to paint WOTC in a bad light here for this.

You're thinking in black and white. "Pirates are bad...so obviously these people are good!"

No.

Again, they're BOTH the bad guys in this situation. The pirates are wrong, stupid, and engaging in illegal activity. WotC is destroying their lives over it, and are gaining close to nothing in return for it.

The issue isn't that WotC is going after them, for christ's sake, and I've already said just that. The issue is that several people, myself included, feel that the punishment doesn't fit the crime.

Poland and the Phillipines are NOT "Third World" countries. Read up about them on Wikipedia. Technically the term "third world" is outdated with the fall of the Soviet Union. But both nations have thriving economies and are not centers of rampant poverty.

Ok, Phillipines is a Developing Country. Better?

One could also point out that even if the defendants lived in third world countries, given that they apparently have enough money to have access to a computer, the internet, and a scanner, they would probably be amoung the privileged elite in such a country, and I wouldn't be shedding many tears for them.

Congrats on being able to make excuses to not care about other people, I guess?

 

[JohnRTroy]

Ok, Phillipines is a Developing Country. Better?

Not quite.

Economy of the Philippines - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Next Eleven - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Granted, the country has close to 40% of people "below the poverty line", but considering the big development in that country, something tells me if the defendant has access to a computer and has the time to be interested in the D&D game (by using a PDF), he's not one of those "bottom 40%".

 

[Storm Raven]

Congrats on being able to make excuses to not care about other people, I guess?

You ever been to a "developing country"? I have. And I'm saying that the people who have computers, internet access and the free time to spend scanning and uploading materials to torrent sites aren't impovereshed waifs living on the streets scrabbling for scraps of bread. In fact, most of them probably come from families significantly wealthier than most of the people in the "developed countries" who frequent this board.

So I'm not going to feel like WotC is doing something beyond the pale by bringing a suit against a guy in a "developing country" under these circumstances.

 

[Storm Raven]

Again, they're BOTH the bad guys in this situation. The pirates are wrong, stupid, and engaging in illegal activity. WotC is destroying their lives over it, and are gaining close to nothing in return for it.

If $225,000 is "close to nothing", perhaps you could mail that over to me.

The issue isn't that WotC is going after them, for christ's sake, and I've already said just that. The issue is that several people, myself included, feel that the punishment doesn't fit the crime.

Take it up with Congress if it bothers you.

 

[Voadam]

What's more, I hear that often from people who also say they prefer the PDF format to the print format, in general.

Generally speaking, you get to pay less for a product when it is similarly less convenient for you to use. Furniture you assemble yourself is typically cheaper than stuff that is assembled for you. if the PDF is actually more useful to you, you should expect to pay the higher price.

And I think that may be the logic behind Wotc keeping PDF prices high. Those of use who prefer dead-tree format don't want the PDFs, and are not likely to buy them. Those who prefer PDFs should, in theory, be willing to pay for the extra convenience the PDF offers them.

If you aren't willing to pay more for what is actually for you a convenience, honestly, you want to have your cake and eat it too. I don't think you get to gripe about not being able to do that.

No, market forces drive down price. Competition, easy availability, low cost of production all drive down price. You might really want convenient water, but that does not mean you should expect to spend an exorbitant amount on it when you are in a place where it is plentiful and easy to get. This is so even though water is a necessity, if you have to you will pay premium prices to secure your basic necessity water needs.

RPG products are not necessities, nobody needs these products. In a market, price will matter for luxury goods.

I'm one of those who generally prefers pdf to print, yet I still go for cheaper pdfs over very pricey ones. Price can be a big issue for me. I didn't buy 3e WotC pdfs because of their high price, even though I play D&D and use a lot of supplemental material. I bought lots of cheap old edition D&D pdfs and tons of OGL stuff because there were plenty of high quality cheap things I was also interested in. If the 3e pdfs had been priced low enough, I would have bought them.

Inconvenient products I simply do without entirely. When DrivethruRPG offered DRM pdfs I never got a single one. The market for luxury goods is a competition for what I spend my disposable RPG budget money on, convenience is one factor, but price is as well.

 

[Hadrian the Builder]

Which brings us to the salient question. Exactly how should illegally downloaded content be valued? What metric do you propose other than "what the copyright holder would have sold the property for"

Indeed these are the salient questions, and think they are the root of the ongoing arguments about piracy.

I the nature of the pirated media (pdf in this case) is the main difficulty.

Personally, if someone got a $125,000 judgement against me, that would ruin me, financially, because I make enough to pay the penalty (over time), but it would take me 20 years to do so. That kind of penalty inflicted on a person seems disproportionate relative to making a single file available for download, which thousands of people then searched for and copied of their own volition.

The fair thing, to my mind, would be to seek a judgement of $40 (an example cost of a single book) against each person who stole the material by copying it. But given the cost of lawyers, no corporation will do this, and that is a problem with the IP law today. It is economically sound and legally permissible to sue one person for copyright infringement and hold him responsible for ALL incidents of infringement. That bothers me.

 

[evilref]

That's odd, I can go onto a torrent site and find the latest 4e books. And yet, according to this, I wouldn't be able to do so.

Looks like that answers that.

You're making a strawman here as that's not what MR argued.

His point was this 'might' have a deterrence.

You're asserting he said it caused all scans/copies to vanish.

Now, you could make the point 'it's evidently not a very good deterrence'. But you'd run up against the problem that, subjectively, less individuals are source-releasing pdfs of wotc books now than before. Primarily caused by the fact they now need to be scanned, however, in the immediate aftermath of the announcement of the lawsuits copies of the PHB2 vanished from many upload sites and torrents. So there was 'some effect' but how good it was remains to be seen.

Likewise the actual deterrence value of the settlements remains to be seen because they've only just happened.


As for your point that the punishment is excessive, aside from it being far less than WotC could have pushed for, just what do you think is a reasonable punishment for taking a book and releasing it for free against the rights holder's consent. Or, in the case of one of the individuals accused, taking hundreds of books across multiple companies and making them available for free over the period of years?