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I get it from a lot of places. Look at the iTunes music store. You can easily get all that music from the p2p networks for free, but somehow Apple is running a booming business. By your logic, that should be impossible. I get it from observing how people around me (me included) act. I've...

Well, we'll just have to agree to disagree on this. In my worldview, there are a lot of things that are illegal but are "ok" as far as my sense of personal ethics is concerned. There are also a lot of things that are totally legal, but totally unethical to me. The legal system has its own...

So we have two facts: 1) their sales have been dropping (by some unknown amount) 2) their books can be found on p2p networks pretty soon after they are released There could very well be a correlation. But there might very well not be. At this point I could link to the lovely "pirate population...

You're confusing ethics and legality here. Ethics are a personal issue, and have pretty much nothing to do with whether something is legal or not. "Ethics imposed by the law" is quite a different beast. I don't think anyone is saying that illegal copying is legal, that would be somewhat of an...

Ah. Yeah, that I can agree with. :) Again playing the devil's advocate here, how do you know their dropping sales (I assume their sales have dropped, from you wording) are the result of piracy, and not some other factors (migration to computer games, migration away from d20 games, etc etc)?

Since it's a personal ethical choice, nobody except me needs to decide. That's how value judgements are made. You wouldn't do this, that's *your* decision on where you draw the line. In this case, *I* don't see an ethical problem since this is a "no sale in any situation" case -- as long as the...

Well, I'd seriously contest that "undeserved" up there, but let's not beat that poor dead horse any more. :) I'll say this: purchases made when DTRPG had Adobe DRM: zero. Purchases made after they switched to watermarks: 12 (I think). As for adding extra value: I think this is precisely the way...

I'm with Jim on this one. You don't *need* rpg books, not having money does not give you license to copy stuff without paying. However, things do get a bit grey in the fringes. I have no ethical problems with someone grabbing an illegal copy of something thats out of print and only available on...

We can debate about the ethics of the issue forever (and why not, it's an interesting issue). LIkewise for the legal viewpoints. But none of that matters to the question posed by this thread. It doesn't matter whether or not it's ethically ok. It doesn't matter whether or not it's legal. It...

Fair enough. We seem to be pretty much in agreement on this issue, it seems.

1) I wasn't claiming that he doesn't know his sales figures. Of course he does. What I was saying is that he has no more clue about the *reasons* for his lost sales than I do, or you do. Being an prg publishes does not give him magical knowledge about things like that (more's the pity :) 2)...

No, it is in no way equivalent. If you steal N copies of item X from WalMart, WalMart no longer has those items (and cannot sell them to anyone else). This is called "stealing". If you copy N copies of item X from SomePdfPublisher, they still have those bits and can sell any number of more...

I don't have a direct reference to the legal precedents, but they involved (at least) the game of Monopoly. As for the copyright law, here's a cut+paste from the U.S. Copyright office FAQ (see http://www.copyright.gov/faq.html for more details): The first one is a pretty close fit to playing...

I don't buy this. As has been noted on various threads, this actually opens White Wolf to *more* litigation. Previously, if something tragic had happened at a larp, WW would have said "they used our books, but our books have huge disclaimers in them on how to play with them. The organizers...

According to White Wolf's FAQ, there isn't. According to them, the moment any money exchanges hands, no matter the purpose, you are suddenly "charging to use their IP" and have to pay them $20 and join their player organization (and abide by rules of said org, which means no playing with anyone...

Sorry, but you are quite wrong on this. The only thing you have to actively protect are trademarks. Copyrights and patents do not need any sort of active defense. In addition, previous legal precedents have ruled that playing a game is not a "performance" of said product (like reciting a book...

A wonderful set of modules, I remember running these years and years and years ago. Don't remember any details, tho', this was *way* back :). I just realized that running a modified version of these using Adventure! characters and rules (either Storyteller or d20) might be a huge pile of fun...

Same here. There's no real *need* to own any one gaming book. *However*, making buying the honest version a bad deal lowers the barrier towards turning to piracy. I wouldn't do it myself, but I can easily see someone else saying "screw this" and turning to the pirate p2p channels, when they...

Oh, I agree with you. But that's not the point. I can and do trust people. I usually do not trust companies. Companies are amoral creatures that mimic human behaviour when they are young and small, but become less and less human and more likely to stab you in the back the larger they grow. At...

True. But take software, it's intimately tied to a certain technology and (often) hardware, so it's natural that it has a lifetime that is tied to the platform it's running on. For hardware devices, they don't flat out *stop working* at some point (barring normal wear and tear), or change the...