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It's all about supply and demand, and your article proposes to drive up the supply of cheap art (public domain and stock art) and drive down the demand for new art. Public domain art does not pay artists. Cheap stock art may pay the artist a living wage for the time spent on that piece of art...

Going the other direction, when I'm watching the Secret of NIMH, and the mouse Mrs. Brisby does the oh-so-awesome feat of lifting a cinder block, I should scoff? Because according to your standard, as relative as any, but relative to baseline humans, that's a trivial feat. Where does it say...

I think that 5th Edition changed it a lot with bounded accuracy. I'm not exactly a 5E maven, so I'm not sure about the details. In terms of 3E, no, a level 6 Fighter is not objectively good at fighting. They're pretty nice if they're facing an orc, but their best bet for surviving a storm giant...

That's weird. Given the books that can be bought for less than $50, why don't they have someone doing this? They could get better scans more reliably by doing it in-house. Is it just saving money by being able to reject bad scans?

It's been done a lot, but it makes me uncomfortable. If WotC was more litigious about this, "floating eyeballers" seems like a perfect target for a copyright suit. I think it much more honorable to just go a different way. Between the SRD MM, the three Tomes of Horrors, three Creature...

Legally, trademark law lets you identify compatibility, for good reason. The OGL limits that right, but I don't see any reason to go beyond the straightforward text of the license. WotC demanded certain things, but we aren't obliged to work to avoid requests they never made.

Later pastiche material that the estate had had produced. That alone negates your argument. One might also discuss the use of the Conan name on three movies that look nothing like anything Robert E. Howard wrote. In the case of movies, there's an argument that copyright helps encourage...

I don't get how that follows. What matters is how much money you're getting, not how much money other people are getting. If I understand the economics of game stores, the store gets about 50% the face price of a book and the publisher only 25%, but that model has long gone on. If using the...

My response was exactly opposite. As was said up thread, DriveThruRPG is 40%, and people find that quite acceptable. A 10% additional surcharge to use Forgotten Realms? That's cheap.

It is your moral responsibility as the citizen of a state to uphold (nor necessarily enforce) righteous laws. At the very least, you can stop whining when others want to talk about it. Really. I didn't know I could cast magic spells; I assumed you had free will. When you say "What I do mind...

What does that mean? The only way I can interpret the sentence "it is up to the rights holder to defend their IP" such that it can be either true or false is by taking it as a legal claim, and then it's false; copyright infringement is a crime, and the prosecutor can file changes in absence of a...

Geeks complain about DRM and copy protection. They complain when the companies sue the individuals doing the downloading. They complain when The Pirate Bay and MegaUpload are taken down. Some of those complains I agree with, but that's besides the point. Geeks get all annoyed when companies...

But real estate is the only usual type of property (that comes to mind at least) that is taxed for mere existence. Real estate is not passively yours; it can and will be taken from you unless you actively maintain your hold on it. I think there's an interesting comparison to the copyright issue...

I'm not worried about Siegel and Shuster; they got their credit. I'm worried about artists on the comics of the 50s, or the photographer of that Mussolini photo. They probably took a close look at the business possibilities, and figuring that trying to make their own deal would leave them...

Real estate is fundamentally different from most forms of property in the way that it's practically limited. Cars can be made to meet demand, but land for most practical purposes can't be created; we are limited to what is. This is about as far away from IP as you can get; when Winnie the Pooh...

Bottom line, it's not stuff. It's a limited monopoly granted by the state for the purposes of society. It is an incredibly invasive monopoly; if you're in your house not bothering anyone, to break the law in the US you can either make explosives, controlled drugs, forge legal documents, rip your...

You're conflating what is, with what should be. Yes, a candy maker does care that I copied his candy precisely and started making it. As does a furniture maker or clothing maker, neither of which get much intellectual property protection. Why is a dressmaker only protected by his name, whereas...

The new generation is spoiled! News on the next scroll! Oldest story in the world. In 1978, a novel came out titled "Star Wars", by George Lucas. It was really written by Alan Dean Foster. It seems that the practices of failing to credit comics writers and series writers has mostly stopped...

Copyright as property is analogy. From another perspective, copyright is an incredible invasion of personal property rights. If I bought candy and wanted to make the same candy at home, I could. You're saying that I bought a book but Big Brother is going to stand outside my window and grab me if...

That's not how it works; it either goes off the life of the human author, or they get a flat term (95 years in the US).