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

[jgbrowning]

All these lawsuits accomplished is putting a view dummies into debt. Thousands of pirates will not even notice and continue to get away with it. Makes me wonder what the point of it all is.

$225,000?

joe b.

 

[georgegad]

This is the firs ttime I've ever heard of someone saying Piracy actually is the reason why MS is the dominant company

I have heard that before. It is true of a lot of companies, dont sue for infringement untill you have a strong customer base. I can only guess this means Hasbro feel their customer base is strong enough.

Yes, this is true. The moral thing to do is to go without, .

Absolutely not. the most important thing when you are boycotting a product is to not be discomforted yourself. You are punishing the company, you dont have to be punished.

 

[Jack99]

If it's some kid who just took it to buy a new mountain bike or something, and it's his first offense, yes, I'd absolutely be fine with getting my money back. Well, that, and an apology. But if it's some hoodlum whose been in jail a dozen times, probably not.

Maybe if you didn't settle for just an apology and your money back, the first offender doesn't turn into a hoodlum that goes to jail several times. After all, that is the point of prison - deterrence.

Back on topic, IMO, the parties involved were wrong, but the price they are paying is ludicrous. You don't put a kid in jail for 10 years for stealing a candy bar.

Did anyone go to jail (in this case) or did you just go into hyper(bole) overdrive?

 

[Hussar]

/snip

Is WotC the good guy? No. Just because "they did a crime" does not equate to "I get to decide the punishment." The issue here is that you DO have some regular guys of variant ages, some underaged and living in a third world country, the proper response is not "Let's levy a huge lawsuit and ruin their lives."

/snip

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.

 

[Obryn]

Absolutely not. the most important thing when you are boycotting a product is to not be discomforted yourself. You are punishing the company, you dont have to be punished.

???

So if I'm boycotting Honda, but I really want a Civic, it's okay to drive one off the lot?

And yes, an essential part of any boycott is either doing without - because you'd rather that company stopped operations - or to find a legal substitute, to deprive that company of your money while giving your money to their competitors.

-O

 

[Storm Raven]

It's out of line because if 4,000 people downloaded it, they would not have bought it. So saying "That's $40 per book, times 4,000 people who downloaded it and didn't buy it" is a bogus logical conclusion because those 4,000 people who downloaded it would not have spent the money on the books if they were not able to download it.

That's a nice argument in favor of misappropriating anything with no penalty. It is supposedly bogus because you assume that no one would have bought the book, because they downloaded it instead of buying it, which means that they didn't value the book as much as the seller did. How do you come to that conclusion? You have no idea how much the downloaders valued the book, and how much they would have paid absent the ability to download the product for free. Your assumptions that they valued the book less than retail value is as much an assumption as you accuse the legal system of making.

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". Unless you have some sort of other metric that is somehow able to be figured out that is objectively "correct" in the sense you want to apply, then you simply don't have a leg to stand on.

 

[Voadam]

I originally brought it up because people were discussing whether or not the settlement amounts reflected a decision to punish or send a message to other infringers. I pointed out that the settlement didn't reflect any decision at all, because there was no decision maker- it was a negotiated outcome, and reflected what the parties expected at trial.

The point seems to have taken on a life of its own, though.

If the settlement is based on expected statutory damages from trial that are themselves Conressionally designed to punish infringers and send a message to other infringers doesn't it necessarily follow that the settlement reflects the decision to punish infringers and send a message to other infringers?

And are you suggesting WotC's choice to pursue this litigation is not an effort to punish these infringers and send a message to other infringers? You are suggesting they are solely in it for the money capitalizing on the legal situation? Or simply to exercise its ability to civilly sue in this situation because the law says it can?

A desire from WotC to punish those who copied their material and deter others from doing so seems a natural inference from WotC's binging this civil lawsuit. It is a rationale and plausible motive.

 

[Storm Raven]

Is WotC the good guy? No. Just because "they did a crime" does not equate to "I get to decide the punishment." The issue here is that you DO have some regular guys of variant ages, some underaged and living in a third world country, the proper response is not "Let's levy a huge lawsuit and ruin their lives."

The main flaw with your argument is that WotC did not decide punishment. The U.S. Congress did. WotC merely used the tools provided by the law. If you have a problem with the size of the potential award in an infringement suit, complain to Congress rather than ranting on the internet.

WotC sued those infringers they presumably thought they had the evidence to prove their case against. This was not a random selection of guys, but rather a selection of guys against whom they could prove a claim of infringement. The fact that they were scattered about the world and have a modest range of ages is beside the point.

 

[JohnRTroy]

Attached are all the legal documents in question. I have not chosen the Poland based one because no progress has been made there.

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.

 

[Voadam]

*sniff* *sniff* Wow, I'm touched. Hopefully that balances the bad karma of the dog I killed on page 1 of the thread.

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