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

[Voadam]

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

Settlement amount the defendants owe. Not actual dollars now in WotC's bank account. How much do you think you would be willing to pay to be entitled to collect that judgment from those defendants.

 

[Hadrian the Builder]

But you'd run up against the problem that, subjectively, less individuals are source-releasing pdfs of wotc books now than before.

...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?

It only takes one person to make one copy of a file, so until the level of deterrence is 100%, it doesn't matter much.

In the case of that individual, multiple companies suing for the cost of each book that he made available, plus legal fees, should be sufficientl.

 

[Voadam]

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

I know I wouldn't find a sketch worth paying $50 or $100 for. The fact that others do is their business. My desire for the limited commodity of Sergio Aragonnes original art is simply not that high. I'm fine with having read a Cerebus comic collection in the library and never getting any individual pieces of the art.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

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.


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

Perhaps I should be more clear with my analogies. You don't fine a kid $125,000 for what amounts to the theft of a candy bar. And that's all it is. Somewhere between 0 and 2600 sales were lost. WOTC, of course, wants us to believe it was close to 2600. I, however, believe it is much closer to 0 - or more likely, it garnered sales.

 

[evilref]

It only takes one person to make one copy of a file, so until the level of deterrence is 100%, it doesn't matter much.

In the case of that individual, multiple companies suing for the cost of each book that he made available, plus legal fees, should be sufficientl.

Obscenely large fines (see the RIAA) don't work (to stop all pirates, they do deter an unquantifiable number). People still pirate stuff. Ignoring it doesn't 'work' in that you'll have X amount of lost sales. This being an unquantifiable number. Plus as a creator/coworker of creators/employee of said rights-holding company there's a level of irritation caused when you see something you worked on being distributed for free.

Internet taxation to distribute the money to 'those who get pirated' isn't going to work (see CD-Rs in Canada). Likewise excessive computer monitoring will just turn into a tech race between the pirate and the companies being paid by rights-holders to do so.

There's no easy solution on this one. And all those people saying 'companies should find a way round it' might as well say 'someone should invent cold fusion'.

What is certain, however, is that if a company finds someone who has willfully taken one of their products, stripped out the protection/identification and re-released it online for others to obtain for free, that company is legally and morally (IMO) justified in taking that individual to court.

The amount of the settlement/fine is up to the courts and law, which is a societal issue. Laws are often up to 20 years behind societal changes, however, so it could be a long time before judgements catch up.

One of the main issues, at present, with the model of fine=number of copyright violations (downloads) multiplied by cost/fixed amount is
that that really hasn't taken into account how one upload could lead to a million downloads. Well, the RIAA likes that number, but with fines associated with them getting more and more punitive it's likely to get a succesful challenge at some point in the US (and punishments are a lot less in other parts of the world, while still being high enough to deter).

 

[Storm Raven]

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.

Well, permissible to hold him responsible for all incidents of infringement that he had a hand in. The lesson here is if you don't want to be potentially liable for many instances of infringement, don't upload a book to a torrent site.

 

[Storm Raven]

Settlement amount the defendants owe. Not actual dollars now in WotC's bank account. How much do you think you would be willing to pay to be entitled to collect that judgment from those defendants.

I'd need to look at their credit histories, ages, and so on. Just because they may not be able to pay this off now doesn't mean that they won't have resources in the future, and a judgment is usually enforceable for twenty years (or even thirty in some jurisdictions).

However, the simplest answer is "probably considerably more than the 'close to nothing' amount that has been suggested".

 

[Storm Raven]

Perhaps I should be more clear with my analogies. You don't fine a kid $125,000 for what amounts to the theft of a candy bar. And that's all it is. Somewhere between 0 and 2600 sales were lost. WOTC, of course, wants us to believe it was close to 2600. I, however, believe it is much closer to 0 - or more likely, it garnered sales.

Well, since it can't be demonstrated that it did garner sales, that's not going to be very persuasive in court. Like I said before, there is only one reasonably objective metric for measuring the effect of this sort of thing: the actual number of illegal downloads. Anything else is purely speculative. Sure, saying that every illegal download is a lost sale has a speculative element to it, but it is better grounded than any other measure that you could come up with.

I'd say this isn't the adolescent theft of a candy bar. This is more akin to the theft of a trade secret - suppose someone stole the (currently secret) formula for Coke and posted it on the internet. How much harm has he done to the Coca-Cola company? How about the (currently secret) recipe for KFC? Is it merely a trivial affair, or have they done something that will have a large impact on their business and should it be treated as such? I'd go with "large impact" myself.

But to provide someone with copyrighted content, you have to give them the actual content. You can't keep the formula secret and sell them the result of the use of the formula. And that's why copyright infringement penalties are generally very large. Because the law is protecting copyright holders who are willing to run the risk of exposing their actual product to the marketplace in a way that most other actors in the economy do not.

 

[Hadrian the Builder]

@evilref: I think I agree with everthing you've said. And it seems to coincide with my point of view, that companies that want to protect their IP could do so better by stinging many downloaders lightly (cost of good + legal fees for each pirate). So that, if I download alot of material, I should expect to get caught eventually, and I should expect to pay alot more for it than I would have purchasing it legally.

@Storm Raven: I think that that is the lesson being "taught" now, and it isn't working well enough. I think the more effective message would be: pirate our stuff and expect to pay more than you could have with a legal purchase.

I hesitate to use an analogy...but...I regularly drive over the posted 65 mph speed limit. But I don't drive so fast that I am going faster than traffic, and I'm not reckless. I do so because my risk of being pulled over is small but real, and I am willing to take that chance and pay the reasonable fines and the extra fuel consumption. However, if the cops started writing tickets to every person they could pull over for going even 1 mph over the speed limit, I would reduce my speed to 65mph becuase my risk of getting caught and incurring those expenses has gone up dramatically.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

Well, since it can't be demonstrated that it did garner sales, that's not going to be very persuasive in court. Like I said before, there is only one reasonably objective metric for measuring the effect of this sort of thing: the actual number of illegal downloads. Anything else is purely speculative. Sure, saying that every illegal download is a lost sale has a speculative element to it, but it is better grounded than any other measure that you could come up with.

But it's still just a number they pulled out their posterior. No one knows how many lost sales were caused. Somewhere between 0 and 2600. A guess is not proof, and until proof is shown, any number is as good as another.

I'd say this isn't the adolescent theft of a candy bar. This is more akin to the theft of a trade secret - suppose someone stole the (currently secret) formula for Coke and posted it on the internet.

I can't go to Barnes and Noble and read the recipe for Coke, nor can I check the recipe out of my local library.