[3.5] WotC motivation revealed!

[totoro]

Re: Banshee

I agree with Trickster here. Spending more money on the books I bought 3 years ago is *not* impressing me. And the manner in which it's been done doens't leave a lot choice. Of the 6 players in my group, *none* of them want to have to buy the books all over again.

It's one thing to rehash everything every 10 years. That's fine. But 3 years after the books were released? I've got more important things to spend money on....

Banshee

I have a suggestion, then. Have only one of you buy it and make copies for all of your friends. Probably one of your group is a "collector". Make him buy them. As long as you only share the copies with your group, you aren't violating any copyright laws. (Just don't sell the copies.)

 

[KenM]

Re: Re: Banshee

I have a suggestion, then. Have only one of you buy it and make copies for all of your friends. Probably one of your group is a "collector". Make him buy them. As long as you only share the copies with your group, you aren't violating any copyright laws. (Just don't sell the copies.)

Accually I belive you are violating copyright laws, and as much as I don't like what WOTC is doing with DnD, if you make a copies of the books and give them to your friends, thats piracy and WOTC loses money. Thats just wrong.

 

[totoro]

Re: Re: Re: Banshee

Accually I belive you are violating copyright laws, and as much as I don't like what WOTC is doing with DnD, if you make a copies of the books and give them to your friends, thats piracy and WOTC loses money. Thats just wrong.

You clearly don't know the copyright laws. That's OK. You sound like a Good Person (TM), so I will enlighten you so that you won't look down on others who also consider themselves Good Persons, such as myself.

In case you remember the Napster file-sharing case, one of the legal arguments was that Napster was not doing anything wrong because sharing copyrighted material with your friends is allowed. The court decided the members of the Napster network were not just "friends swapping music" and found for the recoring industry. However, you are allowed to make copies of your books for your own use and share them with the people in your gaming group to further the enjoyment of the game. Perfectly legal. An important point to be made is that you do not *sell* them to your friends and you do not distribute them online to your friends such that anyone else who happens by can get hold of them. If one person, such as the DM, forks out the cash for the books and makes copies of the PHB for all of the players, that is a reasonable use of the materials.

That is not to say there hasn't been significant and successful efforts to change copyright law in certain instances. Microsoft's insisting that you buy separate identical software for each of your computers comes to mind. Fortunately, I don't think WOTC has the political power to make game books another exception to the copyright laws.