Actually, it's free product. If you mean advertising in the sense of "more people know about it", yes, but as advertising is generally intended to increase sales, this is un-advertising, as it is removing potential customers from the market.
Advertisement is the art of making things known. Advertisement is generally used to inform people, this can be done to motivate to buy a certain product or service. Not every concept is about making money...
I don't know if I would go for this, either. If this could be stated absolutely, it would be true, but then if the material has no interest for you (the generic, hypothetical "you", of course, I'm not referring to the person I'm quoting specifically), then why download it?
If a person downloads the material, then that person can be said to have some interest in it. That level of interest, small as it may be, still represents the possibility of a sale.
You theorize with the assumption that the consumer has unlimited resources, or atleast enough to satisfy all it's needs. This is not true for 95% of the consumer population of the western world. I'm in the luxury position to currently spend 2/3 of my income on my hobby (€1000), but there sure is more stuff i would love to have.
The consumer has a limited buget, this budget goes first to the most desired consumables. When money runs out, the downloading starts. Atleast in the 'ideal' world. I've heard enough people gloating that they downloaded a very good pdf, to spare a f4ew bucks, so they could buy another six pack. That in my eyes is amoral, that booz is more important then a good book...
Mao Tse Tung wrote of guerillas that "they must move like fish through the sea of the people". Put less poetically, criminals need public support to transform themselves into 'daring renegades', as the pirates typically portray themselves. Public support results in lowered public vigilance.
Additionally, up to a smaller point, the more people engage in piracy the less likely an individual will be targeted, unless the level of piracy is sufficient to trigger a specific response, and as long as it is considered wrong to steal in this way. Also, the more pirates, the more sources for pirated materials.
You mean this bit?
It’s time to build Communist parties of a new type, with the application of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism within the concrete conditions in which the parties are operating—that is, with the development of a specific thought that will allow the class vanguard to swim like fish among the masses of every single country, to penetrate specific contradictions putting this at the service of people’s war.
The 'sharing' community still has to keep it's distance from the masses, because inevetabily the current share network will reach critical mass and a crackdown will follow. The 'share' community has the added grief of constantly upgrading their network before the current one reaches critical mass. That's not really a problem with something as big as sharing movies, apps, or music, but for rpg books it's a lot more difficult to establish a new network.
Yes, It's Atlas games fault that I couldn't find all the Rafael Sabatini books in print.
No, but it is Atlas Games's fault that not all of their products are in print or available as pdf. That's one of the reasons people are scanning AM3rd now...
I wasn't actually pointing at Atlas, but more at TSR, FASA, GDW, etc. The old giants of the industry. They finally saw the light, but by then the monkey was already out of the box.
I could even speculate that you like doing naughty things to puppies, but I won't ...
Hmm... Little puppies...Tasty puppies... ;-p
It would indeed be a slimy thing to accuse someone else of acting in opposition to their stated intentions without any evidence, so I'm glad that you went to *so much trouble* to tell us that you weren't doing that ...
Just showing the flipside of the coin John picked up, but only bothered to show us one possible side of the coin, i showed the possible flip side of the coin...
And how the hell am i supposed to proof what he was thinking when he thought up this scheme? Or is the use of scheme badsemantics? ;-p
Material that I agreed with, or found not notably objectionable, I left out. This has the risk of making my post seem more hostile than I intend. I hope I have avoided that.
I like to be complet, so i reply to everything ;-)
On another topic in this thread, I hope that piracy foes not restrict my ability to buy pdf products. While the area I live in gets gaming material in as a slow trickle, the primary reason that I like pdf's are for compactness. It is easier to fit something on a CD-Rom than on a bookshelf, and there is no risk of getting in my wife's way
I highly doubt it, because there where already high quality scans and OCRs floating around of physical books before there even was a D20 pdf market.
I really dig it that i can have my entire book collection on my laptop, instead of hiring a 10 tonner to move all my gaming material when i'm at my friends house. My physical RPG book collection is large, my pdf rpg book collection is just as large...
