Chris Cocks says it makes sense to move D&D to a "live service" model, but Hasbro will always make physical books

Chris Cocks isn't shy about plans to move Dungeons & Dragons to a more live service model of gaming. In a recent interview with GamesRadar, Cocks explicitly said that "it makes sense" for players to shift their mindset towards a live service due to the high amount of players using digital services, but assured the interviewer that books will still be produced by Hasbro. When asked if Wizards was moving away from books in favor of a more piecemeal release schedule, following the announcement of D&D Beyond's new Drops service. "Books will always be an important part of D&D," Cocks said. "It will always be kind of like a special totem that you can collect. I have a big bookshelf of D&D books myself."

"But we see what's happening – almost everyone who plays D&D uses D&D Beyond, like a super high percentage uses it," Cocks continued. "A very high percentage use Foundry VTT or Roll20, and so it just makes sense that you should start to migrate your thinking about the way you play to more of a live service where you don't have to wait 18 months for us to build a book. We can start to release components or aspects of that book over time, and you don't have to buy everything all at once. You can buy chapters or segments of it over time. That makes a ton of sense to me. That said we will still have big moments. We will still have like, 'hey, ta da, here's a huge campaign.' You can expect there'll be more around that, both from us and from all the creators in the world that can leverage a platform like D&D Beyond to share their content as well."

Broadly speaking, Dungeons & Dragons has always been a "live service" game, as the game's core business model involves continuously releasing new content in the form of new rulebooks or campaigns. However, it seems that Cocks is principally interested in shifting this model around more frequent releases. We'll note that the business model suggested by Cocks was already rolled out in a manner of speaking. The Dhampir species rules were released as a "digital DLC" for D&D Beyond subscribers who digitally ordered a Forgotten Realms book bundle, but a physical version of the rules are being released via the upcoming Ravenloft: The Horrors Within book. However, a la carte purchases were removed from D&D Beyond several years ago in order to force users to purchase entire books instead.

 

[abazaba]

I am not talking about eye patches and sailing boats, but maybe you are?

Judging by your posts so far, it wouldn't surprise me at all if you were indeed talking about 'eye patches and sailing boats', and not about illegally sharing copyrighted works.

 

[mamba]

This statement makes no sense and you should really read more before asserting something like this.

that works both ways, you clearly did not understand what I wrote. If a file is hosted by someone on the internet, and you do not download it, you are not guilty of pirating it. That is trivially obvious, yet that is the part you chose to bold and claim is wrong. Two times in a row now…

 

[mamba]

Judging by your posts so far, it wouldn't surprise me at all if you were indeed talking about 'eye patches and sailing boats', and not about illegally sharing copyrighted works.

maybe I would consider this if you did not repeatedly demonstrate that you completely misunderstand what I wrote

 

[abazaba]

maybe I would consider this if you did not repeatedly demonstrate that you completely misunderstand what I wrote

So you are saying that you are (talking about) illegally sharing copyrighted works ?

 

[bsss]

that works both ways, you clearly did not understand what I wrote. If a file is hosted by someone on the internet, and you do not download it, you are not guilty of pirating it. That is trivially obvious, yet that is the part you chose to bold and claim is wrong. Two times in a row now…

Your use of "downloading" has been ambiguous ("read-only, no downloads PDF") in this thread --- if it is read, even by one of your friends, it is copied. "No downloads" is an irrelevant idea at that point, the copyright infringement occurred on the mere read, regardless of what they do with it --- or how you think you restricted what they can do with it --- afterwards.

So, I took "not download" as "not save", which is a pointless event beyond the point in time of infringement. If you mean download in the maximalist sense of transferring data in any form, despite the scenario of it being there for the purpose of being shared and read, and no one, literally no one, ever accessed the file at any time, then whether or not you're committing "piracy" is some dispute about parties, but there are definitely licenses and legal interpretations that would include a conveyance of the file to a computer that is not your own (e.g. a cloud service) as making an unauthorized copy, so it's wrong to conclude "not piracy" so absolutely.

If your hypothetical is so in a vacuum that you have exactly one file on exactly one hard drive and that hard drive is directly connected to the internet, and no one ever accesses that file ever, and that is "not piracy", then I concede your point. It's a very pointless point, but you'd be right that a file that is never duplicated and never accessed is never copied.

 

[AlViking]

that bolded part can’t possibly be wrong. Maybe it is piracy to host it in the first place, even if no one downloads it (debatable imo, but maybe close enough to an attempt to count), but not downloading it is definitely not piracy…


yes, it is about the two. Is the act of hosting a file for a select group of people (so not for the public at large) already piracy, and if you circumvent whatever protections are in place so you can create a permanent copy, is’n’t then the receiver the pirate rather than the ‘sender’ who tried to prevent this from happening

I would hope we could all agree that if I got a copy of Project Hail Mary and started streaming it on my website for public consumption that would constitute copyright infringement and piracy, yes? Even though no one is "downloading" it anywhere. If I invite some friends over to watch it at my house, it's not. If I show it in a public auditorium where anyone can attend (even if they do not) it is.

Spoiler: A handy dandy chart for movies, but it still applies

So in theory if you're running a game using Zoom, Discord or similar and streaming video you can share images of your PDF as long as it's not an open meeting. You are not allowed to provide a copy of a PDF to anyone else no matter how temporary it is.

 

[mamba]

So, I took "not download" as "not save", which is a pointless event beyond the point in time of infringement. If you mean download in the maximalist sense of transferring data in any form

yes, you never accessed the file, you might not even be aware of its existence, so no you did not pirate it just because it is out there ready to be accessed.

and no one, literally no one, ever accessed the file at any time, then whether or not you're committing "piracy" is some dispute about parties

as the one making the file available, possibly, I acknowledged that. As anyone else, no.

but there are definitely licenses and legal interpretations that would include a conveyance of the file to a computer that is not your own (e.g. a cloud service) as making an unauthorized copy

could be a backup too, maybe there are licenses that do not allow that, it’s a wide world, but I doubt TTRPG PDFs regularly come with such a restriction.

I also wonder how that could ever be enforced, but that is a separate issue

 

[bsss]

could be a backup too, maybe there are licenses that do not allow that, it’s a wide world, but I doubt TTRPG PDFs regularly come with such a restriction.

I also wonder how that could ever be enforced, but that is a separate issue

The thing in question being a TTRPG PDF doesn't matter to copyright law. The situation is more that a copy transmitted to another party, even one who is acting as an intermediary, is still a copy, and again the law doesn't care who received the copy or how or why. It cares that a copy was made and the copyright was infringed upon, and if the copyright holder found out (say, Dropbox ratted you out), you'd be stuck trying to argue it's an archival copy you copied to someone else for some reason. No explicit or extra restriction is necessary.

Paying attention to copies and their location is a not-uncommon condition in e.g. enterprise software licensing, where it's enforceable by the software phoning home or checking in with a license server, assuming the copy is run. And I know there are also enterprise licensors that audit their customers to detect unauthorized copies resident on disk. But how it works as a license term isn't really the point, the point is that an inert copy is still a copy and that some copyright holders have been successful in maintaining that position, even with paying customers and even if those paying customers were to say something like "well I never ran both copies at the same time" or some other defense. It all hinges on it still being a copy under copyright law.

Enforcement is a different matter, but it's very difficult to carve out a solid "not copyright infringement" scenario that's relevant to files being available to others in any form.

 

[mamba]

The thing in question being a TTRPG PDF doesn't matter to copyright law.

obviously not, I didn’t claim it does. I said chances are the license that comes with it had no such restriction

But how it works as a license term isn't really the point, the point is that an inert copy is still a copy and that some copyright holders have been successful in maintaining that position, even with paying customers and even if those paying customers were to say something like "well I never ran both copies at the same time" or some other defense.

Isn’t that still a matter of license terms? There is enough software out there that you are allowed to install on multiple machines as long as only one copy is actively used at a time.

Is your take that if the license were to say nothing on that point and the law kicks in, that second copy on a separate PC I own and installed the software on for convenience (so I can use it on either, but since it is just me, only one install is used at a time) is piracy?

It’s still at least indisputable a second copy though, which in the ‘view only’ scenario was still somewhat of an open question

The courts have decided this, almost completely unambiguously (the only quibble I can find is if the work in RAM is explicitly and concretely a copy, but it's almost always irrelevant respective to the other acts being disputed).

the bolded part is the entire point, it might not be a clear ‘this is perfectly ok’, but it does not appear to be an unequivocal ‘this is definitely piracy’ either.

The other aspects would be of interest too, because I have not really seen a case that matched my scenario, generally those ‘other acts’ were clearly piracy, making it moot to decide whether the copy in RAM already would constitute that or not.

 

[bsss]

obviously not, I didn’t claim it does. I said chances are the license that comes with it had no such restriction

Isn’t that still a matter of license terms? There is enough software out there that you are allowed to install on multiple machines as long as only one copy is actively used at a time.

Is your take that if the license were to say nothing on that point and the law kicks in, that second copy on a separate PC I own and installed the software on for convenience (so I can use it on either, but since it is just me, only one install is used at a time) is piracy?

It’s still at least indisputable a second copy though, which in the ‘view only’ scenario was still somewhat of an open question

A license is just a way to govern how something can be redistributed. The lack of a license term, or the lack of a license entirely, isn't the same as allowing redistribution, it's just "fall back to the law", essentially. The law says you can't make copies unless you are the copyright holder, period. What's a copy (is it "fixed", etc.)? That's for lawyers and courts to argue about.

A PDF or something that comes with no license would mean its redistribution is essentially restricted exclusively by copyright law (within its exceptions) as in if you have nothing granting you specific rights, under copyright law, you have zero rights to make copies (again not withstanding something that's at least somewhat defensible, like an archival copy). If you have received a license, you'd have to decide on a license by license basis whether or not you are allowed to copy the thing onto a second machine. If you don't have any license, you making a copy, even for convenience, is likely to be considered copyright infringement, and your response to that would be a personal decision on if you think you have a defense (e.g. it's an archival copy, some educational fair use argument, whatever), and/or if you think no one is going to bother you (or even find out) about your trivial-level infringement (e.g. you copied a PDF from your desktop to your laptop and are using it on both places, but so what).