Exclusive interview WotC President Greg Leeds

[Darrin Drader]

It might be impossible for them to track the exact numbers, but they can do the following:

1. Have someone actively looking for torrent downloads.

2. Have someone torrent the books and leave them seeded.

3. Watch to see how many other seeds are out there and how many leeches there are.

4. Monitor their torrent client to see what other IP addresses are involved, contact their ISPs to see who they belong to and put the legal the smackdown on them (RIAA anyone?).

Or they could just go to the torrent sites, look for the specific book (PHB2) and see how many times the torrent has been downloaded. Many torrent sites do track the number of downloads each file has had. In theory, each download equals one person.

Can it be perfectly tracked? No. Impossible.

Can you monitor readily available data and get some sort of an idea of what the ratio is? Yes, definitely.

The reason that this won't make a difference is that someone will just scan the pages, create a new PDF, and make that available where the original PDF used to be. Or maybe there will be another leak from the printer. I think the only way to crack down on pirating is to get the ISPs to block torrenting, which is far from impossible. Unfortunately a lot of people torrent perfectly legal content including MMO clients and other items that the publishers want distributed in this way.

 

[Obryn]

100% of the PDFs for all future WotC books will be acquired through piracy.

And 0% will be of high-quality, extensively bookmarked, searchable PDFs with low file-sizes built by WotC.

I don't think this is a great decision. I think it's misguided. However, if you reduce the quality of a free product, it will become less and less of a suitable replacement for a non-free product.

-O

 

[El Mahdi]

... Then again, its hard to believe that this is a legitimate interview, considering WOTC is a major ad contributor for enworld. Not calling anyone into question, but any interview provided by people who are paid by the interviewee can be touted as little more than a press release. ...

Not cool, man.

Saying "it's hard to believe that this is a legitimate interview", is calling the integrity of Morrus and PirateCat into question. No matter what one may say afterwards to distance themself from the statement.

Personally, I'm very appreciative of the effort and professionalism they put into this interview.

Greg Leeds not really answering the questions is absolutely no reflection upon Morrus or PirateCat. And Greg Leeds not really answering the questions is just an answer of a different sort.

I'm glad Morrus didn't come back and comment on this, because he shouldn't be swinging at pitches in the dirt (sorry Morrus, baseball reference - I don't know the rules of Cricket).


Very, not cool.

 

[darjr]

Very, not cool.

Thank you. Lashing out at EnWorld, it's users, or its staff is way out of line.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

And 0% will be of high-quality, extensively bookmarked, searchable PDFs with low file-sizes built by WotC.

I don't think this is a great decision. I think it's misguided. However, if you reduce the quality of a free product, it will become less and less of a suitable replacement for a non-free product.

-O

No, they might in fact be better. I've seen pirated pdfs that are of incredible quality, and yes, they have bookmarks, they're searchable, and they have low file-sizes.

You underestimate. Severely.

 

[Obryn]

No, they might in fact be better. I've seen pirated pdfs that are of incredible quality, and yes, they have bookmarks, they're searchable, and they have low file-sizes.

You underestimate. Severely.

I don't really think I do, unless they were stolen from the printers. (And that's both rare and relatively easy to catch).

Most pirate PDFs are, to put it mildly, crap.

But even in a universe where pirated PDFs would be more functional than the perfectly-functional WotC ones, the point stands that it wouldn't be WotC themselves spending time and money on them.

Please note - I still don't at all think this is a good idea. However, I do think it's a decision a company could easily make without the sky falling.

-O

 

[TwinBahamut]

The people in charge of the over-arching business decisions, however? Has Greg Leeds ever rolled a d20? Can you see anyone in current management ever posting something like this or this?

Does it really matter?

Honestly, I don't think a person needs to be a lifetime D&D geek in order to be a great manager for WotC. I mean, for one thing D&D is just a small subset of WotC's business, but much more importantly it simply seems irrelvant. The CEO makes business decisions, not game design decisions. A CEO should be hired for raw ability, not "geek cred". If I had the choice, I would much rather see a competant CEO who keeps D&D profitable than one who may muck up the game with too much personal involvement.

Besides, I may be mistaken, but wasn't Scott Rouse derided when he first took up his current position because he didn't have enough "geek cred"? These days everyone seems to like him (for good reason), but it is not like he had any kind of long-standing involvement in the growth of D&D before he became the face of the D&D brand he is today.

 

[OstogVin]

What, exactly, do you find so difficult about analyzing network traffic?

Nothing, except gaining access to all relevant routers in the world. An ISP can monitor traffic in their network. WoTC can't monitor anywhere else than in their internal network. I'm pretty sure they did not get their numbers from network analysis, they probably just looked at the numbers on the tracker site. Of course, this does not mean that their conservative number is wrong. In fact, if they only used the number from one (popular) site, this would be the lower bound of illegal downloads. Unless the site is inflating the numbers to seem more popular.

TCP/IP was not designed to be easy to track by the way. It was design to be able to be able to get data from one place to another, even if someone destroyed the normal path, which makes it harder to track, because in theory data might suddenly start using a different route. In practice this does not really work anymore, because full redundancy of routes everywhere is expensive, and the now commercial providers can't afford/won't pay for it.

 

[Jack99]

No, they might in fact be better. I've seen pirated pdfs that are of incredible quality, and yes, they have bookmarks, they're searchable, and they have low file-sizes.

You underestimate. Severely.

Funny how those only started to appear (for D&D) until WotC started to make them...

 

[Dumnbunny]

Really?

First, this isn't software you or I or WotC can just install on a computer and start running it. It's intended to be installed by ISPs and only monitors traffic into and out of that ISP. When considering what WotC can and cannot monitor, it's important to keep in mind the fact that they are not the NSA or the FBI. They're just a private company.

Also, this relevant quote from the article you link throws another spanner in the works:

From a legal standpoint, Schulze says that privacy may be a more significant problem. "Neither the U.S. nor any European country would allow [anyone] to install a device that inspects the traffic of every user just to stop Internet piracy," he says. "In this approach, every user is considered to be suspicious."

Add Canada to the list of countries where this approach would likely face a legal challenge under Canada's Privacy Act of 2005.


The bottom line is there are certainly things WotC can do to track downloads, such as getting the log files from Scribd, watching activity on key torrents. Other methods of file sharing are beyond their technological and legal reach to track.