File-Sharing: Has it affected the RPG industry?

[woodelf]

On an different line of thought, I was considering how complicated reasonable copyright laws are. For a single work, setting some period of time - let me just grab the random number of (roll, roll, roll) ten years - seems reasonable, but there are a number of cases where this seems unjust. Consider an ongoing work; the Harry Potter series, or the Batman comic, or the Peanuts strip. By having copyright expire in these cases, then J.K. Rowling loses the income from the first book in the series about the time the last one will come out; anybody can put out a Batman comic, and Charles Schulz would only have been in control of a tiny fraction of his work.

It would seem reasonable to differentiate between the ability to copy material and the ability to use the characters, though I can see some limitation based on a requirement to keep in characters in play to keep the rights protected.

Don't forget trademark. While the old Batman comics might become PD, Batman himself wouldn't, so others still couldn't write new Batman stories. I'm not sure i like this state of affairs, but if it didn't also change, shortened copyright would do essentially nothing to threaten the holders of valuable entertainment IP, almost all of which has distinctive trademarkable elements. Disney is in no danger of losing exclusive control over Mickey Mouse (or any other character) just because Steamboat Willie falls into the public domain.

And, in any case, copyright renewals could very well take care of that. They should not be cheap--while initial copyright must be free to do its job, renewals could be expensive enough to discourage their use except for things like very valuable series. If i were J.K. Rowling, i'd gladly pay a few 10s of thousands of dollars to renew the copyright on the first couple of Harry Potter books until all of the series was out. It might even be possible to automatically extend copyright in some manner where series are concerned, though it'd take some careful rules to balance the benefits with the potential for abuse.

 

[Dr. Harry]

I was unclear. I'm not suggesting legislation based on motives. I'm suggesting exactly the opposite: legislation based on results. As opposed to legislation based on how you got to that result. IOW, it seems to me to be better to say that it either is or is not legal to have a digital scan of a book you legally own, rather than to say that it is legal to scan a book you own, but not legal to acquire a scan of a book you own. The current situation is, to my mind, actually more like trying to legislate based on motive, rather than action, in that it makes two externally identical results legally different based on how you got there (method in the piracy case, mindset in, say, a hate crime case). Part of the problem was my choice of words: the "rationale" i'm referring to is the rationale for differentiating between the two situations, not the rationale for commiting the action/crime.

The means are important. If you make a legal copy of material that you have legal possesion of, that's one thing, but if you obtain a stolen copy of that material in another media, then you have utilized an illegal service. Zap. At this point it wouldn't matter if you did it to read it to orphans, the illegal action (downloading pirated material) has been done. In a sense, I suppose (though I would like to ask Dannyalcatraz if he thinks that this has any basis) that this is legally similar to receiving stolen property.

The current situation is based on action: did you obtain material from an illegal source?

 

[woodelf]

Honestly? Nothing?

I can only imagine you don't know because you don't bother to find out, because of your bias against corporations. Google for "[company name here] charitable contributions" and away you go.

OK, i should've been clearer. Those are not good things that corporations have done. Those are good things that their profits have done. Instead of one giant toy company fixing a thousand cleft palates a year, why couldn't 200 smaller toy companies each fix 5? Those sorts of massive donations sound impressive, and are genuine goods done. But they are not in any way unique to corporations, when scaled for the available wealth of the donor. And, last i checked, i found that most non-profits get most of their money from small donors, in the aggregate.

And the very fact that those charitable contributions are a pittance is an indication of the problem: Lots of people give a significant percentage of their income to charities (5%+). A bike company that i buy most of my accessories from gives 25% of profits (obviously, significantly less than sales, admittedly) to advocacy groups. When i hear about someone like WalMart giving 25% of profits, or 5% of gross sales, to charities, then i'll definitely change my tune.

Need we mention Rockefeller and Carnegie?

If modern corporations behaved like they did (especially Carnegie), we'd probably be better off. They don't. They can't--their stockholders wouldn't let them.

But let's talk about your favorite target. One (just one) of Hasbro's charities is "Operation Smile." The operation to repair a cleft palate costs as little as $700. A pittance to Hasbro, a world of difference to children in poor countries.

http://www.operationsmile.org/

Boundless Playgrounds is a pretty cool Hasbro charity, too. They build equal access playgrounds for children with disabilities to play alongside other children of all abilities.

http://www.boundlessplaygrounds.org/

Hasbro's corporate culture is extraordinarily civic minded. Employees are given paid leave for charitable work, and Hasbro matches all employee charitable contributions dollar for dollar.

Very cool.

oh, and, personally, i really didn't have any opinion on Hasbro's ethics societal prior to your post. I don't like the way that WotC is being run lately, but i didn't like the way it was run before Hasbro acquired them, so i'm don't necessarily think that Hasbro is tob lame. I just pointed out that Hasbro is the only business in the RPG world that might qualify as a "big" corporation. It sounds like they may actually be pretty decent, as big corps go.

My "favorite target", if there is such a thing, is Wal-Mart.

If corporations strive to lower prices, your wages go further.

Not necessarily. IME, the two ways that businesses lower prices are by lowering wages, and by lowering manufactering costs. Obviously, they could also theoretically lower materials costs, but that is often not possible or not practical (if steal costs X, then you pay X). Now, manufacturing costs can only be lowered if you can come up with a way to do so: cheaper machines, faster machines, fewer steps--in short, greater efficiency. And there are often fairly tight limitations on this, for mechanical reasons. But wages can be lowered as far as the market will bear. So you can often make the biggest cut in your bottom line by lowering wages (especially if, as in some industries, labor is the lion's share of your costs to begin with). So, when corporations lower prices, they most often do so by lowering wages. Which significantly cuts into that theoretically-increased purchasing power.

Let my take a concrete example. Oscar Mayer has [one of?] their main plant here. Starting wage is currently something like $12/hr. Which sounds pretty good. And it can be empirically shown that the cost of an Oscar Mayer hotdog is less, in absolute dollars, than it was 30yrs ago. However, how has it gotten that way, despite inflation (since even a constant real cost would result in a higher sticker price)? Well, i'm sure some of it is manufacturing efficiencies. I also know that the starting wage in the late '70s at the same plant was around $11/hr--high for meatpacking jobs, in fact. Adjusting for inflation, that's a real loss of 55%-65%. And that is true, in general, for manufacturing jobs.

 

[woodelf]

How does a store like Half-Price books fit into this discussion?
For example I go to my local FLGS see the Draconomicon book that WOTC just put out. I don't want to pay the 40.00 bucks for it, so I don't buy it. Later on I see the same book at Half-Price Books for 20.00 bucks and buy it. WOTC didn't get my money, but I do have the book. Was the book stolen from WOTC because I didn't pay them for the book?

That's why i won't buy books at Half-Price Books.

It's actually even a bit more complex than that. My understanding is that a lot of the books at Half-Price Books have been "remaindered". If i understand correctly, in at least some, if not a lot of, contracts with authors, a remaindered book isn't the same as a sold book, and actually has more in common with a destroyed or stripped book. In short, authors often don't get royalties on remaindered copies, or the royalties are significantly less than on retailed copies. There are rumors about that some publishers have been known to remainder the rest of a print run fairly early if sales are slow, because that gets them out of paying royalties on whatever further copies *do* sell. Even if this isn't completely true (or the news source i read glossed over a significant point), selling new books for half price, especially as quickly as Half-Price Books sometimes does, has a negative impact on new-book prices which i don't think is right. I think they're a bit hard on the used book market, too, which is a tragedy.

 

[woodelf]

I view file-sharing as an expression of resistance by consumers to the restrictions that inhibit their ability to exploit this new distribution model (i-Tunes's success, even in a format-limited and heavily controlled structure, is an example of the demand for this new way of distribution in the music industry).

Yeah, i got a little kick out of the RIAA saying "consumers don't want individual tracks, they want free stuff", while consumers kept saying "if prices are reasonable, we'd pay for it, but CD prices aren't reasonable and we just want a couple tracks", and then Apple puts together the iTunes music store and, wham, sales from day one are off the charts. Not to mention the bump in sales when CD prices were lowered last year. OK, we now return you to your regularly-scheduled thread.

 

[woodelf]

Sigh. Fine then if the Author has lost something by a hypothetical person looking at something via download and then buying it later, then he's also lost something from said hypothetical person looking at it in the store and then buying it later. The act of preview->buy later is still identical, only the location changes. So why if this is so clear cut isn't preview something in a store illegal ? Heck come to that isn't it by this a worse crime to preview something in a store and then NEVER buy it, compared to download it at home, look at it and buy it ?

Up until a few years ago, it generally was. I don't think it was until the advent of Barnes & Noble (or Borders--which one came first?) that bookstores, in general, became reader-friendly (as opposed to purchaser-friendly). I remember being all but chased out of bookstores before that for spending too much time reading a book without buying it. Not to mention the ubiquitous "this is a bookstore, not a library" signs in most bookstores. It was precisely free previewing that gave B&N their initial competitive advantage--they made the bookstore browser-friendly, under the logic that it would, over all, increase sales. And they seem to have been right. So the question becomes, are crappy PDF scans of books the next evolution of browsing, and thus a complement to sales, or an end-run around buying?

Oh, and i might add that i still believe this way, perhaps through conditioning. I feel guilty if i read more than a reasonable bit of a book (RPG or otherwise) in the store and then don't buy it. Even though i know the store considers it perfectly reasonable behavior, i don't.

On the flip side, that's also part of why i've bought so few D20 System books. Generally, i can get all the value i need out of the book with a cursory skim in the store--the core ideas are often simple enough to understand and memorize at a quick glance, the bulk of the material being the specific mechanical implementation of those ideas. And that latter part is easy for me to do, so i'm not inclined to pay someone to do it for me, unless they've done an exceptionally clever job of it. Or, to use common terms, crunch has very little appeal to me, because i can create my own with minimal effort; fluff has a great deal of appea to me, because it takes me a lot of time and effort to create myself. So i buy mostly fluff-heavy books, and most D20 System books are crunch-heavy.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

OK, i should've been clearer. Those are not good things that corporations have done. Those are good things that their profits have done. Instead of one giant toy company fixing a thousand cleft palates a year, why couldn't 200 smaller toy companies each fix 5?

Just another of the economies of scale that big corporations enjoy: charitable contributions. Yes, it would be great if smaller companies could pick up the slack-- but they don't. They can't afford to make charitable contributions for the same reason they can't afford to cover health benefits, or retirement benefits, or lower their prices.

If modern corporations behaved like they did (especially Carnegie), we'd probably be better off. They don't. They can't--their stockholders wouldn't let them.

This is demonstrably untrue. Many (most?) publicly held companies have charitable trusts. Corporate conscience is another form of marketing; it adds value to the company, and is supported by the stockholders for that reason. By your own example, you prefer to buy from companies who donate to charity.

You'll note that in recent months, Wal-Mart has started making aggressive steps to improve their public perception. This was not due to any governmental regulation, it was due solely to market forces: you, personally, and many like you, shopping elsewhere because "Wal-Mart sucks."

This is as it should be; it just takes more time to move a target that large.

I don't like the way that WotC is being run lately, but i didn't like the way it was run before Hasbro acquired them.

I guess the still unanswered question is how one goes from there to a rationalization of theft; with the very clear side effect of putting Hasbro employees out on the street and drying up Hasbro's profits, from whence charitable contributions come.


Wulf

 

[Dr. Harry]

That's what i'm asking. An argument that says they are not meaningfully different might persuade me. But if you simply state that there is no difference, it feels like you're jumping to conclusions, glossing over a hole in your argument so that it doesn't get exposed. I'm not saying you are doing that, just that it feels like you are. It's probably just a difference of POV: you seem to see it as an already-answered question, while i see it as a significant point of the debate [on the legality of filesharing].


(1) possessing illegally, and (2) denying someone of possession


Agreed. But i consider it a relevant point of debate as to how the situation differs when (2) doesn't come into play. How does that change the situation? You seem to be saying "not at all." But that doesn't make sense to me, because we clearly recognize in other areas of law that denying someone of their possessions is wrong. If (2), on its own, is wrong, and (1)+(2) is wrong, then it seems to me that (1)+(2), minus the (2), should be somewhat less wrong, because we're not doing (2), which is in and of itself a wrong. Especially since, generalizing over various acts that are usually agreed upon to be wrong, the relative magnitude of wrongness of (1)+(2) and (2) are comparable--one does not significantly overshadow the other. I'm not arguing for simple economic addition here. I don't think that if, say, stealing a $10k car and destroying a $10k car have the same penalty, that therefore the illegal possession part of the car-stealing crime must be valued at zero. Nor do i intend to extend that to claiming that pirating is therefore a zero-cost crime. But, at the opposite extreme, it doesn't make sense to me that it is "just as much of" a crime as stealing. That would imply that if you pirated someone's IP, and then later destroyed their version, you would've done nothing more wrong. After all, if the piracy is just as bad as theft, then you're already guilty of that magnitude of crime and you've done nothing worse by also depriving the creator/owner of their copy. Does that seem right to you? Or should you be charged with two thefts in that situation? IOW, is it worse to pirate a copy, then destroy the original at a later date, than it is to simply steal it all in one fell swoop?

While I will grant that different criminal acts have different consequences, and that the penalties for those crimes should, in themselves, differ, they are both still crimes and can both still be wrong. To shoplift a copy of a book is a crime with a given range of pentalties regardless of whether the store burned down that night, or whether the thief intended to return it after browsing, as the action is what makes the crime, not necessarily the intention. If there is confusion on this point, it migt be due to me writing as this will also be read by those who have posted along the lines "It is acceptable behavior if it is not the worst thing going on" or "File-sharing is acceptable behavior if I don't like the company I'm stealing from". I am not saying that you have advanced these arguments, just that my responses have been written to be read by more than just the person to whom I am directly responding.

In its basic sense, and this may appear to be splitting hares, it is different to say that {(1)+(2) is worse than (1)} than it is to say that {(1) is less wrong than (1) + (2)}. "Right" and "Wrong" are basic descriptors I use like "positive" and "negative - perhaps "Acceptable" (nonnegative) and "Wrong" would be better); there can still be a difference in degree.(Hmm ... you can see that I'm more of a DM than a player.)

There is no difference in that they are both crimes and can both be wrong; they acts are similar in that they are both forms of theft. Piracy is a form of theft, though stealing a pdf of "Waterdeep and the North" is different than stealing a car. The situation changes "not at all" in the sense that a form of theft has been committed, though the degree can differ. I feel justified in calling both theft in the sense of the legal definition of theft quoted by Dannyalcatraz a bit back.

 

[woodelf]

Just another of the economies of scale that big corporations enjoy: charitable contributions. Yes, it would be great if smaller companies could pick up the slack-- but they don't. They can't afford to make charitable contributions for the same reason they can't afford to cover health benefits, or retirement benefits, or lower their prices.

OK, my google-fu is weak. Can you point to me some figures showing that big corps, on average, give a larger percentage of either their profits or their sales to charities, than do small businesses?

This is demonstrably untrue. Many (most?) publicly held companies have charitable trusts. Corporate conscience is another form of marketing; it adds value to the company, and is supported by the stockholders for that reason. By your own example, you prefer to buy from companies who donate to charity.

That's a very good point. But it's the very fact that it's in service to marketing that it disappoints me. And worries me--because the impetus isn't "do good", the impetus is "have a good reputation", and there's too much disconnect between those two, IMHO. And, in any case, if i had to choose between a corp donating 5% of profits to charities, or decreasing profits by 5% in order to raise their lowest-wage employees' wages, i think that the latter would almost always do more good. For that matter, the disparity between CEO and assembly-line worker (or cashier, or whatever) in salary is simply ridiculous. It's yet another symptom of not valuing the employee--how else can you claim that one person is worth, say, 300x as much as another to the business?

You'll note that in recent months, Wal-Mart has started making aggressive steps to improve their public perception. This was not due to any governmental regulation, it was due solely to market forces: you, personally, and many like you, shopping elsewhere because "Wal-Mart sucks."

By sidestepping the real issues. Nobody was complaining that WalMart didn't donate enough money to charities. If they don't raise wages, eliminate the glass ceiling, provide proper breaks, stop tolerating sub-minimum-wage workers, and in other ways clean up their employment practices, they haven't improved their behavior. Based on their current tact (ad campaign, emphasizing charity donations), i have to conclude that it is cheaper to mount an ad campaign, and/or give to charities, than to pay their employees more. Which gets back to the whole "so what they give to charities--they're not giving enough money to matter to them." Someone is not being generous giving up money they don't need. Whether that is a person or a corporation. Generosity is giving to others that which is of value to you.

This is as it should be; it just takes more time to move a target that large.

Well, only time (and investigative journalism) will tell. I really do hope you're right. But i have my doubts.

I guess the still unanswered question is how one goes from there to a rationalization of theft; with the very clear side effect of putting Hasbro employees out on the street and drying up Hasbro's profits, from whence charitable contributions come.

First, like i said, i've never put Hasbro in the "big evil corporation" box (whether or not that designation is reasonable). Second, speaking of corporations that i might advocate, or at least condone, theft against: --no, wait, i don't ever advocate theft, just condone it. I simply said that the Kantian test of "what if everybody did it" doesn't clearly argue against theft in those circumstances. Yes, at the extreme, people will be out of jobs. Yes, the pittance of those profits that was going to charities won't be any more. I'm not unaware of the consequences. That is not the same as saying that i think those consequences are worse than whatever damage the corporations are doing by their existence. It's the old "lesser of two evils" argument. It is also utterly subjective. That is, we can argue about the consequences, but even once we agree on what they are it becomes a subjective opinion as to which is the worse. Partly, i'm seeing this from a very-long-term POV. The damage i see IP-controlling companies doing could have detrimental effects (both direct and secondary) for centuries. A few tens of thousands of people out of jobs is likely to have effects that last only a generation or two--and possibly not even that long.

 

[woodelf]

This paragraph doesn't make sense to me.

You're right. It was obviously past my bedtime when i wrote that.

If you haven't bought anything from a major label in 15 years, you're NOT subsidizing any artists on their labels at all.

If they haven't produced anything you want to hear, you have no "reason" to steal their product, so, as you say, you don't.

But because you don't value their product, you don't think its criminal if someone else steals it? It is obviously of value to someone- the creator, the thief, and the intended market.

This is a classic legal slippery slope problem- if a law is not enforced merely because you find that the victim of the crime is worthless, at some point, the law will become unenforceable.

Or, to put it another way, if you refuse to act while someone is robbed your neighbor, your neigbor will not act when you are being robbed. If you (and others) refuse to convict someone of CRIME X on the grounds that you don't like the victim, eventually, the state will not bring charges of comitting CRIME X even if the victim is a saint.

That's a very good point. For the most part, i agree with it. I never thought of this as a s lippery-slope issue, or at least not WRT who the copyright holder is (i do see it as a slippery-slope issue WRT to fair use, but that's another topic). The question becomes, what do you do about an unjust law? In this specific case, i see distinct shades of meaning and behavior, so that some violations of the law are moral, while others are not. But how do i know whether other people violating the law are doing so out of moral conviction, rather than simple disregard for the law? My argument isn't "because i don't like the victim", but, rather, "because the victim is somehow different and undeserving of protection of this sort".

This analogy will probably seem really bizarre to you, but let me try it anyway: Under current law in most parts of the US, if you poison someone, it is murder. If they were suffering horribly from disease, it is still murder. If you are a doctor caring for the person, and they were suffering horribly from disease, it is still murder. If you are a doctor caring for a person, they are suffering horribly from an incurable disease, and they ask you to help them die, it might be assisted suicide, or it might still be murder. If your pet is suffering horribly from disease, and you poison them, perhaps no crime has been committed (probably depends on jurisdiction and circumstances). If you are a vet, and an animal is suffering horribly from disease, and you poison them, no crime has been committed. So, legally speaking, humans and non-humans are clearly distinct entities, and treated differently in many ways. Morally/psychologicall/sociologically, most people do not start down the slippery slope of assuming shooting people is ok just because shooting deer is ok. Me, i see a lot less distinction between humans and non-humans, so i think there is a definite connection between how we treat animals, and how we treat humans (not just on the individual level, but on the societal level). But that is, perhaps, just an article of faith on my part--i'm not even going to try and prove it.

Back to the topic at hand. You seem to see corporations and people as being very similar, or at least fear that society at large sees them as very similar. (please, correct me if i've misunderstood you.) I don't. I have no fear that society will sanction a given treatment of people just because it sanctions that treatment of corporations. Nor do i think that the typical person equates the two. But i could very well be wrong on the distinction between "megacorp" and "mom-n-pop store"--maybe it doen't exist, and/or maybe most people don't see the distinction.