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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 1557075" data-attributes="member: 19675">1)  You could be right.  If everyone gets into illegal file swapping, Hasbro may kill off D&D as being unprofitable, sticking to board games that don't have as much of problem (there are still pirate knockoffs of boardgames, but its still a minor problem).  Then there will be nothing AT ALL to purchase.While we may yet move to a 100% electronic distribution process, that does not equate with non-payment.  There is no economic model for a competitive business that must compete with its product having mass free availability.Sure, Gygax and Cook and all the others would probably still have done what they did for fun, but if they weren't paid for their efforts, the RPG hobby would either be limited to a couple of houses in Wisconsin or having a different game system in every block as each club creates their own-we as a hobby would have no common ground or history.2) Fair use is for teaching, that is, academic purposes.  If you are using D&D as a teaching tool, you can use portions (NOT the whole product) free of charge beyond the cost of making the copies.3) All we can do is educate people that electronic products are still somebody's work, and thus, worthy of pay.  THAT is a question of upbringing, personal morality, and civic duty.I have cousins who USED to download music all the time- heck, even I have an old bootleg tape or two.  But when I pointed out that the past success (sales) of a particular artist's product affects both how much royalties he'll get (now and on subsequent releases) and whether the company will keep him on or fire him, they realized that downloading was a factor in whether their favorite artist of today was going to release an album ever again.The game industry is no different.  The percieved lack of impact may just be because of the size of the industry.  I daresay that even at $0.15/album (typical for a rookie artist), a single successful album nets the artist who recorded it more money than a second tier RPG release does for its author.  Thus there is no economic interest in there being an agency to accurately track in-store sales or losses due to downloading in the RPG industry.  All we have is anecdotal evidence.4)  Lack of guilt and anonymity are probably equal partners in this problem.  There are some famous psychology studies that show that anonymity increases the likelyhood of violence.  Most study participants who were assured of anonymity followed orders to inflict pain (no pain was actually inflicted, just actors writhing around and screaming on the other side of the one-way glass) either without question or with "minimal" delay, even after the actors seemed to pass out from pain.  Similar results came from studies with masked participants, or even those wearing mirrored sunglasses and uniforms.  The same can be said of mass/mob action studies in which people act differently (less inhibited by law or social mores) when acting in large groups-like the massive number of downloaders out there.  And who of us is not aware that people online are more likely to use inappropriate language online relative to face-to-face communication.  Anonymity in any form relaxes the grip of civilization's taboos upon our behavior- when our identities are concealed, we are more likely to act inappropriately.And the taboo against violence is much stronger than the taboo against theft.</blockquote>

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