Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dannyalcatraz" data-source="post: 1558035" data-attributes="member: 19675">That Webster's quote is OK, but it still won't fly in a court of law.  If I render your car undrivable by, say, shooting my 45 through the engine, I have still committed a theft, called conversion.  You still have full possession, but I have denied you at least one of the rights in the bundle of property rights called your car.  If I take your car without your knowledge or permission for a joyride, but return it-I'm still guilty of grand theft auto.Similarly, if I'm walking through a grocery store, and take a bite out of an apple without the store's permission (some do allow sampling) and without the intent of actually buying an apple, I have comitted a theft called shoplifting.  The store still has the rest of the apple, but I'm liable for the whole price.  In fact, you are guilty of shoplifting the MOMENT you exert control over the apple with the intent to take or damage it- you don't even have to complete the act.There are many kinds of theft that have specialized names (embezzlement, fraud, conversion, shoplifting, larceny, burglary, robbery, industrial espionage, copyright infringement, and so on).  Some have been supplanted by other crimes-if I had lit your car on fire instead of shooting it, I would be charged with vandalism or arson or some other crime depending on jurisdiction.  I'd still be guilty of conversion, though I might not be charged with it if it is not considered to be as serious a crime.   But they are all THEFT- the taking of property without the owner's consent (exerpted from Black's Law Dictionary).The property is the set of ideas in the book.  By downloading an unauthorized PDF of the book, you have acquired that set of ideas, and thus have taken 1 sale from the author, publisher, and bookstore. OK, I chose the wrong book.  The difference here is that the Gutenburg Project put that there with permission of the current copyright holder.  Where permission is granted, there is no theft (except in the most esoteric case where someone was actually trying to steal something being given away and charges are actually found-rare as hen's teeth).So, remove War and Peace from that example, and instead insert the title of the next book to be released by WOTC or Malhavoc.  These aren't big companies-you won't find legal entire-text freebie PDFs of those books anytime soon.  They have costs to recoup. There are many reasons RPG companies make changes.  Accumulated errata.  Accumulated alternatvie rules.  Player's requests.  But the #1 reason for changes (as an industry, not for a particular product) is money.  The concept is called "planned obsolescence".  Does GM NEED to put out a new version of every car they make every year?  Yes and No.  We don't need a new version, but a new version drives sales by making the previous version somehow less valuable.To put it this way, If WOTC doesn't release a new version every so often, making us go buy versionX, WOTC goes out of business.  Its even worse for a smaller RPG company.  How many years will a company be around if they sell 5000 copies of a $30 book in 10 years?I mean, AD&D and 2Ed are still playable, aren't they?  Then why did you buy 3.0? 3.5?Like getting the car repaired at the shop, you can try to have it rebound at Kinkos or any similar copy shop.  I do that with my sheet music books.  Pretty cheap.Clarification:  Your "right to enjoy" is the right to enjoy THAT PERFORMANCE in THAT FORM.  If you buy the ticket to see Cheap Trick at Budokan, you don't have the right to wave your ticket at Tower records and pick up a freebie CD of that performance.  Nor, if you had a time machine, could you buy the CD and then get into the performance.  It isn't the right that may last longer than your lifetime, it is the form- books or CDs may last longer than a human lifetime.Even so, all things are affected by entropy.  The center cannot hold, things fall apart.  The fact that something you own falls apart doesn't give you a right to freebie replacement.  WARRANTIES may give you a right to free replacement, but not the phrase "It broke."Only if you're in posession of the car on a lease program, and there its because of a contractual clause.  Under a lease, you aren't an owner-Volvo is, so THEY control who can drive it.  You are paying them for the USE of their car, not transferring the ownership of it.  I'm buying my car.  I loan it out to certain people all the time.  Volvo has ZERO say in the matter.Black's Law Dictionary:By definition, you have stolen 1 copy, admittedly only an electronic one, but still a copy.In the world of IP, if you loaned the person ALL of your copies of the IP, no problem.  Only one person has access to it.The problem is that, by there very nature, most IP can exist in multiple forms all over the world simultaneously, all essentially identical in relevant content.  That is why, like in the Volvo case, software companies (at least the business software people) don't sell software-they LEASE it.Another industry feeling the pinch is music publishing.  There are hundreds of thousands of unauthorized song transcription PDFs out there, each costing the songwriter a couple of bucks.Everything counts in large amounts.HeavyG felt my book analogy was bad, but it isn't.  It was directed at Bendris Noulg, who wrote on p1 of this thread:Bendris' loss of 5 copies of Metallica's Ride the Lightning comment is all about justifying the downloading of an electronic media version of copyrighted material after losing 5 physical copies, as is my book comment.His loss is lamentable-that album turned me on to Metallica-but it does not make downloading the songs justified.</blockquote>

Verification