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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yair" data-source="post: 1558596" data-attributes="member: 10913">I do not download "freely", only occasionally (my friends download "freely"). But that's immaterial.The difference is that (with RPG downloads) I do purchase the things I download, if and when I use them. My friends do not (some of them); they seem to think the people who produce these things don't deserve their money. I consider that to be a big difference.Let me give a real example. Suppose I wanted to purchase a book on dwarves. In an ideal world I would go to a shop, see a horde of appropriate books at various prices, and be able to purchase the ones I want - free competition and all of that.Now for the real world. My "FLGS" is 2 hours drive away, in the center of the largest city in the country. That's 4 hours + parking + lots of hussle to visit. It also has an appalingly miniscule selection; I am fairly certain NO books on dwarves are available. So I go to read reviews online, and see there are a few books (with their price not so wide spread). I read reviews, but that ain't like browsing. So I download and skim. And in fact, I did - and very much enjoyed Hammer and Helm, so I purchased it (even though I never used it, or got it - it got lost in the mail). I purchased it becuase I liked it, because I wanted to support the people who wrote and produce it; if I knew the book wouldn't reach me I probably would have tried to donate to them directly. It has nothing to do with the fact they legally demanded I purchase the book at set price and never download it; the price, for me, was just a "this is what I would like to get payed for this" sign, so I payed it. As a show of appreciation and support. Not as a  purchase of goods. I already had the goods I wanted (I didn't even bother to reorder the book from Amazon, which would have been free - as far as I am concerned, I already got what I wanted).For another example - there have been many cases where I could have walked away from a store without paying. I didn't, not because I feared the law but because I think I ought to pay for the stuff I took from the store - the shopkeeper has to make a living, and all of that. As for music - for some brands I am not paying, yes; I do not believe this hurts the artists or producers, as I believe they have made a fair profit of it already. That has nothing to do with "paying for work they can download freely", it has to do with "paying for work that has already been paid for". (For the record: in practice I often do purchase music that I like; it's just that I don't think I really should - I do so because I am lazy, not because I think it is right. I think it is wrong.)I guess what I am saying is that when a work was rewarded enough, it should be released into the public domain. But I am not proposing a method of doing that, because I can't think of any system to measure this. No system at all.</blockquote>

Verification