I find it amazing how much pseudo-intellectual crud and rationalization gets tossed around as a smoke screen regarding illegal file sharing. If anyone can make
up on the fly in order to justify their behavior is the self-superior, entitlement-minded, pseudo-intellectual, anti-social individual who is just educated enough to twist ethics and moral philosophy into self-serving knots.
I can get nearly every available RPing game book from P2P networks but I don't because 1.) I prefer hard copy with pretty graphics and 2.) It is wrong if you intend on making use of the materials your download ie. if you couldn't download it you would be a customer.
I used to be a file sharer years ago when it first got started with napster. I discovered sharman networks kazaa and downloaded everything I could get my hands on. This included RPG books. I thought it was the most amazing thing in the world. Free stuff is a pretty powerful temptation.
What I came to realize, after I could no longer rationalize the fact that I was using something I didn't pay for, is that morally and ethically I should pay for whatever I was actually getting value from. I now have a huge collection of hard and softcover books....50% of which were once only digital files on my computer.
However, by the same token, I don't believe that file sharing actually hurts the industry big boys too much. I say this because I knew folks who had gigs of RPing materials downloaded and you know what they did with most of it......absolutely nothing. About 95% of the files took up space and nothing more and they new they would be unlikely to ever use most of the stuff they downloaded.
These folks would never have bought what they downloaded except maybe 5% of the time.....maybe that's too high an estimate. Actually these pirates would never have been customers because they would never have purchased the materials they were collecting. Most of the pirates I knew were merely cheapskate collectors who would relish having huge collections of materials they could look at and read over once or twice before forgetting about it.
I do believe that if you can honestly say that if the P2P networks were unavailable you would have bought the item you downloaded or you know that you are going to use the material then you should
PAY FOR IT. The last thing I downloaded was Unearthed Arcana in order to look it over. After I found that I could get some use out of this book I bought it. I see nothing wrong with auditioning a book before purchasing it, that seems fair to me but to use it without paying for it is the same as walking into a local gaming store and walking out with the book.
I have a stake in this because within the next year to year and a half I am getting into the PDF publishing market. If folks were using P2P to sample what I am offering in order to see whether or not it fits them as a DM or Player, that's fine by me. If you are downloading something I have spent many hours working on and are going to use it on your game or in your product (if its OGC) I find that tantamount to stealing from me because your are benefitting from my work without paying me.
Anyone who thinks they are sticking it to the man by downloading what that would have otherwise purchased is self-deluded, all they are doing is denying me just compensation for my work and the hard work of other small to medium sized PDF publishers who rely on this income to pay bills, eat, feed their children, pay for gas, clothing, etc. Its the little guy who can't afford lost sales that you are screwing when you take what you are in no way entitled to.
There aren't enough pirates out there to really hurt WoTC.
Chris
