PDFS--Of the WotC Court Case

[jgerman]

Stealing is taking something that you should not be taking, plain and simple. Whether lawyers choose to differentiate between digital piracy and theft as legal terms is neither here nor there. N0Man took things he should not have taken. If you would rather N0Man be labelled a pirate than a thief, that's fine by me. Either way, it's pretty scummy behaviour and distasteful of him to come here and crow about how it's actually OK.

What the law chooses to call it is EXACTLY here AND there. Once you step away from the legal definitions you're forwarding nothing more than opinion.

Personally, I'm comfortable with talking about whether or not he was wrong legally and even whether or not it should be wrong. I'm not so much interested in your personal opinions on morality. Especially since attitudes like that tend to squash discussion.

 

[N0Man]

Instead of posting more inflammatory remarks, why don't you answer the question I posed.

If I had personally scanned my hardcopies and OCR'd them, put them on my laptop or thumb-drive for strictly my own personal use, would you still say that I was stealing?

And for the record, I was not "crowing" about it or any other such nonsense. In fact, I was reluctant to even admit it, but only did so for the sake of discussion. My whole reason for it was to make the valid and true point that you can't assume that all downloads are a sales loss. It's simply not true.

I stole nothing. I deprived WotC of nothing. I bought the materials, I am not a thief. Technically you could say I committed piracy, and even that was only to obtain digital versions for my own personal use that I could have created myself under Fair Use.

I'm not even going to say that what I did was right, or legal. At the very best, it would be a gray area of rationalizing, and I realize that. However, what I will argue is that I created absolutely no loss to WotC, and that it is very likely that many other exceptions exist, and *again*, downloads does not equal sales loss. *THAT* is my main and only point I've tried to bring up before your derailment.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

He took something that didn't belong to him without paying for it and without the owner's permission. That is stealing. Simple as that.

No, it's copyright infringement.

The "owner" is whoever bought the book, who presumably was ok with sharing it. If WotC remained the onwer of a book you bought, and being the owner of said book allowed them to dictate exactly what you can and can't do with it ("no showing it to people who haven't bought it!") RPGs would have a hard time staying in existence...

Stop insulting him. I reported your first post, I'm tempted to do so for every single one that followed since they're all harassing, but I won't bother the mods like that. I look forward to not having your annoying precense in this thread soon, so I can go back to reading insightful posts.

N0man, thanks for trying to give some kind of anectdotal information, since that's the best we can do right now to understand how piracy affects sales. Kudos to you for actually buying all the products you like, instead of just keeping the free copy you downloaded.

 

[Dannager]

He took something that didn't belong to him without paying for it and without the owner's permission. That is stealing. Simple as that.

No.

You can call it whatever you like, but your perspective on theft and piracy does not reflect reality.

The fact that you are using that same perspective to judge others is pretty bad.

Why should he "wear it" when you seem completely unwilling to apply an accurate label to him? If you want to make him "wear" something, it's going to have to be the label of copyright infringer, not thief.

 

[Mark Hope]

Fair enough guys - I'll step out of this now. It isn't going anywhere and it'll just end up causing offence. I've said what I want to say. You wanna be a pirate? Go for it. Your loss.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

Simple as that.

Those three words have done more to shut down conversations and debates all over the history of mankind then anything else. They're the reason politics and religion are such impolite topics to talk about.

Incidentally, in this case, they're proof that you have no desire to hear anyone's side, and that you're only here to attempt to force people to believe what you believe and nothing else.

Incidentally again, those three words are precisely why discussions about piracy inevitably fall into the maw of chaos and flamebait.

Because, and here's the dirty little secret - It's NEVER "simple as that."

As for digital rights piracy, many people believe it is always 100% morally wrong. Far fewer believe it is 100% always morally right. And I'd say that far more would say that sometimes it is wrong, and sometimes it is right. It's all about context.

DRM tends to be the other side of the coin. Many people believe it is always 100% wrong. Fewer believe it is 100% always right. And far more say that sometimes it is wrong, and sometimes it is right.

If there are any sales that piracy has ended for a fact, it's the one time sale of the guy who doesn't really like the game but didn't have a chance to find out. Piracy gives him that preview to look at the product and go "Oh hey, I do like this" or "Oh hey, I don't like this."

In the current age of information, hype and marketing are both at insanely all time highs. Pirating is rising higher and higher in the video game industry, but I would wager that it's not out of peoples' inherent laziness or desire to fight the system, but merely because there are no media outlets for reviews on video games that they feel they can trust. 9 times out of ten, if you buy a game only to find out it sucks, pretty much every major gaming media source will tell you how AWESOME it is, and how much of a <insult> you are for not agreeing with them. Magazines and websites for games have all become great big jokes, in part due to the very real bribery and coercion that occurs to ensure games get the highest scores and most positive reviews. In short, game reviews are no longer about the games themselves, but what the company gave/did to the magazine/website to ensure their grade. Naturally, it doesn't help that the writers for these media outlets have begin openly displaying and stating that they rarely play the games they review, and mostly write what they're told to write by their editors, marketing staff, and other writers. Furthermore, with internet fandom reaching glorious levels of fanaticism, trying to separate the honest opinions from the fandumb is nearly impossible. And to top it all off, those wonderful things known as "demos" are almost non-existent, and time and time again, developers have been caught open faced lying about their game in order to better sell it, both in interviews and in those curious playtests they have or show at conventions - often times detailing things that aren't in the actual game, but were programmed into the playtest to sell it.

Piracy has given people the ability to ignore marketing and make their own opinions about a product before they have to buy it. If the critics can't be trusted, if the creators can't be trusted, if your peers can't be trusted, and people have gone to lengths to ensure that you don't get a chance to try out a game before buying it, then how do you ascertain that you're making a smart purchase before buying the product? In that specific situation, I would argue that piracy IS morally right.

 

[Baron Opal]

Nope. It's 100% indicative of file sharing taking place, that is all.
It is uncertain whether this file sharing had a positive or negative impact on WotCs sales.

You can't possibly be that naive. How can you possibly say there hasn't been lost sales when it can be proven that, on a single server, there have been twice as many downloads as sales? Particularly when you interact with the people on the warez and pirating sites, those that I talked to back in the day had no sense of courtesy or honor. "Why should I pay for it when I can get it for free?" was the theme.

Actually, that is not indicative of a single lost sale. All it indicates is that people downloaded the product without paying for it.

It is exactly indicative of a lost sale since they downloaded it from torrents instead of RPGNow. They accessed the data through a free channel rather than a pay channel. The five people they are going after had purchased copies which were then released on the torrents.

I agree that current businesses need to take into account that their work is going to be scattered all over the internet soon after release. I think there are better solutions, however, that just throwing up your hands and saying "it's inevitable".

 

[ProfessorCirno]

You can't possibly be that naive. How can you possibly say there hasn't been lost sales when it can be proven that, on a single server, there have been twice as many downloads as sales? Particularly when you interact with the people on the warez and pirating sites, those that I talked to back in the day had no sense of courtesy or honor. "Why should I pay for it when I can get it for free?" was the theme.



It is exactly indicative of a lost sale since they downloaded it from torrents instead of RPGNow. They accessed the data through a free channel rather than a pay channel. The five people they are going after had purchased copies which were then released on the torrents.

I agree that current businesses need to take into account that their work is going to be scattered all over the internet soon after release. I think there are better solutions, however, that just throwing up your hands and saying "it's inevitable".

I think th eproblem is, you're assuming:

Person A wants the book
Person A is willing to buy the book
Person A pirates it instead
The book was originally going to have a sale, but did not because of piracy
Piracy caused lost sales

When in truth, there are a fairly large number of cases where this happens instead:

Person B wants the book
Person B is not willing to buy the book
Person B pirates is instead
The book was not originally going to have a sale
Piracy caused no lost sales

 

[N0Man]

You can't possibly be that naive. How can you possibly say there hasn't been lost sales when it can be proven that, on a single server, there have been twice as many downloads as sales? Particularly when you interact with the people on the warez and pirating sites, those that I talked to back in the day had no sense of courtesy or honor. "Why should I pay for it when I can get it for free?" was the theme.

It's already been discussed here previously, but there was a lot of derailment so I will say it again. There are many scenarios possibly involved with people who have downloaded pirated copies, and not all of them involve lost sales (though some certainly do).

I can't claim to think of them all, but here are some examples from each:

Scenarios that usually cause lost sales:

• Someone downloading it simply because they can, who intend to use the document instead of buying the book.
• Someone who didn't seek out the pirated copy, but were given it by someone, and aren't going to bother buy a book now that they have it digital.
• Downloading a book that they plan on buying for evaluation and then finding out through their evaluation that the product is not worth buying.
• Someone downloading it because they can't afford it, but would have bought it otherwise. However, now that they've found it digitally, they decide to spend their money on something else (such as another book, gas, college text books, and ramen noodles).

Scenarios that do not or usually do not cause lost sales:

• Someone pirating a book or material that is out of print and unobtainable through reasonable and legal channels.
• Someone who downloads a copy to evaluate before buying, who buys the book shortly after (effectively saving them a trip to the book store to thumb through it).
• Someone who downloads a copy of a book they've already purchased.
• Someone who downloads a copy of a book that is not in stock currently so they can go ahead and start using it, until it's back in stock and they buy it.
• Someone who downloads a copy just because they can, but would never have bothered to buy the game if they couldn't get it for "free".
• Someone who downloads a copy, and wants to buy a copy, but can't afford to (but will do so when they are able to afford it).
• Someone who downloads it because they are an anti-fan, and to download out of spite against the company, and so they can pick out things to criticize about the game, but despise the game and would never actually buy it.

I feel confidant that each of these things occur in some cases (and I've seen every one of these happen before). There's no way for me to know how many of each of these happens, but neither can you.

 

[N0Man]

Looks like both of us were writing nearly the same ideas at the same time Prof. ;-)