NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 4747370" data-attributes="member: 14159">Trying to prevent any .pdf's being made and distributed is like trying to swim up a waterfall.Even if they came up with virtually airtight security, as has been shown it's possible (thanks to cash, public WiFi, and other anonymous means) to purchase the book in question, anonymously obtaining the hardware and software required to turn the book into a file, and then distribute it and work around watermarks in scanners and printers.It's just a matter of how much money and effort is someone willing to put into doing something that they aren't doing for financial gain.  Someone does this because they either want to share the book with others (like a lot of out-of-print pdf's on the P2P nets that are probably out there because somebody wants to share some old gem they like), or because they are just irate at the company in question and see it as their little petty revenge.Someone really, really doesn't like 4e and wants to "stick it to WotC" as revenge for canceling 3.5 (or eliminating the legal pdf downloads from the web, or other nerdrage target of the month)?  I could see somebody spending a few hundred dollars on the right hardware and books and putting lots of stuff out on the net.  WotC's lawyers will run themselves ragged chasing it all down, and if somebody is pretty cagey it's going to be really hard to get it traced back to you.This is the same sort of thing that the music industry went through, and what really cut into that piracy was making high quality, affordable downloads easily available (iTunes et al), not pulling the legal downloads from the web and suing.I honestly wonder what goes through the Hasbro execs minds sometimes.  It's crystal clear that WotC is not run in any way, shape or form by gamers, nerds, or the like, but the "suits" who use standard large-corporation procedures and mentalities.  In theory this is good because it's the professionals who are supposed to know how to do things, but it can mean seeing the same mistakes that other businesses have made repeated over again because of the same patterns of behavior.</blockquote>

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