D&D 4E Piracy and 4e

[Jack99]

Piracy is so ubiquitous and widespread they might as well just shrug and accept it, it's not really doing the sort of damage they're worried about and attempts to stamp it out just piss people off who will perpetuate it out of spitefullness.

There are parts of the internet that are black, don't show up on search engines or spiders, have no Domain Name or footprint of DNS servers. They can only be accessed with a direct IP connection and an invite, I've already seen a few low-quality pirated scans of 4e on some of these places. Remember the books are being printed in China a place where digital piracy is rampant.

Two things.

I find it funny that it is one of the biggest 4e haters around that seems to be the only one who has come across pirated 4e docs.

Also, We were told recently that WoTC still print their books in the USA - Although I can't for the life of me remember if the source was official or not. Maybe someone who cares about stuff like this can help out?

 

[Rashak Mani]

I have never bought a D&D book without checking out a pirate copy first. That has saved me a load of pain and waste of money.

Also all the books I did buy I still keep the Pirate PDF copy for easy consulting, especially outside my home.

Yet I still bought a load of 3.5 edition books.

When we started Star Wars RPG... if it weren't for the pirate pdf copies we handed over to players we would have never managed to play. Eventually half the players bought a SW book. No pirate copies would probably have meant less sales.

So piracy doesn't hurt D&D much

 

[Orius]

I guess it depends on how much of a problem WotC thinks it is, and what if anything they plan to do about it.

 

[Zil]

I have never bought a D&D book without checking out a pirate copy first. That has saved me a load of pain and waste of money.

Also all the books I did buy I still keep the Pirate PDF copy for easy consulting, especially outside my home.

Yet I still bought a load of 3.5 edition books.

When we started Star Wars RPG... if it weren't for the pirate pdf copies we handed over to players we would have never managed to play. Eventually half the players bought a SW book. No pirate copies would probably have meant less sales.

So piracy doesn't hurt D&D much

Funny, I never used a single pirated book at all for 3E (and I have a lot of 3E stuff - far too much).

The only pirated gaming book I ever used was a photocopied Players Handbook from AD&D (1E) that we relied on when the player who owned the Players Handbook quit the gaming group. We were pretty young at the time with little money (but one of us did have access to a photocopier). I don't think the photocopied book hurt TSR because its use helped create some pretty hard core D&D gamers. I have thousands of dollars of D&D books and magazines going back through all the previous editions of D&D.

I would have to agree with Rashak Mani. In many ways, piracy is good for the company being pirated because it helps prevent other systems filling that space. To apply an example from the software world, I'm sure that despite the winging of Microsoft about piracy, they would far prefer people to be running pirated copies of Windows than to be running a different Operating System because at least it keeps a rival OS out of the market. And all of those pirate users might someday be converted to being legit - or they might buy some legitimate add-ons down the road.

 

[Saeviomagy]

I have yet to see any game of D&D run that requires the DM or players to pass a laptop or a home-printed set of rules around.

That's not to say that piracy doesn't happen, it's just that when it comes down to it, people buy stuff or they don't and piracy has no input to that (except possibly from a marketing standpoint, for good or ill).

 

[Cadfan]

I used to game at a gaming club.

There were a lot of pirated pdfs floating around.

If you asked around, someone had a legitimate copy of what you were looking for. But most people just traded the pdfs.

 

[Nyarlathotep]

I suspect that it will be at exactly the same level that 3.x was at. If there are electronic documents available, it will be released slightly faster to the piracey scene, if there aren't it'll take a couple of weeks for scanned copies to hit the web.

 

[AtomicPope]

A friend of mine is the lead web dev of a major porn company and complains of the same issues of piracy and the internet. The problem was this:
1) The only places in the world where piracy can be legally enforced (i.e. the Western World) are quick to stop with a warning.
2) Hiring Hackers to crash and destroy pirate sites outside of the Western World is still illegal and can result in your company being sued.

Bottom line is this: They can sue us, we can't sue them.

That's the major problem with Piracy and the Internet. If someone outside of the Western World decides to make illegal material available, companies can't do anything about it. It's not until someone under the legal jurisdiction downloads it that feasible litigation is possible.

 

[AtomicPope]

My quick solution for anti-piracy is to demand that players own any book they wish to use. Minimum, all players must have the PHB. I see that as a way to have players pay-for-play. That's pretty much what we do when we purchase a book. If every player was required to have a PHB then most game tables would have less "borrowing" and more playing. Also, there would be more money supporting the game that takes up so much of our time.

 

[ianleblanc]

Popular answers to what motivates DRM crackers:

"I was fed up with not being able to play a movie the way I wanted to play it," that is, on a PC that ran Linux. - Jon Johansen

"I hack my PSP so it can do things that it _should've_ been able to do out of the box," -Darwin

I suspect that the downloading of DnD digital material might have something in common with these answers…