D&D 4E Piracy and 4e

[Dannyalcatraz]

Piracy is a fact of life for intellectual properties. It happens, it's always happened, it's always going to happen.

QFT- that's one of the reasons I do what I do.

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

If its a "IP for sale" pirate site, you can actually get them shut down for short periods of time by complaining to/taking legal action against the companies that process their cash flow. No cash flow means the business isn't worth jack anymore.

Of course, they usually just shut down and pop up again under a different name, but if you think of it like crunching cockroaches...

And if they're just giving it away...that's a whole different kettle of fish. You can actually get things done by going to the officials in the country- even if you're talking about Russia or China. Its just going to cost you money to do so- often more than you're losing via piracy. IOW, its kind of in the dark "sweet spot" of economics called the economically efficient level of criminal activity."

...the point about "Nascaar is popular, sci fi shows are not! It must be piracy!" misses a much broader social context and is pretty dismissive of Nascaar.

I think he was just saying that the geek population tends to kill the goose laying the golden eggs by circumventing IP rights, or simply fast forwarding through all the commercials with their TIVOs etc., while things like NASCAR do an excellent job of getting their fans to tie into the products that are marketed to them. And we're not talking just one time sales spikes- its lifetime commitments and repeat sales. Its very easy to measure the impact of getting advertisements during a NASCAR event- or on one of the cars- and its much greater than any sci-fi franchise out there.

 

[Szatany]

I think the biggest issue of piracy for 3e was Freeport. Arr!

... What?

Ahem. From Less Scrupulous Friends I know, the most recent 3.5 books are hard to find pirated copies for. City of Stormreach, Elder Evils, etc etc. This is also true of Paizo; a Pathfinder issue may be pirated months after it's released. But that's what I'm told.

Really?
I just made a test - it took less than 8 minutes for me to download Elder Evils.

 

[Will]

I hate rpg pirates.

 

[Spatula]

I think he was just saying that the geek population tends to kill the goose laying the golden eggs by circumventing IP rights, or simply fast forwarding through all the commercials with their TIVOs etc., while things like NASCAR do an excellent job of getting their fans to tie into the products that are marketed to them. And we're not talking just one time sales spikes- its lifetime commitments and repeat sales. Its very easy to measure the impact of getting advertisements during a NASCAR event- or on one of the cars- and its much greater than any sci-fi franchise out there.

Yes, but that's because sporting events have a MUCH larger audience than sci-fi shows do. MUCH MUCH larger. More viewers = more advertising money. Sci-fi/fantasy shows are expensive to produce and don't have a mass audience, which has nothing at all to do with piracy or tivo.

(also, nascar is the ultimate in product placement, covering every bare surface with brand logos, which undoubtedly contributes to its profitability)

 

[Mirtek]

wanted a specific feat or some tid bit from the book
[...]
If someone is only looking for a piece of data from a book then pirating may seem like a good solution, but outside of that, it has little value to most gamers.

Isn't that the point with most of the supplements?

I mean I always only want a specific tibit (sometimes as small as a single feat) from a xxx pages book (e.g. from CW I only used a single feat and from CA only a single PrC and nothing else from the books).

It may be different with players who have spellcaster characters who indeed could use each and every spell in a new supplement (just needing gold and spellbooks), but as a player of melee characters I always know in advance that I will only be able to use 5% (and that would already be much) of any new splatbook (because my character will only have 7 feats in his whole lifetime and 4 of them he has already taken, so it's doesn't matter whether the book has 70 new feats of 10 new feats, because 70 feats only increase the chance that there will be the one single feat I finally take with my character)

So if this would be the directive for piracy, I shouldn't have bought 90% of my supplements

 

[Mirtek]

On thing I surely think will hurt WotC is the "legal-piracy" I might even resort to myself:

Buy a single one-month subscription of DDI every 3-4 month and then write down every new rule they released since the last one-month subscription from the rules database.

It's not piracy, but it may very well have the same effect.

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.

Actually, at various Cons, I have met a lot of players who only had a PHB as their only printed book in their bag and also an file with a lot of copied pages from supplement X and splatbook Y with them.

Sure, it could be a weight issue (if your char only uses a single feat from CW, why carry the whole book if a copy of the single page with the feat suffices?), but I also guess a fair number of them do not have the supplements from which they carry the copied pages

 

[Destil]

The absolute best thing WotC could do is use the DDI to remove the appeal of piracy.

Let's say a DM has a subscription and buys a book, pays a nominal (Absolute maximum of $5) fee. All of their players have free accounts linked to his campaign page DDI, which can support so many players (subscription fee or one time payment to increase this).

The players should get database access to all the rules crunch in the book in a solid, clean, customizable environment with things like a search engine, customizable API et cetera... maybe even let the DM send like a 2-4 page section of the book in PDF to each player if there's some non-crunch info they might need.

Give us that and then let someone look at some crappy, possibly low res, possibly non OCRed PDF they can download and mull over the price of the subscription and the appeal of the pirated book... bet you'll see fewer pirates and more happy customers.

 

[arscott]

Yes, but that's because sporting events have a MUCH larger audience than sci-fi shows do. MUCH MUCH larger. More viewers = more advertising money. Sci-fi/fantasy shows are expensive to produce and don't have a mass audience, which has nothing at all to do with piracy or tivo.

(also, nascar is the ultimate in product placement, covering every bare surface with brand logos, which undoubtedly contributes to its profitability)

The fact that NASCAR is insanely popular, while true, is beside the point. Forget popularity. Forget the differences in production costs. On a viewer-by-viewer basis, NASCAR watchers are still more likely to buy the things being advertised at them than Firefly fans.

Ironically, one of Firefly's major problems was that it had a broad appeal--It's fans varied across enough demographics that it wasn't a good venue for targeted advertisements.

 

[Imban]

Actually, at various Cons, I have met a lot of players who only had a PHB as their only printed book in their bag and also an file with a lot of copied pages from supplement X and splatbook Y with them.

In my online games, where we assumedly have the books or PDFs *right at hand*, we still tend to type up and link the full text of anything we're using from sources not available on d20SRD from our character sheets, because it saves time. Copied pages with Stuff You Have is a great resource.

While it seems less and less likely by the week that I'm going to move to 4e, the DDI's rules database is a very tempting alternative to PDFs, legal or otherwise, for me. If it allows me to quickly and easily access the rules content I want from a web browser (so that I can use it while on any of IRC or MapTool or the official game table), it'd be a heck of a lot more convenient than digging around for a book or loading PDFs and flipping through them.

 

[Derren]

I guess the piracy will be worse because of DDI. You don't have to scan the images anymore but to simply copy/paste it.
Especially DDI exclusive content will likely be pirated days, if not hours after release.