piracy is a problem

[pogminky]

Intellectual rights, copyright, pirating and filesharing are complex ethical and legal issues.

I have no real idea as to what effect torrentz have on sales figures - how could anyone really ever know whether someone would or would not have bought a book if they didn't exist?

What I am concerned about though is the encouragement of further piracy. By d/l stuff like this more people are encouraged to scan, download, use pirated materials or turn a blind eye to other forms of copyright infringement. This in turn devalues intellectual property and IMHO hampers the creation of new music/books/games etc. by the small guys. Sure, the established names have little to fear financially - but I'd imagine the small retailers/producers/artists etc. suffer - not to mention the costs of protection and the lost profits are probably passed onto the next generation of consumers.

I'm no expert in ethics or morality - heck, I'm not even a good person and would be a hypocrite if I said that people were 'bad' for doing stuff like this - but the fact remains that in my gut I feel that torrentz and piracy is a form of theft. And I feel that people have a right to own private property, intellectual or material, without it being stolen, damaged or misused.

Judging by survey results of peoples attitudes to theft in the UK I'm in a shrinking demographic.

 

[Scribble]

I believe it's more accurate to say I am judging them on their past efforts and broken promises.

Broken promises? (I'm out of the loop on this one... what broken promises?)

Sure their past efforts have been less then desirable, but they've outlined a plan for the future edition. The release date of the plan has not arrived yet.

Also, an "online rules compendium" isn't what I want. I want a PDF.

I'd pay for a reasonably priced PDF. I don't know if I'd pay for a "online rules compendium", but we'll see.

Shrug. Dunno how that effects the legality/morality of downloading a copy. WOTC offered a solution that meets both your needs (digital rules format) and theirs (less chance of it being pirated.)

Maybe it makes it even less moral? Should you have the right to do something illegal just because you don't agree with the legal way of doing it... That's not really an argument for this board though!

Cloudware is increasingly being pushed by many companies. True, the monthly premium is a PITA, but there are also a lot of benefits.

 

[Daniel D. Fox]

And I did notice that the core gift set has dropped to #8 on the Amazon bestseller list since the torrents started circulating.

Coincidence?

Actually, that is likely due to the fact that thousands of people cancelled their pre-order with Amazon yesterday because Buy.com is already shipping them out.

The word spread like wildfire across RPG.net, ENWorld.org and the Wizards forums.

 

[Tervin]

Who's to say WoTC didn't leak this themselves to generate more interest?

I am not saying that they did. But I do actually think this leak is good for them. Lots of people previewing their very nice looking, very fresh product. And, at least when it comes to the Player's Handbook, realising that it would be oh so much handier to have the physical book as well.

Leaks of splat books and adventures are bad for them, no doubt about that, but this leak feels more than a little like back in the 90s when every M$ Office or Windows product could be installed using 111 111 etc for product key.

More people looking at the books will generate more interest, and hopefully more sales.

 

[SuperGnome]

Where it will hurt is with the people who are on the fence about switching to 4E, who are preordering out of curiosity but may cancel their preorders once they get to actually read the 4E rules.

I dunno about where everyone else is, but local libraries should have copies to check out and peruse for free as well. If they find them to their liking, they may in turn purchase them, but aren't required to.

*preordered, but will probably also aquire pdf's

[edit] - It might take a bit longer for the library though since I doubt they pre-order, and I don't know if that's the kind of strategy WotC is into (providing copies free of charge to encourage interest).

 

[Obryn]

Where it will hurt is with the people who are on the fence about switching to 4E, who are preordering out of curiosity but may cancel their preorders once they get to actually read the 4E rules.

...

Even if it's just a 5% drop in sales, or a 10% drop in sales. Anything that causes less books to be sold is bad for 4E. Anything that causes fewer people to play 4E is bad for 4E.

If "fewer sales" is the final result, then absolutely it is. I am reasonably sure that music piracy does, in fact, discourage people from buying the music they have pirated - though there's evidence to show that those same people are more likely to buy other music. I am less certain that book piracy discourages actual sales of printed books. It's a different market. The ownership benefit of downloaded music is - if played on an mp3 player - identical to the ownership benefits of purchased music. The same does not hold for printed books.

I am not going to argue that piracy is good, moral, legal, or anything like that. It's simply a fact of modern commerce that every company needs to consider. I will, however, argue is that there's no good data as to whether freely available core book PDFs drive or hurt sales of those core books.

On a different note, I think it's kind of ridiculous to assert that WotC has seeded the pirated copies themselves. They have no motivation to do so that I can see. It's much, much more likely that they were leaked by a printing employee, WotC employee, or a compromised server/mail account.

And I did notice that the core gift set has dropped to #8 on the Amazon bestseller list since the torrents started circulating.

Coincidence?

Yeah. Amazon updates their top sellers hourly, if I remember right. They're pretty meaningless.

-O

 

[Cirex]

How is taking what other people produced without their permission "expanding culture"?

What are the pirates *producing*?

And you're correct, though, "pirates" is the wrong term. Real pirates risked their lives for their booty. They at least had some courage. They looked their enemies in the eye and fought them face to face. Modern pirates risk nothing. I think a better term is "parasite". They live off the efforts of creative people and those who support creative people. Everytime a pirate downloads a book, *I* am being robbed. Why? Because I pay for books, and that pays not only for the book I buy, but for FUTURE books -- I am paying to help produce the NEXT thing the parasites steal.

What are they doing for me, in return?

Nothing.

Hence, parasite. A lifeform which drains the resources of another and cannot exist without its host. (No one pays for books==nothing for the parasite to steal.)

First thing : Entertainment is culture.
Second thing : Stealing implies the use of force against people or objects. In this case, there is none.

You got to remember that any kind of product that has entertainment in mind is composed of two parts:
-The product itself.
-Its integration at society.

If WotC books were not released, if the musician never recorded any song, if the movie was never edited, if the book was just random notes that lead to nowhere, society wouldn't be aware of it. The product, as art, as an entertainment product, culture itself, wouldn't exist.

If WotC didn't release books, they wouldn't contribute to the culture of each society that reads those books. A society rich in culture, is a rich society. There are societies that got no access to culture in this world, they don't have Internet, they can't buy books, they don't listen to music often or maybe they won't watch a single movie in their entire life. However, if you could give them a piece of culture, wouldn't you like it to be spread among all of them?

WotC is a business company. Business = money, but while some companies make money by building parts of the society (buildings, cars, communications) other companies make money by spreading culture.
The writer is seeking to publish books to make money, but at same time, he's writing books to feed the society with culture.


People who download things are nor pirates, nor thieves. You are very wrong assuming that people who download things are stealing from you. You can argue that if many people downloaded these handbooks, WotC wouldn't have enough money to publish more handbooks, but, into marketing, those who count are those who buy the books, not those who download it. Many people who downloaded the books are going to buy the handbooks. It's a psychological thing. Look at this forum, how many people preordered? Probably everybody. Downloading the books is just a way to get their hands into information sooner, but the copies will be sold. The one who is not going to buy the book is not even reading forums or looking for the books online.

The "one product downloaded, one less product bought" is one of the biggest fallacies of this era. IF I downloaded the entire collection of FR and Eberron books, would that mean that I was planning to buy them? No way!

In more general terms, people who download movies wouldn't have watched them at cinema anyways. Same for music or any kind of product.

Now, look at the other side. If people who download products like them, it's more likely that they will be spending money on those products. Money that, in other circunstances, wouldn't have been spent on that thing. Think about music concerts. At least in Spain, the % of them have increased by absurd amounts since music is so easy to obtain. The amount of people that go to the cinema have decreased, yet the amount of DVDs sold have increased.


So, to review it, a society who has more access to culture is a richer culture, and, at the end, will end spending more money on entertainment than a poor society.

The majority of people who downloaded the handbooks are going to buy the books. And minis. And splat books. And this. And the other thing.

 

[Counterspin]

And I did notice that the core gift set has dropped to #8 on the Amazon bestseller list since the torrents started circulating.

Coincidence?

Ooh, I can play this game. It also increased in rank from I think #41 to #1 on buy.com. Surely torrents are greatly helping sales!

 

[malraux]

And I did notice that the core gift set has dropped to #8 on the Amazon bestseller list since the torrents started circulating.

Coincidence?

I dunno. I looked a few weeks ago and it was like #46 or so. There's a huge amount of noise in the hourly sales rates. And like others have said, if anything, its buy.com picking up extra orders from amazon.

 

[DarkAngel1979]

Informational anarchy is inevitable. From the beginning, property rights have been a statist abstraction many steps removed from the physical reality that they represented in the Law (goods scarcity, usufruct). Intellectual property result from a further abstraction of this already disconnected concept. When one trades A for B, and both actors now have A+B instead of just having A or B, and the only loser(s) in the deal are completly outside the scope of that market exchange, how can the old scarcity property paradigm even be patched up to work?

Welcome to the post-scarcity society, or at least a preview.

/me starts singing the Internationale.