Pirating RPGs. (And were not talking "arggg" pirate stuff here.)

[Piratecat]

Please steer this thread away from overt politics. It's a little difficult considering the subject matter, but politics (international or local) is still a strict no-no.

Thanks!

 

[francisca]

Heh. Try telling that to someone who runs a high-traffic web site.

echoed for truth.

Not only is there the cost for the care and feeding of the bandwidth, if you are stuck supporting the servers these files are placed on, there is the cost for the additional storage needed and the costs associated with backing up the data, etc...

I work for a Univeristy. We deal with the fallout of filesharing on a regular basis. It is very costly both in time and dollars.

 

[S'mon]

Er... nice weather we're having?

 

[billd91]

Information does not have an inherent value. Information is infinitely sharable at practically zero cost to anyone. If I acquire some information without paying for it I have in no way decreased your benefit if you acquired that same information via some effort on your part or by paying for it.

The effort that some person goes through to create or discover some information certainly has some value. I firmly believe that people that discover/create information can be fully compensated for their efforts even if the information they create/discover is made available at no direct cost. See above.

The effort that people go through to create information is exactly what copyright is about. They have the exclusive right to distribute their work as they crafted it for a reasonable period of time (then it does enter the public domain... unless they keep extending the dates so that Disney is appeased and Mickey Mouse is kept private).
But there's a difference between information and IP. If your DM teaches a new player that he needs to roll a d20, add his modifiers, and tell him the result to make an attack roll, that's information. The exact wording distributed in the PH is IP. And if everyone were telling each other about the rules in one book or another, that wouldn't be infringing on IP. Making an exact copy of the PDF and putting it up for download is clearly infringing and is not distributing mere information. It's distributing someone's exact work when they are the only ones with the right to do so.

And on the subject of copyright infringement being theft... it clearly is. You are stealing the exclusive right to distribute that work (so maybe it's a civil rights violation?). It may not be legally theft, but the law revolves around convoluted semantics to distinguish between one thing and another (like grand theft and petty theft and so on, involuntary manslaughter and voluntary manslaughter... why that isn't murder I don't know...). We all know what we're really talking about here and it's theft of an exclusive right.
As non-lawyers, we can certainly call copyright infringement theft even if the damage is unquantifiable and we aren't using the legalistic term.

 

[billd91]

I did ignore the difference between information and intellectual property. I believe intellectual property is a false construct of the modern age that will vanish in the future. Many great thinkers and artists existed long before intellectual property laws existed and we still had great music, poetry, literature and scientific discoveries (Mozart, Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Plato, Socrates, etc.). The fact that someone can own a thought, idea or series of musical notes arranged a certain way is offensive to me, but that's the world we live in.

One thing to add to the comments about these historical figures and others of similar ilk. Not only did many of them have patronage, but a good many of them were pretty wealthy and didn't depend on their writing to pay the bills.
Also, distribution of their works was much more complicated than in the world today. How would someone have distributed Plato's writings in his time? By laboriously hand copying the whole thing, not by spawning an infinite number of exact duplicates for little time or effort.
IP may be a modern construct, but it's hard to declare it a false one consider its intent is to protect the ability of people to exclusively benefit from their hard work.

 

[Breakdaddy]

Maybe so. But I hope the people reading this are decent enough people not to participate in downloading and exchanging illegal PDFs. I pay my bills through PDF sales and every copy downloaded is potentially lost revenue.

I hope I can trust all of you to respect me, my work, and the other people who work in the game industry enough not to download or distribute illegal PDFs.

I would NEVER steal on of your PDFs, Phil....
say, what kind of car do you drive (and does it have an alarm on it)?

 

[Jonny Nexus]

This right is protectable under contract law or the law of breach of confidence, again it doesn't depend on your monopoly control of the information, only on my agreement to you not to distribute your work. The situation changes when you've published the work & anyone can access it.

So it's mine if I want to say no-one can read it... but it's not mine to sell?

I suppose what I'm saying is that I either own the work or I don't. Whether or not I own it is a matter of opinion, but if I own it then I think I should be able to set preconditions like, only myself being able to make copies of it.

 

[Psion]

I suppose what I'm saying is that I either own the work or I don't.

This is obviously a false dichotomy.

 

[Turjan]

now, what happens? all of the sudden whoever downloads stuff on p2p network is a pirate, a scun, the scourge of earth. so, even people who is LEGALLY downloading my stuff (which i uploaded myself), is a pirate and is breaking the law.
not really, but the general public has that idea, and that equation in mind. p2p=pirate.

I think that will change slowly. Many companies have started using p2p networks for distributing their files in order to reduce their bandwidth costs. BitTorrent seems to become some kind of accepted standard, at least in parts of the industy.

 

[philreed]

I would NEVER steal on of your PDFs, Phil....
say, what kind of car do you drive (and does it have an alarm on it)?

Lincoln Mark VIII and yes, it has an alarm.