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

[Storm Raven]

It's all a matter of personal belief. It almost sounded like you were trying to force your moral beliefs on others. (I'm not saying you were, I'm just saying it sounded like that).

Of course, one of the reasons for the existence of a law is to impose moral beliefs in a general manner. We condemn rape as illegal, because we have (correctly) evaluated it as morally wrong. We condemn misappropriation of property (whether through theft, conversion, trespass, detainer, embezzlement, or infrongement) as illegal, because for the most part, he have evaluated it as morally wrong (to a lesser degree).

 

[jasper]

Like BAEN books ... some of their books are available online, free, to read. It's up to the authors to put them up. I've actually found several authors whose books I've bought by reading from their free library when I'm bored and poor and have a connection. I think it's sound, forward-thinking business sense.
This correct Heap. Some authors have volunteer to release their works on the net in hopes a read will by a hardcopy. Or at least pay for a download. Brent Nail reads their works, uses their works, and then decides maybe to pay for the download. One is advertising the other is thief.
So using BN model it okay for me to read Eric Flint books from online sources since I don’t like his work especially those books who are currently in hardback and not legally available for download.
But musicians are SELLING their works to the big bad recording industry to get the exposure of their works. Since the big bad recording industry does have a pipeline to millions of people thru advertising, radio, mtv etc. Speaking of artists getting their money how many of you know of the following artists. Waylon, Willie, Britney, Cip, the Bubbas, and Gareth. Hint the first 3 have contracts with recording industry the last three are artists who I know and occasionally throw a beer too. On of the last three has seen his works stolen and placed on the net and some times submit as original works in competition.

Writers could become much like research professors at universities. The university pays a salary. The professor does research and publishes the information (usually) at no charge to the public. The benefits of the research goes back to university either thru patents, pr, etc. So this is another form of both patronage and advertising.

The ravager is talking about libraries who have gotten a mother may I either from the authors or the publishers to lend their works out. Again pr campaign.

If *you* believe it is wrong, fine. But not everyone believes that. If the guy who stole the book and put it on P2P believes it *isn't* wrong, then for him, it isn't. Hmm Situational ethics at it best. So it okay for me to shoot people who bother me.

We are gamers, we know full and well there is a difference between what is moral and what is ethical (Law/Chaos Good/Evil here folks, we've seen this debate before in other contexts). Sorry Wing and sword from what I seen here and at the game table at cons where my stuff was stolen you need to add in “some” in a few places.

 

[Spell]

A good computer game requires a crew of dozens of highly talented and trained people and millions of dollars to make up front. How the hell would anybody be able to make a good computer game in your 'idealized' society?

a good computer game TODAY requires such a stuff, because if you have to pay 50$+ for a game, you expect something like flashy graphic, patches update, a reasonably long and complex game, and so on.

i have owned a computer of some sort ever since i was 4, and i can remember very well the days i have spent playing computer games whose graphic would make you throw up by today's standard.
kick off 2 for amiga, my all time favourite to this day, was programmed by one man alone, mr dino dini.

keep also in mind that the same model could be applied to films: do you really need to spend 100 millions to make a film? do you really need to see those perfectly rendered special effects on screen?
the answer is no. and the real world example is hitchcock's psycho, who was filmed using substandard equipment by that time (for example, colour was fairly common in all but the cheapest b-movie productions, in USA), and without big names and with no special effect. i don't think you need me to tell you that the film had an enourmous success.
what about woody allen's films? you might not like them, but the guy himself told times and again to the press that he is allowed to make any film he wants because he works with a ridicolous budget, so he recoupes the costs very very quickly.

what about literature? music? arts? i don't know about my idealised world, but guys like poe, shakespeare, mozart, bach, giotto, leonardo da vinci, and so on, existed in this world, so they would stil exist without copyright law. you might argue that they would be rare and far between, and i can tell you that i agree. i don't see how the copyright law makes leonardos more likely to happen... as a matter of fact, we had just as many geniuses in the 20th century as they had in the previous ones.

please, don't assume that since today the world goes in a direction that has always been the way things stood, or that it's impossible to have another model of existance. you would be guilty of the same sin of medieval commentators who objected scientific research because the world had always been the same, just as written in the bible... (and i have to bite my tongue not to make a political remark here... i guess you know what i'm pointing at, though!)

Who will compensate them? The magic money fairies?

no, the magic money of their public, or that of their protectors (sorry, i'm tired and my english is starting to slip... it's not the best term to describe them... )
it has happened for millennia. why should it stop all of the sudden?

If they don't charge people for their work

i never ever advocated that artists or authors should give everything for free if they don't want so. if you read that in my posts, please read again, because you got it wrong.
what i have been saying is that one thing is protecting the right of an author, another is putting the p2p on moral ground when the big corporations that are doing it are the ones to blame if the situation got out of hand, and yet another is to claim that without copyright we would all grab a club and return to the caves. sorry, this is simply not going to happen.

my source? just 6000 years of human history, during which, copyright or not, men created works of art that take breaths away even today (pyramids, anyone? venus of milo? [you name it here]?).
you don't have to believe my logic, you simply have to go to the library and open an art book.

people are not going to donate more money than the producer would have made by selling it.

donations wouldn't make anybody rich. but, perdon my blasphemy, there's people who does their work not just because of the money, you know...
or you believe that gary gygax started to design dungeons & dragons because he wanted to become filthy rich? or that no game designer had a "normal" day job before getting lucky and having the opportunity to work all the time for his favourite hobby?
who's the naive one now?

Donations is, farnky, an imbeclic response. Very few people are going to donate, humans are greedy and self-centered. If we're given something for free, only a few of us are going to choose to donate money for it.

i might live in a fairy land, but, man, you live in a very sad world...
if it's dog eats dog, i think it doesn't make much difference who wins... in the end, at best, he would still be just a dog.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

*the best post in the thread*

--The Sigil

Damn. Well, that pretty much says it all then. Those quotes from 1841 were eerie.

 

[Storm Raven]

By the way, this is actually one of the things that vexes me about copyright law. Would you object if the "magic molecular rearrangement machine" became available? That is to say, would you say I was "stealing from Ford/GM/Toyota/insert company here" by using my "magic molecular rearrangement machine" to create an exact copy of their car? It was my dirt. It was my machine. I did not take away my neighbor's car, he can still drive it, and enjoy it.

They may, as they have a property right in the design of the car, but that gets into some very esoteric issues concerning copyright of designs and patent law.

Leaving that aside, the problem with your analogy is that it is fatally flawed. Part of the legal framework is the ability to act in reliance upon certain expectations. That is, for example, why we have rules against ex post facto laws - you should be able to judge your behaviour based upon the nature of the law, and adjust your decisions accordingly. The creatirs of copyrighted material have a certain expectation with regard to the product of their work. They have relied upon the legal framework to provide them with certain rights in that work. Circumventing that deprives the author of what he (quite reasonably) believed he would be entitled to when he set about working on his creation.

As a result, the author is less likely to act in that way in the future. By making the intellectual property environment less lucrative, he will be less willing, and possibly less able to create more stuff for us to enjoy. He may decide to get out of the intellectual property creation business. He may decide not to offer .pdfs any more. Whatever he does, it is likely that less intellectual property will be created in the future. Is this a result that is desirable?

 

[Desdichado]

People are pissed at "the man" for lengthening copyright to, essentially, perpetuity (my *father* hasn't seen anything fall out of copyright in *his* lifetime, and I don't honestly expect to see anything enter the public domain in 2018... I fully expect lobbying for yet another extension).

Edgar Rice Burroughs and H.P. Lovecraft's works (or at least some of them) have entered the public domain in my lifetime. For what that's worth.

 

[Numion]

Of course, one of the reasons for the existence of a law is to impose moral beliefs in a general manner. We condemn rape as illegal, because we have (correctly) evaluated it as morally wrong. We condemn misappropriation of property (whether through theft, conversion, trespass, detainer, embezzlement, or infrongement) as illegal, because for the most part, he have evaluated it as morally wrong (to a lesser degree).

How come it's illegal to steal a guys TV, but legal to steal his girlfriend? Both are immoral, methinks

 

[Jonny Nexus]

Randy Milholland, creator of the webcomic Something Positive said to his readers, "readers, I have lost my job and I'm at a crossroads. Either I can devote myself to making this webcomic, or I can set it aside until I've got my bills paid and then come back to it, which might lose me a lot of my readership and result in the collapse of the comic. But if I'm going to do the former, I'll need money. If you can give me an income of (I think) $20,000, I'll do this webcomic every day for a year without asking for any more money."

And they gave it to him. And he did. Now, he's so well established that I think he gets by on a combination of donations and sales of items related to the comic (t-shirts, etc.) that aren't what you'd call media. The IP he gives away for free, and people give him money so that it keeps coming. Personally, I find his comic to be a bit boring, but I can't argue with his ability to get people to give him money.

True, good point. But that's one pretty popular comic, and he wasn't exactly asking for what I'd consider a living wage. (If I only earned $20,000 a year the bank would come and take my house away). I was deliberately picking what I'd consider to be a minimal figure when I picked the $30,000.

So that only proves that as a business model, it can be sort of almost viable for certain popular items where it's a one man band.

I guess that given that the RPG market has lots of products and niches, what I should have asked is whether there are a hundred rich people willing to pay 100 RPG writers $30,000 a year each.

 

[Storm Raven]

no, the magic money of their public, or that of their protectors (sorry, i'm tired and my english is starting to slip... it's not the best term to describe them... )
it has happened for millennia. why should it stop all of the sudden?

I believe the term you are looking for is "patron". But is it really desirable to throw the production of intellectual property back into the hands of the very wealthy? Do we really want to rely upon the largesse of the well-connected and well-heeled for our future intellectual property? It was done that way for centuries, and produced some fine art and a tiny amount of literature, but in far less volume, and with far less diversity than has been since the development of copyright laws to support the development of works of authorship.

Do you really want the available range of music to be determined by guys like George Soros? Or the availabale range of literature to be determined by guys like William F. Buckley, Jr.?

 

[Storm Raven]

How come it's illegal to steal a guys TV, but legal to steal his girlfriend? Both are immoral, methinks

I don't think you have property rights in your girlfriend. I believe we even have a Constitutional amendment that makes that clear.