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

[Spell]

There is a surprisingly simple answer to this: because without the suits, the artist would make far less money than they would with them. The suits provide value, whether you believe it or not. In the modern world, producing things is generally much easier than distributing them.

there's a better answer.
1. Kamikaze Midget is talking apples and oranges. the artists receives 100% of the royalties every time the song is used in any way. the money he gets out of record sales has absolutely nothing to do with copyright.
2. there are artists that are getting 100% out of their recording sales. just to point to a fairly large business, check www.cdbaby.com
3. most artists do renounce to a huge share of their record sales, because the accept to sign a contract. said contract can be unfair or not (it depends on your view of the subject), but nobody is putting a gun to their head to make them sign.

 

[Jacen]

Er... nice weather we're having?

Well considering that World Championships had to be canceled for tuesday due to uncommon strong thunder storm it is not so nice weather. There were tens of centimeters of water flowing at streets and flooding basements.

 

[Spell]

Call me stupid, but I have bought almost whole production from couple of bands after hearing them from D/L mp3s. You know that sometimes it is almost pain in the a** trying to find some older CD that was produced in small quantaties.

same boat here, mate!

Copyprotected discs sucks and I am voting with my wallet. Too bad that one of the bands I like started to use them.

well, i usually do not buy copyprotected cds, either. but i really really must (or when the web site does not say that the cd is copyprotected... i ended up buying the first kings of leon album because of that! :I), i simply connect my cd player to my recording stuff, and make a copy of the recording. maybe not 100% noise free (99%), but useful enough to have a mp3 copy at bitrate 96 (which, by the way, is the same quality of a good FM station... i can't hear the difference on my portable mp3 reader, so why bother?).
that show how stupid it is to reduce the usefulness of a support when, if you really want, you can make copies anyway. are you stopping the pirates? no. are you pissing of your customers? you bet. and then they blame someone else when the public stops buying...


Haven't bought any of their CDs after that (but own an self made CD version of their plastic wannabe CD). And levy was paid from empty media -> not even an illegal copy.[/QUOTE]

 

[Jacen]

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?).

Wow, never knew that after illegal copy is made right owner can't do copies anymore.

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.

Exclusive right granted by law. So law says that you have that kind of right and acording to that same right someone who breaks that is not thief. Besides I am paying levy that gives the right to make personal copy.

Enforcing some country specific law to whole world sucks. And even more if it is done by big companies trying to gain immoral benefit over other companies.

As non-lawyers, we can certainly call copyright infringement theft even if the damage is unquantifiable and we aren't using the legalistic term.

On contary. If a photo taken by is published without my authorization and not paying any compensation I haven't lost anything. I am only denied the rightfully compensataion, but nothing is taken from me. So im my eyes tha tis not theft. If the company I work for doesn't pay the salary I am not target of theft. I am then target of fraud. So as a non-lawer it in my eyes is not theft. If law says that it is ilegal and there is no levy collected it is a crime - but it is not a theft.

 

[Sledge]

I really think a lot of the people downloading the free stuff don't even read it -- they collect PDFs.

Too true Phil. I actually buy pdfs, and have bundles that I've paid for, but I just recently went through my "downloads dir" and cleaned out a couple of gigs of sample files.

Seriously though I know it is unpopular to hear this when you are publishing books and finding people using them without paying, but it has never been proven to actually hurt sales. The only situations I've seen where the results of piracy have been tested were ones that resulted in MORE sales. The problem with the RPG pdf industry is that since sales are so small, and so many of the downloaders are casual types who never even look at it. I'm sure that the next highest percentage of people are those that are just checking it out and sampling it. My only evidence here is that I've never seen someone show up with a pdf printed out they hadn't paid for. Has anyone here on all of ENWorld seen that happen.

#1: Accept it and wait for it to kill the industry, leaving it entirely up to hobbyists to support the game,

What evidence do you have to support this theory? Seriously take two similar books of which only 1 is on the P2Ps. See which has higher sales since the P2P copy appeared. Obviously more controls will need to be in place to get realistic numbers, but those numbers must be out there.
Anyone care to comment?


Finally I would really like to see more free stuff on the P2P networks. In other words, start putting up demo copies on the P2P and include links to where to buy the real books etc. I'd love to just do a d20 search on a P2P and find some new books to buy. It's annoying to go looking at everyones websites.
So any takers here?

 

[bodhi]

You forgot the absolutists.

"There is no grey area!"
"Practical solutions miss the point!"
"You just don't get it, do you?"
"If you disagree with me, you're not just wrong, you're violating universal principles of righteousness!"

You forgot my favorite.

"Death to all fanatics!"

 

[Spell]

Has anyone here on all of ENWorld seen that happen.

i have. in my old group, one of the players was using a prestige class from songs and silence and one or two feats from i can't remember what supplement, without having them in hard copy. he said he wasn't interested in the rest of the books.
to be fair, he never used more than that, though.

 

[Spell]

You forgot my favorite.

"Death to all fanatics!"

what about "you are all wrong, even if you agree with me?"

 

[philreed]

Hell, Phil, I've bought stuff of yours that I haven't read.

Thank you, but . . .

Stop that! It's a lot more fun for all of us if you at least read (and hopefully use) the PDFs that I write.

Thank you, though.

 

[Jonny Nexus]

Would you stop preparing gaming materials if you weren't getting paid for it? Would you no longer prepare adventures, or write house rules, or develop campaign settings, if there wasn't a paycheck waiting at the end of it?

Creative people don't always seek to make a living off their art. One can be an artist without being a full-time professional artist.

There are two issues you are missing here:

1) If your job is creating gaming materials then you are likely to develop a greater quantity of gaming materials due to the fact that you simply have a lot more time to do it (than if you are doing it in your spare time whilst also doing a full-time job to pay the bills).

2) If you are selling gaming materials (as opposed to giving them away for free) then you feel an obligation to make them worthwhile and suitable for the consumer.

In other words, if every single gaming writer had to give it up and get a job, yes, they'd still be spending their spare time producing gaming materials: but it would most likely be just stuff for their own campaigns. It wouldn't be anything you could use.

Like I said earlier in the thread, I used to get a lot of people complaining that I didn't publish Critical Miss very often, and then, when I stopped, complaining that I wasn't publishing it at all. I think what they didn't realise was that to do just one issue required me to do a lot of work in evenings and weekends for several weeks, and then usually take a week off work to finish it off. If you're getting something for free then the flipside of that is that is that you're not going to get very much of it.

(Note:- I'm not complaining that people were eager to see more of Critical Miss; but a few of them were a little "insistant").