RPG Illegal File Sharing Hurts the Hobby

[Jim Hague]

So, you're saying he's damned now and he shouldn't bother spending his tax return buying the books he downloaded? I fail to see how he's driving up the cost of books, considering he's buying all the books eventually. And by eventually, I don't mean, within 20 years. I mean, as soon as he manages to spare the cash, as he's said.

I think you're misapplying your ire. This guy isn't part of the problem. He's buying books. All the books he uses, apparently. It's only the people who both download the books and also either use them without buying them or distribute them to others who are part of the problem.

That's a good point - I have a particularly unpleasant reaction when people use the 'I can't afford it' argument for piracy. That's just me, my particular hot button. But...

The problem here is that the RPG publishing industry runs close to the wire - those unbought books now might have a more serious impact. Small businesses must follow positively insane practices when it comes to accounting, distributors are chancy at best (which is a whole 'nother problem)...those lost sales in the short term can hurt. It's mitigated a bit by buying later...but later isn't always better.

 

[PetriWessman]

I can't agree with that. The correct course is to simply not buy the book, not to download it illegally. What if you "don't ethically want to give your financial support to", for example, capitalism? The concept of paying for things? Products made by people with red hair? Who decides if your ethical objection is valid and someone else's isn't?

Since it's a personal ethical choice, nobody except me needs to decide. That's how value judgements are made. You wouldn't do this, that's *your* decision on where you draw the line.

In this case, *I* don't see an ethical problem since this is a "no sale in any situation" case -- as long as the product is not sold in a form that is ethically acceptable to me, I will not buy it. So copying it does no financial harm... and actually, in cases like this I often wish I could do financial harm to the company. Take the recent Sony case as a good example -- I would *love* to see Sony hurt financially here. In my view, they more than deserve it.

Again, my personal view and choice. Legalities change from country to country, and ethics change from culture to culture and from person to person. The combinations are pretty much infinite.

Clarification: I have never pirated an PRG product in my life, and don't see any need to do so in the future (unless we were to move to some bizarro land where all prgs came with nasty DRM attached). Besides, I tend to prefer dead tree books anyway, you can't easily curl up on the sofa with a PDF -- not yet, anyway

 

[Morrus]

Since it's a personal ethical choice, nobody except me needs to decide. That's how value judgements are made. You wouldn't do this, that's *your* decision on where you draw the line.

That's not true. Your ethics don't override society's. It's not a legal defence to a crime to say "Oh, but it is in accordance to my personal ethics", and it shouldn't be - otherwise we have no law. The concept of law is based on the idea that society imposes its ethics on every indivdual member of that society, whether they agree with it or not.

 

[PetriWessman]

I strongly suspect that the DTRPG folks got snookered by Adobe regarding the DRM package they got sold. Hence my take that they didn't deserve the bad rap.

Ah. Yeah, that I can agree with.

Ronin Arts does really well with the free updates, as does Green Ronin. Both've been hit and hit hard by piracy, unfortunately.

Again playing the devil's advocate here, how do you know their dropping sales (I assume their sales have dropped, from you wording) are the result of piracy, and not some other factors (migration to computer games, migration away from d20 games, etc etc)?

 

[PetriWessman]

That's not true. Your ethics don't override society's. It's not a legal defence to a crime to say "Oh, but it is in accordance to my personal ethics", and it shouldn't be - otherwise we have no law. The concept of law is based on the idea that society imposes its ethics on every indivdual member of that society, whether they agree with it or not.

You're confusing ethics and legality here.

Ethics are a personal issue, and have pretty much nothing to do with whether something is legal or not. "Ethics imposed by the law" is quite a different beast. I don't think anyone is saying that illegal copying is legal, that would be somewhat of an oxymoron

 

[Morrus]

You're confusing ethics and legality here.

Really, I'm not!

My point is that the initial premise was that there was no problem in committing a particular crime (illegal downloads) due to not having an ethical problem with it. I felt that one's personal ethics don't override those of society's, and that that wasn't justification enough for the illegal act. There are people out there with the most bizarre ethics, but we don't accept those personal beliefs as justifcation for criminal behaviour - we arrest them and lock them up just the same. That's because society's ethics (in the form of codified law) have overridden the individual's; society has ruled the individual's ethics as, for want of a better word, "wrong".

So, I take exception to the cncept of someone happily committing illegal acts because their "ethics" allow them to - as a concept. I recognise that there are exceptions, and even cases where such acts must or should be taken, but the pilfering of leisure goods is not one of those cases.

 

[Jim Hague]

Again playing the devil's advocate here, how do you know their dropping sales (I assume their sales have dropped, from you wording) are the result of piracy, and not some other factors (migration to computer games, migration away from d20 games, etc etc)?

Phil and Nikki're good folks, with no reason to lie, and have said so. I'm not going to press them for sales figures, but when copies of MnM 2e started appearing on filesharing networks 2 days after the book went on sale, I don't think that's a good thing. It's a sad fact that people often don't buy when they can get something for free.

 

[Mallus]

Except that this strawman has been beaten to death - we have producers who, unlike huge multinationals, are actually hurt financially by pirates. Who do not have the resources to 'turn' the pirate networks to their advantage. What matters is that pirates are stealing IP, and in turn that drives up the cost of books as publishers try to tread water.

I don't see how my observations constitute a strawman. I'm not interested in justifying (or condemning) media piracy in the RPG world.

It hurts some (perhaps most), it helps others, and its not going away.

Now what?

 

[Alzrius]

Really, I'm not!

Actually, I think I agree with Petri here that you are.

My point is that the initial premise was that there was no problem in committing a particular crime (illegal downloads) due to not having an ethical problem with it. I felt that one's personal ethics don't override those of society's, and that that wasn't justification enough for the illegal act. There are people out there with the most bizarre ethics, but we don't accept those personal beliefs as justifcation for criminal behaviour - we arrest them and lock them up just the same. That's because society's ethics (in the form of codified law) have overridden the individual's; society has ruled the individual's ethics as, for want of a better word, "wrong".

Leaving aside the concrete example of illegal downloads, on principle I disagree with this. Society may have a regulatory code of unacceptable behavior that is punishable by the government, but that's not a stance on what is ethically (or morally) right or wrong; it's just what society feels best serves itself so that it continues to function in a smooth, controlled, peaceful manner.

History is a good example of how laws are not legislative ethics. In pre-Civil War America, it was illegal to free slaves, and, by your rationale, thus also lacking in ethics to do so. But now, we universally condemn slavery, and laud those who worked to free slaves back then. So clearly, the laws at the time couldn't have been what was ethical.

It is, IMHO, foolish and irresponsible to accept at face value that what the laws say are wrong must therefore also be ethically wrong. One must make a personal choice in regards to all such matters, and it is not inconceivable that the results of such a decision may result in holding views different from those that society holds as laws. It may be a crime, but it does not have to be something you hold as wrong, no matter what the legality is.

So, I take exception to the cncept of someone happily committing illegal acts because their "ethics" allow them to - as a concept. I recognise that there are exceptions, and even cases where such acts must or should be taken, but the pilfering of leisure goods is not one of those cases.

Again, I disagree, mostly because this then states that if the law were to change, it'd be perfectly fine to then download copyrighted materials for free. A set of laws do not ethics make.

 

[PetriWessman]

Phil and Nikki're good folks, with no reason to lie, and have said so. I'm not going to press them for sales figures, but when copies of MnM 2e started appearing on filesharing networks 2 days after the book went on sale, I don't think that's a good thing.

So we have two facts:

1) their sales have been dropping (by some unknown amount)
2) their books can be found on p2p networks pretty soon after they are released

There could very well be a correlation. But there might very well not be. At this point I could link to the lovely "pirate population vs. average global temperature" graph someone drew up on rpg.net -- this *might* be just as meaningless. I'm not saying there isn't a correlation, I'm just saying you have no real data to back up your claim of one. You can make pretty much any claim you want based on a bunch of data (I should know, my wife is a researches and does a lot of statistics work, and she has a lot of opinions on the subject ).

It's a sad fact that people often don't buy when they can get something for free.

Agreed. But just as often, if not more, they will buy.

What's happening in Green Ronin's case? Unless you have some other data, I'll have to say "we don't know". You think it's piracy. I suspect it could also be a lot of other factors.

Note: you could be right for all I know. I'm just very wary of guesswork like this presented as cold facts. That's *my* hot button, if there is one