RPG Piracy

[Archibald Theocliste]

Hmmm, I want to jump into the lava pool too…

Ok I know what is piracy and piracy is illegal, I will never try to justify myself, if I own copies of documents while not owning the original I am wrong! So if I know it’s wrong I won’t do it right?

Well, here we go : let’s just say I own the following books from WOTC (purchased at full price) : Player’s Handbook, DMG, MM, MM2, Psionic Handbook, ELH, Manual of the Planes, D&Demigods, BoVD, FRCS, Faiths and Pantheons, Monsters of Faerun, Lords of Darkness, Silver Marches, D20 Modern, WoT, CoC, SWRPG.
And let’s just say now that I downloaded all the five classbooks without owning the originals considering they are overpriced for their use at my gaming table, what will you do if you were WotC? If someone tell me that my life will become Hell on Earth cause of these classbooks I’ll just say that I will no longer buy the future products the company. The Splatbook cost 150$ that won’t go to the company but the other books cost around 800$ and I’ll buy all the future Hardcovers from WotC and FR Softcovers so do you really want to sue me now, gain back your $ and lost me forever as a regular customer? Am I less important to WotC with my 800$ spent vs 150$ stolen (Steal bad! Kids don’t steal!) than someone who legaly purchased 60$ of products in his whole life?

As I said I’m not trying to justify anything, to me it is a fact. If a company sell Online products, knowing that I downloaded 10 of their products but own on my hard drive an illegal copy of an eleventh one will they take the risk to sue me and lost me as a regular buyer? Of course my attitude toward this company is ambiguous since I’m supposed to be a loyal customer but you can’t expect people to buy 100% of the products they need if :
1/ They consider the product overpriced for the use or including only 50% or so usable material.
2/ They are low on cash, especially if they already spend a lot of their money buying RPG books.
3/ Whatever reason they think make them feel right in their own mind…

Maybe I’m completely wrong here but it seems to me that if you attack these pirates (cause they are pirates anyway!), you’ll win law-wise, but in the end your company will be the real loser!

P.S. : My english must be horrible, sorry for scorching your eyes with my post

 

[Olive]

i'm wondering too, why people would scan the whole damn thing in...

i've only used kazaa to download one DnD book, to see if it would be useful. it wasn't so i got rid of the file... and there we go. I regard this as legitimate personally.

i do think that DL of PDF version of print products are different that DL of PDF-only products as well... in terms fo the effect.

 

[Regdar]

The point was that releasing the core books for free DL hasn't hurt their sales. Regardless of any OGL/D20 licenses, the books are there.

 

[The Sigil]

I also know people who DL PDF products for free, stealing them. Not a one of them would have bought the item to begin with anyway.

This is entirely irrelevant. Your line of reasoning is:

A person "steals" a PDF by downloading it from a warez site or what have you. That person was unable/unwilling to pay for the PDF. Therefore it is not a "potential sale" because the publisher wasn't going to get the money in the first place.

Critique one: That person was UNWILLING to pay for the PDF. That is outright stealing and is both immoral and is VERY MUCH a "lost sale" in my book. If you can afford a luxury and you choose to steal it rather than pay for it that is (by my definition anyway) a "lost sale." You obviously wanted the product or you wouldn't have dowloaded it. You had the means to acquire it legally. Lost sale. Period.

Critique two: The person is UNABLE to pay for the PDF. Leaving aside for the moment the possibility of a child who is using his parents' computer, if you can afford a $500 machine, I find it highly difficult to believe you can't afford a $5 PDF. Skip a lunch and McDonald's and eat in. I think this segment is MUCH smaller than most people - especially those who consider themselves a part of it - would like to believe. So instead of saving up for it, these folks steal it, thereby passing the "cost" in "broken trust" (rather than actual dollar figures) on to society. It's still unethical. And it still hurts YOU and the rest of society - not because the publisher isn't getting your money but because he's getting pissed off that society isn't upholding ITS end of the bargain (to act as responsible adults and not steal his stuff) and therefore he may choose to no longer share with you - in which case you've cut off your own nose to spite your face.

For me, most of my stuff is either review copies or stuff i can't get no more (1e stuff, etc). I don't have the HD space to keep anything I don't like enought o eventually buy, too much pr0n

Are "review copies" those that are sent to you by a publisher so that you can review the works? If so, those are legitimate copies. If you download a copy to browse through it, that's stealing. Either way, you're not justified in including "review copies" as part of your argument because they either don't apply (because they're legit) or they're just a fancy name for "stolen items" (in which case, they fall into the case we're talking about anyway).

As for the 1e stuff, it is available, inexpensively, from SVGames.com - I have some sympathy to the argument that out-of-print stuff is not as bad since the publisher is no longer attempting to get anything out of it - but in this case, that doesn't apply. Again, it's stealing.

You can chalk up my being miffed to "well, he's just a publisher, so he's obviously biased. That's a load of... bovine scatology. I have always said (and will continue to say) that as soon as total sales for my works meet a level that I find acceptable, I will immediately change the price to free. I'm not out to rake you over the coals.

I am, however, annoyed, at the flippant, ignorant, and nonchalant attitude that you display. Your attitude appears to be that you care not a fig for others and are interested only in gratifying yourself - now, where possible - and preferably with someone else footing the bill.

I understand your argument. However, I reject it on both moral and practical grounds. Get off your backside and quit wasting time leaving messages on ENWorld, go get a job at McDonalds, flip some burgers, and EARN the money you need to support your PDF habits. Be responsible. There is enough shrugging of responsibility going on in the world today. Your argument is not all that offensive. Your attitude is.

Anyone who really WANTS to have the money to buy a few relatively inexpensive (and let's admit it, PDFs ARE inexpensive) luxury items can easily obtain it. To claim you do not have the money while typing on a comparatively expensive computer and at a temporal cost tells me that it's not that you couldn't get the money, it's that you lack the desire to obtain it. And why should you, when you can just get stuff for free?

The answer: Because the more stuff you grab for free, the less stuff - free or otherwise - there will be in the future. I want there to be lots of stuff in the future. Which is why I GO TO WORK and DELAY MY GRATIFICATION and SAVE MY MONEY, and only then do I get to REAP THE BENEFITS OF ANOTHER'S WORK when I PAY THEM FOR THEIR WORK.

It's that simple, really. I'm not pissed at electronic thieves as a publisher, but as a consumer - in a very real sense, you're stealing bread from my table - I have to pay higher prices for my stuff because of you and furthermore, there's less stuff out there for me to choose from because publishers are sick of dealing with jerks like you who show a blatant disregard for principle, ethics, morality, and common sense... not to mention an obvious aversion to good honest work. Forgive those of us who bust butt 24/7 to pay the bills and feed our families for not having sympathy for you leeches.

/rant

--The Sigil

 

[BiggusGeekus@Work]

Well, here we go : let’s just say I own the following books from WOTC (purchased at full price) : Player’s Handbook, DMG, MM, MM2, Psionic Handbook, ELH, Manual of the Planes, D&Demigods, BoVD, FRCS, Faiths and Pantheons, Monsters of Faerun, Lords of Darkness, Silver Marches, D20 Modern, WoT, CoC, SWRPG.
And let’s just say now that I downloaded all the five classbooks without owning the originals considering they are overpriced for their use at my gaming table, what will you do if you were WotC?

What would I do? Nothing because WotC isn't big enough to stop that kind of stealing. Which leads me to another point: the books aren't overpriced in terms of how much it costs to make them. Seriously. RPG products have very low print runs. But look at other books that are roughly the same size with a color cover and lots of interior illustrations. They're about the same price. This isn't an evil conspiracy to swindle you out of your cash, it's the simple fact that it costs money to make these books.

You may not like the price, but the price is fair.

If someone tell me that my life will become Hell on Earth cause of these classbooks I’ll just say that I will no longer buy the future products the company. The Splatbook cost 150$ that won’t go to the company but the other books cost around 800$ and I’ll buy all the future Hardcovers from WotC and FR Softcovers so do you really want to sue me now, gain back your $ and lost me forever as a regular customer? Am I less important to WotC with my 800$ spent vs 150$ stolen (Steal bad! Kids don’t steal!) than someone who legaly purchased 60$ of products in his whole life?

Less important? No. But certainly there's less incentive for WotC to print the softcover books. The smaller books have a much smaller profit margin. If you -- and by extension lots of other people -- steal the smaller books and buy the big ones, why shouldn't WotC have a bunch of product lines like Wheel of Time or Call of Cuthullu? Big names, big books, and minimal support products.

As I said I’m not trying to justify anything, to me it is a fact. If a company sell Online products, knowing that I downloaded 10 of their products but own on my hard drive an illegal copy of an eleventh one will they take the risk to sue me and lost me as a regular buyer?

They've already lost you as a regular buyer, remember? You hypothetically have already reached the decision not to buy certain books.

(small snipping)

1/ They consider the product overpriced for the use or including only 50% or so usable material.
2/ They are low on cash, especially if they already spend a lot of their money buying RPG books.
3/ Whatever reason they think make them feel right in their own mind…

1) They may consider the product overpriced, but that doesn't mean it is.
2) Gaming is a luxury, not a necessity. Just like going to the movies and eating at nice restaurants is a luxury and not a necessity. Do you also feel justified in sneaking into the movies and running out of restaurants before the waiter can bring you the bill?
3) They are right as far as I can see.

I apologize in advance if my above points come across as hostile. I don't mean to be. I just wanted to address your points.

Happy gaming!

 

[The Sigil]

And let’s just say now that I downloaded all the five classbooks without owning the originals considering they are overpriced for their use at my gaming table, what will you do if you were WotC?

Here's the problem with your reasoning... in its present system, books, including RPGs, are not sold on a haggle system. It's not a question of whether or not you think a book is "overpriced." Without going to deeply into copyright, the publisher has every right to say, "this is the price. Take it or leave it." If you consider it "overpriced" you cannot justify stealing by saying, "this way I'm paying what I consider to be a fair price." You do not have that negotiating power. EDIT: Furthermore, as many publishers have pointed out, profit margins are EXCEEDINGLY slim on print books. You may feel the price is too high, but don't blame the RPG company. Blame the printer. And paper mill. And lumberjack. And so on. RPG books CAN'T sell for much less. BTW, you might go down to your local Barnes & Noble or Borders Bookstore or what have you and check out the price of a "typical" book with a high illustration content. I guarantee you you'll find that RPG books are on the cheap end of the spectrum. /EDIT

Furthermore, with the RPG/d20 market becoming more open, you generally have more options available. No longer can TSR/WotC say, "here's all you can have, take it or leave it." Someone else can say, "instead of the Wizards Splatbooks, try the Quintessential X series - cheaper and bigger." The market will respond to your buying dollars over time. That means that over time, your decisions to buy or not buy are like "haggling." But it also means you still do not get to haggle over individual products.

Am I less important to WotC with my 800$ spent vs 150$ stolen (Steal bad! Kids don’t steal!) than someone who legaly purchased 60$ of products in his whole life?

In an absolute sense, no. In a moral/ethical sense, yes. He that breaks one commandment breaks the whole law.

To put it another way, the price of your honesty is $800 instead of $60. Either way, you're dishonest. It's just that at $800 it takes more to make you dishonest than at $60.

I again refer you to the anecdote:

"Will you sleep with me for $50 million?"
"Yes."
"Will you sleep with me for $5?"
"Of course not! What kind of woman do you think I am?"
"You established that with your answer to my initial offer. All we're doing now is haggling over the price."

As I said I’m not trying to justify anything, to me it is a fact. If a company sell Online products, knowing that I downloaded 10 of their products but own on my hard drive an illegal copy of an eleventh one will they take the risk to sue me and lost me as a regular buyer?

A good question. My answer is, for myself, "in practical terms, no, because I can't afford the legal bills." If my own legal bills were of no concern, the answer would be, "yes. If you steal one of my products, what's to say you won't steal another? And what about the one after that? And the one after that?"

We've already established what you are, now we're just haggling over price.

Of course my attitude toward this company is ambiguous since I’m supposed to be a loyal customer

Very true. And your choice of words following this is interesting, because in this sense, "But" usually means "go ahead and ignore everything I just said."

but you can’t expect people to buy 100% of the products they need if :
1/ They consider the product overpriced for the use or including only 50% or so usable material.
2/ They are low on cash, especially if they already spend a lot of their money buying RPG books.
3/ Whatever reason they think make them feel right in their own mind…

First red flag... "100% of the products they need."

Will missing out on a product starve you? Asphyxiate you? Cause you to freeze? No. You need food. You need water. You need clothing. You need shelter. You do NOT need RPGs. Sorry.

There is no such thing as "100% of the products they need." There is only "100% of the products they want."

Having gone through that, we'll address your points.

1.) Again, this is not haggling. The terms of your access to a product are, "if you pay X you may have 100% access. If you do not pay X, you may have 0% access." You have complete control of your choice to pay X but you must live with the terms of that choice.

2.) They are low on cash? Will it kill you to wait another week or two to buy that book? Again, anyone who REALLY wants the cash can get it legally by working or skipping a McDonald's lunch (I realize it is not as easy outside of the US, but the principle holds that if you can't afford it don't buy it).

3.) People can rationalize however they want. They're still rationalizing... and if you need an excuse, that's usually a pretty good clue that it's wrong in the first place.

Maybe I’m completely wrong here but it seems to me that if you attack these pirates (cause they are pirates anyway!), you’ll win law-wise, but in the end your company will be the real loser!

I agree with you there. The problem truly is out of control because it is impractical.

All I can ask is that YOU yourself choose not to partake. I can't control you. I can't control anyone else. I can control me. If my decisions are made in accordance with ethics and a true understanding of the costs and consequences of what I do, I won't feel bad whether the RPG market booms or busts.

As a publisher, I want EVERYONE to use my material - because I think it's the best stuff out there in its niche (I'm egotistical that way ). That does NOT mean I want everyone to pay for it. It means simply that I think everyone deserves the best and that my stuff happens to be the best. (It's not, but I like to think it is.) That's why as soon as I get enough sales to offset the expense making it (including compensation for my time), I will make my stuff free. It's as simple as that. If you want my stuff to be free, buy it. Maybe that sounds paradoxical, but that's how I figure I can best incent people who want the material for free to buy it. If they know that once a certain number of people buy it, I make it free, they may buy a product or two, hoping to help reach that number, and hoping that other people will do the same for other products. If everyone does this, everyone gets free stuff, I make back my time and money and have the incentive to do more, and nobody has to pay out the wazoo.

--The Sigil

 

[maddman75]

All I can point out is this

-- One of the big arguements is that some people don't have enough money. Since we are talking about DLable pdfs, the price point I feel is relevent. The baseline is what, 5-6 dollars? Maybe as much as ten or twelve for a really large suppliment?

I could probably dig 5-6 bucks in change out of the floorboards of my car. If you can't afford that, you need to be doing something different with your life. Go to school, look for a job, whatever. How do you even afford the electricity to power your PC if you can't pony up a lousy $5? And even for print products, 20-30 is not too much for a hardbound, full color rulebook.

In some cases file sharing can benefit the industry that protests against it. Cases in point

- Software. Microsoft lives on their monopoly on operating systems. Their last statement said they had an 85% profit margin on OS sales. Everything else lost money.

How did they get this monopoly? They had a 'good-enough' product that was cheap and ran on cheap hardware. They really didn't care who pirated it. They put hooks in their software to encourage people to follow the One Microsoft Way. But it would have never taken off if not for people learning it at work and taking the CDs home at night. Now that they are cracking down, many companies are rebelling against them.

This does NOT apply to RPGs, as downloading a pdf will not encourage other people in other groups to use that same supplement.

- Music. Music benefits because an album has 12-18 songs on it. People don't want to get screwed by buying an album after liking a couple singles, and ending up with the two singles and ten tracks of crap.

This also does NOT apply to RPGs. Its not like I can just download the spells section to BEOM and see if I like it. Boom, there's the whole thing, in the exact form I get it from Monte.

I cannot see any way of P2P benefiting RPG authors. There's no network effect to make the piracy pay off in the long run, there's no free advertisement to encourage people to buy the whole product.

 

[Bhaal]

A couple points/observations:

* Price isn't the issue (though I wince when small books go for $20+). You could sell gaming books at 50 cents a pop and they would still be pirated. As long as the desire to have these books electronically is there, the "market" will be there. Actual books have their own advantages, but so does copy/paste, find, multiple windows, bookmarks, etc. This is not the source of the problem, and there is no solution involved with manipulating the price.

* Witch Hunts simply won't work. I know this travels dangerously into the politics zone, but consider this analgous to the war on drugs (in some respects).
First Parallel: The true scope and scale of the problem is difficult to perceive, much less quantify. For every person you bust, 10 more step up to fill his sieve in the market. There is no "kill the ringleader" in this game, and eventually you'll end up with a laughable amount of legal overhead.
Second Parallel: Different countries/laws/etc are involved. This point has already been hammered on, I think it's been examined sufficiently.
Third Parallel: This is something a nominal portion of the population wants. Or at least they are ignorant of its indirect consequences (per Sigil's excellent post). Bottom line is if enough people want something, they'll get it. Sabotaging the means is truly a temporary solution to a permenant problem. If you want to snuff out the problem permenantly, you have to get at the root; you have to stop people from wanting it. Which flows into my last point...

* Fight fire with fire. People want electronic books largely because it holds advantages real books can't offer. Most products don't offer a complete version of their book electronically (by complete I mean as though the book was scanned). If you want an electronic version and the people you'd buy the books from don't offer it and someone else does, odds are you're going to get that electronic version. The publishers really have advantage here because as anyone who has electronic versions of books knows, the quality is dubious. If publishers released good quality, complete electronic versions of their texts, many who resort to illegal means would switch to the legit stuff on the basis of quality alone. The logistics of setting it up may take consideration but I'm sure such a solution exists, and it would take the momentum away from illegal copies by offering a good quality, legitimate product in the medium that people want. Piracy can't be stopped because there is nothing to compete with it.

 

[Sulimo]

And pirated RPGs have a major problem that pirated music doesn't - PDFs just plain suck to read. People will always buy a print version of a product, as long as it's readily available and reasonably priced, because it's far more convenient. The trouble

Yes. IMO gaming PDF's are pretty much useless except to have a bit of a read through. And it's not worth the effort to try and print 'em out...at least the substantial works. With the printing and binding costs, I might as well just buy the original.

 

[Teflon Billy]

...Even dealing with music piracy, the majority of people listening to current music are listening to legit copies. Not MOST, but the majority of them...

What's the difference between "most of them" and "the majority of them"?