RPG Piracy

[Magestrike]

Ummm..yea

Ummm...yea.....what Sigil said. I agree with him.

 

[Roland Delacroix]

Next up....the entertainment industry will rig all tvs, cable boxes, etc to not allow recording of shows anymore, and make them not be able to play things that are not copy protected.

I think I read some hackers cracked that last week. Would you like a link to a how-to?

 

[evil_rmf]

The only reason they want it is to say that they got it.

You hit the nail right on the head! It's all about "he who dies with the most toys wins."

Let's just say you go out and grab the entire tsr/wotc catalog og ESDs, all of the d20 pdf stuff, plus all of the D&D stuff which is not ESD but has been scanned by pirates. That's got to be what, 1000+ files? And that's just D&D. How the heck could you possibly ever use all of that?

There are some who are just compulsive about this hobby (and other things, I'm sure), who will just collect this stuff, burn it to CD and never look at it. I dunno if that is better or worse than using it.

 

[The Sigil]

No, Congress didn't. They just changed the duration of copyrights from the previous version to the one set out in the Berne Convention. We are now in line with the Berne Convention, and the copyright protection in these implementing acts has an explicit duration. Given that the Constitution specifically gives Congress the power to set rules for copyrights, changing those rules on occassion is well within their power.

This is getting into politics. However, as a statement of fact, I will point out that this is not entirely true. The US is NOT in fact in line with the Berne Convention. Anyone who cares may read here why:

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/02/1956248&mode=thread&tid=141

The gist - we are in line with the Berne Convention with respect to copyrights for work done TODAY. But US copyrights were retroactively extended; some work that was scheduled to fall into the public domain before the extension is now falling into public domain in Europe, where the copyright law in effect AT THE TIME A WORK WAS WRITTEN stands with no extensions. For example, some of Elvis' recordings are falling into the Public Domain in Europe because at the time he recorded them, copyright was life of author plus 50 years.

So you are partly correct in that we adjusted to fit current material's copyrights into the Berne Convention scheme, but incorrect in that by making the extension retroactive, we got "out of step" with the Berne Convention.

Sorry, not trying to be political, merely making a correction on a fallacious statement.

--The Sigil

 

[Numion]

The OGL/D20 license is a completely differet kettle of fish that is designed to allow others to create products that will, in turn, increase sales for WotC. Not the same thing at all.

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.

And the reason the studies don't prove anything is:

A) It's exceedingly difficult to measure potential loss, and

B) The music industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. A dollar figure that wouldn't even show up as a blip on their radar can completely destroy an RPG company.

A) No it's not. Just forget the BS people say about potential purchases: "I wouldn't have bought it anyway.. " etc. We're trying to prove the effects of inet piracy on sales, one way or another. Record industry can probably manage to do these kind of studies, because they have better data than the RPG industry.

People are very quick to go strongarming individual consumers, even before they know they're just shooting themselves in the leg.

B) ? Percentages would probably be a better measure, just because of those reasons.

 

[Regdar]

Point 2) It is not victimless, hear about the layoffs at WoTC, now if you had a choice of either buying the books or not owning them at all, it may inspire you to BUY more books. This is an excuse and it is a lame one no crime is victimless and I hate to say it but your qulaity of living will not rise if RPG companies can't make more books because some idiot puts our books on a d/l site.

We have companies and product lines that 100 more sales may be the keep going or stopping point and if it is available for free and people do not buy it you are hurting the industry so do not use the term victimless crime all crimes have victims you just may not see the direct influence it has on them.

OK enuff from me.

Ah this is the same argument that the Record Companies tried, when in fact record sales were up until the crack down started.

 

[BiggusGeekus@Work]

Percentages would probably be a better measure, just because of those reasons.

Perhaps. But RPG sales are really small. IIRC, if a PDF sells around 500 it's done very well and the typical number is about 100. So even five purchases are statiscally significant. The market is better for paper products, obviously. But my point is that is doesn't take much to have a noticiable effect in our hobby.

 

[jdavis]

These things always get deep. You want to know why nobody can stop it.

1. It just cost too much, I am not sure about the actual cost but I believe it cost around $30,000 a year to keep somebody in jail. It is not uncommon for a long or intense court case to cost up to $100,000 and sometimes they get to be drastically more. It cost thousands apon thousands of dollars to find the sites then find the people then get the proof, then you have to hope they are in a country that actually cares. How easy it was for you to find a warez site was not indicative of how easy they are to find but of how many of them there are. How may thousands of dollars do you spend on trying to stop somebody from costing your company thousands of dollars. Where do you draw a line?

2. Not everybody wants to stop it. Yes there are the Imformation wants to be free people, and the I'm too poor people and the I didn't think anybody got hurt people, they are well documented. One group that hasn't been mentioned here is the computer companies themselves. Does Microsoft want to stop computer program piracy, yes, do they want to stop music and video piracy? well thats a trickier question, I mean hackers and pirates are some of the computer industry's best customers. Lets face it all this computer equipment is not cheap (oops there goes the I don't have any money arguement for piracy). Companies who make CD burners and now DVD burners and the disk you use to burn stuff on are making a killing in profits from people stealing MP3's, the same thing happened with VCR's it wasn't a victory for the common man it was a victory for one industry over another. Just go to any electronics store and look to see how many MP3 players there are, if sombody cracked down on MP3's then the MP3 player market would tank. What gets me is that several of these companies are feeding off both ends, Sony the music label is fighting hard to stop piracy but Sony the electronics company is producing many of the products out there that will be used to play the pirated media. Computers are big business, the internet is big business, You don't want to crack down so hard that people are scared to get computers and get on the internet. This logic gets alot of smaller companies hurt because they don't have fingers in both pies.

3. The problem is much larger than alot of people realize. there are not hundreds of warez sites there are thousands, and with file sharing there are millions and millions of people involved. Do you realize how many people have something illegal on their computer. A lot of people do not even realize it. It was mentioned about why people don't go after the small fish, well thats because there are millions of small fish. Most people would never go into a store and shoplift something but they wouldn't think twice about downloading something, yes stealing is stealing but it just doesn't feel as bad over the internet, and lets not forget alot of people don't actually know all the laws of where they live, there are people who don't even realize some of this stuff is illegal. Once again where do you draw the line?

4. Some of the smartest people in the world are involved. Who knows computers and the internet better than the hackers who set up and run this type of stuff. Yes the local guys with the scanner do the hard work, but it's the guys who go out and get stuff together and find ways to beat the antipiracy systems and programs that are the problem. Alot of the worst warez sites are run by people who are smart enough to make it real hard for them to get caught, and the harder it is to catch them the more money it cost to catch them. Once again where do you draw the line?

 

[Storm Raven]

The gist - we are in line with the Berne Convention with respect to copyrights for work done TODAY. But US copyrights were retroactively extended; some work that was scheduled to fall into the public domain before the extension is now falling into public domain in Europe, where the copyright law in effect AT THE TIME A WORK WAS WRITTEN stands with no extensions. For example, some of Elvis' recordings are falling into the Public Domain in Europe because at the time he recorded them, copyright was life of author plus 50 years.

If I remember correctly, the Berne Convention doesn't really go into the issue of retroactive implementation of the extended term of copyright. Making it an entirely side issue with respect to the Berne Convention. Whether you make the extension retroactive or not is a side issue to the Berne Convention, the requirement is that the term be at least "life of the author + X years" (where X is 50 last time I checked).

The point I was making was that it was stated that in the 1970's Congress changed copyright law to abolish durations on copyright. This is incorrect, the law was changed to bring us into compliance with the Berne Convention (prior to this time copyright had been for a set term from creation, with a second term renewable on application, now it is some variant of life of author + X years).

Besides, when we accepted the Berne Convention we retroactively made some previously public domain works into protected works: prior to the Berne Convention, there was a time during which foreign authors were not entitled to U.S. copyright protection. This is why Tolkien (for example) has a plea on some copies of LotR to purchase the authorized vbersion, and not the unauthorized one.

 

[Mercule]

Re: Ummm..yea

Ummm...yea.....what Sigil said. I agree with him.

Climbing onto the "me, too" bus.

I'd try to defend what he said against posts since, but I couldn't say it as well as he did.

He's right, factually and ethically.