RPG Piracy

[Archibald Theocliste]

Wow, I suck at posting! All the ideas I tried to share were forgotten and everybody only remember my exemples...

basically I tried to say that if Mr. A stole me a product while Ms B is a good and loyal customer, if Mr. A give me more money than Ms B anyway despite of his theft I won't try to make him fall cause in the end I'll be the loser. I'll be right to sue him, the MORAL is with me, the LAW is with me! But in my world less money=BAD, and moral and laws won't give me money here, Mr. A will do. This won't stop a company from attacking him, he won't sleep better after his theft but anyway the company can't win (money-wise).

On another subject I reject the argument wich state that if you stole a product one time you'll start stealing regulary and change your habits. This is something I still have to verify and for what I see everyday it has proven to be false (but my vision of the RPG market is restricted to a few towns, few shops and a single country so...)

 

[s/LaSH]

I haven't read the whole thread so forgive me if I'm occasionally redundant.

Stopping piracy is a job for law enforcement, not private enforcers (although the though of powered-armour-wearing corporate enforcers was too cool for me to resist, so it's in my novel). Hopefully, as law becomes more universal through international treaties and standards, international piracy will become easier to quelch... especially if the fuzz gets wise and hires some leet codeslicer to send out some bot that can track down piracy.

You might have to cut a deal with Adobe, though, because unless you've got some sophisticated OCR tech you won't be able to pick up PDFs with a blind search algorithm.

Anyway, point I wanted to make was, way I hear it, when the New York City police started cracking down on petty crime, major crime took a nosedive too. That's something people might want to bear in mind... vaguely anecdotal, but definitely not disproven.

 

[Numion]

Reading all these "more laws! stricter laws! enforce!" demands makes me happy that I live where I live. Here the police don't give a crap if you aren't making money / don't distribute, so in essence home use piracy is ok.

Not that I would pirate RPG products, but in regards to music.

 

[Archibald Theocliste]

Originally posted by Numion
Reading all these "more laws! stricter laws! enforce!" demands makes me happy that I live where I live. Here the police don't give a crap if you aren't making money / don't distribute, so in essence home use piracy is ok.

You do realize that Finland is part of the European Community and as such will sooner or later have to comply to the same antipiracy laws than the other countries here. (Ok, ok, I know, realizing how fast we are at making unilateral laws, you should start to fear a reaction in 2040-2041... 2099? )

 

[Drawmack]

Because its illegal for them to hack into our computers. And if your someone like me, who sets KaZaA to not share files (i can d/l, but ppl cant d/l from me), they cant find me. And it would cost them too much to stop everyone, because when one person is stopped, another starts.

Your IP can be tracked from the person you d/l from. So they can get probable cause without hacking you. As I said before just because you hide behind a monitor and a phone line does not mean that you are impervious. Make not mistake about it YOU CAN BE CAUGHT.

 

[Numion]

Your IP can be tracked from the person you d/l from. So they can get probable cause without hacking you. As I said before just because you hide behind a monitor and a phone line does not mean that you are impervious. Make not mistake about it YOU CAN BE CAUGHT.

I doubt that kazaa will constitute probable cause. Furthermore I suspect that pirating your stuff in order to nail those who then get it isn't such a good idea. Just sounds too goofy.

IT'S HIGHLY UNLIKELY TO GET CAUGHT.

 

[Numion]

You do realize that Finland is part of the European Community and as such will sooner or later have to comply to the same antipiracy laws than the other countries here. (Ok, ok, I know, realizing how fast we are at making unilateral laws, you should start to fear a reaction in 2040-2041... 2099? )

I believe that the laws are very much the same here. It's just that the police and prosecutors can choose how strongly they enforce those laws.

 

[med stud]

One thing came up in my head when reading all this. It is something a Soviet official said about thieves in the Soviet union (theft was rampant in that country): "We cant put all thieves in jail, because we cant put everyone in jail." I think that is one reason why piracy cant be stopped.

One way of stopping it would be to use the same methods as the Soviet rulers used (propaganda aimed at the thieves to stop what they are doing). This would be something like "dont make illegal copies, it really hurts the business and the people in it." The problem is that everyone already have heard this argument, and the people who are downloading simply dont agree with these arguments. To say it twice doesnt make people agree more.

The other way of stopping it would be using laws, but as already noted by other posters, it is very hard to use legal processes to stop this kind of thing. It isnt cost efficient by any standards, and if the police were to chase pirates, it would mean less resources for chasing killers, rapists and terrorists, something that probably would piss off the population ("now the cops are chasing my 17 year old son instead of finding my stolen car. Society stinks"). Besides, surveys have shown that a lot of cops are downloading MP3s, something that makes fighting it very hard. In short, a massive public backing of piracy and the trouble of actually nailing a pirate makes laws an almost impossible option. It's like the Soviet Union's (sorry for dragging this example up all the time, but I think it is fitting) problem with thieves. Too many people are doing it, and too few people consider it serious for the law to be effective, no matter what measures are taken.

I think we have come to a point in history where technology has outgrown society. The big distribution companies are losing ground because distribution can be done at a much smaller level. This is like when Spinning Jenny was invented or the part of "Grapes of Wrath" when the bank sent tractors (I hope it's the right word) that did the job of 16 farmers on the field. It will cause economocal losses, but in the same way as Spinning Jenny it is impossible to stop. The wisest thing to do would be to play along if piracy is to be stopped. The problem then is that the major record companies would have to commit suicide to play along, and therefore they will try to put up inefficient measures to stop piracy.

On the sales of RPG PDFs, I seriously dont think piracy hurts sales to a big level. The prices are low enough to be considered fair, and role players IMX generally have a decent moral level and arent cheap. If there are pirate copies of a 5 $ PDF around, it probably belongs to someone who wouldnt have bought the product anyway, something that seriously cant be considered loss of profits.

 

[Geron Raveneye]

Hmmm...

...I haven't read through the last 1.5 pages of this thread yet, but maybe this is a new spin on the question why there is piracy.

My answer would be because, at least partly, the gaming industry reacted far too slowly again in modifying their products. The point being that, since before 3E and d20 came out, computers and electronic readers were widely spread, and internet connections pretty available. So what kept them from making their products available not just in hardcopy form, but also as an electronic file?

I'm not talking about the OGL here, mind you. What I was imagining was a fully fledged and bookmarked pdf-version of the Core Rulebooks, for example, with all the nice colours, pictures and a linked index page. Sold electronically for, let's say 10$ per book? Or one of the adventures, or slimmer sourcebooks for 5$? Sounds too cheap? I'm not sure about this...after all, all that would have to be done was to set those files up once, put them on server space (and a well-done pdf-book doesn't take much space) and then sell them over and over again by placing a buying form before it and sending the file to everybody who fills out the form with his preferred financial transaction. For a small fee, the file can be sent on a CD.

Want to keep it from spreading for free after it's sent to a customer? Strike a deal with the creators of major burning software, place a small add-on to that file that allows it to be copied to hardcopy ONCE, and then makes a burning software deny any further copies.
Want to coax people into buying them even more? Give the buyer of a digital book percentages off the hardcopy price. A customer number, a way to allow any shop to check that number on the publisher's website or phone service, and you can give discounts with lowered risks of abuse.

Of course, it is easy to abuse this...one legally bought book copied through the gaming group, copy protections hacked etc. But seriously, if I WANT a book for free that one of my friends has, I borrow it, and busy my university's copy machine for an hour...

Of course, I'm not talking about smaller, independent publishers, who may not have the resources to put up their rulebooks/adventures in both formats at once...but the bigger guns could easily do this, reap a bigger profit and probably keep the piracy level a little lower.

By the way..where I come from, it is perfectly legal to own one "security copy" of any legally bought piece of music, literature and/or software, be this copy digital or hardcopy. In some cases, it is even legal to make free copies of music CDs to give them out to a certain amount of friends or family. So it really differs from nation to nation.

 

[Storm Raven]

I think the best solution I have seen is the "chessboard" rule. Create a work and you own the copyright for a year. To renew it for another year, you must pay one cent. To renew it for a third year, you must pay two cents. To renew it for a fourth year, you must pay four cents. The fifth year, the cost is eight cents. And so on. Of course, this would have to be normalized to a certain year's dollars to keep inflation from running rampant, but you get the idea.

So, you basically want to change copyright law to greatly dilute the value of the copyrights? Essentially that is what you are arguing for. Esepcially since right now, there is no fee for copyright protection.

This allows artists, writers, and others to generously benefit from their work in the short term (most studies I am familar with agree that a movie, book, song, software title, etc. makes over 95% of its profits in the first two years after its creation), while making it increasingly difficult to "sit" on something. If a property is really that enduring in value, it will continue to generate sufficient revenue to pay off the increases in "copyright fees" but is all but guaranteed to eventually fall into the public domain.

In other words, if you create something that is enduring in value, you, as the copyright holder, will be penalized for that. And that if your material does not "hit it big" in the first couple of years of its life, you should be penalized for that too. Doesn't that seem like a perverse message to be sending with your copyright law structure? Essentially, you are saying that someone who writes Genie in a Bottle or Shake Your Love (essentially disposable bubblegum music) should be compensated more generously than those who produce enduring classics like Nowhere Man or Fortunate Son. I find that to be an odd way to structure the laws.

Further, the oft-repeated line of "yes, but how will the writer/composer be incented to continue to create stuff?" has worn hollow. I highly doubt Gershwin or Tolkien or John Lennon needs an incentive to create more stuff (they're dead). Their estates don't create more stuff (with the exception of the Tolkien estate); clearly they do not need the incentive of receiving greater profits.

The idea of copyright is not to stimulate dead authors to produce material, it is to stimulate living authors to produce stuff. The idea is that the next Lennon, Tolkien or Gershwin will be pushed to producing more material (and yes, people do view compensation provided after their own death to be valuable, this is the whole basis for life insurance, for example).

Exactly what that period should be is of course a matter of debate, but I personally think that once something is "out of circulation," it's time to put it into the public domain. I don't need to see Disney re-re-re-re-re-re-release Snow White to try to milk a few more dollars out of it.

But your system won't provide much of a disincentive for that. Disney doesn't sit on most of its properties: it markets them aggressively, and continues to make them profitable. Your proposal would do little in this regard other than somewhat increase the revenues of the Librarian of Congress. Since Disney still profits from Snow White, it would not be transferred to the public domain, but people of modest means who produce copyrightable work would be penalized if they don't keep up with their fee payments. In other words, your proposal would do little to solve the problem you have determined needs to be solved, and would cause difficulties for those who you claim you want to benefit.