Torrent throwdown on the Wizards board

[Novem5er]

I, for one, long since stopped caring if people pirated PDFs of products I wrote.

Wolfgang Baur uses a ransom model, where he only actually releases the work he has written once a certain amount of money has been paid. He releases some free content to raise interest, then raises money to make writing worth his while.

WotC is part of Hasbro, and is probably too corporate to change their thought processes enough to make that work. Plus they have a business cycle they have to keep with, so their quarterly profits are high enough. However, they are doing more than just releasing books. They've also got minis, maps, online programs (theoretically) -- all things that you can't just 'pirate.'

I do wish WotC had put PDFs of their books on sale. I know a fair number of people would have actually paid for it. A lot would pirate it, sure, but I figure in any given gaming group, at least one player will buy a physical copy to make playing the game easier.

If they could have sold the books by PDF, and if the Digital Initiative was already up and running, I think WotC could have really profited. As some people have pointed out, a lot of folks online just expect to be able to get stuff for free. You can fight this, but I suspect we've tilted too far, and society is just changing.

So you don't fight it. You find other things to sell people: services (DI) and physical objects (minis and maps).

Even if some people just pirate 4e and play it without buying the books, I imagine a fair number of them will still buy minis and maps. WotC still gets to move product. The game just becomes a big advertising campaign for the real product: the minis and maps. Just like cartoons for the longest time have just been ads for toys.

Thank you! I made the point a few pages ago that the books are just PART of the D&D revenue stream. Now we have DDI, separate books with "core material" in them (Frost Giants, anyone?), miniatures, and maps. D&D (Gygax, TSR, WotC) have NEVER had a business model where every player had to purchase their books, as they've found out that the more people who "play", the more books they actually sell.

The vast majority of people like owning stuff!

I'm also an aspiring author. Of course, I want people to buy my book!!! But do I expect every person who ever reads it to have paid me for that pleasure?! No... it would just be greedy to assume this was how things are supposed to be. Obviously, if a significant portion of readers only read "copied" versions of my book, I'd be a little pissed. But guess what? Fans of mine (I can only wish to have fans one day) are GOING to buy the book because they know that, if they don't, there won't be a second one.

And guess what? As an artist, I'd rather give my work away FREE to a million people than require EVERY reader to have legally purchased a copy. That situation reeks of thought-police and big brother on a corporate scale.

 

[billd91]

I am a Spanish citizen, so what I do from Spain is under Spanish laws.

I know USA has stricter rules and it is NOT encouraging innovation and creativity. Copyright was born to encourage the spreading and expanding of culture. Ironic, isn't it?

Actually, by treaty I believe, copyright law is governed by the country where the copyright is held. That's why a lot of technical and scientific journals are published out of Switzerland, where the copyright law is stricter on fair use than it is in the US.

In fact, fair use is one area where US copyright law shines compared to many others. Our definition of that is pretty broad and designed to enable review, parody, and education. And it works quite well for that.

The problem with intellectual property laws, in the US at least, is their relationships with corporations. IP laws designed to protect an author's (or creator's) right to profit from the work can have the effect of suppressing creativity that they weren't originally intended to have because large corporations have longevity and political influence far beyond that of small publishers and individual authors. Mickey Mouse should have been public domain by now but the Disney Corporation and a compliant congress have extended the IP laws so that Disney can retain exclusive control of their signature icon. And they'll probably extended it again right before he comes up for public domain, all of this long after the Mouse's creator is long dead.

 

[Vorhaart]

Actually, no, you don't.

Legally, the company you paid for has an obligation to ship you the product by a given date; if they fail to meet that obligation, you have the legal right to demand your money back. There's no law I know of which states, "If you pre-order a book, the minute you pay you're entitled to aquire it by any means." Please remember, the people you bought the book from aren't the copyright holders. You may have bought the books from Amazon, but when you download them, you violate the copyrights held by WOTC. How does your purchase from Amazon give you legal authority to violate WOTC's copyrights?

I agree, such a law would likely be almost impossible to enforce in any practical manner. However, downloading electronic versions of the books that you own the physical copyright to is a sticky legal issue. For the uninitiated, it is known as format shift or fair use ; the same loophole that lets you copy music you have on CD to an MP3 player. Or record TV programs to a VCR/DVR.

Perhaps I am ignorant of current jurisprudence on this matter. Links to relevant legal citations? I eagerly await the appropriate documentation for your interpretation of the law.

Actually, I am probably ignorant of current jurisprudence as well. As I search for some appropriate material, can you provide any that supports your own interpretation? Until we have some solid legal ground, I doubt we can get any useful dialogue going. Things seems to be devolving into more of a shouting match right now....

As I understand it though, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, copyright law in the US extends only as far as preventing distribution or displaying for-profit; merely obtaining something you own in a different media is not strictly illegal. So far, I attempting to slog my way through Section 107: Fair Use of the US Copyright Law. Can anyone provide courtroom examples?

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#107

In particular, note: "The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors."

Meanwhile, I'll have to put this in the same category as the "My lousy boss doesn't pay me enough, so it's alright to shoplift" legal theory. (A close cousin to "They have insurance, so, it's not really hurting anyone" and "Those big companies have more money than they need, anyway.")

Not to antagonize, but that's VERY much a strawman argument you have going right there. Nothing I said was even remotely similar to this. There is a very real and substantial difference between format shift and outright theft.

Also, to those accusing me of criminal behaviour and making generally insulting remarks (no names but you know who you are), I'd like to point out that no, I haven't downloaded the books and have no intention to. I'm presenting a scenario and making an argument for why it may not be "wrong". Nothing more.

The key phrase here is PREordered. It hasnt officially been released. Therefore, no, noone was really supposed to see it before the 6th. Just be patient.

Exactly. Patience is a virtue. I've got plenty to occupy the time, I'm just thinking out loud.

 

[mattdm]

I think people are tilting at a windmill. I don't think PDF versions of the books will hurt WotC's sales.

Bingo.

Amazon sales rank (in all books) for the core gift set before the leaked PDFs appeared: #7. Today: #5.

This was going to happen eventually (what with it being the 21st century and all), although the amount of time before the release date was a surprise.

How should WotC react? They should go back to the expressed plan of offering PDF editions of the book to anyone who has a hard copy for a couple of bucks. I'd pay it without blinking.

If you want PDFs alone with no printed books, say 75% of the cover price. I'd totally pay that for DM-oriented supplements where I prefer an electronic form anyway. (But D&DI is no good because, 1) no net on the MBTA and 2) goes away when you stop paying.)

 

[Lizard]

People would be welcome to tape my lessons and post them online, as long as I still got paid to teach them. My point is that knowledge requires SOME people to pay for its creation and distribution, but everyone who accesses that knowledge does not need to pay to do so.

How do you propose we decide which poor sucker gets stuck with the bill?

History shows that when everyone gets the benefit but only some do the work, eventually, the hard workers catch on that they're being scammed, and stop working so hard. This is why communism, whether on the large scale of the USSR or the small scale of hippie communes, collapses. This is why kibbutzes have gone toward market systems.

So a system based on some people paying while the majority doesn't will sputter along for a while, based on inertia, but one by one, the payers decide that they're tired of supporting the non-payers and drop out, or, more often, decide "I've paid enough -- someone else's turn!" and become non-payers. Then the pressure on the remaining payers increase, so they're more likely to drop out, and the cycle collapses.

We are in the VERY early part of the cycle -- there's still dupes out there who feel like they're being noble and heroic when they support an artist, even though others just take the work for free. They feel, "Hey, I'll pay for this book now, and someone else will pay for the next book, the writer makes enough to live off, and everyone's happy!" But with each iteration, more leech and fewer pay. The writer has less time to write because he needs to earn money from other projects. The people who supported him feel disgruntled because they were buying, in part, his future productivity. So with less promise of more material to come, they are less likely to pay for what IS produced, and, also, when there's a lot of existing material, people newly aware of the artists are more likely to consume what's already out there for "free" instead of paying for the new material when it's released.

Look at early factory productivity in the USSR, or the way kibbutzes worked in the first generation of Israel's existence, or the way most communes and utopian communities in America started (and this goes back to the 19th century, the hippies were followers and copycats). Then look at how they worked a decade, two decades, a generation later. Same pattern, over and over. We're in a real "up" part of the "free" content cycle. The crash is coming.

 

[Silverblade The Ench]

Marvel Comics has already done something similar to this. For, I think, $10 a month you can view all of Marvel's digital titles unlimited. They don't have all of their comics "scanned" into the system yet, but they have an impressive list of both new and old titles, and it grows daily. I'd have signed up if I weren't a DC man myself. The titles are viewed over the web, and can't be downloaded (unless some enterprising hacker has already gotten past this). I wonder how well this is working for Marvel? I would LOVE to see something similar integrated into the D&D Insider package, it would rock!

SImple answer to all this, isn't it?


For those who are big against anti-piracy, to the point they'd jail folk who aren't selling downloaded stuff (selling is, IMHO another matter), think on this:

Star Trek "replicators" were thought of as things not to be seen for centuries, or a joke, right?
yet today we've already got computer displays, voices and communicators as science fact, as Star Trek predicted (sort of).
By end of this century, we could have replicators.

Ever seen a 3d printer work? A design in digital 3d is used to make an object, say a car prototype model for wind tunnel testing. Initially incredibly expensive, improved technology has reduced prices, improved quality, I could now make a 3D model in Rhino, send it away, get a solid object back in a week for $150.
That's just plastic though.

By end of the century, you could have nano-replictors in your house.
You'd buy "designs", say, for your TV, no longer would you waste effort, fuel, warehouse space with goods, you'd just have raw materials and a machine that turns blueprints into finished goods, for real.

What does this mean for copyright?

Ok, if you go by the insane and sometimes illegal EULAs attached to software (go check them!), you, a real human being, would own NOTHING, all your stuff would be "licensed to you" by the blueprint maker..seriously, that's what they'd try and do, going by today's laws.

So, Human Beings would own nothing, corporations would own everything, you would exist on their sufferance.

Anyone think that's "good" ?
Hence we need ot trash our current ideas on copyright and IP, and come up with something much better, before we end up in trouble by sticking to foolish, old ideas.

You cannot own electrons or ideas, but folk deserve respect and payment for their work. Corporations are not real, I've never ever met one, they don't exist, they should never ever have rights beyond a Human Being.
Thus copyright, IP should be limited to actual people, NEVER ficticious business entities, and for a specific, short time, depending on nature of item.
More folk involved = less time copyright lasts, as it cannot be one person's sole effort in that case, their sole income.

I'd suggest something like 2 years for therapeutic drugs, but there after, for their natural lifespans, original creators still get some royalties. Drugs are too vital to let folk contorl them, it's life or death. Make the researchers get well paid, not the damned pharma companies.

Print 15 years for group, 30 years for individual, there after, they must always get a minimal royalty for any item sold, for their life times. Point being, to encourage use of their work, by preventing total domination of selling (by a publisher who may actually greatly reduce what the artist could earn), but ALWAYS respecting their effort.
better to make 1% of a million sales, than 10% of 10,000!

Or some such system. What we have now is actually dangerous , the RIAA and manipulations of the USA government by lobbyists for copyright groups, show this very serious danger to civil liberties.
Copying a book or music for non-profit use, sans national security, should NEVER get you jailed for goodness sake!

Encourage folk to buy pdfs instead, sell them cheap, it's only electrons and server maintenance for goodness sake, not very heavy books (requiring logging, bleaching, printing etc). Folk know that anyone selling a pdf at same price as a book is ripping them off, it's common sense, thus, they get angry: so don't do it! Sell pdfs cheap

Encourage honest, paying users, don't criminalize folk or get dangerously greedy. The Internet = vaslty greater opportuinities for sale and higher profit margins by/for artists themselves, big companies don't want that!

 

[billd91]

DVD sales dropped roughly 2% last year, which may seem like a small number but when you consider the amazing rate of growth that sector was showing not too long ago, it's a jarring change in direction.

Do the DVD sales figures include HD and Blu-ray sales? If they don't, the growth of those two formats (and now just growth of Blu-ray) could account for the change. What evidence was presented that digital piracy was the cause of the decline?

 

[JohnSnow]

The problem with intellectual property laws, in the US at least, is their relationships with corporations. IP laws designed to protect an author's (or creator's) right to profit from the work can have the effect of suppressing creativity that they weren't originally intended to have because large corporations have longevity and political influence far beyond that of small publishers and individual authors. Mickey Mouse should have been public domain by now but the Disney Corporation and a compliant congress have extended the IP laws so that Disney can retain exclusive control of their signature icon. And they'll probably extended it again right before he comes up for public domain, all of this long after the Mouse's creator is long dead.

This is horribly off-topic, but a fair number of legal problems were created by the Courts ruling that Corporations counted as "individuals" (including all the rights thereof) for legal purposes.

Corporations, which have no natural expiration date (unlike, say people), aren't subject to many of the "controls" that govern individual property, like inheritance tax and the like. However, they benefit from all the rights. This creates a skewed situation in many areas, not just intellectual property law.

Whether (or when) this will be altered, I have no idea.

 

[Novem5er]

You're engaging in an act of logical sophistry by talking about the difference between 1 person benefitting from a product and 10 people benefitting from the product. Since it's hard to say where you "draw the line" in that case, you're arguing that it's hard to say where to draw the line period.

To which I say: rubbish!

At the point at which you post a product online for anyone to use, we're not talking about the difference between 1 and 10 people benefitting. We're talking about the difference between 1 and THOUSANDS. At that point, I think we'd all agree that whatever line there is has been crossed.

Or are you telling me that it's "fair" for 9000 people to use the product as long as one of them paid for it? Really? Really?!

Under what theory is this right? I suppose the idea is that none of those 9000 would have paid for it, and so you're not actually costing anyone anything. And you know this for a fact, do you? Fine. Prove it and you won't go to jail.

Sorry, but people are just bending over backwards to try to find some justification for unethical behavior. And the point at which someone is trying to equate stealing music with freeing slaves, I think we're awfully close to Godwin's Law.

JohnSnow, I accept your opinion and I always value your posts. No hard feelings, on my part, for any of this.

That said, I think you're arguing against yourself now. You say it's okay to copy a couple pages or to let a few people benefit without having paid for it . . . because it's not hurting anyone? But you're saying that 9,000 downloads is NOT okay because . . . it surely IS hurting someone? You put that burden of proof on me, but isn't it the prosecution's job to provide evidence of guilt?

What if 9,000 downloads also meant 9,000 purchased core books? What if people who downloaded, out of curiosity, were never going to purchase it at all? How does one prove that downloads hurt sales by claiming it hurt "potential" sales?

No, if you read my other posts, I'm not claiming that we just spread free RPG books around the net, nor any other form of knowledge. What I'm saying is that any source of knowledge HAS to be financially supported, but by far fewer people than the number that actually benefit from that knowledge.

 

[Thasmodious]

Anti-piracy laws are not unjust. Being a buzzkill is not unjust.

It is many people's views, including mine, that the intellectual property laws in America are very unjust. They exist to enslave the creators, inventors, musicians and artists, exploit the consumer and protect the rights of the distributors. The creator doesn't own the property created, the company that distributes the property owns it. The creator has to actually give up their rights to it to the company that has print facilities and a distribution network. Ideas, information and art should belong to everyone, not to the distribution companies.

It's so messed up that not even the author or artist actually owns the intellectual property they create. You can create whatever you want. But if you want to actually make a living or have your work seen or heard (you know, in the sense that art elevates all of humanity), you have to sell your soul to some company who then owns the work you produce

User to user distribution is an expression of that viewpoint. Sure, most of the people who actually use such services to "get free stuff" don't think about that or care. But those who invented, support, and disseminate the technologies that make such networks viable very often do.

Funny how anyone who makes the claim "stealing is stealing" in regards to this issue never seems to consider the grossly inflated profits of the distribution companies that put out movies, music, video games, etc., to be theft.

That brings us to another ridiculous statement -

Also, morality and ethics are not subjective.

Of course they are. They can't be any other way. Subjectivity means that something is relative to the way it is perceived. Objective means that something is what something is, without the filer of perception. Morality is entirely an invention of humanity and cannot be viewed outside of that context. Therefore it is entirely subjective. Yes, we can all agree Hitler = bad. That doesn't make it objective. And no, Hitler didn't agree that Hitler = bad. Many of the Nazis working the camps didn't agree that what they were doing was bad. They felt it was justified. Just as there are many people today who feel it would be justified to exterminate all muslims. MOST of the world agrees that such a thing would be wrong, and not only wrong, but purely evil. But it is still, and can only be, a subjective evaluation.

Subjectively, many people view our archaic notions of property rights to be a moral evil. Like I said, I do. I want to see the people, the "consumers" (I hate that term) empowered - not the owner caste who want to control, exploit and profit from what everyone even reads, sees, hears, and enjoys.

(All that said, our hobby is different. Gamers make the products, gamers run the stores, gamers work and run the companies involved. It all kicks up to corporate overlords like Hasbro, sure, but the profits are a lot more slim than, say, the runaway gouging that takes place in music sales for example. If you play the game, support the game. If you use the services of a local game store, support the local game store. Paying for our D&D books comes pretty close to directly paying the creators of the works that we enjoy. The gaming market is one that is small enough, and specialized enough that the consumers really do exercise a degree of control on the market, rather than the Owner Caste. So support that, it's a rare thing in a real world capitalist market.)

-puts soapbox back in closet, goes back to reading .pdfs-