Unearthed Arcana 3.5....where besides Kazaa?

[Henry]

It think a more apt one would be "If a person walks into a store and takes a photograph of a newspaper, then tosses out the photgraph without "reading" it, is it still theft?".

That's just as inaccurate, because a photo of a newspaper is not the article in question, either - it is a flawed copy with ostensibly no value (you could read the heeadline, and maybe some of the first page, but that's it) - it's not the equivalent product that they are selling.

But the stuff you can get from file sharing IS equivalent product - in many cases (like downloadable PDF's), it's the SAME product that the vendor is offering, byte for byte.

And though I think you meant the next bit rhetorically, your question "does that inventory still need to be written off by said store?" is answered with a deifinite "no", as the seller was not deprived of any product.

The physical inventory in my example WAS taken, and needs to be written off.

At this point, a vendor of an electronic product cannot legally write off illegally copied inventory because the only protection he has is copyright law, enforced through the publisher - but the revenue of the license he distributes is deprived of him just the same. "Never would have bought it anyway" does not make sense to me, because if he never would have bought it, he wouldn't have the product then, would he? Yet here our hypothetical downloader is, complete with his copy of the work!

It's still a loss by the vendor of said product, no matter what specific laws it falls under. I was referring to Amal Shukup's point that it should not be counted as a loss, because the downloader wouldn't have purchased anyway. Something WAS taken, even if it's not a tangible product - it was a license to use said product, taken without just compensation.

Fine, copyright infringement it is, to be accurate. Legally, it's infringement. Ethically, it's theft.

Personally, i'd be a very happy camper if many publishers offered their text products in PDF format, because an electronic copy would be handy to me for reference. But if they don't, they don't, and I have to live with it.

 

[Calico_Jack73]

They don't, because they're not responsible for what users do with their protocols.

Why can't the courts see the similarity between this and gun manufacturers? Neither industry should be held responsible for what users do with their product.

 

[Nifelhein]

Kenji shows some quite good law knowledge, not the legal stuff and text in itself but the very thing that make any law legitimate in the first case, I totally agree, if there is a law forbidding something that is common practice it is certainly not a law anymore, only rigid and dogmatic people would stand that point of view and that has made many dictatorships in the 20th century.

On blaming oneself for not owning a copy of the original product of Microsoft, yes, I do say I don't, it is common here in Brazil, even companies don't buy it and most stand out of the law, they would try and make sure the law is followed but that would be a waste, else companies are shifting their systems to Linux... To know the extense of the problem, you usually buy computers with Windows and Office in it, all are illegal copies though.

LightPhoenix,

I did not want to say it was less i9llegal, I wanted to say that the problem is a lot deeper than it is said here and that we are debating just a small portion of the problem, sure my examples are not P2P, they were not when I wrote them, what I poinetd out was that if the products prices were closer to the reality of the common user/ customer and that the publishers/ producers offered differentials to what one can easily have, most people would indeed get a copy of the original thing.

The pdfs are a interesting move in rpgs because the price is much closer to what one can actually afford to pay, that said, I think I would not get a pdf product illegaly when I cqan buy it for 3 or 5 at rpgnow or some other store, suporting the producer/ writer and artists is always a concern I have.

Sure some people do not behave that way, I cannot take the blame for those kind of people though, but while some people have said that the weapon maker thing was dumb, in fact it stands very well in a legal statement, P2P will never be illegal in itself and all those who have Kazaa installed on their systems here are possible co-authors in any crime if you would like to stand that point of view, after all, P2P work by having super nodes and any user can mark that damn box to be one, thus helping all those who commite crimes.

OGL is free, none needs to have the book to use it or have it, if they would release their pieces that way P2P would surely not die but I do think that the customers would be much more surprised, not a single company of rpg producing has made that move I stated and I can say that is just plain silly, I think doing it would surely not hurt their busniness more than the P2P does, in fact I believe it would make a very important distinction, the product itself must be more than a single work that is released as OGL. Consider the SRD, for instance, you can have it for free but when you actually get the book you see that you clearly get a much superior product, they use the same base though.

The actual legal term, whether theft, copyright infringement is of less importance too, illegal it surely is. The root of copyright is to protect the original author and make sure he got paid by those who use it, if the copyright law can be changed in such a way as to make the author still be payed and to allow people to share files, I thinkw e can have the optimum way of doing things.

My example of Windows was intended to show that while we have someone who we like to protect things are one way but it surely turns against Microsoft most of the time, I doubt any other product is used in such an extense with illegal copies as Windows and Microsoft Office is.

If Windows and Office would not cost that much or they had a free version and a differential vesion for paying customers, they could have less illegal use, I believe, I would have the freee one, that is for sure, I hate illegal use and that is just what I would be looking for, now to pay a hundred dollars for a copy of a software that has thousands of problems, that we have no support for and that we will have to buy again in a few years, no that is not something I would be doing... ever.

 

[Breakdaddy]

Personally, i'd be a very happy camper if many publishers offered their text products in PDF format, because an electronic copy would be handy to me for reference. But if they don't, they don't, and I have to live with it.

No sir, you CHOOSE to live with that. Other people choose to steal from the publishers without any moral concern or reimbursement to those that put forth the hard work to bring you a product. This gets under my skin badly, but if people dont open their eyes and see that piracy is the regional equivalent of taking cash right out of the creator's pockets, then their will be an even greater deficit of quality products in our beloved hobby. So buy the books, and maybe they will keep making them for us.

 

[Nifelhein]

Why can't the courts see the similarity between this and gun manufacturers? Neither industry should be held responsible for what users do with their product.

Here in Brazil they would, else they would be creating a very problematic standard that they could not keep for long and still have a legal security in the system itself...

The creators are not criminals, much like the weapon makeers aren't, that scientists can't be blamed for the atomic bomb or any biological weapon, sometimes it can be said otherwise but doing so wo make the whole thing come down on any producer... a bad idea on any standard.

 

[kenjib]

Maybe, to a degree. I think more likely is that the early days of both computing and the huge internet bubble inadvertantly trained the populace to expect all online content should be free and then they got ticked off when it was suggested that that should not be the case (after companies found out you could not, after all, make any cash from 'eyeballs'). I suspect another 'shift' about the pricing (or existance) of online content is on the way and it probably won't be a very pleasent one.

You're looking at internet sharing as a utility using old economic models, and by doing so I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding what the internet is. The old model is Produce > Distribute > Consume = profit. In this models producers/distributors and consumers are completely seperate entities with defined roles, and the consumer is a passive entity. That is not how the internet works. Every consumer is also a producer. All you need to do is put some files out there. Peer to peer only takes advantage of this fundamental principle of the architecture of the internet in a very efficient manner. The idea of peer to peer was fundamental to internet architecture before the the advent of file sharing clients. It *is* the internet. The internet is decentralized and peer to peer technology does not require that anyone makes money off of it to distribute efficiently.

This is another battle being fought with the potential of severely impeding some of the best potential benefits of this new technology through short sightedness. Most traditional model corporations don't like people directly sharing content. They want to artificially prevent consumers from becoming producers by creating legal barriers. Essentially they are trying to use legal means to inject themselves as a bottleneck into what is fundamentally an open-ended process. The motive behind this is clear enough. By hosting and sharing information, thus utilizing networking exactly as it is intended to be utilized, consumer-producers are a direct threat to their obsolete business model.

 

[kenjib]

At this point, a vendor of an electronic product cannot legally write off illegally copied inventory because the only protection he has is copyright law, enforced through the publisher - but the revenue of the license he distributes is deprived of him just the same. "Never would have bought it anyway" does not make sense to me, because if he never would have bought it, he wouldn't have the product then, would he? Yet here our hypothetical downloader is, complete with his copy of the work!

The rest of your argument seems to pivot around this brushing off of "never would have bought it anyway," so I'll address this one. You don't own a $500,000 limited edition luxury car, correct? Now let's say you were able to obtain such a car for free by copying someone else's. Of course you'd take it (the legality of the transaction is not at issue here - since that part of the equation has already been answered at this point). That doesn't mean that you would have bought it for $500,000. In fact, you might not even have any real use for it - you've already got a decent car - but at that price you can grab it and not worry about whether you need it or not. It's a simple enough principle.

If the downloader had to pay for the product, it would not be sitting on his hard drive. That's the simple solution to your supposed conundrum.

Okay, you say, but I simply can't afford that kind of 1/2 mil price range, so that's a different case. In that case simply scale down the example until you find your breaking point - a $100 jar of caviar, a $200 kitchen knife, a large wide screen TV, an armani suit, $50 for Conan RPG. Everyone has a point at which this principle applies.

Fine, copyright infringement it is, to be accurate. Legally, it's infringement. Ethically, it's theft.

No, they are factually different. In theft, the object clearly *transfers* ownership improperly. In copyright infringement, the object is copied, and both parties retain a copy. This is a fundamental difference that should be kept clear, regardless of how bad a crime you feel that copyright infringement is - and you are certainly entitled to feel that it is a bad crime.

The way you feel, a more accurate statement with similar intent would be: "Ethically, it's just as bad as theft."

 

[kenjib]

If the downloader had to pay for the product, it would not be sitting on his hard drive. That's the simple solution to your supposed conundrum.

I should qualify this by saying that this is only a percentage of downloaders. Some of them would have paid for it and do represent lost revenue, it is true. The point is that there is no 1-to-1 correlation between lost sales and illegal copies. The relationship is much more murky than that and it varies from case to case.

 

[Dingleberry]

"The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly."

-Abraham Lincoln

 

[Nifelhein]

I should qualify this by saying that this is only a percentage of downloaders. Some of them would have paid for it and do represent lost revenue, it is true. The point is that there is no 1-to-1 correlation between lost sales and illegal copies. The relationship is much more murky than that and it varies from case to case.

Yes, that is true, as the actual amount of money they would be willing tpo pay would vary a lot, I rarely get pdf products myself but if I would download it from Kazaa for use and it was available for U$5, then I would go and pay for it, that is a price I can pay anyway, and it supports authors and artists... the conscience is something that can change that a lot...

As a side note, I think that this can be a bigger problem when your children or your brother's or friends' are actually being raised doing the downloads and never worrying about it, if you educate them you have a good possibility of having more people like me and ssquirrel, for instance.