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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4746457" data-attributes="member: 2067">I like this idea, but I keep seeing parallels to prohibition rather than Civil Rights. File trading is probably, morally speaking, on par with drinking alcohol. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> This is, to my mind, more about the state (and several industries) ignoring the need for change, turning huge swaths of the population into criminals. Most files traded are like bathtub hooch sold out of speakeasies. Which makes this, in my mind, more of a civil thing than a moral thing. Any law that causes a huge percentage of the population to be outlaws is probably a bad law, in need of change to mirror the way society actually behaves rather than how entrenched industries would like it to behave. Rather than using the law to change people, I'd like to see people changing the law. Yes, I drank before I was 21. Yes, I usually go about 5 MPH above the speed limit. Yes, I have partaken of illegal drugs. Personally, I don't think this makes me inherently immoral as a person, or even much of a poor citizen. IP laws have deeper roots and more ramifications, and what might someday replace them hasn't emerged yet, but in the next 50 or so years, I'd say that the idea that you can make a tidy profit selling copies is going to become an antiquated idea, by and large. Whether this is overall something positive or negative, it's hard to say. I'm probably not a huge fan of replacing the movie industry with YouTube, but I'm not about to go insane with the idea that file trading must be stopped, either. It's speeding and underage drinking and marajuana and pornography. It might not be especially GOOD, but it isn't going away, and you won't be able to legislate it out of existence. I don't really think any of those things are inherently immoral either (speeding probably comes the closest, as it has actual risk to human life involved in it). Your best bet, usually, is to trump the pirates on convenience and reliability of your own products: deliver what people want in an easy and timely fashion and at a good price. Which is why the DDI Compendium is a genius idea, and that making it better will only reduce the pirating. Which is also why selling PDFs for $30 and removing the sale of PDFs isn't going to curb the thing much. You can probably make a profit this way, but whether or not you can make increasing profit, year after year, that meets bean-counter expectations...that's probably sketchier, because Six Sigma doesn't account for cultural sea change in its management strategies.</blockquote>

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