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Message: <blockquote data-quote="joethelawyer" data-source="post: 4745559" data-attributes="member: 55764">The more I think about this...The more I think about this, the more I am driven to a simple conclusion.  If you know that:1.  It's a stupid business decision to pull the pdf's---which is something any 12 yr. old can tell you; and2.  It's a PR debacle of legendary proportions; then3.  It must be the fault of the lawyers.I can imagine a situation where, for whatever reason, the illegal pdf's got onto the radar of some executive at WOTC or Hasbro.  Who knows, maybe he saw his kid downloaded a torrent of AD&D stuff onto the family computer.  He decided to make a big deal of it and calls a "Come to Jesus Meeting" of all involved.  A directive is given to make a stand and sue to put the fear of the law into these pirates.The lawyers get involved.  They start to consider the legal aspects of the case.  They see its a clear-cut win for them, assuming they can find the people that shared files.  However, they immediately see that the issue of damages is going to be a pain in the arse to prove.  In other words, how do you prove your losses?  How do you prove that every download was a lost sale?  Or was made by someone who didn't already have a copy of the book?Also, since the plaintiff, WOTC, has the duty to all they can to mitigate damages, could it be an offset to the damages awardd to WOTC if it is proven that WOTC's actions in making downloads available for download actually added to the illegal downloading of the files?  So if I'm the legal dept., the first thing I do is report up the chain of command that in order to mitigate damages, we need to stop selling the pdf's, so we can't be held to be at least partly at fault.  We need to make it look like we did all we could do to stop the illegal downloading of files.  That incudes not making high quality copies available for distribution. Otherwise, someone might be able to argue that prior to WOTC's making available high quality pdf's for download, the illegal pdf market was small.  Sure, you could find files out there, but the scan quality sucked. Only after WOTC started making these high quality scans available did the illegal pdf download market explode.  Therefore, a lot of the blame for the illegal downloads lies with WOTC themselves.Makes sense, right?The thing that is interesting is that the mitigation measures won't affect the pending lawsuit. They only affect suits going forward...which would mean there are more to come.Just a theory.</blockquote>

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