NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Miyaa" data-source="post: 4747405" data-attributes="member: 7016">Just curious, did Wizards of the Coast take over the copyright from TSR for their 1st and 2nd editions? If I recall correctly, copyrights have a shelf-life of about fifty years, meaning something published originally in the 1970's have until 2020 before their copyright date expire.I will agree that piracy is a big deal strictly on the issue of copyrighting infringement alone. And while what the RIAA attempted to do became essentially a Sisyphus task, they did what they had to do. The internet has turned out to be really hard to make a profit except for a very select band of companies (Apple, Google, maybe Amazon, the MMORPG group).One minor thing I have heard is that the piracy allows access to materials that you might not be able to get to from paid sources. I heard someone complain that is the problem with Napster. You don't have that problem with Apple's iTunes, where anything can be found at inexpensive prices that makes it more likely to be swayed from the sirens of the pirates.Piracy is a lot like getting repair parts for your car from the junkyard. It's used, maybe not as high quality as you might get from your quality (insert car brand here) dealership, but you might get the selection that maybe more suitable to your problem. And it's much cheaper than having to deal with your dealership. But you could also be getting a piece that was just as defective, if not more so than the problem piece you have in the car already.And here lies the problem with Wizard's and the pdfs. If they didn't charge full price for a pdf as they did for the book, they might have had more buyers of the pdf, and less of a piracy threat. But, because they didn't want to diminish the physical book market (i.e. Amazon, the local gaming store, etc.), they kept the rates the same, which they didn't need to since the RPG gaming market is such a niche market made up of a majority of fanatics who will buy the book and buy the pdf.I think Ryan Delancy was right about Wizards as a business being in a death spiral. The only difference between it and TSR is that it has an even bigger entity in Hasbro with them, and it is a matter of time where either Wizards becomes either an appendix and thus completely useless, or is spun off before hand by Hasbro. Either way this is finalized before it minimizes the profits that Hasbro could potentially receive if it weren't in their umbrella of brands.</blockquote>

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