I don’t agree with your statement that “The greater the rate of pirated books, the less money RPG companies recoup for their efforts”. It assumes that everyone will have heard of the RPG anyway and that no one will ever buy a copy if they have access to a pirated copy. Neither of these things are true. Most of the people I know that pirate things online do so to test if they like them, if they do (and when they can afford to) they will buy them.

And I do believe in supporting the creation of art. Unfortunately, copyright interferes far more than it needs to for that. So much so that violating it has become the norm, reducing any support of the law to lip service. If I do follow it, it’s because of a personal decision, or the threat of someone with a gun.

Copyright is well intentioned but amoral. As a publisher, you have to work within the law, but don’t expect me to sit at the back of the bus.

Exploring alternate business models is critical. Stop treating everything people will do anyway as amoral and they might start caring again about obeying the law.

Batman: Arkham Asylum has a programmed bug that, in the cracked game, prevents Batman from doing the “jump-glide” maneuver, which is necessary to complete the game. The regular game works properly.

Now, could someone do this in PDF, perhaps with a few very incorrect stat-blocks? Or maybe a few pages of Lorem Ipsum? I dunno, but it’s worth looking into…

Piracy is wrong. Plain and simple. Yes, monopolies and ridiculous restraints on what you can do with media that you purchased are wrong too, but that doesn’t change the fact that piracy means you are stealing something that is not yours. That is why it is called piracy and not normalcy. Normalcy is “I paid others for the goods and services that they provided and that I want.” Piracy is “I steal what I want.”

Two wrongs don’t make a right. Especially since all of the materials that are normally pirated are for entertainment purposes and not necessary for survival. Boycotting anything produced by major studios and record labels, or big RPG companies, would have a much bigger impact than stealing their works. They’ll lower their prices in response to a boycott, and they’ll change their business strategies too. Against piracy they will just prosecute the offenders.

Excellent article! Great job!

The large companies (WotC) can afford to implement the measures that will reduce the impact of piracy, and their products will be sufficiently wide-spread that the percentage of people who do pay for these products will cover the cost of producing them. If we’re not conscientious of the impact that our money has on the industry, we’ll end up shooting ourselves in the gnomish foot.

I’m definitely glad to hear of the success that some people have had so far in implementing these new business models.

Right of First Sale cannot work the same for electronic media as it does for other media – the ability to mass produce copies breaks the system. If I share a copy of a book with a friend, I haven’t disrupted the producer’s ability to sell. If I make 300 copies of said book and hand them out, I’ve gravely disrupted said ability.

Piracy, in essence, punishes companies for widening their methods of distribution. Taken to its logical extreme, this can produce one of three results:

1) The company realizes the hit it is taking, decides it is costing more than it is worth, and digital distro stops.

2) The company decides the hit is worth the exposure but the lost revenue reduces the number of products they would otherwise have produced.

3) The company doesn’t realize how much revenue is lost, plans go awry, and gamers lose that company altogether.

“you have to justify your beliefs so as to explain away the inalienable right of those who produce a good or service to provide it to others at any terms they see fit”

You call it a doozy, and you’re not wrong. However, that is not the current state of affairs for many industries — particularly the music industry, which historically has been the primary target of piracy thanks to the broad market and convenient digital formats available.

In the music industry, the huge expense of recording music, transferring it to physical media and distributing it to stores made recording labels the dominate player in the music industry. If you view the goods as being that physical media — the records, tapes and CDs — then the record company is the producer of the goods. If you see the music as the goods, then it is not.

When it comes to an MP3, that record label is certainly not the producer of the goods. The musicians who create the music are. Because they are used to their position of power, and their traditional stranglehold over the production of the media allowed them to force musicians to sign away the rights to their music, the record companies are fighting a war against piracy that many of the content creators do not want to see fought. They still believe that the musicians work for them, though we are not far from the day in which it is the other way around (if the labels manage to continue to exist in their present form at all).

This is not to say you’re wrong, but to point out that the real situation is much more complex than your statement makes it out to be. Additionally, the situation varies greatly from industry to industry, despite the one-size-fits-all approaches to piracy which are generally seen. For instance, my above argument would not seem to hold at all for the movie industry. Writing roleplaying games is an entirely different kettle of fish as well.

Secondly, I am uncertain on your insistence that downloading the PDF of a RPG that has been out of print for 10 years is wrong.

While it may technically be illegal, before the Internet allowed for content to be sold absent a medium, we did not pay for content. We paid for the material goods.

We bought CDs, not music. DVDs, not movies. And so on.

The cost of a book or CD did not depend on the quality of the material within, but the cost to produce, ship and shelve the physical material. The content was free.

This is why we are free to buy second-hand books. The first purchaser has (presumably) already read them. In a content-based model, they should not be able to sell it (or lend it) to a second person who ALSO gets to read the book without further compensation to the creator of the work. And if it is sold second-hand, why is the price reduced?

If a work was published and printed under these assumptions, and there are no future sales are not going to be undermined by the free PDF, it is hard to see the wrong in it. The publisher never expected to profit from the content, and they are not harmed by the download.

To me the recent Paizo’s marketing of Pathfinder was very similar to Flint’s model. They provided the beta version for free and those that liked it went on to buy PDFs or Hardcovers of the final product (And many other products). My guess is that they gained far more sales by providing “free material” than they lost.

This is unofficially the way that many game developers used to model their business, fansites, homebrew, and developmental community were encouraged and sometimes actively fostered.

I am very happy to see that someone has picked up the torch…

Also thanks for the name – the game looks like a good read.

What concerns me mostly with online sales is the heavily rights managed products that are being produced. I believe in the right of first sale – having purchased this product I should be able sell, trade, or give it away as I see fit. I understand that with the proliferation of electronic copies and how easily they are reproduced some system of control is needed but its clear the distribution model hasn’t matured enough to address this issue fairly.

Ill freely admit to downloading copies of games prior to purchase to asses my desire to buy, and I always buy the games/products I play with – that doesnt make it legal or “right”, but I can honestly say I buy more now, being able to asses my satisfaction with a product more thoroughly then If I was browsing the pages in a book store. Also I “pirate” PDF copies of anything I do own and use, print them landscape, 2 up and double sided so I have a rough copy I can make notes on and mark up. Some publishers give you the rights to make copies for personal use, which is fair, some don’t.
This in many ways doubles the value I received for this book, making it more useful.

The issue wont go away overnight, and the internet and “piracy” is here to stay. Businesses will need to adapt, hopefully they will see the correlation between customer satisfaction and the bottom line while drafting policies and banging on their lawyers doors…

I’m guessing Eclipse Phase is a derivative of this – selling the PDF and the book, but also hosting the “pirate” torrent and licensing the whole thing under Creative Commons.

“Wrong” is subjective; we each have a different definition of it. Piracy may be wrong.

“Illegal” is pretty well established. Yes, it may be a moving target in some cases, but it doesn’t move terribly fast. Piracy is illegal.

Each gamer (heck, each person) has to select their own level of comfort with piracy, and be prepared to take the full consequences of their actions. Don’t blame capitalism, society, or copyright laws for the consequences of your actions.

I’m very keen on the development and large-scale application of the Ransom Model for web-based distribution, because it does seem to counteract any standard claims of piracy. Of course, the problem with the RM is that you need to be an established designer FIRST, or at the very least be amazing at drumming up buzz for your product.

I’m not a prude by any means. I’ve got a few pirated movies or series that are out of print and unavailable . I’ve got a collection of old PDFs for out of print RPG books. I’ve also got a lot of music that came from CDs I own that I’ve ripped to my computer. These have all been called piracy. The thing I don’t have is materials that I’ve gotten just because I don’t want to pay for them.

Since the RPG industry is made up of so many fragile companies that relay on meager sales to stay in business, I like to purchase things and keep these companies afloat. Like small bands, and like you mentioned in the article, they are turning to alternate business models, which is awesome. People are realizing that there are multiple new means of distributing their materials and making a profit and that the new technologies aren’t inherently bad. While copying and distributing a PDF isn’t taking money out of a publisher’s pocket, it is making an impact as a possible lost sale.

Excellent Article!