RPG Illegal File Sharing Hurts the Hobby

[Klaus]

Just to point out something, as I think some have misunderstood my point about downloading tv. When I download tv, it is not a dvd rip - it comes from a TiVo box I assume, broadcast over a network already. When I do, I have already paid for a pre-order of said dvd. I do not rip dvd's. I want to pay for my quality sci-fi tv - I just don't see why I have to wait 9 months to see it. If I have pre-ordered a dvd, and money has changed hands, then who can say I do not own any eps I may have downloaded off it?

Anyway.....

Aramis:

Before WWI American and European corporations routinely ignored patent law. Companies such as Siemens, Ford, DuPont etc would not necessarily be what they are without breaking IP.

I absolutely resent the fact that certain companies have patented MY dna. Know also that British Telecom filed a patent for the hyperlink in the 70's. Do you really want to have to pay a fee for every link in your website? Many patents are spurious - it's just that the little man can't afford to test them. Legitimate patents are 'stolen' by large companies off small companies that can't afford to take them to court. The idea that patent law is fair and equitable is faintly ludicrous.

Copyright is a different matter. Does anybody ever download pictures from the net, or recieve them in emails from friends, such as badly parked planes, cranes in harbours etc etc. Well, they're all copyrighted material. As soon as a picture is taken it is the copyright of the photographer. Even if it is he who puts the pic online, it is still his copyright, whether it has a little © or not. Yet it is shared all over the web, from inbox to inbox, and thats all fine. If someone decides to charge for it, put it on a pay website, or enter it in competition as theirs, then that is breach of copyright, and wrong

Copying for fair use as a back-up is still legal in Europe. My BSG dvd box and my BSG limewire downloads are legal together. I own the right to that.

Taking the idea that everyone should pay for all the culture they witness/consume to extreme, I should really charge anyone who likes listening to my CD's when they come round. After all, I paid for it!

Compression is NOT encryption. It is encoding. Those lawyers are wrong. You can have encrypted and unencrypted dvds.

Filesharing and downloading is not a black and white issue.

 

[aramis]

Patents, fortunately, are of limited duration, and not readily renwable.

Copyright is of far less limited duration.

Case in point: .GIF encoding is protected under lempel ziv and weller's crytopgraphic works under copyright, as it includes LZW encryption as its compression routine. They are one field, with differing applications, academically.

The .gif patent was found to have infringed said copyright. Much legal wrangling. Net result, Compuserve wound up having to de-open-license the .GIF standard, and LZW get something like a quarter for each encoder.

Fair Use used to be enshrined in the US copyright laws, as recently as 1991, when I first did research on it in college. Fair use for music meant many things. For written music, it was explicit on backups. You could make one photocopy for each purchased copy, no more, and could use either the copy or the original, but the other had to be secured and unused, and all copies needed to be collected, and preferably destroyed, after use, by the person owning the purchased copies.

The concept of copyright is simple: You buy the media, but you never buy the information, only access to it.

And, until last couple years, US copyright required notice; no notice, no copyright. A hand-copyright expired after 2 years; it could be renewed only by revision or registration. Either DMCA or one of the other recent acts changed that.

That is NOT, to my mind, as a composer, a good thing, either.

Likewise, relatively recently, a chap was arrested for distribution of material taped off of TV. He's serving 2 years for distribution of stolen property, and violation of the DCMA: VHS is different encoding than NTSC, and requires specific hardware to access the data: A VHS VCR, instead of an NTSC VHF Tuner.

For wrong or right, that is the standard in use in the federal courts of the US 9th circuit: Is it inherently human readable AS IS.

Klaus: I consider what you're doing fair use, but the taped from broadcast exception was written OUT of the law. (Cable never has been covered by it; cable is not Broadcast TV.)

Germany's had "copyright since conception" for years; it's new to the US. It is also, IMO, a bad idea: it stifles creativity. It also means that, if, inadvertantly, I teach using someone else's words, then I am infringing upon their copyright. It falls into the area of comunications privacy, and definitions of fair use.

Gnusam's not advocating for fair use, he's advocating for intellectual property anarchy, a very different set of results.

IP's NEED to expire!!! Copyright and Patent should expire in a reasonable time: 20 years would be a good benchmark, with renewal to life of originating natural person of registration. Patents should be limited to a generation: say, 20 years for most things, 10 for electronics, 5 for medicines and softwares.

Trademarks are also IP. They, too, should expire.. upon the death of the holder or the non-use for 20 years...

Unfortuneatly, Expiry for all is much less regularized. Big Buisiness can, will, and is lobbying for longer IP times. In all categories. This is bad.

But IP anarchy is worse: It says that nothing intagible is worth anything. Gnusam's postulations, taken to full extent, devalue Bach, Beethoven, Beldon, and Hostman all to nothing more than the paper the collected works thereof are written upon... putting 2000 hours of my life down to a ream of paper. The same for the guys at ID, Nintendo, Atari, and more.

And it's Nintendo who's sued to keep a non-current game OFF the nets, specifically so that it had value for nostalgia editions. Zelda, and others, produce more value in collection editions than people expect, and having the software available elsewhere does lower demand.

 

[Klaus]

You're absolutely right. Copyright and IP laws are fairly inadequate, and will get more so as we get more connected. The corporations seem to be responding with an IP landgrab. I really fear that in the near future they'll have use continually paying for our music/film collections, renting our culture, and that is intolerable.

The terms you suggest are perfectly reasonable, yet big money wants 99 years. I also think copyright should not be transferable, merely licencable, so that the actual creator retains control. If this were the case it would be possible for Firefly to return our tv screens.

I feel the issue of rights management software is a bit of a non-starter too, especially music. So even if I've downloaded my song from iTunes and burnt it on the 7 cds I'm allowed to do, I could still play it off say my xBox back into my laptop thru the audio in, technically without bypassing any encryption, and end up with a 'clean' version. And unlike breaking rm software, it's pretty simple. So whats the point in it?

 

[Kyron]

Originally posted by Captain Zoom:
Andrew, you are probably safe from the DMCA when viewing unencrypted PDFs:

From the DMCA:

a) Violations Regarding Circumvention of Technological Measures. - (1)(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

Just fyi the DMCA is a US Law and not a universal one. It is therefore not applicable around the world. Some lawyers do forget that.

 

[kafka47]

I agree with some of the sediments above. But, unless games manufactures issue tons of free material, I cannot see file sharing really stopping. Just like in the past, we, poor students used photocopies of things and scrumped and saved then eventually the game was within our purchasing power we actually bought it. Parallel markets for PDFs have to be created but not producing paper only encourages a certain amount of desire for more. So if gaming companies want to stop file sharing produce more high quality items that gamers will not want to take apart to scan because it is too valuable. But, produce low quality stuff either in print and pdf, then people will file share. Gresham's law of money does apply here as well.

 

[Klaus]

Curious thought. Years ago I bought alot of Star Frontiers stuff, then lost it, or it was nicked etc etc. I recently found a site with alot of it on in pdf (alot was in html too), downloaded a couple of modules for nostalgia's sake. Now, since that back in the day I have already paid money for it, and there are no purchasable downloads, have I done a bad thing? Also consider WOTC has offered tons of the TSR back catalogue for free download on their site (but unfortunately no Star Frontiers).

 

[aramis]

WOTC used to point to a couple of those sites... pre hasbro, post TSR; that is about as close to permission as you're going to find.

If alternity had survived, I suspect the next setting would have been a single-boook Star Frontiers; they'd been doing the needed work and sliding somme out for testing. One article even provided the core races in alternity format.

But it's pretty clear that they are not pursuing those sites, as WOTC's been aware of the content for almost a decade now.