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D&D Handbook Distribution Lawsuit Settled For $125,000
The Installer writes "Wizards of the Coast is in the process of settling its claim against several individuals for illegal distribution of its newest copyrighted handbook. 'In one of three lawsuits brought by Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro Inc., US District Judge Thomas S. Zilly on Friday accepted a settlement in which Thomas Patrick Nolan of Milton, Fla., agreed to a judgment against him of $125,000.' These were the lawsuits that went along with WotC's decision to stop selling the handbook in .PDF format. 'According to court filings, more than 2,600 copies of the handbook were downloaded from Scribd.com, and more than 4,200 copies were viewed online before the material was pulled from the document-sharing site at Wizards' request.'"
Because this is news for NERDS. Stuff that MATTERS! Seriously, you need to wash the troll stank off yourself and get out. Nerd news is nerd news. Why do you think this article is in its own section?
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Free advice: do not address Judge as Dungeon Master. IANAL.
I always knew Wizards of the Coast wasn't too great - they've cheapened tabletop gaming to an almost insane degree and discouraged many people from playing... but suing gamers? From my experience, I've found that when most people start out, they aren't too sure about what to get and tend to borrow or download materials. Gamers who have been playing a long time will usually buy handbooks, custom dice sets, player figurines, etc. So basically, WotC is driving away NEW players with this - and people wonder why tabletop gaming is getting stale and too introverted for its own good? To provide a comparison - imagine if there was a company from the mainframe days which created the first operating systems, and copyrighted the hell out of them. Now imagine that almost every other operating system was derivative from those original ones. This means that everyone would essentially be enslaved to that company, and to get freedom they would have to start from scratch, and couldn't use any of the ideas and refinements that that company had used.
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It's not really clear what you're asking but this matters on non-nerd levels aside from beloved nerd game's mired history of legal action becoming even more mired. In my opinion, something needs to be done about consumer awareness when purchasing digital editions of songs, movies, books, photographs and digital art in general. All too frequently we purchase things without really understanding what exactly it is we are purchasing. This court case may just be another case of piracy but what sparked it is -- again, in my opinion -- an omen of a landslide of similar digital rights revocation. Because customers don't understand what their rights are and almost always wording is put into the agreement, terms of service or license text that gives the company complete authority to terminate your right to enjoy that piece of work whenever they want, even iTunes Music Service has this.
Basically what we're looking at is a future where if any of those content providers starts to do badly in the market and they're offering digital works of their cash cows, they will terminate those licenses. They will blame piracy. While it may never be clear why they started losing money, it won't matter. They'll be sitting with their fingers on a reset switch that will only work once that will theoretically boost sales again. Now, that's laughable when you look at how they can enforce that unless they have a draconian DRM scheme in place. But the simple fact of the matter is that I want the same exact rights to digital content that I received with a good old fashion book or I'll pay the premium for the book. Those rights are simple: lifetime rights for myself to enjoy that work digitally in an open fashion on a number of third party devices. I have yet to see this in any of my perusals of online publishing. Digital publishing licenses are a very sorry state of affairs right now which is sad because it has such liberating potential for the consumer.
My work here is dung.
Well, if you do actually want to get nerdy about it.. Wizards of the Coast is the most "evil" company for roleplaying. Their games and rules bring down the other, actually great, games down to something like Wii level. And now they're suing publishers who sell their handbooks for a reason I still dont understand. Most people getting into roleyplaying actually would *want* to get those. So what is the reason to ban the sales?
Because they're selling pirated copies of the handbook, which is the problem. Its not that sales of the handbook are banned, but buying a PDF from some dude who made one without authorization is pretty much a crime, like the counterfeit dvd factories in Hong Kong, not the dude sharing over bittorrent for free. But, oh yeah, this is Slashdot -- home of the FOSS zealot -- fans of a system which lives or dies by copyright, but to whom copyright is anathema.
The reason is that they fucked up their model.
DnD 3.0 (and really, the fixes in 3.5) were a way of taking all the organically grown rules from the previous editions, making it simpler, and then putting the game back together in a reasonably streamlined process. They opened up the core rules as an SRD, so you could run the game with no money down. The SRD didn't have all the rules, monsters, or flavour text, but it had the core rules.
The problem came from splat books. Anyone could write a book, and there were some terrible ones. You could combine the books and make ridiculously powerful characters. More to the point, WotC didn't get the money for lots of those books.
Along comes 4th edition. It took everyone by surprise. One day, they put it up on their website with no notice to game stores or players, lots of whom had amassed thousands of dollars of these splat books. Money that wasn't going to Hasbro.
WotC split up the core rules into a clever scheme wherein you couldn't get along with just one book. They put some characters in one book, others in another, and put out extra books that had parts for both characters. If you have a party with a bard and a paladin, you would have to have:
1. Player's Handbook (paladin)
2. Player's Handbook 2 (bard)
3. Martial Power (paladin supplementary)
4. Divine Power (paladin supplementary)
5. Arcane Power (bard supplementary)
6. Player's Handbook 1 miniatures
7. Player's Handbook 2 miniatures.
8. Subscription to D&D insider at $15/month. (Dragon Magazine has extra rules and benefits for players)
This is for a game that's been out for about a year, and that's JUST FOR THE CORE RULES FOR TWO CHARACTERS. This doesn't include the DMG 1 & 2, MM 1 & 2, maps, figures, etc.
For some _unimaginable_ reason, people said "WTF is this shit?" and just grabbed the torrents for the books. While they were still printing the PDFs, it was incredibly easy to just pack them up as a torrent and share. Now it takes an extra day with a flatbed scanner. Well, it does make for slightly larger files, but that's about it.
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On one side of the coin, I understand and agree how you could come to your opinion RE: the direction Hasbro is taking.
On the other side of the coin, knowing the history of all the companies that have been behind D&D since it started, I have to think this is simply a rinse and repeat cycle that's been happening since the first edition and spats between Gygax, Arneson, and the Blumes.
This is a franchise run by people that have always been willing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory whenever someone in charge wakes up and gets greedy. It just seems to be in genes.
It looks like the pen and paper RPG-market is plummeting right now. That is bad new for me as a customer, because I really enjoy playing D&D. and I want to be able to buy new and exiting products in the future..
I personally hope that Hasbro makes enough money to keep making new D&D products, and I don't support sharing their stuff illegally over the internet.
So court procedure and etique is more important than things like the law.
The main reason this was done was to protect the fact that Wizard's is spending most of its energy focusing on its online product. Ebooks are a direct competitor to their fee-charging online service.
When they only release a decent amount of content for players once every year, its no surprise they'd be more protective of their content. Everyone I know who still is fortunate enough to have a 3.X DnD group has every WotC PDF on their computer and/or hard drive. And the group collectively owns every book. In my own group we have 5 copies of Lords of Madness, 2 of Draconomicon, 4 Complete Warriors, 3 Complete Arcanes and, of course, countless players handbooks, monster manuals and DMGs for 3.0 and 3.5. And we still downloaded content.
And we were happy to pay money for the books since we weren't given these official online resources that you pretty much need to use more than half the content 4.0 has to offer. We liked paper and flipping through well printed books. Ebooks were an ok substitute when our book was being loaned to a friend or something...but for the most part nothing beat paper since there were no advantages to using ebooks other than search features (which, really, isn't that good a feature since a lot of the times you'll forget the exact wording of something and are better off flipping through a book until you find the adjacent picture).
Every other month Wizards would release some amazing module for players to get new ideas. The complete and environmental series gave us feats, spells, items and classes. Campaign modules gave us the same. Monster Manuals gave players new races and summons. Nearly every module until May 2007 (Complete Champion) (hey, a month after 4.0 was announced to be released; coincidence?). Every month we'd also get a good dozen or so feats and a handful of prestige classes from a dragon magazine too.
Flash forward to 4.0 where Wizards wants to make the game "easier" to attract a wider audience. Now we get ~6 powers per dragon magazine, about 3 classes races every 6 months and most updates to the game are to make it "easier" (Monster Builder tools, character creation tools, etc...) and to promote their monthly subscription service with some new online trinket no one asked for.
DnD was played like Magic the Gathering in many ways. It was "collect the books/magazines/obscure article". And players loved it. It added a certain radical element to RPGs--the ability to have something no one player has or knows about without being substantially or necessarily stronger or weaker than them. Where RPGs like WoW or tabletop RPGs like Shadowrun have such limited content that nothing a player has on his or her sheet is ever 'new' to someone who scans the modules/playguides or has played for over a year, DnD flooded the market with so much 1st and 3rd party material that players had the opportunity to 'feel special'.
The other bonus element was the fact that players who didn't like scouring every source for obscure little classes or whatnot could feel like they are doing something new and special using the player's handbook, as the optimizers and vorthos' preferred the unique classes and avoided the player's handbook classes like the plague (save for dips, wizards and druids).
Of course it doesn't matter how many classes you make for 4.0. They all basically fill in the same 4 basic roles that ensure once you've played 4 different characters, you've done it all.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
They got their judgement. Now will they become for profit lawsuit machine or will they actually make something worth downloading? I suppose at some point I'll have to play that version of D&D but it sounds about as boring as some of the eternal leveling before the fun starts MMORGs.
And yes it's wrong but it is obligatory. It's one of the fascinating facets of the Streisand effect.
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