Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
agreed to a judgment against him of $125,000
So they didn't roll for damages?
Is it wrong that my first reaction was to flip over to a torrent site and snag my own copy of the PDFs? Purely for research purposes, of course.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
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?
Boredom is bliss.
I'm tempted to just say "who cares 4th edition sucked" since I don't personally like it and think it is dumbed down MMO style mechanics made into a table top game. In fact I think the fact that I bought the first set of books probably hurt Hasbro in the long term. If I had previewed them somehow and didn't like them I probably would have continued to look at their products but since I bought them and didn't like them I haven't picked up another 4th edition product. However, in the spirit of an actual discussion I'll give my 2 cents beyond just my dislike of 4th Edition.
I think you're about to see Hasbro get all litigious on folks because they are not making what they think they ought to from the brand. Whatever the reason I think when companies start worrying about this kind of nonsense rather than continually producing good content its a harbinger of hard times ahead. Hopefully they'll sell of the brand or others like Pathfinder will take their place. I think it was a bad sign when they nixed the d20 license from 3rd edition. I don't know what Hasbro's numbers looked like but the industry as a whole was much better off when everyone was writing d20 products and the bookstores and cons were full of the stuff. Today D&D is almost irrelevant among the people that I know who still play RPGs. As a disclaimer, I'm just a sad creature who still reads through the books for entertainment value and writes a few pieces from time to time.
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.
Yet Another Tech Blog
(but so much more, including game and movie reviews)
http://yanteb.peasantoid.org
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.
Wizards of the Coast was bought out by Hasbro a while back and underwent a transformation from geek utopia to corporate cash machine.
The current dire state of the economy is forcing them to show their true nature to an unusual extent- for example, they've recently added a chase rarity to their flagship product, Magic: The Gathering, as well as releasing semi-monthly "collector's edition" products for same.
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?
My, when the IT bubble burst in naught one, this D&D nerd at work was canned and that night, at a D&D game, he gets another job - for more money! Those games are what golf is to other professions!
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
Other gaming companies are embracing the idea of open source and digital distribution, for example: Catalyst Game Labs. More importantly, their open source release of Eclipse Phase, and perhaps even unofficial support for the fan-made MegaMek/MekWars for their Battletech line.
Meanwhile companies like WizKids and Games Workshop continue to show their complete disdain for their customers and the fans of their products as well as their utter inability to properly market their games. Which is especially evidenced by the utter failure of WizKids' "Mech Clix" line for Battletech, and arguably evidenced by Games Workshops' constant price increases for Warhammer 40k; Catalyst seems to be going in completely the opposite direction - embracing digital distribution and open source in ways essentially unheard of in this day and age.
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.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
They are supposed to be bringing back Dark Sun, but it'd be best to have very low expectations, cause they just want something "gritty".
http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd/drfe/20090814
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.
I knew they were doomed when I ran into to WotC employees at GDC'06.
It was after hours, and a few of us working at the conference were getting together for the yearly D&D game. We asked the two WotC people working the booth if they'd like to join us. "Oh... We don't play games, actually..."
Big difference from the old days of any random person at WotC (even accounting!) being pulled in to playtest the latest
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
I never understood this..
Why ... The ... Hell ... Did ... You ... 'Need' ... Those ... Books
(sorry)
Don't those books just give you extra rules and powers? What happened to simply making up house rules to fill whatever gaps you percieve there are? Is it so important to have publisher certified material say that you get extra turn undead roll on level 12?
Making those rules and sharing them with community? Or is there some comandment that you mus only ever use whatever is in handbooks, no more, no less?
Have players and DMs grown so pitifull that they can not use their own fantasy and creativity to have fantasy adventure? Have you all turned to munchkins in few years since I last played RPG?
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
I use that many books for a single character from 3.5. The difference is the books were cheaper ($10 on ebay if 6 months or older; $25 in comic shops; $30 retail), there was no DD-insider (meaning more people owned more paper books so you could borrow from friends) and the online content wizards provided was free (there was a LOT of free content on wizards.com).
For example, my soul knife uses Player's Handbook (Fighter), a Dragon Magazine (Feat), Expanded Psionics Handbook (Base Class), PHBII (feat), Complete Warrior (feat), Shining South (Prestige Class), Magic item Compendium (gear), a third party Psion book and uses a custom race varianted from an AEG book.
Exploring lots of books is not my problem with 4E. Its how little content there are per book and how unusable all of the content is for fear of an "unbalanced game". Yeah, you can get infinite attacks with an unerrata'd loop found a week before 4E launched using just the Player's Handbook 1. Games will be broken, that's why we have GMs.
The truth is, 4E still has less classes, feats and races after a year then 3.X had with JUST the SRD. Not even the actual books. Yes, I'm including monstrous races since I believe one of the greatest appeals for me in DnD was the ability to play more than a human, a short human, a short buff human, a big ugly human or a tall foresty human or a half-human half-tall foresty human with barely any the benefits of either. And I wouldn't even be that angry about it if Wizard's didn't market 4E as having 'more interesting races' like the half-demons and half-dragons. Despite the fact they had them in 3E at launch in the Monster Manual! Yes, level adjustments are a little odd...but the SRD includes rules for buying off level adjustments that balances them and makes them fun for the player quite easily (I'd say 'but they are a headache for the DM, but that's just not true for a competant DM who knows more than 'insert X monsters into room and see how my players fair').
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
That's just completely, utterly, false. Why don't you also claim you need to buy the official WotC dice? It's about as true as the rest you're saying.
As a group, the only WotC products you need are the original 3 core books, same as with 3E. You'd think this would be obvious from the fact that thousands were playing the game before all the other products you mention were even released.
Yes, if you specifically want to play a class from PHB2, then you need PHB2, duh. If you specifically wanted to play a warlock in 3E, you needed Complete Arcane. This is no different.
There's no reason to buy the "Power" books, unless you'd like more options for your characters. Same as with the "Complete" books in 3.5, and the spatbooks in 3.0. And Complete Martial is not at all a Paladin Supplement. It doesn't have any significant content for paladins, and it's explicitly not marketed as a paladin supplement.
As to the official mini's: these are not at all required, and I've never before heard anyone claim that they were. The same is true for a D&D Insider subscription. That's basically a subscription to Dungeon and Dragon magazines plus some online tools. Do you feel Dungeon and Dragon magazines were required to play 3E? I should hope not.
And what's that nonsense about 4E being a complete surprise? WotC announced 4E 10 months in advance. They even published preview books! And anyone paying attention had noticed that Wizards had been experimenting with radically new mechanics for D&D for at least a year before that, so it was only an open secret that WotC was working on a new edition.
All in all, your post is nothing more than a troll.