On Piracy (WotC edition)

Yarrr! There be bandwidth to starboard!

OK, now that that's out of my system...

My apologies to those who are actually reading this for the long break in posts. With a lot going on in life, writing fell by the wayside.

Yesterday, all outlets that had previously been doing so ceased sales of PDFs of Wizards of the Coast products. Additionally, users who had previously purchased content and had not yet used all of their allotted downloads no longer had access to those downloads.

As of yesterday, there was no information no the reasons for this, other than the retailers statements that "WotC told us to do so."

As of this morning, a press release had been put out by Wizards stating that this move was made in response to "recent illegal sharing of [their] property."

My first problem with their reasoning is that it was not simply currently-released products that were pulled from the digital shelves. Everything from old AD&D books that have been out of print for over a decade up until the PHB2 which was released 2 weeks ago is no longer available in a (legal) digital form. The vast majority of these are products that Wizards was making NO profit on. If only one person downloaded a copy, removed the copyright, and torrented the file, that's STILL ONE COPY THEY SOLD of a property that was making nothing.

(As a side note, I wonder how much legal liability they have opened themselves up to by invalidating previous sales. I Am Not A Lawyer, but it seems like this is a class action waiting to happen.)

Secondly, it is worth noting that the most common complaint right now from the D&D community is that WotC's communication sucks. When 4e was released and D&D Insider wasn't ready on launch day as we'd been promised for months, there was nothing. When the pricing structure for both DDI and the "virtual minis" for their online tabletop (which, I note, has yet to materialize... OK, poor choice of words) was revamped repeatedly, apparently by throwing a dart at someone walking by the Wizards offices and asking them how much they would pay (NB - medical examiners have not actually PROVEN that the dart was coated in a powerful hallucinogenic, it's still just a theory), there was nothing. In both cases, the response cycle went something like this:

Stupid action by WotC
Fan outrage
Justification of action by WotC
Fan outrage and disdain
Reworking of policy by WotC to something that makes a goodly number of fans happy.

You'd think they'd have learned by now that talking to your consumer base would cut some of the more painful bits out of this process. In the case of the PDFs being removed from sale, the fact that it was 24 hours before they said ANYTHING publically, giving the retailers time to pass off all the blame to the publisher, is inexcusable from a PR standpoint.

Finally, and I think this is key to the whole thing, this will do nothing to stop the pirating of D&D books! 8 days before 4e was released, all the core books were available on torrent sites because the printers' proofs had been leaked. Before that, every single 3.5 book was scanned, bookmarked and OCR'd. D&D players tend to be more comfortable with technology that the average person, in my experience and we want searchable, bookmarked PDFs of our gaming books. I can't count the number of people I know who run/play their games off their laptops. Or, to put it another way:

Attention WotC: People WILL download your books for use at the game table.

Ahem.

You want a sure-fire get rich quick scheme in this economy? Find out what medical supplier is closest to the Wizards HQ and buy as much of their stock as you can. Why? Crutches, my friend. With the amount of time that company spends shooting themselves in the foot, crutches are a goddamn goldmine.

The point of this rant is that this move is, at best, counter-productive in the War On Piracy. Wizards has managed to prosecute a half dozen (or so) uploaders who were too stupid/naive to delete the watermark from whatever site they bought the PHB2 on, and then torrented it out to the world. They have done nothing, and CAN do nothing, to stop the people who will scan their books and put them out there for others to read and use. All they have done is get rid of the one LEGAL way to obtain their content for those people who want to give them money. I am very sadly reminded of Metallica's campaign against filesharing of about 10 years ago, and the damage that did to their reputation among their fans and detractors alike.

I will not say that what the people who scan books to PDF are doing is right, but I won't say that it's hurting WotC's sales, either. Why won't I say that? Because I can count, from my personal knowledge, a significant number of 4e book sales that would not have occurred without a consumer downloading a copy of the book first and deciding it was worth his or her money. Is this anecdotal evidence necessarily relevant to the business's bottom line? No. But it is something that the creators and owners of digital content should think about when assessing what risks to take in putting their content out there for the world. Because yes, WotC, we will still download your books, and if you don't let us do so legally, we will do so illegally. But if you put out a quality product, we will buy the books, too. I promise you that.

One more thing, and then it's off to spend some quality time with my couch and the DVDs of Avatar that I picked up today:
When thinking about the apparent War On Piracy, I keep thinking in terms of a political-style cartoon that I swear no one has ever drawn. The content owners (read: WotC, the RIAA, the MPAA, et al) are Don Quixote. DRM is his breastplate, rusty, battered and all but useless. The windmill is, of course, Digital Piracy.

...I don't know who Sancho Panza represents... and I think Aldonza is supposed to be Lars Ulrich...