Piracy, the Trove and how they affect the Hobby

[carpocratian]

I'm not really sure you can say that has hurt the porn industry, just as it is hard to say tech has hurt the music industry. Yes it has caused a shift that has hurt some individual businesses, mostly those focused on organizing and distribution, but the industry as a whole seems to be doing just fine, and I don't think there has been a time in modern history where it has been easier for people to directly find an audience to sell their work whether music, porn, writing or widgets and keep the money that would have gone to a record label, film studio or other means of getting it out to the public.

It has helped individual performers who do streaming shows, no doubt. People will pay for real-time interactions with the performers, particularly if they can get immediate emotional feedback (or guide the action) via tips. The people who run clip sites make money, too, though a significant amount of what they host is pirated content. It has become increasingly more difficult for other people in the industry to make money, though.

 

[carpocratian]

OnlyFans improved things from the nadir but overall most directors and performers get way, way less work.

It is the performers and directors themselves who say this, just give the series from Ronson a listen to hear from them.

I also worked in the music industry so I saw the decline happen in real time. But I get people want to believe otherwise.

Traditional performers who mainly did scenes for movies get less work. Some of the ones who have shifted from doing individual scenes to streaming tip-based work (coupled with the other traditional sidelines, like feature stripping) are making more, though. There are also a lot of people who normally wouldn't realistically be able to make money doing porn who are now able to make money doing so.

There is definitely a lot less money to be made in movies and clip-based sales, though, for both directors and performers.

 

[chuckdee]

Jumping back on topic (non Pub like though that is), an interesting indicator that these debates about piracy aren't new.

This is from Grognardia's readthrough of White Dwarf, in this case April/May 1979.

I remember the same thing for the Warhammer 40k tournaments.

 

[Voros]

Traditional performers who mainly did scenes for movies get less work. Some of the ones who have shifted from doing individual scenes to streaming tip-based work (coupled with the other traditional sidelines, like feature stripping) are making more, though. There are also a lot of people who normally wouldn't realistically be able to make money doing porn who are now able to make money doing so.

There is definitely a lot less money to be made in movies and clip-based sales, though, for both directors and performers.

Yeah I'm glad that at least now with OF they can make a decent living and often without dealing with sketchy directors and studios. I think that's why the outcry about OF going no-porn was so surprisingly loud and effective.

 

[Bunch]

Definitely. Back in my full-time programmer/developer days, I started to keep up with the professional discussions within that industry because it was frequently the test grown for new technologies. You could see what was potentially coming down the pipeline to the regular IT world (particularly in the entertainment and Internet branches of it) by seeing what the porn folks were experimenting with, often a couple of years earlier. That industry was always a good potential source of programming side-gigs, since they sometimes had trouble finding experienced developers to work for them.

Piracy became a bigger issue for them as download speeds improved and more people got online, but really went out the roof when clip sites (like PornHub) became so popular. Many of them have had to grudgingly work with the clip sites, providing their own preview clips, some focus on DMCA takedowns, and some pivoted hard to streaming chat stuff, like OnlyFans. A lot of performers figured out pretty quickly that they didn't need porn producers to acts as middlemen for them on the streaming chat sites, though. That shift has been beneficial to a lot of performers.

These days, the non-performer porn producers (in the U.S., at least) that have survived are the ones that are shrewd businesspeople who are good at targeting specific types of customers and/or produce very niche content. Most of them aren't making nearly as much money as they did in the 90s, though.

That is one of the few industries I am aware of where the effects of piracy has been that cut and dry, though. The issue becomes a lot more complex when you start to look at things like ttrpgs.

We're from the same era and yes porn was highly innovative. They were not only at the cutting edge of tech but in business processes like just in time manufacturing. At a party I was at in L.A. I met a box photographer(probably not the correct name). He would spool together clips of various actors for a VHS/DvD cover and put it up for preorder. If it got enough orders they made the movie. That's pretty much Kickstarter for you. In 2001.

Porn has some other attributes that you don't have with most media. I mean most people don't really want the world to know anything about their porn habits. So theft adds to the protection. No credit card tracks, no package in the mail. I think it is a special case.

 

[AsenRG]

We're from the same era and yes porn was highly innovative. They were not only at the cutting edge of tech but in business processes like just in time manufacturing. At a party I was at in L.A. I met a box photographer(probably not the correct name). He would spool together clips of various actors for a VHS/DvD cover and put it up for preorder. If it got enough orders they made the movie. That's pretty much Kickstarter for you. In 2001.

...I'm amazed and I admit it.

Porn has some other attributes that you don't have with most media. I mean most people don't really want the world to know anything about their porn habits. So theft adds to the protection. No credit card tracks, no package in the mail. I think it is a special case.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking immediately after reading the first post.

 

[lategamer]

Kind of a necro but what a pain in the ass the world is.

PDFs of OOP with POP (see, I can do acronyms) would be amazing. I say this as someone who is getting two RPGs from my "library" at home in Ireland shipped out to Spain because I want to read them and there are no PDFs available, anywhere. It's not even the expense or the time, or the nice part where most PDFs are searchable (Honestly, the Modiphius Dune RPG would be horrendous without the searchable PDF).

As for The Trove. I was a sent a link to it a year back. Noticed one of my OOP games on there. Didn't worry - after all I'd spent the last couple of years mailing out paper copies of this one to anyone who wanted it FOC.

Was it a cancer on the industry? Nope. Was it a good idea. Also nope.

I remember speaking to a WOTC person, in person, at a convention, around the time when MTG was really big and they had just started buying up RPG properties, including TSR and Nightfall. He said their strategy was no-one would be able to PLAY an game of D&D without them getting a few shillings from it. Whether that was everyone having to have their own copy of the Players Handbook or whatever.

The hobby has always been fast and loose with copyright. We are aggrieved when someone pirates a favoured game. Yet we balk at a favoured author who refuses a reasonable licensing deal or a musician who hoards the IP for a great property that should be out of copyright. We photocopy not just character sheets but other parts of books and stitch them into our own GM screens.

But what would I give for even out of print books to be digitised. And to access it I have to provide the code word from page XX, paragraph X, sentence X. Just like the POP of older video games (which most people pirated the heck out of - I didn't because I was the only loser with a Spectrum - everyone else had a Commodore 64).

 

[Brock Savage]

@ lategamer Out of curiosity, what are the OOP games you are looking for?

 

[ffilz]

It really would be nice to see every game available in PDF form. I wonder how many are impossible to release because the rights holder can't be found. I wonder how many can't be released because the rights holder is known but won't release it. I wonder how many can't be released because the rights holders are known but not all in agreement (for example, a few Talislanta books are NOT available because of this issue, also some Traveller stuff, and then there's stuff that violated someone's copyright and has been removed from availability, and then there's stuff not available because the trademark license has expired).

I wish copyright law would find a way to deal with rights holders who won't release something, though that can't really solve access to publications that included something without permission because it is absolutely fair for the owner of the property that was lifted to deny it's inclusion in some other property. The trademark license issues are thorny here also, but I'm inclined for there to be a way to force such stuff to still be available. Fundamentally, if it's possible to have a book in a library, I think there should be a way for it to be available to anyone.

 

[A Fiery Flying Roll]

It really would be nice to see every game available in PDF form. I wonder how many are impossible to release because the rights holder can't be found. I wonder how many can't be released because the rights holder is known but won't release it. I wonder how many can't be released because the rights holders are known but not all in agreement (for example, a few Talislanta books are NOT available because of this issue, also some Traveller stuff, and then there's stuff that violated someone's copyright and has been removed from availability, and then there's stuff not available because the trademark license has expired).

I'd solve this in the following ways.

Make all copyright transfer by license not assignment.

Revert all rights to the licensee (aka the creator) after a period of time. My instinct is a decade but I might be willing to compromise at 20 years.

That's not going to make everything available.

If a creator really doesn't want to have their work available, I have to reluctantly accept that's their right.

You also get the issues you mention where more than one person created a work. My understanding is that a new edition or even a republication of Nightlife is never happening because the co-creators aren't on speaking terms.

You'd also have to flesh out the issue of inherited copyright. But generally it would stop IP being lost because it's held by companies who don't want to do anything with it but won't give it back either. (Games Workshop and Golden Heroes).

I wish copyright law would find a way to deal with rights holders who won't release something, though that can't really solve access to publications that included something without permission because it is absolutely fair for the owner of the property that was lifted to deny it's inclusion in some other property. The trademark license issues are thorny here also, but I'm inclined for there to be a way to force such stuff to still be available. Fundamentally, if it's possible to have a book in a library, I think there should be a way for it to be available to anyone.

"Use it or lose it" does have potential, but you need to close loopholes. Otherwise you get stuff like companies releasing print runs of 100 copies to keep ownership.

 

[Moonglum]

It's obviously contrary to copyright law and damaging to some authors and publishers when people circulate free pdf's of games online. On the other hand, many of the properties we are discussing are long OOP, have been abandoned by whomever owns them, and seem to have no path to being offered legally for a fee. Distributing these kinds of things on the Trove is a crime, but it is more like jaywalking than bank robbery, so I think people should de escalate a bit when it comes to throwing around condemnations about it. Very little of this (to my knowledge) involves pirating and widely distributing things that are in print and easily available through legal channels. The gray zone are properties that are not easy to find but have someone associated with them that is trying to keep them in print and just hasn't figured out the details. There I think it is possible for file sharers to hurt someone, and the practice should be stopped.

 

[ffilz]

I had some more thoughts. It would be cool if people who were interested in titles that aren't appealing to the rights holder to keep in print could sponsor those titles for distribution, say via DriveThruRPG in a way where the distributor would collect payments to offset the actual cost of hosting the item, and keep accounting of the payments such that if the title actually gains enough interest to collect payments in excess of the cost of hosting, the rights holder could then decide "gee, they'd like some cash" and less appropriate fees and such, collect the excess. If the title is costing the distributor more than they care to bear, the sponsor can be on the hook for what are hopefully nominal costs. Sould it really cost more than $10/year or something to host a title? Would sponsors be willing to pony up for $10/year per title less any actual sales?

Now the Trove DID host many PDFs for in print games, most of which could legitimately be purchased in PDF form.

But there's another need for access to PDFs. As more and more RPG shopping is online (sometimes digital only), we have lost the opportunity to browse titles. I used to peruse many titles at the game store (with at least some game stores willing to take titles out of the protective sleeve for perusal) to determine if the title had stuff I was interested in. I don't know how to solve that problem... The previews on DriveThruRPG are often useless. I just looked at one yesterday that was just the cover and title page and such. Not even a table of contents... And no description of the title either... Sorry, I'm not paying 10 bucks for a not even that pretty piece of art which is all I know I'm getting for my money...

 

[A Fiery Flying Roll]

It's obviously contrary to copyright law and damaging to some authors and publishers when people circulate free pdf's of games online. On the other hand, many of the properties we are discussing are long OOP, have been abandoned by whomever owns them, and seem to have no path to being offered legally for a fee. Distributing these kinds of things on the Trove is a crime, but it is more like jaywalking than bank robbery, so I think people should de escalate a bit when it comes to throwing around condemnations about it. Very little of this (to my knowledge) involves pirating and widely distributing things that are in print and easily available through legal channels. The gray zone are properties that are not easy to find but have someone associated with them that is trying to keep them in print and just hasn't figured out the details. There I think it is possible for file sharers to hurt someone, and the practice should be stopped.

In the case of the Trove (specifically) they had stuff on there that had been released in the past year and ignored takedown requests. So while I agree there needs to be some way of archiving old RPGs, I don't think their model was justifiable.

 

[Endless Flight]

The PDF previews need to be random pages selected from the work and not consecutive pages. Too often the publisher just does a preview of the first ten pages and we get blanks and a table of contents and a “what is Roleplaying” page.

 

[ffilz]

The PDF previews need to be random pages selected from the work and not consecutive pages. Too often the publisher just does a preview of the first ten pages and we get blanks and a table of contents and a “what is Roleplaying” page.

Ideally the pages would be a curated set by the author that highlights some of what's interesting. Table of Contents IS useful, but let's say it's a rule book, show us the sample character, show us a page that summarizes the resolution system, etc. This way folks could get a decent feel for the game.

Option if the default was show some random pages... Have them change each time... If someone refreshed often enough, sure, they could pirate...

 

[David Johansen]

So, I've always put my games out for free but I'd like to make some money on them while keeping them free. Donations haven't worked. Any other ideas?

Yes, writing games people actually want would be a step, but where's the fun in that? :p

 

[Fenris-77]

So, I've always put my games out for free but I'd like to make some money on them while keeping them free. Donations haven't worked. Any other ideas?

Yes, writing games people actually want would be a step, but where's the fun in that? :p

There's some devious psychology behind the notion of 'pay what you want'. Some people will still take it for free, but a lot of people will pony something up.

 

[A Fiery Flying Roll]

There's some devious psychology behind the notion of 'pay what you want'. Some people will still take it for free, but a lot of people will pony something up.

Not, unfortunately, my experience with PWYW on Drivethru at least. People overwhelmingly treat it as "free with voluntary donation".

If you want to get the game out for free to people who can't afford it then set price plus community copies is probably the way to go.

 

[Fenris-77]

Not, unfortunately, my experience with PWYW on Drivethru at least. People overwhelmingly treat it as "free with voluntary donation".

If you want to get the game out for free to people who can't afford it then set price plus community copies is probably the way to go.

I've read a couple of articles that suggest that it does indeed work, but I suspect that the product and producer in question also makes a big difference. All reported fact on my part, not personal knowledge, so a grain of salt and all that.

Edit: I love the idea of community copies. It's awesome.

 

[A Fiery Flying Roll]

I've read a couple of articles that suggest that it does indeed work, but I suspect that the product and producer in question also makes a big difference. All reported fact on my part, not personal knowledge, so a grain of salt and all that.

It's music focused, but "Why Your Music is Worthless and how to sell it anyway" by Simon Indelicate has bearing on this.

Why Your Music Is Worthless (And How To Sell It Anyway)

Economics, music and how to survive as a cult indie artist when music has a market value of zero

www.indelicates.com

(Full disclosure: Simon's an online friend).

 

[BedrockBrendan]

There's some devious psychology behind the notion of 'pay what you want'. Some people will still take it for free, but a lot of people will pony something up.

I use PWYW. I think of it more as pay what you can (which is why I like to include a suggested price----which is what I think the game is worth....and even that is usually pretty low). My thoughts on it are, sometimes a GM decides to run a game and the players all need to buy the core book, if they can't afford it, they can at least still get it in PDF. Also, I think it allows people to make the decision based on what they think they should pay. If they bought the print book, they may feel entitled to a free PDF, and can pick it up for 0 if they want. And if people can't afford the book, it is helpful. In terms of what people pay, it is all over the place (but it is always within the suggested price range so I think it is useful to provide that to people in the product description-----just so people aren't throwing 27 dollars at something you were expecting 10 dollars for). One feature I think would maybe be helpful is allowing people to set how much they want to pay after they download the PDF. That is not an option but I would like to see them make it one at some point.

But as a strategy for making money, PWYW isn't a good one (at least I haven't found it to be as reliable as setting the price). It is good for getting people to play the game because access is more easy for everyone, but you won't make as much money as you would if you put a concrete price tag on it in my experience. Still I do like putting things out there as PWYW. It depends on the book of course.

One down side to PWYW that people should be aware of is on Drivethru, sales only impact rankings and best seller status metals based on the amount of money they bring in. So 200 sales that are 0 dollars, won't impact the status of a book on the best seller list, and it won't nudge you into copper best seller.

 

[BedrockBrendan]

I've read a couple of articles that suggest that it does indeed work, but I suspect that the product and producer in question also makes a big difference. All reported fact on my part, not personal knowledge, so a grain of salt and all that.

Edit: I love the idea of community copies. It's awesome.

I say this knowing I just gave my own take, so apply this advice to that too, but yes, I think take all these kinds of articles with a hefty grain of salt, especially if they are coming from the keyboards of designers and publishers. The combination of self interest, wishful thinking, and a desire to obscure tactics from other publishers, mislead competition, is going to filter into anything people say about this sort of feature. That plus every publisher could be having radically different experiences with it.

 

[The Butcher]

Man, I miss The Trove.

There, I said it.

 

[BedrockBrendan]

Not, unfortunately, my experience with PWYW on Drivethru at least. People overwhelmingly treat it as "free with voluntary donation".

It is funny, I have looked for patterns on PWYW sales and they are really inconsistent when I run the numbers. One pattern that does occasionally emerge, which I am happy to see, is one sale at something like half the suggested or full suggested price, followed by a slew of 3-5 zero dollar sales. I always assume that is a GM and a group of players. But I have had months where it seemed like a lot of people were paying something (not often the full suggested amount, but not pennies either), then had months where there are just tons of zero dollar downloads. It is rather hard to make sense of.

 

[Gringnr]

I used to think it was OK to pirate OOP stuff, but some of the stuff I pirated and/or shared ended up being released, or re-released, in PDF later, then I felt bad. Not throwing stones, yes I've pirated stuff. These days I don't play anything I don't physically own. Not for any moral reasons, I mean, partly, I guess. I just like to have the books, though.

 

[Fenris-77]

PWYW very much isn't a way to make money, I agree. It is, however, a reasonable way to get noticed and get your product out there while possibly still making a buck or two. Audience is priceless when it comes to TTRPG sales, so building audience is how I tend to focus my thoughts.

 

[EmperorNorton]

My general approach to piracy is that if it is not possible to obtain something outside of the collector's market (and paying jacked up prices, none of which go to the rights holders/creators anyway), then I don't mind getting stuff in a less than legal way.

I've felt this way about video games and TTRPGs.

(With video games I've also pirated ROMs of games I do physically own so I can use them with an emulator if they aren't available on PC somehow, cause sometimes I don't want to drag an old console out of the storage room to play a game).

 

[EmperorNorton]

Also, on the subject of preservation of the past, this one is video games, but it is still relevant.

So Nintendo is notoriously litigious about their out of print games. They also don't particularly make it easy to access large portions of them, making people rebuy multiple times in cases, and soon the only legal way to play some of them will be through a Switch subscription service.

But here is the funny thing: without Piracy we may have never actually gotten some of the releases they did do. Their official releases of old NES/SNES titles are just the ROMs using a in house made emulator for whatever system it is.

Quite a few times, people have hacked them open to get the ROMs out and found the header information was 100% from a pirated ROM that had been floating around the internet for a long time.

 

[lategamer]

@ lategamer Out of curiosity, what are the OOP games you are looking for?

In this shipment, Domination and Jorune. In the past I've had over a dozen titles shipped over from my safe locker, including Living Steel.

 

[Bunch]

My general approach to piracy is that if it is not possible to obtain something outside of the collector's market (and paying jacked up prices, none of which go to the rights holders/creators anyway), then I don't mind getting stuff in a less than legal way.

I've felt this way about video games and TTRPGs.

(With video games I've also pirated ROMs of games I do physically own so I can use them with an emulator if they aren't available on PC somehow, cause sometimes I don't want to drag an old console out of the storage room to play a game).

This is my feeling. I don't see why society makes the tradeoff to protect something with it's legal system if the owner doesn't make it obtainable through legal means. If I wrote the law that wouldn't be allowed. Make it available at a reasonable price to a good number of people or lose the protection.

 

[Endless Flight]

Man, I miss The Trove.

There, I said it.

 

[Brock Savage]

Man, I miss The Trove.

There, I said it.

It was good source of pdfs for books I either already paid for or were OOP. I would rather pay for a decent pdf than download a sketchy but free 100MB scan of the latest and greatest game books

 

[Fenris-77]

I'll admit, I freely used the Trove rather a lot to download PDFs of books I have in storage.

 

[Ravenswing]

If a creator really doesn't want to have their work available, I have to reluctantly accept that's their right.

Emphasis mine.

Beyond that, copyright law's a famously tangled snakepit, and lawyers enjoy European vacations and pay for their children's college educations happily arguing both sides of a case. Steve Jackson exploited an obscure loophole to get the rights for TFT back, and the legal window he used could only be exercised between thirty-five and forty years after original publication. (If he tried to do it TODAY, he'd fail.) For instance, I have just until the end of next year if I wanted to reclaim the rights to my first published gaming work.

Which I wouldn't. I didn't do a BAD job, but it's what I wrote when I was 22 and far from polished as a writer. Never mind that it's been long time since I published anything, and don't imagine it'd be worth my while to do so now. If I did, I'd do a lot better job of it.

 

[Moonglum]

Does anyone know anything concrete (i.e., beyond trivial anecdotes) about how much pirated pdfs have impacted purchases of actively supported and widely available games? Like, is there a significant-sized community out there who is pirating pdfs of 5E but not buying official hard copy or pdf books?

 

[Bunch]

Does anyone know anything concrete (i.e., beyond trivial anecdotes) about how much pirated pdfs have impacted purchases of actively supported and widely available games? Like, is there a significant-sized community out there who is pirating pdfs of 5E but not buying official hard copy or pdf books?

WotC doesnt produce 5e pdfs so baring someone scanning their own book all the Wizards PDF books are pirated. Same with Goodman Games Reincarnated books. I believe that's due to their various deals with FG, Roll20, etc for electronic versions. I suspect the number of people getting just stolen pdfs of WotC 5e products is small compared to the overall number of 5e books sold but I bet it's also larger than most of their competitors total sales. I mean PDF is just too damn handy to not get somehow.

 

[SavAce]

Does anyone know anything concrete (i.e., beyond trivial anecdotes) about how much pirated pdfs have impacted purchases of actively supported and widely available games? Like, is there a significant-sized community out there who is pirating pdfs of 5E but not buying official hard copy or pdf books?

This is the kind of question that seems reasonable to ask on its face, but ultimately... depending on what you mean by "significant-sized community", is impossible to realistically answer. WotC know concretely what they have sold. Anecdotally, I'm thinking a lot of people are familiar with groups that share books, or somebody has the books and PDFs are swapped around, however you want to count that. Beyond that, it is impossible to know (sticking with 5e) how many books have been swapped or traded among all the various ways that can be done. Among those swapped, how many sit in a pile unread? How many are read, then lead to a sale? How many downloaded PDFs are used to supplement a purchased book? How many are read and not played? How many are used for play and the game is never purchased. Among those, how many people would have purchased the game if copyright infringement was not possible (resulting is a sale) vs. those who would never purchase? I think any supposedly concrete claims about "how much pirated PDFs have impacted purchases" are going to be BS spin by whoever is offering up the claim (pro or anti).

 

[Bunch]

If a creator really doesn't want to have their work available, I have to reluctantly accept that's their right.

This is the one where I disagree. I don't think you should get the protections of a whole legal system and the use of it's officers and enforcers if you don't actually make the work available. To me that's the tradeoff. If you want to write at home just for you then cool you do that. If you decide to put it out there and claim protection then you need to keep your end of the bargain and put it out there.

 

[Winterblight]

My own experience with PWYW is that it is pretty lame. The last time I cared to look, my PWYW stuff had fewer downloads than free stuff and I just made most of it free.

 

[Toadmaster]

There's some devious psychology behind the notion of 'pay what you want'. Some people will still take it for free, but a lot of people will pony something up.

My issue with pay what you want is I don't know what it is worth to me until after I have it. When there is a suggested price I'll usually pay that but there should be an easy way to bump the price after the fact when you've read through it and decided it was really worth paying for.

It isn't even easy to buy it a second time, since that usually gets flagged as an error (at least based on my trying to buy games I forgot I already bought).