Piracy, the Trove and how they affect the Hobby

[A Fiery Flying Roll]

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.

Protection doesn't start when you put it out there though, any more than your lawnmower only becomes yours when you mow the grass. Even if something is never made commercially available, it's still illegal to plagarise it.

I can see an argument for archivists and academics having a free hand, but giving all unpublished works over to Google to monitise (which is the likely outcome of your proposed approach) strikes me as a step backwards not forwards.

 

[Bunch]

Protection doesn't start when you put it out there though, any more than your lawnmower only becomes yours when you mow the grass. Even if something is never made commercially available, it's still illegal to plagarise it.

I can see an argument for archivists and academics having a free hand, but giving all unpublished works over to Google to monitise (which is the likely outcome of your proposed approach) strikes me as a step backwards not forwards.

But I can't plagiarize it if it is never put out to see. If I happen to come up with something identical to you it isn't plagiarism. To get the plagiarism protection you have to put it out into the world. That's when protection begins at least to me thats when it should begin. That's when you interact with society. That's when you ask and receive the benefits of society.

 

[Fenris-77]

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).

Well, I know I'm not a whole set of examples, but I tend to pay for PWYW items.

 

[A Fiery Flying Roll]

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.

I don't mind giving my data on this, with the proviso it's a LARP product, so even more niche than most RPGs.

My game Space Shuttle Diplomacy has:

124 free and non free copies sold. Honestly, that's not a terrible number. It's low, but it's a freeform LARP with no promotion.

Of those, 16 non free units have been sold.

That's a bit complicated because it started as PWYW and then I shifted it to "very low" instead. But of those 16, the average is $3.31 with a range between $1 and $5.

Obviously, the bulk of downloads come from the first few months it was up, but I haven't noticed any drop off since it was taken off PWYW.

It has three reviews (stars, not detailed). That's 2 fours and 1 five. So not that many reviews, but it rates highly with that limited dataset.

Very tellingly, there's not a single other LARP in "TITLES ALSO BOUGHT WITH THIS TITLE", it's all PWYW and free tabletop stuff. It also isn't good at turning up under "recommended" to people who buy other LARPs.

Obviously, it's a bit risky drawing conclusions from a single product, but this is my speculations at least.

I'm pretty sure that those who paid recommended price or more are the actual LARPers, especially fellow LARP writers. Which means realistically I probably know at least half of them at least casually. LARP is a small scene. There's at least one of those sales I'm convinced is the same person whose games I buy so we're just passing the money back and forth).

While you might think that PWYW was good for visibility I think it may have had a negative effect on this. I needed to hit the LARPers. Instead I hit the people who go through downloading all the free and PWYW stuff regardless of what it is.

Obviously, I'm not saying most of the people that picked it up free would have bought it if that hadn't been an option. It would have been a handful if that. I strongly suspect that a lot of the people getting it free won't even have got round to downloading and reading it.

I don't see any real evidence that the people who paid money for it would have been put off if I'd just set a low base price from the start. Certainly not the people paying the three dollars average and higher. Even if I'd set it at five dollars, I doubt there's many who'd find that extra two a dealbreaker.

I do think there's at least a possibility it would have sold more if it hadn't ever been PWYW. That may have stopped people taking it seriously as a "proper" product.

Overall, I don't regret or resent having had it as PWYW for a bit. But from my point of view it was a marketing experiment and one that conclusively failed. It's not a model I'm planing to return to in the future.

 

[Winterblight]

Thanks for the insight. I agree that PWYW is a bit of a failed experiment from my own perspective. Not that I have enough sales of anything to have a really good data set, but anything I put out in the future is going to have a price tag or be free.

 

[AsenRG]

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).

Weird, it never did that to me. And I usually pay after having read and played or otherwise used the title, so most of my paid purchases have been "buying it for a second time".

...and I just realized I've never bought anything since Drivethru changed their site's design, so was that an issue with the old site?

 

[ffilz]

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.

Hmm, that's a problem. I guess they will never get any 5e money from me. I don't buy hard copy much anymore. And I'm not going to pay for content tied to a specific VTT.

 

[ffilz]

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.

Copyright was originally intended to encourage people to publish. And the original term was also intentional to allow works to become public after some time of protection. Disney convinced the government to nix that...

 

[Imaginos]

With PWYW, I get exposed to more games than I would otherwise. Most of the time, if I have to pay an amount up front, it will get skipped unless it is something I was already interested in. With PWYW, I can look and see if it is something I might play at some time or be interested in reading again. If it is, I can go back and buy it for a price. More often than not, I realize I will never look at it again, much less run it, and I just delete it.

 

[Acmegamer]

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 try to always drop a fiver if it's listed as free and at least twenty pages. If it's less than that I'll drop two dollars usually, even for a one or two page chart. I honestly feel that I should pay at least that much for someones creative effort. If it's bigger I'll definitely give more.

 

[Andrew J. Luther]

My one PWYW is a complete sector that I created for Traveller as part of a series of blog posts. It’s been downloaded a few hundred times from DTRPG with a big spike when someone in Shanghai posted a review of it (and according to Google Translate, they really liked it).

But the vast majority of people didn’t pay anything, and of those that did, it was usually less than a dollar. I now wish I had set a price for it (even if only $0.99) since it would probably have at least made it to Copper seller.

 

[Acmegamer]

My one PWYW is a complete sector that I created for Traveller as part of a series of blog posts. It’s been downloaded a few hundred times from DTRPG with a big spike when someone in Shanghai posted a review of it (and according to Google Translate, they really liked it).

But the vast majority of people didn’t pay anything, and of those that did, it was usually less than a dollar. I now wish I had set a price for it (even if only $0.99) since it would probably have at least made it to Copper seller.

Wow, you did a complete sector and folks aren't giving at least $5.00? That sucks major league.

 

[AsenRG]

My one PWYW is a complete sector that I created for Traveller as part of a series of blog posts. It’s been downloaded a few hundred times from DTRPG with a big spike when someone in Shanghai posted a review of it (and according to Google Translate, they really liked it).

But the vast majority of people didn’t pay anything, and of those that did, it was usually less than a dollar. I now wish I had set a price for it (even if only $0.99) since it would probably have at least made it to Copper seller.

...you probably should have. I mean, I think I paid a fiver for John Wick's heroes game, and that's one I've only ran once, for a one-shot.

Also, link?

 

[Ravenswing]

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.

Nope. You just do not get to jack my property with legal impunity, for no other reason -- and let's face it, there IS no other reason -- than that you want it available to you. The only "bargains" I made in writing any material for publication is the contractual arrangements I made with the companies that published them. I made NO "bargain" with you or any other gamer, any more than I get to take your car because you "put it out there" in your driveway, visible to anyone walking by and there for the grabbing.

And were I to put out work on DriveThru or any other such outlet, the only "bargain" that constitutes for gamers is the ability to get that stuff if they pay for it. And if I decide to withdraw it, then I do. I own it, I get to make those decisions. I reject, contemptuously, the premise that there's an amorphous mass of gamers out there who get to tell me what I'm allowed to do with my own creative property.

Now I freely concede that current technology allows, without a whole lot of effort, that amorphous mass of gamers to steal that property. (I've seen bootleg PDFs online for most everything I ever wrote.) So stipulated. I just don't feel the need to cloak that in justifications. You want to use anything I wrote, legally, without paying for it? Great. 75 years from my death, it's yours, free and clear.

 

[A Fiery Flying Roll]

Nope. You just do not get to jack my property with legal impunity, for no other reason -- and let's face it, there IS no other reason -- than that you want it available to you. The only "bargains" I made in writing any material for publication is the contractual arrangements I made with the companies that published them. I made NO "bargain" with you or any other gamer, any more than I get to take your car because you "put it out there" in your driveway, visible to anyone walking by and there for the grabbing.

And were I to put out work on DriveThru or any other such outlet, the only "bargain" that constitutes for gamers is the ability to get that stuff if they pay for it. And if I decide to withdraw it, then I do. I own it, I get to make those decisions. I reject, contemptuously, the premise that there's an amorphous mass of gamers out there who get to tell me what I'm allowed to do with my own creative property.

Now I freely concede that current technology allows, without a whole lot of effort, that amorphous mass of gamers to steal that property. (I've seen bootleg PDFs online for most everything I ever wrote.) So stipulated. I just don't feel the need to cloak that in justifications. You want to wait to use anything I wrote, legally, without paying for it? Great. 75 years from my death, it's yours, free and clear.

I'm somewhere in the middle of the two of you I think. I'm a copyright reformist, not an abolitionist or a preservationist.

I do think that there are really strong arguments for much looser fair use/fair dealing laws and there's reasonable arguments for a shortening of terms, although I'd happily trade that for the former. And if you want to get more complicated I think looking at the distinction between commercial and non commercial use is valid.

That said, any argument about terms is pretty abstract in a world where the current effective term for the lapse of copyright is instant. Too many people still approach this argument as if we were in the world of Napster (the last actual "ideological" pirate site I can think of).

 

[Bunch]

Nope. You just do not get to jack my property with legal impunity, for no other reason -- and let's face it, there IS no other reason -- than that you want it available to you. The only "bargains" I made in writing any material for publication is the contractual arrangements I made with the companies that published them. I made NO "bargain" with you or any other gamer, any more than I get to take your car because you "put it out there" in your driveway, visible to anyone walking by and there for the grabbing.

And were I to put out work on DriveThru or any other such outlet, the only "bargain" that constitutes for gamers is the ability to get that stuff if they pay for it. And if I decide to withdraw it, then I do. I own it, I get to make those decisions. I reject, contemptuously, the premise that there's an amorphous mass of gamers out there who get to tell me what I'm allowed to do with my own creative property.

Now I freely concede that current technology allows, without a whole lot of effort, that amorphous mass of gamers to steal that property. (I've seen bootleg PDFs online for most everything I ever wrote.) So stipulated. I just don't feel the need to cloak that in justifications. You want to use anything I wrote, legally, without paying for it? Great. 75 years from my death, it's yours, free and clear.

To me all people claiming copyright are making a bargain. Society says we will allow you use of our legal system, police system etc to enforce it but we require you to give us something in return. I think you're saying you want the exchange to be very heavily on your side with very limited rights to society. I think thats fine but don't use the public legal system or police system to defend it. You can pay privately to have the armed thugs come put me in your personal prison you pay for. If you can't do that then we are at least agreeing you are getting something out of this from society and they have some say in what they will and will not pay the do for you. Should you be able to copyright original things and make a living even a phenomenal living off of your creations hell yes. Should at some point society say ok you've done good now its in the public domain for others to build off of? I think yes.

I'm somewhere in the middle of the two of you I think. I'm a copyright reformist, not an abolitionist or a preservationist.

I do think that there are really strong arguments for much looser fair use/fair dealing laws and there's reasonable arguments for a shortening of terms, although I'd happily trade that for the former. And if you want to get more complicated I think looking at the distinction between commercial and non commercial use is valid.

That said, any argument about terms is pretty abstract in a world where the current effective term for the lapse of copyright is instant. Too many people still approach this argument as if we were in the world of Napster (the last actual "ideological" pirate site I can think of).

I'm not advocating for piracy and no copyright at all. But I think it is fair for society to say if you want to use our system to protect your works we at least want to have them available for purchase. Society has huge amounts of say in every business and writing/drawing/art for profit is a business.

 

[A Fiery Flying Roll]

I'm not advocating for piracy and no copyright at all. But I think it is fair for society to say if you want to use our system to protect your works we at least want to have them available for purchase. Society has huge amounts of say in every business and writing/drawing/art for profit is a business.

Society has huge amounts of say in business, but I can't think of any other case where the results of someone's work would be considered up for grabs if it's not being made available for purchase. If you make a rug for your front room, I don't get to nick it because you won't make me one.

 

[Brock Savage]

I try to always drop a fiver if it's listed as free and at least twenty pages. If it's less than that I'll drop two dollars usually, even for a one or two page chart.

Heh it's kinda funny because that's exactly the same guideline I use. I don't download every free product I come across just because it's free like some people I know so it's not a big deal to pay a few bucks when I do.

As a consumer, the RPG business model I have grown to like is "basic product for free, premium product for $$". A lot of RPGs have been using that model successfully lately so I imagine it works okay for creators.

 

[Bunch]

Society has huge amounts of say in business, but I can't think of any other case where the results of someone's work would be considered up for grabs if it's not being made available for purchase. If you make a rug for your front room, I don't get to nick it because you won't make me one.

I tend to think of intellectual property as different since often the marginal cost of producing another item is zero but even there I agree I cant see compelling someone to make DrivethruRPG so compelling someone to run a DTRPG just to comply with making it available is unreasonable.

I know you're using an analogy and its not expected to be perfect but would you agree that I am not suggesting in any way someone takes a rug from one person to give to another? I'm saying if there exists automated looms where someone is willing to weave any rug design available for license then you must license your rug design for them to produce at a reasonable price (also subject to some negotiation such that it is neither so high none actually get produced or so low that the artist/writer/creative makes no meaningful money)

 

[Bunch]

The differences in term lengths for things like patents and copyrights also seem disconnected from any reason. You could spend nothing to millions/billions coming up with something to patent and the term for it is 14-21 years depending on when it was patented regardless of initial investment.

Copyright which takes vastly less money to create gets protection for minimum 70 years and realistically for a 30 year old author 100+ years. Originally in the US is was 14 years with an extension for another 14 years. No life of the author.

Why is society doing such odd incentives? What's the logic? I mean I get it if you're an author hearing you would feel like something is being taken away but something was taken away from the public and we're kind of annoyed about it too.

I suspect with more reasonable copyright lengths you'd get less arguments about the validity of pirating but if someone is going to say "I'm going to use the public goods to lock up my public creation for 120 years because I feel like it." you shouldn't be too shocked if the public says "I'm not so sure I think that's fair trade..."

 

[Toadmaster]

Well, I know I'm not a whole set of examples, but I tend to pay for PWYW items.

I'll usually pay the suggested, but sometimes that is like $2 and after going through it I think you know I'd pay $6 for this or whatever. Not often that I think I want my $2 back, but I'm sure there is stuff like that out there.

 

[TJS]

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.

D&D products, at least the actual rules stuff (and personally I can't imagine wanting their books for anything else, though I'm sure some do) is absolutely ubiquitous on the web through online wikis and tools and encounter builders and the like. There's really not even any reason for anyone to download the PDFs as reference.

 

[lategamer]

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.

Copyright holders quickly become like patent trolls.

Look at H.G.Wells War of the Worlds. That was massively copyright-trolled.

 

[Vile Traveller]

RE: the idea of "use it or lose it" copyright, I'm not sure there isn't precedent for limiting property rights in this way. Developers, for example, often have limitations on public land purchases to the effect that they actually have to build on it within a certain time limit rather than sit on it as a land bank until property prices go up, or that they have to do specific things for the public good with it such as creating wildlife zones or building a percentage of low-income housing. Copyright limited to the lifespan of the creator seems perfectly reasonable to me (I don't believe in selling property rights or assigning them by accident of birth). Trademarks also usually have to be used, or at least defended, to remain valid. Copyright just seems to sit in this weird, unreasonable space compared to most other laws. Because of a mouse, of course.

 

[Necrozius]

D&D products, at least the actual rules stuff (and personally I can't imagine wanting their books for anything else, though I'm sure some do) is absolutely ubiquitous on the web through online wikis and tools and encounter builders and the like. There's really not even any reason for anyone to download the PDFs as reference.

Plus a group of people can share the costs of a DND Beyond account and, well share the content fully within the rules (create a campaign and share the content with your players).

Not “free” but super convenient.

 

[lategamer]

If the conversation devolves into bits versus atoms, then we have lost the thread.

The rug example, for instance, is a straw man. I'm not nicking your rug and therefore you have no rug. I'm making a perfect duplicate of your rug and now we both have rugs. Your rug is not lessened. Your rug is not changed.

If an idea with copyright is out of print, then it doesn't matter who had the copyright if even the holders refuse to copy it. That doesn't transfer you the right to copy it at all.

How ever, you are permitted media shifting rights. You are permitted to make copies of the media for personal use. In practice this is a pain in the ass.

I don't think giving the content to Google (or Trove or DTRPG for that matter) removes any of the problems because none of these places are actually public domain. There is no public land on the internet.

Where it gets really muddy is with The Mouse (and I'l include the equally skeevy Jeff Wayne because I'm still bitter about it) which actively lobbies to pervert the point of copyright. It was to provide an income to the creator and their family. Not their family to the Nth generation. Not to a board of shareholders who bought the copyright with a Venture backed hedge fund.

 

[Nobby-W]

If the conversation devolves into bits versus atoms, then we have lost the thread.

The rug example, for instance, is a straw man. I'm not nicking your rug and therefore you have no rug. I'm making a perfect duplicate of your rug and now we both have rugs. Your rug is not lessened. Your rug is not changed.

Technically it's a false equivalence. A straw man implies misrepresenting an opponent's argument.

 

[lategamer]

Technically a false equivalence. A straw man implies misrepresenting an opponent's argument.

The rug was brought up as a misrepresentation of the argument of theft owned materials so I considered it fitting.

 

[A Fiery Flying Roll]

I tend to think of intellectual property as different since often the marginal cost of producing another item is zero but even there I agree I cant see compelling someone to make DrivethruRPG so compelling someone to run a DTRPG just to comply with making it available is unreasonable.

I know you're using an analogy and its not expected to be perfect but would you agree that I am not suggesting in any way someone takes a rug from one person to give to another? I'm saying if there exists automated looms where someone is willing to weave any rug design available for license then you must license your rug design for them to produce at a reasonable price (also subject to some negotiation such that it is neither so high none actually get produced or so low that the artist/writer/creative makes no meaningful money)

I accept you're not saying that someone should take a rug. But my analogy is much more about the principle of insisting that someone makes the results of their labour commercially available or loses the right to complain when it's taken anyway without their consent. It's not that I never think the latter is permissible, but the bar needs to be reasonably high for me.

The differences in term lengths for things like patents and copyrights also seem disconnected from any reason. You could spend nothing to millions/billions coming up with something to patent and the term for it is 14-21 years depending on when it was patented regardless of initial investment.

Patents aren't my area, but my understanding is they're very different. Utility patents protect the idea, not the expression of it.

Copyright which takes vastly less money to create gets protection for minimum 70 years and realistically for a 30 year old author 100+ years. Originally in the US is was 14 years with an extension for another 14 years. No life of the author.

Yeah and that was based on the Statute of Anne which in turn was a replacement for the old system of requiring books to be licensed. While historical copyright is interesting, the world has changed enough (in particular the ease of distribution now) that I don't think it's going to be directly usable if looking at law reform. Besides, from a selfish point of view, I'm not exactly keen to return to the days where my work could be published with no compensation in the US because I'm not an American citizen. (Nor, I suspect, would most American creatives and publishers be keen for that to be true in reverse.

My instinct is to go for something based on the UK law on broadcasts and standardise that across the board. 50 years from the date of publication. No term extensions, no death of author effect. Boom, done. In terms of RPGs that would mean that early D&D was about to come into the public domain and that the wargames that influenced it would be there already. That *feels* about right.

Why is society doing such odd incentives? What's the logic? I mean I get it if you're an author hearing you would feel like something is being taken away but something was taken away from the public and we're kind of annoyed about it too.

If something didn't belong to the general public in the first place, nothing has been taken away from them. I don't see any real argument for a moral right to other people's work. (My support for shorter copyright terms is based on societal good which is something different).

I suspect with more reasonable copyright lengths you'd get less arguments about the validity of pirating but if someone is going to say "I'm going to use the public goods to lock up my public creation for 120 years because I feel like it." you shouldn't be too shocked if the public says "I'm not so sure I think that's fair trade..."

I think you're being remarkably optimistic if you think that most piracy is caused by some kind of moral position. If what you're saying here was the case the RPG public would be downloading a lot more obscure 70s RPGs (which I'll be honest and say that's the main thing I pirate) and a lot less latest D&D books. That's really not the case; the vast majority of piracy is of commercially available highly popular products.

 

[A Fiery Flying Roll]

The rug was brought up as a misrepresentation of the argument of theft owned materials so I considered it fitting.

But the argument was "if you do not make your work commercially available then it is justified to take it".

 

[TristramEvans]

10 years from the date of initial publication with one chance for renewal by the original creator, as long as it's in print, for an additional ten years or up until the death of the author, whichever comes first. Rights non-transferrable, the creator can license it out. Corporations barred from owning copyrights. Copyright only covers specific expressions of ideas, not the ideas themselves, meaning no copyright of fictional characters themselves only specific stories.

 

[Bunch]

But the argument was "if you do not make your work commercially available then it is justified to take it".

Well my argument is if you don't make it commercially available you lose the protection from society against people making it without your consent and payment.

 

[David Johansen]

So I don't own my games?

 

[Endless Flight]

Even if Superman and Batman were in the public domain, nobody would be able to use them because WB will hold the trademark until the end of time.

 

[Bunch]

So I don't own my games?

If your asking me then it depends on what we are defining as own. You have it. If it's just for personal use then cool beans none of this really applies but if you put it out for commercial use to get the protections enforced by society then yeah society might say the trade off is you have to make them available for purchase.

Why is society spending money to protect your ability to do nothing with something? Your compelling other people to work because you don't want to be able to be paid for your work. That's wierd.

 

[ReluctantGM]

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).

Every gotdamned word of Simon's post is the Gods' Honest Truth. I never made a dime on music until I abandoned my label pretensions and just started doing it all myself.

 

[Gringnr]

I'll usually pay the suggested, but sometimes that is like $2 and after going through it I think you know I'd pay $6 for this or whatever. Not often that I think I want my $2 back, but I'm sure there is stuff like that out there.

 

[Gabriel]

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.

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).

I think that subconsciously I realized what Toadmaster points out. If it's pay what you want, I don't know what it's worth to me.

To Winterblight 's point, whenever I see PWYW stuff, I've just skipped over it and ignored it thereafter.

 

[Ravenswing]

RE: the idea of "use it or lose it" copyright, I'm not sure there isn't precedent for limiting property rights in this way. Developers, for example, often have limitations on public land purchases to the effect that they actually have to build on it within a certain time limit rather than sit on it as a land bank until property prices go up, or that they have to do specific things for the public good with it such as creating wildlife zones or building a percentage of low-income housing.

But that's a different matter altogether. Public land is in public hands in trust for the good of all, and when sold is often sold for well under market value, and always with stipulations as a precondition of sale. (In like fashion, in its divestiture of surplus properties, the Catholic Church invariably puts a legal stipulation in its sale agreement that the property not be used for purposes "contrary to Church teachings.")

And I could do the same in selling my own property. I could put a restrictive clause requiring that the buyer do any of the things you mention yourself. It'd be up to the buyer to decide whether they could live with those limitations ... and how much less they'd be willing to pay for the property under those circumstances.

 

[Ravenswing]

To me all people claiming copyright are making a bargain. Society says we will allow you use of our legal system, police system etc to enforce it but we require you to give us something in return. I think you're saying you want the exchange to be very heavily on your side with very limited rights to society. I think thats fine but don't use the public legal system or police system to defend it. You can pay privately to have the armed thugs come put me in your personal prison you pay for. If you can't do that then we are at least agreeing you are getting something out of this from society and they have some say in what they will and will not pay the do for you. Should you be able to copyright original things and make a living even a phenomenal living off of your creations hell yes. Should at some point society say ok you've done good now its in the public domain for others to build off of? I think yes.

I'm not advocating for piracy and no copyright at all. But I think it is fair for society to say if you want to use our system to protect your works we at least want to have them available for purchase. Society has huge amounts of say in every business and writing/drawing/art for profit is a business.

Utter, arrant bullshit.

Were you a convicted child molester and tax dodger, you would still enjoy the protection of society's laws. I would not have the right to come at you with a baseball bat, and I would be liable to prison if I did. I would not have the right to torch your house, steal your car, or pick your pocket -- I would be liable for prison if I did. No matter how much you rejected our society's values, even if you were one of those rejectionist "sovereign citizen" types, you would still not forfeit the protection of its laws. In the United States at least, the degree to which you are required to "give something in return" is vanishingly small; there are posters on this forum who come from nations imposing compulsory national service, for one.

Indeed, writing/drawing/art for profit is a business. And like every other business, I can decide whether or not I want to participate. I am not required to sell my art if I don't want to do so. I'm not required to sell the gaming works I write if I don't want to do so. And the laws protect me from you seeking to steal them the same way the laws protect me from you trying to steal my wallet.

Now is copyright law a snake pit? Already said so. Is it an international tangle? Yup. But copyright laws predate Disney, and without them, nothing would ever get published, because no one could make a buck off of them. That the notion pisses you off is something for which I decline to feel sorrow or sympathy.