Rpg piracy and you!

So there is this cool little website called http://www.scribd.com/. They are neat! Basicly, for those of you to lazy to click the "about us" link. It is a place where you can self publish your own works for everyone to see and download easily. I am a big fan of self publishing and there is something pleasent about scribd that appeals to eccentric nature.

Recently, scribd made geek news when Wizards of the Coast went after 5 diffrent people who were distributing the second volume of their players handbook via that web site.

Now in general I am a pro piracy, anti corporate nut job and I would be all over that sort of thing like white on lice. However... not this time. Unlike most fist wavers who just seem to be content to unitellegably yell into the distance over everything and anything I have goals. It is important to have goals when you are fighting for things. That way you know it is time to move onto the next battle.

Anyway my demands are fairly reasonable. I wish for digital media to have the same general restrictions as print media. I wish to be able to loan out, and possibly resell my books, music, and movies without a huge fucking hassle. I wish to be able to ensure that I am able to take steps to protect my investment, without a huge fucking hassle.

As far as I am concerned this battle has been more or less won when it comes to roleplaying pdfs. Instead of restrictive drm codes that interfere with everything everywhere we now have discrete little water marks. This means I can back up my files where ever and how ever I want. I can distrubute my files to my friends, and if I can find someone willing to buy them I could even sell my ebook collection on DVD. This is swell. I approve of this. The watermark sometimes is just annoying and other times if can be used to track you, like in the case of the Scribd.com morons. So if your paticular ebook ends up on a file sharing site you get what you get.

You gotta give a little to get a little, and so far the companies still willing to take part in PDF sales have been very helpful in this regard and I applaud them for trying so hard to cater to us. The companies that are being assholes numbers 1 and that is Wizards of the Coast. Just vote with yer dollars and everything is cool.

So I don't condem Hasbro for doing what they did. In fact I am glad. It prooves that watermarking is an effective tool, more effective than DRM which can be removed and then the file will be destributed just for spite. This is something I personally gaurntee. No. It works. I am also ultra pissed off that they used Scribd. People. There is a front line for this sort of thing. It is called pirate's bay. Those people have become parias in multiple countries, they risk years of jail time, all so that we can stand up and say STOP. You will not control the internet the way you control everything else. Here is where your domain ends and where mine begins. Frankly using things that aren't pirate's bay is disrespectful. Using a self publishing site not only puts other writters at risk of not being able to publish their things, but it also smacks of plagurism. So you get what you deserve says I.

And that's that.