Fellow discussants:
With respect to the ability of Wizards of the Coast to track copyright infringement: yes, it can. Or, more accurately—and much more likely—it can hire a company that specializes in such things to do so.
Companies like BayTSP [1] have actually built the infrastructure necessary to monitor the networks, including BitTorrent, the various instant messaging and other peer-to-peer networks, NNTP and even UUCP-based networks, for content infringing their customers' copyrights.
A customer—Wizards of the Coast, in this case—provides examples of what to look for on the networks, and BayTSP simply adds it to the already massive index of things for which it is looking. BayTSP then emits periodic reports on the traffic it finds of the sample materials provided by the customer.
Does this method yield records of
all of the illegal traffic in Wizards of the Coast's properties? No. But it certainly provides a baseline from which to make decisions. The reports that Wizards of the Coast gets back from the tracking company will differentiate with high likelihood between copies made on servers primarily for re-transmission and copies made for end use. [2]
The numbers reported by a company like BayTSP will represent minimums: they call out the activity
actually observed by the tracking company's systems. Such reports are likely to have been the source of the "10:1" figure given for the ratio of illegal to legal copies of
Player's Handbook II: that ratio may in fact be higher if the copyright violators are successful in concealing their activities from the tracking company.
With respect to Wizards of the Coast having decided to withdraw from the PDF-based electronic book market entirely, this seems a superficially poor business decision: it does little or nothing to deter illegal copying, and it alienates existing, previously loyal customers.
On the other hand, I find it unlikely in the extreme that the decision to withdraw from the market was made lightly; I also find it unlikely that those making the decision were afflicted with acute idiocy. The alternative seems to be that we—those of us not privy to the process by which the decision was made—lack some crucial piece or crucial pieces of information regarding the context in which the decision was made.
We may, of course, speculate freely as to causes and motives: some of what we say may indeed have an impact on future decisions made by Wizards of the Coast.
I look forward both to the continued discussion, and to the future of
Dungeons & Dragons.
In the hope that I have contributed to understanding and enlightened discourse, I remain respectfully yours,
—Siran Dunmorgan
[1] I have no information to suggest that Wizards of the Coast has actually hired BayTSP: I mention that specific company because I happen to be familiar with its operation and methods.
BayTSP - Piracy Protection For Your Digital Assets
[2] No, it's not absolute, but it's possible to differentiate these with high likelihood from the behavior of that node on the network, the nature of the network to which the IP address resolves, and the number, sizes, and known contents of files made available by that node.
