Two WOTC President Interviews Regarding PDF Removal

I am on the road this weekend, but I wanted to link to two  brief  interviews with Greg Leeds, president of “Wizards of the Coast”  regarding the removal of all WTOC PDF files from rpgnow.com and Paizo.com.

Greg Leeds Interview

ICV2 Greg Leeds Interview

I have already made my displeasure clear on this issue, but one line nearly reduced me to tears of laughter.   I quote from the Enworld interview, “We hope to deter future offenders – or at least slow down their path to obtaining illegal products.”

By what? Maybe eight hours? A high-speed feeder, decent scanner and some OCR software and your average pirate might spend a day putting together a pirated  PDF. Two days if he added an index or hyperlinks.  A quick, non-OCR job might take an hour.

After reading the interview I understand less about WOTC’s reasoning than when I started.  I hope more information is forthcoming soon.

Trask, The Last Tyromancer


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trask

Trask is a long-time gamer, world traveler and history buff. He hopes that his scribblings will both inform and advance gaming as a hobby.

2 thoughts on “Two WOTC President Interviews Regarding PDF Removal

  • April 11, 2009 at 6:19 am
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    I pretty much agree with you. I’ve done (legal) scanning using a high speed feed scanner before as a primary job duty, so I know roughly how much time is involved. To say removing PDFs will somehow slow this down by any significant amount is both disingenious and, frankly, almost willfully ignorant.

  • April 12, 2009 at 6:10 am
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    It’s beginning to look as if WotC is, in fact, that stupid.

    I couldn’t believe that that would be the case — who in this day and age thinks that taking down copies of PDFs will stop piracy? — but evidently one of the people making the decisions is, in fact, at least 15 years behind the rest of us.

    Sad.

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