View From the Bushes

Lately, the topic of PDF piracy has been a hot topic on the D20-Open Gaming Mailing List. As if electronic publishers didn't already have enough problems, we also have to worry about piracy. This may sound like hubris on my part, but I'm actually in a better position than most on this front. First off, one of the big values of my product is not available with the pdf but has to be obtained from my website. In other words, if you see one of my adventures somewhere and you really like it, then you can either "pirate" that version or you can come to my website and for a relatively small amount of money get the same adventure customized for you, plus all of the other adventures in our archive. With most PDF publishers, if you saw a copy of their PDF on Kazaa you'd be seeing everything they have to offer.

Secondly, since all of my PDF's are generated dynamically for each individual, I could use a steganographic method of fingerprinting each pdf with the identity of the person who generated it. Basically, at several points in the adventure I could give the program a choice of phrases, like "went down," "walked down," or "descended." A code would be generated for each user and the program would pick which phrases it used in an adventure based on that code. Then if I found that all my PDF's had been shared out on Kazaa I could check the encoding and see who had done it. To be honest, if every single one had a different encoding I probably wouldn't do anything, but if they were all from one individual then it might be worth my while to at least have a chat with them.

It's important to note that I haven't implemented the system described above (or maybe I have and I'm trying to throw people off the trail...), partially because of reason one and partially because I think that it would be more effort than it's worth and partially because I'm generally of the opinion that piracy's downward effect on sales is overstated and copy protection's downward effect on sales is understated. In other words, (though it's difficult to imagine how this would be the case with the steganographic system I mentioned above) you can lose a lot of sales by making it difficult for a legitimate buyer to use your product.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross