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Johnnephew

@Johnnephew@dice.camp

President of Atlas Games®, TTRPG professional since 1986, amateur woodworker, would-be recycler of plastics. Duluth, Minnesota.

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Johnnephew , to random
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Just as a "content warning," as I've been privately cautioned that "publicly messing around with an LLM trained off scraped data isn’t a good look for a publisher," I'm likely to continue talking about generative AI and experiments with it because part of the reason to have this, a personal Mastodon account, is to hash through things I'm thinking my way through in a place where I may get input from others. Don't feel bad about muting or unfollowing. This is a place of free association.

Johnnephew OP ,
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(Random side thought: Maybe when you are young, you actively want to embrace strong opinions because it's part of how you find and integrate yourself with a social unit. As we get older, we increasingly have social dependencies and obligations that are outside our choice, and unnecessarily strong opinions are as often an obstacle to those social ties as they are an adhesive.)

Johnnephew OP ,
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Another thing this I'm pondering this morning is parallels between this moment and what we experienced about 25 years ago with the explosion of file sharing and the growth of commercial PDF distribution of RPG books.

I spent a lot of time on usenet arguing about how people were pirating/stealing our books and debating about whether we should be selling digital books (with or without DRM) because it facilitated file sharing with even cleaner and more compact files.

Johnnephew OP ,
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We put a lot of staff hours into DMCA notices to websites where people scanned (and didn't even OCR!) entire RPG books and put them in public locations.

Johnnephew OP ,
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As should be no suprise in hindsight, this was all about as effective as Canute commanding the tide

Johnnephew OP ,
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More than two decades later, I've long accepted that pretty much anything I do professionally, as a writer or publisher, is going to be shared freely somewhere on the internet. And for about that long I've had to approach our business with awareness of that as a stubborn feature of the landscape in which we operate.

Johnnephew OP ,
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Playing whack-a-mole with filesharing is one of the least constructive or economically useful things I can imagine for my time, or to spend money paying employees.

Johnnephew OP ,
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But there are other things to observe. One is that, in spite of the fact that you can find it all (illegitimately) for free, we continue to sell PDFs. Heck, last weekend we offered a discount bundle of the entire Ars Magica 4th Edition line (all of it published before 2005), and netted more than $4000 in a few days. That exceeds the original budget of most of those individual books, including printing.

Johnnephew OP ,
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I'll bet a lot of those buyers know that with a bit of effort they could get that material (illegally) for free. But there is value in getting it together, getting it from a trusted source (not infected with who knows what from a pirate website), and I think people genuinely want to pay for it. Weird, huh? Maybe traditional economic theory doesn't have it all nailed down.

Over the years, I have increasingly come to see our game hobby as something people WANT to spend money on.

Johnnephew OP ,
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Spending money on your hobby is in itself a kind of pleasure. I love backing Kickstarters simply for the feeling of giving money to someone who is doing something that looks kinda awesome.

Johnnephew OP ,
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Here's another thing to observe. There are a lot of people who, for ethical or pragmatic reasons, steer clear of things that might be infringement of intellectual property.

Suppose someone wants to write a novel in the world of Ars Magica, or a probably-legally-counts-as-a-derivative-work sourcebook. They give it away for free. Or, heck, they make it into a digital or physical product for sale.

Johnnephew OP ,
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I am not going to spend my life tracking down such people to get Medieval RIAA on their ass. I'm certainly not going to spend a ton of money on lawyers.

But you know, that's me. I'm a corporate shareholder. If my wife and I were to be hit by a falling airplane engine tomorrow, I can't speak for our heirs and their future adult opinions.

Johnnephew OP ,
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If my successors get a bee in their bonnets about perceived infringement of copyright sometime during its legal duration (how long that is... well, uh, it may be unclear, and could be in some cases 70 years after the death of me or some contributor to a work, or maybe 95 years after publication, and how would you know unless you have access to the original contracts), the definitive question of "is this fair use or infringement?" will be a matter of specific facts and the future state of the law

Johnnephew OP ,
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This means, in practical terms, it only matters is there is a juicy target that makes litigation worthwhile.

Which in turn makes it very likely that anyone who is an juicy litigation target, or wants to make something super awesome that if hugely successful would make them a juicy litigation target, needs to stay the hell away of anything that could be grounds for infringement litigation in the next hundred years or so.

Johnnephew OP ,
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Our current screwed up copyright regime may be presented in terms of creators' rights (life of the author +70 years etc.), but it's really focused on converting the most popular creations into corporate assets that can be traded, securitized, and financialized.

All the years spent keeping Steamboat WIllie out of the public domain ensured that decades of the early history of film went up in flames before anyone bothered to save it.

Johnnephew OP ,
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Thinking through all of this is what has led me to our current intent to open-license all of Ars Magica.

First of all, I believe that fans of the game want to spend money on their hobby, and I think we can find ways to make them feel good about giving us that money. Yay!

But secondly, I want people to create awesome things. Honest self-reflection tells me I have actually been a barrier to that. Given IP law, it's not enough to wink and ignore things that someone in the future might sue over.

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