I'm thinking of doing an episode of the podcast on this issue but need to do a bit of research first. So I thought I'd start with this smaller community. What do you know of this shadow world? I'm particularly curious about these supposed sites that pool money together to buy a pdf and then share it between them. Is this just an internet rumour? If it's real, where are the prime sites for this kind of thing. How well organized are they? Do they have a stated ideology? If so, how coherent is it?

Does anybody know anyone deep in the scene that I could talk to? (anonymously if necessary).

I'm not really looking to get into an argument about pirating here. I'm not against such an argument, but do it elsewhere. This is just for some info-gathering.

Hmm. Good luck with that.

It's quite the hermetic topic you're tackling there.

Is it? How do you know?

I mean pirating movies and videogames seems pretty darn out in the open. Is the RPG club a lot more secretive simply because of the size of our hobby?

Most of the stuff I have heard about goes along the lines of general file piracy, where a person who is file sharing has the file in the directory they share music and other files from and it gets circulated around that way. I am unaware of any group specifically out to shanghai PDF game files.
Do you think they have hooks and eye patchs?
That would be cool, but would make it hard to type......

Well, I can tell you that with Maid RPG we knew it was going to be pirated, especially since it got promoted through 4chan's /tg/ board. We put a little warning/guilt trip in the back, which did in fact sway some people to spend the $8 to get the PDF version. I know it's still being pirated--my Google Alert keeps popping up with BitTorrent and RapidShare sites--though we can always tell if someone's got the pirated version because apparently none of the pirates have bothered to get the updated version. As a creator my position is that obscurity scares me much more than piracy, and while I'd rather people got stuff legitimately, it's better than being ignored.

7chan and 4chan are the big pirate websites for RPGs. For older stuff, there's a ton of Spanish blogs that openly host pirated pdfs, especially of old Trav and OD&D files. Just look up "masmorra" or go to 7chan's /r thread in their /tg section and hunt around for the links. It was torrents a few years ago, but now it's all 4shared, megaupload and occasionally rapidshit. A lot of the new stuff is done by request, and the average turn around that I've observed is about a month after street date for new books. Torrents are mainly for D&D stuff. Dark Heresy is huge right now for pirates, mainly because 40K's huge in the Anon community and IMHO because the books are obscenely expensive.

Watermarks are removed by using a pdf editor to copy/paste the images and text w/o the watermarks to another file.

I have a friend who bought a pdf of a certain RPG book for use at the table and shared it out amongst the other players (with specific instructions not to put it up on file sharing sites), but I'm not going to say anything incriminating by providing more details about him (except to say that it actually wasn't me). He bought it from the website of the company that publishes the game. It does happen, though, IME. I don't even see anything wrong with it personally, anymore than I would lending a friend a book you bought.

This is all from a purely theoretical interest on my part, of course.

Maybe because the RPG world is indeed a lot smaller, and because, in its online community, it is fairly common to interact with RPG authors, publishers, etc directly. This encourages people talking about RPG gaming on the internet to be very vocal against piracy of RPG books.

I don't feel that piracy is very welcome in the RPG online community in general. Do you?

It's extremely common, just not with people on therpgsite or here because these are small communities who tend to be older (late-20s and up) and therefore have the disposable income to spend buying game books and pdfs. It's banned from discussion on rpg.net, which also makes it seem less common there than it probably is.

Go to a site where it's not though - any of the chans, for example - and you'll see that it's fairly openly acknowledged, tolerated and even encouraged. The "fa/tguys" tend to be mid-20s or younger, and I'd guess that all the main /tg boards (4, 420, 7, book-) put together are about as large as rpg.net is.

I feel very close to my customers -- we're just gamers who chose to publish, after all, and so we're the same as any other table. So piracy feels like betrayal to me -- someone who's a hair's breadth from "friend" in my head did something that they know will hurt me.

The piracy itself is not a big deal, but the betrayal stings.

I don't know how elaborate the scene is, or if they pool their money. If I were you, I would google for "piracy advocacy" or something like that. There are a lot of vocal pirates, very defiant. For them, it's a matter of pride and they have all kinds of arguments to justify piracy. Hit the major pirate forums and say you want to interview an RPG pirate.

Also, I agree with you we should avoid discussing actual piracy here but I think it could be an interesting subject for another thread. We haven't had a big thread in a while and I sense a potential winner there Plus, it could give you ideas for the podcast?