[StainlessSteelCynic]

Even if the CD-ROMs from FFE had been a bit more expensive I still would have bought them but for purely selfish reasons - I wanted copies because my main books were getting worn out from use!
Having digital copies made life easier and it was a big bonus to have them all on the one disk rather than multiple pdfs.

I had been given some scanned copies of 1st Ed. modules from friends many years ago (before they were available from DrivethruRPG) and some people took great care with scanning them while others obviously didn't give much thought to doing it properly. Ultimately I never used them because I preferred the original copies I had (this is partly a fondness for books over ebooks and partly some nostalgia from when RPGs were in their heyday and partly an obsessive desire to possess all the material in its published format).

As for the legal side of things, I truly believe that the smaller RPG companies get royally screwed by the torrenting of their products. The big companies really don't make that much of a loss from it but they need to protect their IP so they'll smash the malefactors to the fullest extent of the law - look at how the corporate music business has punished people for possessing unauthorized copies of songs (bringing suites against 12yr olds comes to mind).

Unfortunately the smaller companies can't afford to be so vengeful and not from simply a legal or financial standpoint - if they get a rep for doing such things, their popularity could take a nosedive and the fans might desert them, the kiss of death for a small business in a niche market. So they're damned if they do and damned if they don't and in a number of cases it's because the person torrenting the product was being a cheap-ass-son-of-a-bitch or they believe themselves to be some sort of "warrior for free information" - I'll bet none of them would work for free so why the hell do they expect the RPG companies to do so?

I get a bit hot under the collar about this topic because in my view, if a small company can't make any money because some dickhead is torrenting all their product and giving it away free, then that company will probably collapse and never make any more product. And I'll admit to being selfish, I want those companies to keep making product because I want the product and having been raised in Australia where we believe in the egalitarian attitude, I see it as nothing less than "fair payment for fair work".