Yes I know what a PDF is. My questions involve printing and burning. If I purchase 1 of the PDF's from Drive Thru can I print it multiple times? Can I burn it to DVD/CD? If I burn it to DVD/CD can I print it?

I guess where I'm going with this is if I buy it I have a friend who can bind it for me. Can I transfer the file to him via e-mail or do I have to print it myself? Ideas? Suggestions? And no I don't want to pirate a bunch of copies. I just want the 1 for my self.

Get them from BattleCorps.
They use neither DRM, so you are truely free to do what you want, nor watermarks that would look annoying in print.

Having no idea what DRM stands for, I took the comment "free to do what you want" to be much broader than it was, mostly because of the scope of the question it was answering. Sorry for the confusion.

Digital Rights Management. A broad term that encompasses copy protection, watermarks, and various other things that attempt to control what you can do with a set of 1's and 0's that you purchased.


The wiki entry, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management does a much better job explaining it.

Cool, I understand now. It's just that the first post said "free to do what you want" and your reply to me seems to indicate that it says "able to use it on any PDF-reader and modify it to your liking." It's the difference between those two statements that threw me for a loop.

BattleCorps offers their PDFs with no restrictions. I interpret their policy as they are willing to treat me like a grown up who does not steal, simply because they cannot do anything to meaningfully stop the theft without diminishing the product for those who pay. So what happens is the thiefs still get what they want, and sadly it would probably be in a better format than what I payed for.

I was glad to pay $25 to BattleCorps for SMag, and I'll probably pay $35 or whatever for a hard copy from my local game store. I do it because I enjoy Shadowrun, I know that my theft will diminish the likelyhood of good future products from coming into existance so I don't steal.

I have the advantage of having seriously excessive printing capacity due to the fact that I worked for an office supply superstore and HP likes to make printer salesmen great deals on printers so I can tell my customers from first hand experience how good their printers are.

I did consider taking it into the store I used to work and gaving their copy department do the work for me. As far as copyright would have gone, I would have felt no obligation to delete my copy from my computer just to burn a disk and bring it to them, since I'm not responsible for preventing a print shop from stealing intellectual property. They are just providing me a service. If you give the PDF to your friend and you reasonably suspect he would keep a copy for himself, then you are on shaky moral ground, but your morals are for you to decide.

Frankly I think BattleCorpse policy of using no copy protection costs them nothing in sales, as those who would steal it will steal it anyhow from other means, history has shown that there is more availiable ways to steal digital media than they are ways to prevent it. Ultimately if they didn't choose to treat me as a responsible adult I would have just waited for the hard copy and only purchased that, but since I have been using insect spirits in my current game, and I wanted to use it I decided that I would make the purchase of the PDF knowing full well that I'd also buy the hard copy, but now I'll probably wait until an updated second or third printing is released so I have some of the errata included.

I tend to get overwhelmed and confused by all the copyright laws and stuff, so I try to live by a somewhat simpler set of moral guidelines when it comes to pdfs and copying media:
If the company that produces the product ends up with less money: don't do it.
If the company ends up with more money, or no change whatsoever: it's probably okay.
I guess my attitude is, don't worry about the laws, just be a grown-up person, do the right thing, and everything will be fine.

(seeing Demerzel's post)
Yeah, what he said. They're trusting you to be a responsible adult and not to screw them. They produce a wonderful product that we love. Let's not let 'em down.

I don't mind watermarking, but I do object to being unable to burn pdfs to disc as back-up. I think my pdf version of the SR4 rulebook (from drive-thru) blocks me from doing this, IIRC, and that really sucks. If my computer goes down for some reason, they damn well better give me a new pdf for free.