Dungeons and Dragons - or, How many times would you pay for something?

[The Straight Story]

Last week I posted an article about some interesting letters sent into Dragon Magazine - and it got me to thinking about when I was a teen and how I used to play AD&D and read Dragon Magazine.

So I went online looking for a way to get the magazines and the books from AD&D I used to own (and have bought several times from dealers but have been lost over the many moves I have had in my life).

When it came to the magazine it was basically "If you can find them on ebay, etc, buy them" in other words, if I got the magazines the money I spent on them would not go to the people who wrote the articles or the original TSR (Now wizards.com) but to the collector who had copies of them to sell.

And then I find a guy who has scanned in all the copies from 1976 to 2005, 355 issues including special editions. All for a free download. So, yeah, I grabbed them - all in PDF format.

I also, while searching, find all the books I have bought and various other products (dungeons/adventures) and download them.

Questions though - is it pirating/screwing people out of money - if you have already paid (more than once in some cases) for a product - or if you cannot get the product anymore from the manufacturer/publisher and can find it elsewhere for free?

Let's say you bought a book 15 years ago and it got lost and you find it again online for free - are you stealing/pirating if you download it to read again without paying again?

I guess the same goes to movies - have you ever bought a DVD and then it got lost/etc and you downloaded another copy off the internet to watch. How many times should you pay for something?

For those looking for a political tie in ;) if you pay into Social Security your whole life should you be punished because someone else lost the money you put in to it?