Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
E-book "pirates" refuse to accept the idea that an IP creator is hurt when he is not paid for his work. And in a world where someone is dependent on the income he makes from his IP, every copy not paid for is injurious to him. But the "pirate" in his selfishness doesn't care about someone he's never met, somewhere on the other side of the planet, so he does what he wants, in his rationalizations for justification, and his ultimate belief that he won't get caught.
And every so often, a creator is so hurt by the amount of pirating of his work that he stops creating... we lose their creations, and we are all worse off for it. And still, the "pirate" seeks to blame someone else ("It's the governments"... "It's that guy's high price and DRM"... "Someone else posted the pirated work... they did wrong. I only downloaded it.").
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I'll continue to agree with you that people who break the law and steal content that should be paid for are wrong, and defending that position (especially by playing the role of the revolutionary, bravely not paying for copyrighted materials as a form of righteous protest) is really pretty silly. I also recognize that piracy will always have some effect on the income of the author/musician/artist, but this doesn't necessarily have to be a negative impact, as there are certainly a few examples of creators who have been thrust into the spotlight thanks to the type of "viral" marketing that's possible on the internet. Of course, most of the time piracy
is going to have a negative impact on the pocketbooks of creators and publishers, especially in the e-book market where the viral marketing effect is going to be much less pronounced. I just have to say one more time that the extent to which this income is affected by piracy is often going to be directly proportional to the how well a frank assessment of the realities of piracy is used to develop alternate methods of revenue generation that go beyond appealing to people's good nature.
As for you assertion that piracy will eventually dissuade some authors to stop writing books, that's definitely going to be true in some cases, but I do feel the need to argue the point that when the piracy argument turns into "pay us for being artists or we'll stop making art," my sympathy for the plight of those artists starts going away very quickly. I can say that because I've released a short musical album and written most of a book, both of which I've made available online with no immediate plans to gain any future monetary compensation from them. I don't expect everyone to have the same attitude towards distributing their artistic creations, and I'll admit that my decisions in this area weren't fully altruistic, but any real "gotta get my message out there" artist won't quit because they too many people want to experience their output without paying. On the other hand, I have complete sympathy for the starving artist who has to work two jobs to pay his bills and doesn't have any time to write/draw/paint/record because they're too tired from being on their feet all day. Wanting to keep those people's artistic output up is a good argument for why piracy hurts the little guy, and why it might make it harder for unestablished names to start making a living off of their creative work.