Quote:
Originally Posted by hidari
I would say that most people are well aware of the patronage system of Europe in the past on this forum. . Also, I understand freedom of expression is a right. , so is going to the toilet, so what. I figured you would understand that I was referring to being paid to write. Saying that writing will suffer without writers being paid a fine wage is what I find a weak argument. There are many a fine writer from the past that did not earn a good wage, yet were able to "survive" in their respective cultures.
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I think your argument is specious.
I do understand that not everyone who downloads pirate ebooks reads them, and they would likely not have bought them if they were not available. They certainly don't translate directly into lost sales. Still, I don't think anyone will disagree with the position that at least some percentage of such downloads are lost sales, even if it's only 1-2%.
Writing is a craft just like carpentry. There are people who do carpentry for the sheer joy of it, and others who do it for money. If people in a money-based economy worked on the principle that the products of carpentry should be free the end result would be fewer carpenters and far fewer products of carpentry. Each carpenter would still need to eat, and in order to do that they would need a job that paid (as a writer perhaps?) them enough to live on. Some would move on to jobs that would take all their time and force them to give up carpentry altogether. Others would simply decrease the number of hours spent on carpentry due to the time required for the other job. The end result is a smaller number of carpenter-hours in the economy and thus lowered output.
Writing works the same way.
Some write in their spare time, others full time. Some for a primary income, some for a supplemental income, and others regardless of income. If you remove the reward motivation from writing you will decrease the total amount of hours people spend writing.
This means fewer books will be produced.
It all comes down to two simple facts: Everyone needs to eat, and time is a fixed commodity. If writers are not paid they will not spend as much time writing because they will not have as much time to write. Therefore they will not produce as many books and they will learn the craft more slowly than if they could devote more time to it. End result, fewer books and likely a lower quality.
It's got nothing to do with rights, and everything to do with needs.
Also, it's not about making a "fine" living: Most writers don't, it's about compensation for labor and incentive to produce more. Writing a novel is hard work.