Quote:
Originally Posted by Nate the great
All of these points are obviously refuted by the example of Baen Books. Baen has demonstrated that readily available free content does encourage sales.
P.S. If you are going to nitpick because the content isn't illicit (and thus it isn't piracy), you will need to provide a creditable argument as to why a pirate would behave different from Baen's customer base. Most any argument you do provide cannot be applied to all pirates.
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Actually, I
do make a distinction between free and pirated works. A work given away is not the same as a work stolen. However, I don't know enough about Baen and their customer base to comment on it, so I won't try. Besides, as you pointed out, any statement I made could not be applied to everyone in Baen's customer base.
But I'd still like to see a demonstrated correlation between pirated works and increased sales/author popularity, and especially one that demonstrated greater sales/popularity than legitimate advertising/promotion. The Grateful Dead mention is interesting, though, since the artists
told their fans to record and share their work, that might be the same as free promotion provided by the author (though I imagine their record company didn't see it that way... in effect, that could mean the band was going against their own copyright laws).