Quote:
Originally Posted by taosaur
It might be wrong if it were present in the statement. The point is that obscurity is a greater and definitely real threat that we can all agree upon, whereas any threat posed by piracy is a matter of debate, and at least somewhat balanced by piracy's capacity to grow your audience, thereby relieving obscurity. The subtext is that obscurity also has the capacity to relieve you of the "threat" of piracy, but nothing is gained from such relief. It's an inverse relationship, which only becomes exclusive if one is either so totally pirated or so totally obscure that the other side of the equation drops to zero.
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This is a reasonable argument, but it really only holds for obscure authors.
Stephen King, or James Patterson, or P.D. James, or Stieg Larsson, don't suffer from obscurity, and thus there aren't really any upsides to piracy for them.
An obscure author, on the other hand, *may* benefit from piracy, although I think the benefits are, realistically, quite overstated. Since having your book hidden away on the darknet in a file with 2,000 other books isn't really doing a lot to combat obscurity either, particularly since someone probably only downloaded that file because they knew it had "11-22-63" in it.
Other kinds of piracy are more beneficial. If you have a non-DRM'd book and a reader e-mails a copy of it to a friend with the suggestion that they read this great book, the new reader may well buy the next book by this author. And I see this kind of "retail" piracy having the most impact, since the book comes with a recommendation from someone you already know. I have a hard time seeing "wholesale" piracy having anything near the same effect.
Note that piracy may work different for different media. At 3 minutes a song, you can listen to a hundred of song a day without much effort - this seems much more likely to help with the obscurity issue. As long as people aren't just downloading songs they already know...which is, I think, what most people do.
And I don't see movies being helped by piracy much at all, as movies tend not to be as obscure as other media in the first place, and there tend to be not as many tie in opportunities, either.
TL;DR:
Obscurity is a problem for new authors, but I'm not sure that piracy helps make unknown authors less obscure.