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Originally Posted by sbroome
Just to get you to be more concise with your position, in an article in which a creator (who writes and draws her own stories),has said specifically that people who have nothing to do with her actual creative process do not deserve to distribute her work without her permission and take away page hits and ad revenue from her, what is your contention?
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That it is likely she is exaggerating the amount of damage being done to her, and this undermines her point. If someone driving a car runs into me, that's bad damage, and we should (and do) have laws against that. If the care merely drives close to me and splashes a huge muddy-oily puddle onto me, this may ruin my outfit and *perhaps* we should take action against that. If the care drives several feet away and the breeze of its passing knocks my hat off, I'm in no position to rant about the evils of irresponsible drivers and how they are ruining my life. Even if it was my favorite hat and it lands in a mud puddle.
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This is not a huge media corporate giant, this is an individual who has worked her ASS off to create and sell something, telling people to stop misappropriating it. What possible problem could you have with what she's saying?
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That her case is not more compelling when supported by nebulous unverifiable numbers. That if the goal is to convince people not to share her creations without her permission, she needs to make a case for it not based on "because it costs me money, of an amount I don't know, derived from site activity I can't prove would be happening anyway."
She can tell them that it bothers her (although this isn't often compelling to fans, especially in industries where the actual creators are obscured by the companies who promote their works). She can say that she gets future work contracts based on *measurable* popularity of her past work, which includes both sales and site hits, and encourage people to both buy and download from her site. She can point out that the internet is not like a city--her fans "live" no farther away from her than from their friends, or from download sites, and they can get access to her content from her site instead of other places. (This, of course, presumes she hasn't put weird restrictions on use of her site, like requiring a login ID just to read things, or filling it with blinking flashing ads that drive people away.) She can release her works without DRM that requires *another* type of login ID with commercial data kept by a third party, and pitch that point as why they should buy her works.
Appealing to fans for less piracy and more attention and money to the creators: Good.
Doing so by insisting piracy is costing some unknown-but-it-must-be-huge amount of damage to creators' careers: Not good.