Y'know....I honestly don't know a boatload of folks who would call themselves a
pirate, in my circle of acquaintances. A few, yes, but mostly, no; obviously, given my avocation, it would be at best peculiar if I were to hang out with pirates.
So, my view is naturally a bit one-sided. Nonetheless--and I believe I've spoken about this before, on MR--when I first entered into the line of work I'm in now (eBook making/production), I was surprised to find out just how bloody dishonest people ARE. I spent decades in the Real Estate Development biz (which always incites people to talk about dealing with gangsters, [corrupt] unions, and other unsavory criminal types), and I never--never--deal with so much dishonesty in my life, as I do now.
The first few years I had my (bookmaking) biz, I had it set up to be pay upon completion. Within a few short years, I had to chuck that idea entirely. Over the course of two years,
I was ripped off, by customers, to the tune of $10-$12K--
per year. I was...positively
shocked, that just because the product was digital, that people thought it was
perfectly okay to just take their books and not pay us. But they DID.
So, then, I decided that okay, they'd pay the base formatting fees, as quoted, and I'd invoice for AA (Author amendments) upon completion. After all, how badly could that go? Suffice to say:
very. As of the first of the new year, we changed our policies over, and within the
FIRST QUARTER, I'd
already been ripped off for
more than $2500.00.
So--you guys can sit there and talk about how there are all these people who "know how" to pirate digital media, and how that doesn't mean that they will, necessarily, steal it--but from my perspective, the people that I've dealt with, over the last decade,
are far more likely to rip me off than any gangster or dirtbag I ever dealt with when I was building hotels, office buildings, etc. And that's saying something.
It's patently
obvious to me that:
- The anonymity afforded by the Internet seems to make people inherently less compelled to honesty;
- That people have ZERO respect for anything in digital format, and,
- Less respect than that for the TIME that someone puts in, creating/crafting that digital product.
I have precisely ZERO reason to believe that people are "basically" or "essentially" honest. I used to think that--and now, I don't. Not in any way close to how I used to believe it.
And it's not just us, not just my business. My traditional print-layout clients, ALL--repeat, ALL--have me watermark the eBooks that we give them, to give to their clients. Why? Because those clients will take their PDF interiors, walk off, and, whoops!--"forget" to pay. Forever. Other eBookmakers? Every single one I know that's been in biz for more than 5 minutes insists on payment upfront, for the exact same reasons that I do. They've ALL been ripped off--and ripped off a LOT.
So--you guys can sit there and tell yourselves that authors, publishers, etc., all suffer this
de minimis amount of thievery--oh, right, "copyright infringement"--and all that, but
my actual, real-life experience says that it's anything but minor.
I hope that none of you have to deal with the amount of theft and non-payment that I've had to deal with--and those people were, basically,
ripping me off to my face. So to speak. Work that was done, on a custom basis, for THEM and only them. Not even
remotely in the same category as one digital copy of a book. But, blithely steal it/them, they did.
How honest do you
REALLY THINK that anonymous users, on the Net, are going to be, for some author, publisher, whatever, that will
never know who they are? What,
MORE honest than my customers, who knew that they were stealing actual, custom work, done for them, by someone that they'd MET? Yeah...right,
sure they will.
Before I got into this line of work, I'd have argued that just because someone knows
HOW to do it, doesn't mean that they
will. Now?
Now I'd say that given the opportunity, it seems that
many absolutely, positively
WILL take a digital product sans payment and justify it to themselves however they have to--but
they'll steal it. Period. And if the opportunity doesn't present itself? Well, then, apparently, they'll read this or that website, find out how to circumvent DRM, etc., and they'll
create the opportunity.
Hitch