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Originally Posted by Hitch
People used to talk to me about how I worked in the Real Estate Development world, and with contractors, etc., and about how it must have been awful to work in such a corrupt world, with crooks everywhere, etc--trust me when I tell you, authors and publishers are FAR bigger thieves than any of the contractors, union guys, F&B providers, or the like, ever were. EVER. I had far less trouble with people ripping me off, being corrupt or anything like that, in my former line of work than I do now.
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And in your former line of work you learned very quickly what the deal was and took steps accordingly.
A former co-worker was previously involved in large scale erections. His father had been a master millwright, and taught him things like keeping verifiable records of union staffing on projects to prevent attempts to charge for hours not actually worked by men not actually on site. He made sure the shop stewards knew he kept such records, and false claims didn't occur.
He described a project he worked on where a paper company was building a new mill in Canada. The equipment in the mill was from a German supplier, and my co-worker represented the company supplying the equipment, with responsibility for seeing it was properly installed as per factory specs.
The building was a two story concrete structure. He was on site when a truck pulled up in the lot, and a guy got out, erected a scaffold, and began to drill holes on the second floor. There had apparently be an after the fact decision that an external elevator needed to be installed to provide access to the second floor, and the drilling was the first step in the process.
My guy complained to the contractor it was a bad idea, but he didn't work for the mill and the contractor was going to do the job he was told to do. My friend set up a folding chair, told onlookers he had the best seat in the house, and sat back to watch.
The area the guy was drilling into contained 440 volt feeder lines for the mill equipment. They were live. He drilled into them. He got blown off his scaffold onto the ground. Fortunately, that had not been paved and was still dirt, so he escaped with scrapes and bruises. The entire facility was shorted out.
My guy spent the next two weeks with a team of electricians following him around to run new lines. He told the plant owners "No. You will
not splice around the break. You will run all new cable. If you don't, I will not sign off on the mill equipment installation, and you will not have a working mill."
I don't know what that "Oops!" cost the company building the mill, but it probably would have paid several years of the salary I was making at the time, and I was decently paid.
The father of an old friend was a union electrician for 40 years, and talked about the art of stealing stuff from job sites. He apparently thought it was a perk of the job. Rule 1: Anything not nailed down on a job site is fair game for a union worker. Rule 2: If it can be pried up, it's not nailed down. See Rule 1...
At a bank I used to work for, a fully loaded PC disappeared from an office. The facilities manager agreed with my guess that a union guy working on extensive renovations of the facility made off with it. The IT staff of which I was an unofficial part were disgusted. The PC used contained the
only copy of custom software being developed for the bank. There were
no backups. There wasn't even a hard copy source listing. "Incompetent" was the mildest adjective applied to the developers whose machine it was.
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There's simply something about digital goods--whether they're eBooks or PDFs for print interiors for paperbacks--that just makes people feel as though they're not receiving or thieving, something of value. If they can't SEE you do the work, well....then, it can't be very hard/valuable, either, can it?
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Not just digital goods, but yes.
One of the things I've tried to get across to people for a while is that value is relative - something is worth what someone
else will pay for it. If you can't get your asking price for something, you need to rethink your idea of what it's worth.
I was grimly amused then the movie studios and record companies ere push the SOPA and PIPA legislation, attempting to wave a legal wand to stop piracy. They were making the assumption that "Oh, if we can just stop these nasty pirates making stuff available for illegal download, the downloaders will buy instead, and our revenues will soar!
No, they won't. If the downloaders
can't get it free, they will simply do without. They don't think the content is
worth paying for, and have other uses for the money.
I've had similar conversations with authors about pirated eBooks. I say "Ignore the piracy. It isn't cutting into your revenue. The folks grabbing pirated copies wouldn't buy in the first place, even if you could somehow manage to prevent piracy of your work. Concentrate your efforts on reaching the folks who
will pay for your work, and make it is easy as possible for them to do so."
Getting authors to understand that is an uphill battle.
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Dennis