Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Radio stations pay for the right to broadcast music. TV stations buy the programmes that they broadcast. In both cases, the creator is being recompensed for their work. As we've discussed earlier in this thread, authors even get paid a small amount if you borrow their book from the library (and libraries are a major source of book sales in the first place).
What I don't "get" is the attitude that it is somehow "acceptable" to consume a service without paying for it merely because it's technically possible to do so. The excuse "but I wouldn't have bought it anyway, so nobody's lost anything" is morally bankrupt, IMHO. It's no different from travelling on a train without a ticket and saying that "it's OK because the train was making the journey anyway and there were empty seats".
Sorry, but I cannot and will never accept the argument that "piracy is OK if you wouldn't have bought the item". I do accept, by the way, that it's morally (but not legally) OK to buy a book and then scan it for one's personal use, if a commercial eBook is not commercially available - in that scenario, the author is being correctly recompensed.
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So all the people on this forum from outside the UK who listen to BBC Radio 7 are thieves then? I pay my license fee to fund the BBC, they do not. They get a product for free that I pay for. Nobody said "piracy" is 'acceptable', but it is the reality we are facing. We either understand that reality or we get lost in the stream.
Authors are already criminally underpaid by publishers, around the 7-15% mark on sales after their initial advance in the £2,000-3000 mark. There was a link on here recently (I think it was from Richard Herley's site) that showed the average first time author makes something in the region of £800 on their novel, after everything is taken into account. Add lacklustre promotion, dwindling advances and the dire state of publishing as a whole, and is it any wonder that more and more authors are willing to go the share now - maybe pay later scheme?
It just seems to me there are a lot of people about trying to sell horse-drawn carriages to Model-T owners.