Quote:
Originally Posted by sirbruce
The right of copyright is not just the right to sell at any price; it's the right to control the number and manner of sales as well.
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And that's the whole problem in a nutshell. That control is gone in a digital age. Artist's have to find a new way to leverage the new distributions and attitudes to their advantages. They have to stop thinking of 'how it was' and instead look at 'how it is' and 'how it might be'. Already tons of artists are doing this, offering their work free to promote the sales of physical books, taking donations instead of set prices, publishing themselves through POD (F Paul Wilson, quite a best-seller with the Repairman Jack series, has gone this route on a novella collection). Assigning blame, shouting out about how the artists are losing, about how it's all so unfair on the creators and the companies is tantamount to yelling watch out for the iceberg after the Titanic has already sunk (Okay, terrible analogy, but it's in good company within this thread).
This is how it is, a whole generation and the generations to follow see nothing 'wrong' in downloading and sharing copyrighted works. There's a whole generation who see the corporations as the bad guys and, contrary to a lot that's been said in this thread, are on the side of the creators. They understand that the creators are being stiffed by the companies and they don't want to take part in that system any longer. The social nature of the internet has given them an expectation of a more direct relationship with those creators, and as such, when they want to pay, they don't want to pay a go-between.
Even the companies are wising up to all this and beginning to understand that piracy, or whatever you want to call it, has a lot more benefits than downsides (sadly not Amazon and the book market yet). If you're a US citizen you can watch almost anything for free on Hulu, catch up with South Park on their official channel, watch the Daily Show and the Colbert Report on the Comedy Channel. In Britain we can watch several channels online with 'catch-up'. Many bands are offering their work for free, because they know album sales don't amount to much if you're not a mega star, and the live performances is where the money's at - downloads are becoming promotional. Authors are offering free books in a similar vein - many fine writers already here on Mobileread have done this.
The world has changed. Those who live in the past are doomed to become irrelevant. Those who move with the times have a much better chance of thriving.