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Originally Posted by Good Old Neon
I like how many in the pro-filing sharing camp continue to claim that sharing has very little to no impact on the bottom-line of publishers, etc, but then go on to say that if they dont evolve, their bottom-lines will suffer as a result of file-sharing (though of course they continue to claim folks will be forced into doing so) the sheer amount of cognitive dissonance that results from harboring such contradictions must be deafening.
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Yes, it would be such a contradiction,
if your absurd caricature bore any resemblance to what people here are saying or that pesky nuisance, reality.
From Baen's site:
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Originally Posted by author Eric Flint
1. Online piracy while it is definitely illegal and immoral is, as a practical problem, nothing more than (at most) a nuisance. We're talking brats stealing chewing gum, here, not the Barbary Pirates.
2. Losses any author suffers from piracy are almost certainly offset by the additional publicity which, in practice, any kind of free copies of a book usually engender. Whatever the moral difference, which certainly exists, the practical effect of online piracy is no different from that of any existing method by which readers may obtain books for free or at reduced cost: public libraries, friends borrowing and loaning each other books, used book stores, promotional copies, etc.
3. Any cure which relies on tighter regulation of the market especially the kind of extreme measures being advocated by some people is far worse than the disease. As a widespread phenomenon rather than a nuisance, piracy occurs when artificial restrictions in the market jack up prices beyond what people think are reasonable. The "regulation-enforcement-more regulation" strategy is a bottomless pit which continually recreates (on a larger scale) the problem it supposedly solves. And that commercial effect is often compounded by the more general damage done to social and political freedom.
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Publishers' bottom lines will suffer from misallocation of resources and PR damage. If P2P is taking any significant share of your revenue--hell, in publishing if P2P is not making you money by word of mouth--that's a symptom that your house is not in order.