Quote:
Originally Posted by Moejoe
No, I don't dismiss what you say at all, as an 'indie' publisher you have my ear more than any rep from the big corps would ever have. But I must plead with you to understand what's happening, and what might happen in the future. I don't want to see all the indie pubs go out of business any more than I want the small press or the indie record labels to go out of business. But you, me, any writer can't bury their head in the sand for much longer in the face of the reality of the internet.
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Thanks, Moejoe -- and back at you. While I disagree with your conclusion, I don't dismiss it, nor the reasons you and others have come to it.
And I hope it's obvious that I am trying to understand what's happening now and what may happen in the future. I wouldn't be here if I didn't at least see that digital is -- as a medium -- unstoppable.
But what I hope would also be obvious from my posts is that I value principles. That's why I respect you (I believe that you have them and seem to live by them!) but also why I have a hard time accepting the argument that you advance. On one hand it seems to be morally based -- that either copyright itself or the large companies who tend to own them are intrinsically corrupt/wrong/bad. But on the other hand we have what you accentuated in your more recent post -- the notion that it is simply impossible to protect copyright in this digital world, so why try?
Now on the first (the right or wrongness of the system), I can't really argue with you because it's an article of faith -- a fundamental belief. You either see the world that way or you don't.
But on the second, while I don't want to go overboard in making a rhetorical point, sometimes you do have to draw that line in the sand and fight against something even if it's hopeless. I'd like to think that if one or both of us was trapped in the proverbial burning building, at least someone would try to save us even if the odds were long against success. In my case, I recognize that whether one wishes to call it "piracy" or "sharing" (or even "Fred") it's as you say, a genie out of the bottle. *Some* people are going to do it *some* of the time for *some* materials.
What I want is to try to keep things as civil and reasonable as possible on all sides in hopes that we can come out the other end of the revolution with a system that *does* continue to reward artists and the people who facilitate their work. Essentially, that we don't end up with a world in which *all* people copy *all* materials *all* of the time.