Quote:
Originally Posted by Randolphlalonde
All right, let's set the word 'stealing' aside and not get hung up.
The fact you're ignoring is that if people didn't actually pay for my work in eBook format I wouldn't be able to write full time. I'm not being over dramatic, that's just a fact.
When I can eat for free, have decent free lodgings, free electricity, and other necessities provided for free, then I won't mind giving all my work away for free. Until then, I'll hope that my readers continue to respect the hard work I put into writing and pay the reasonable prices I ask for eBooks.
Try to reverse the scenario. If I came into your work place and told you that you weren't getting paid for any of your work, how would you feel? Imagine if, because you weren't paid for a whole chunk of the time you put in, you couldn't pay rent? Buy as much food as you needed?
I barely keep my head above water in the first place. Piracy, or unauthorized lending, or stealing, or borrowing without permission, or whatever you'd like to call it (pointless semantics, all of it), would literally snatch the opportunity to write full time away. My readers wouldn't be happy about it in the long run, either. Instead of three to four books a year, they'd have to suffice with one every year or two, because I'd have to spend more time at a job I didn't want than I did writing.
Only digital files... start thinking about both sides.
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It's not pointless semantics, it's the difference between what 'is' and what 'is not'. A giraffe is not a Volkswagen Beetle, that's why they have different names. Your whole assumption is based upon a fallacy that payment would have occurred if the file wasn't copied. Whereas the reality is far different from that, and often the copying and distribution of your work freely may gain you fans and revenue in the long run.
As to the workplace argument, it doesn't hold up. If you came into my work place and said I wasn't getting paid I would phone my Union rep and walk out of that workplace, that's because most workplaces you are paid for your time. But
you don't work in a workplace, you have a private business that is writing and that has no set hours and is is subject to far more than just piracy (unproven to affect revenue one way or the other of any digital artifact) for any derived income.
I do think about both sides, it's just that your argument makes no sense on anything but an emotional level. In the digital realm a download is not equal to a sale, and it never will be. I'm sorry if that's a rude awakening, but that's how it is and it's not going to change when you throw around words like stealing.