On the Topic of Piracy - Part Two
While my previous post helps me sleep at night with the knowledge that my products are being stolen, do not take my acceptance on this topic as my approval of it.
I feel the big issue is that people are simply justifying the topic of piracy. Some like to say, "Piracy has always been around, that people used to record music off the radio with cassette tapes." Sure, you are right. But show me one person back in the 80s who could get 50 GB of music (12,500 songs or over 600 hours of music) nearly instantly off the radio? There were none. Back then, it was less work to purchase it legally. Now, that is swapped. It is MUCH easier to pirate something that to purchase it.
Some say, "Well, I will pirate it first, and if I like it purchase it." I call BS! The fact is you and I both know that once they get it in their grubby little hands they will never actually pay for it. Why should they? They already own it!
But the biggest problem is, our society doesn't see this issue as a moral dilemma any longer.
Would you break into an old woman's house and steal her Social Security money that she lives on? Would you stab a single father who is working to put food on the table for his children in the gut with a knife just to take the little bit of money he has in his pocket? Would you shoot a gas station clerk in the face for the $183.72 cents in his register? A normal person would say, "No, of course not."
BUT PIRATING DIGITAL PROPERTY IS THE SAME THING!
You are STEALING something that belongs to someone else. You are taking something that someone has put effort into, in the hopes of making a living, and giving them nothing in return. You are using others for your own personal gain, without giving anything of value in return. There is no difference.
Creators work hard for what we produce. For me, months and months, thousands of hours of labor, go into a product. And to have someone steal it is to have them say, "I plan on enjoying this product, use it to enrich my life, but I feel your time spent working on this is worth zero, nothing, zip." It is basically them telling me that, while they will get pleasure out of my labor, I can go blow. They have no issues with stabbing me in the gut and leaving me to die in the dirty streets provided it means they can have whatever I happen to be carrying at the time.
It also leads to further issues. The fact is, that if I (or any artist) can't make a living at entertaining people, we will stop. I, like most of the world, MUST pay my bills. I MUST purchase food and clothes for my children. I MUST make a living. If I can't do that with the written word, I MUST do that another way.
So, the slippery slope we find ourselves in is this: piracy, since those who do it justify what they do, is growing. More and more people who do not see themselves as THIEVES are becoming thieves without the moral hit. As this continues to grow, the pool of people who are willing to purchase products legally will shrink.
This means there will be less legitimate sales for all. This means that many good artists (art, music, books, whatever - I am lumping them all in here) will be forced to leave their industry to pursue a living elsewhere. This means that eventually the only fiction books you will have will be fan fic. Enjoy that!
The other thing that REALLY PISSES me off about this is that there are people making MILLIONS from pirating. Not the people who pirate themselves, but the sites that host the torrent links sell hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising - and their product is FREE to them. Others post the torrent links and "seed" the files. They have no costs, and make millions off my hard work.
So, sorry if this sounds like I am coming down hard. I just feel that if our society does not start lifting each other up, and start telling our friends how morally wrong it is to pirate digital material, that in the years to come our entertainment will be crap.
Drake
I feel the big issue is that people are simply justifying the topic of piracy. Some like to say, "Piracy has always been around, that people used to record music off the radio with cassette tapes." Sure, you are right. But show me one person back in the 80s who could get 50 GB of music (12,500 songs or over 600 hours of music) nearly instantly off the radio? There were none. Back then, it was less work to purchase it legally. Now, that is swapped. It is MUCH easier to pirate something that to purchase it.
Some say, "Well, I will pirate it first, and if I like it purchase it." I call BS! The fact is you and I both know that once they get it in their grubby little hands they will never actually pay for it. Why should they? They already own it!
But the biggest problem is, our society doesn't see this issue as a moral dilemma any longer.
Would you break into an old woman's house and steal her Social Security money that she lives on? Would you stab a single father who is working to put food on the table for his children in the gut with a knife just to take the little bit of money he has in his pocket? Would you shoot a gas station clerk in the face for the $183.72 cents in his register? A normal person would say, "No, of course not."
BUT PIRATING DIGITAL PROPERTY IS THE SAME THING!
You are STEALING something that belongs to someone else. You are taking something that someone has put effort into, in the hopes of making a living, and giving them nothing in return. You are using others for your own personal gain, without giving anything of value in return. There is no difference.
Creators work hard for what we produce. For me, months and months, thousands of hours of labor, go into a product. And to have someone steal it is to have them say, "I plan on enjoying this product, use it to enrich my life, but I feel your time spent working on this is worth zero, nothing, zip." It is basically them telling me that, while they will get pleasure out of my labor, I can go blow. They have no issues with stabbing me in the gut and leaving me to die in the dirty streets provided it means they can have whatever I happen to be carrying at the time.
It also leads to further issues. The fact is, that if I (or any artist) can't make a living at entertaining people, we will stop. I, like most of the world, MUST pay my bills. I MUST purchase food and clothes for my children. I MUST make a living. If I can't do that with the written word, I MUST do that another way.
So, the slippery slope we find ourselves in is this: piracy, since those who do it justify what they do, is growing. More and more people who do not see themselves as THIEVES are becoming thieves without the moral hit. As this continues to grow, the pool of people who are willing to purchase products legally will shrink.
This means there will be less legitimate sales for all. This means that many good artists (art, music, books, whatever - I am lumping them all in here) will be forced to leave their industry to pursue a living elsewhere. This means that eventually the only fiction books you will have will be fan fic. Enjoy that!
The other thing that REALLY PISSES me off about this is that there are people making MILLIONS from pirating. Not the people who pirate themselves, but the sites that host the torrent links sell hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising - and their product is FREE to them. Others post the torrent links and "seed" the files. They have no costs, and make millions off my hard work.
So, sorry if this sounds like I am coming down hard. I just feel that if our society does not start lifting each other up, and start telling our friends how morally wrong it is to pirate digital material, that in the years to come our entertainment will be crap.
Drake
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First, copyright law in the united states is well beyond broken thanks to Disney and a handful of other well heeled mega-corps and their lobbying power. Copyright was originally designed to give the author/creator time to profit off his work for a reasonable period of time before it became public domain and property of the "people". The reasons used for this is that no work is created in a "void". The free time you have to write, the computer you write on and the blogs you advertise on are all thanks to society in general. If you had to spend all your waking hours farming at a subsistence level then you probably wouldn't also be writing. This system worked and made sense. Now copyright is so mangled that works created now are unlikely to become public domain in my *childrens* lifetime, unlike a patent which only protects for 20 years (yet that's apparently enough).
Second, your only seeing the negatives of piracy which tells me you likely are seeing every download as a lost sale which is a fallacy. The vast majority of "pirates" are simply digital hoarders and rarely use any of the items they download. Sure someone might have a hundred gigs worth of music but how much of it does he actually listen too? Would he have really spent 12,500$ (1$ per song) on all of that music? Its pretty darn unlikely (and I'll get to that point in a second).
Studies have shown (and I find this to be true among people I know as well) that pirates spend *more* on media then non-pirates. Pirates tend to have the largest collections of legit media as well as large collections of pirated media. Piracy often *creates* sales that wouldn't have happened otherwise. I can't imagine the number of games/books/music I've pirated and then purchased because I loved it so much (but wouldn't have ever known it even existed otherwise).
And now the stickiest point, but also the most important in my opinion. Perceived value of the copyrighted item VS *actual* value of the copyrighted item. People are not stupid, they know distribution costs go way way down in the digital world. Its very hard to stomach paying 10$ for a kindle copy of a book when the paperback is also 10$ and i know the paperbacks total cost to create was substantially higher and I end up with something I actually control at that point. It wouldn't surprise me if a substantial amount of the piracy is simple blowback from frustration around pricing and control of the digital product. Look at how successful netflix is. Their product is priced at *actual* value instead of the publishers inflated "perceived" value. In my opinion the industry that is the worst about this is the movie industry. A 2 hour movie is *not* worth 25$, especially not as a digital download. Worse, most online rental services (amazon, sony playstation, etc) charge upwards of 6-8$ to *rent* a 2 hr movie.
Its my opinion (based on my experience with my buying habits and those of my friends and family) that at a certain price point you will sell almost nothing yet if you lower it you can often sell vastly more and make way more money. Ive *never* rented an online movie. 5$+ is way way too expensive. If the same movies were available for 1-2$ per rental I would probably never pirate a movie again. I haven't pirated a video game in years (other then to demo it if it doesn't have a demo) and that is primarily thanks to Steam. Steam effectively lowered the price of the games to the point where I feel like they are at their "true" value to me. Now I own hundreds of games. According to Steam's numbers they also make vastly more money thanks to the sales and discounted games. Apparently its so lopsided that a game may have had a hundred sales in a week at its normal 20$ price point but will get tens of thousands of sales in the same period at its 7$ price point during a sale.
Something not quite on topic, but interesting non the less, is entertainers (not necessarily most authors)make more money then at anytime before in history. Previously an entertainer was more often reviled then revered and their income level tended to be subsistence. Compare that to now where the top (and even the middle tier) movie stars make more in a year then most of us will make in our lifetimes.
It must suck to have your stuff show up on pirate sites. But the reality is book sales are up, music sales are up, movie sales are up, game sales are up. But they are only up in the areas where the industry has embraced the new "value" of the product instead of trying to tell the public what their music is worth they are pricing it at what the public will bare. Thus the popularity of the subscription streaming music services.
I also believe we are reaching a saturation point that is also reducing the value of various forms of media. Now that its stupid easy to create, produce, advertise and distribute all forms of media its only logical that it will drive the price down across the board. You can make an album with a PC and a few hundred dollars in microphones). You can make a movie with a handful of friends and a DSLR. You can make a game and distribute it across multiple platforms in a few days (see "Unity" for that).
As a side note, I actually haven't seen your books on any pirate sites. I *tried* to find them since I bought the paperbacks from you at Origins and wanted to keep reading in the dark while my wife was asleep. Still, Couldn't find any copies anywhere so I used a small LED light.