Authors Without A Yacht (AWaY) discussion

The jaw-dropping hypocrisy of pirates can be downright hilarious.

"Rapidshare is also a pain - with it's arm-twisting messages trying to get you to buy their 'premium' service. Someone told me just to keep trying and I would get the download eventually, and I did, no thanks to rapidshare. That kind of crap ought to be illegal. If I ever decided to buy a premium service, It WON'T be rapidshare."

Do they not realize that what they are doing is illegal?


"Plunder is a no-no to me: too many popups and after say 4 files it won't let me download any more books for the remainder of the day. Ridiculous."

Well done, Plunder, says this author!


http://astatalk.com/thread/5596/1/Fil...

When it comes to piracy it seems the hypocrisy never ends.

For people who are getting things for free they sure do have a lot of complaints. They complain about the host sites, most of which they only have free memberships. They complain about authors’ joining their groups and “watching” them. I read a post not to long ago where a pirate didn’t like an author’s newest release and was ranting about how they made sure to email the author and let them know how much they thought the book sucked. I bet they didn’t mention in their complaint to the author how they obtained their copy of the book.

I believe that the there are very few pirates who don’t realize what they are doing is both immoral and illegal. If it was legal and above aboard then I ask the following questions:

1. Why do you your “sharing” sites need you to hide the link’s you post to hosting sites?

2. If everything is on the up and up why is that when your groups illegal activity get’s noticed by authors and their representatives, you hide your previously viewable profile?

3. Why do you need to hide behind proxy servers?

4. Why do some of you change your names?

5. To those who sign up for the pirate sites but only download and do not post releases, or say thank you for the files you grab, why don’t you click that thanks button? Is it because you don’t want your user name to be associated with the illegal download?

6. Why is it when an author joins your group and politely asks you to take down their books, while explaining to you that it’s a crime and that it hurts them personally because they can’t earn an income from their work when it’s available everywhere for free, the author gets banned?

7. If what your doing is not illegal then why do your file hosts do things like disable your links when a copyright violation is reported. Or remove your file altogether?


I’ve read so many excuses and long rambling explanations about why it’s not wrong and I can’t think of one that doesn’t sound absolutely ridiculous. My most favorite pirate argument in terms of ‘who are they trying to fool’ is “it’s not stealing, it’s infringement, look it up in the dictionary”.

Sorry people but infringement is synonymous with stealing. Don’t know what synonymous means, look it up in the dictionary.

I think the pirates tell themselves and others all these excuses because they need to delude themselves to be able to go through with the actions of pirating. Yes, they still know it’s wrong, and a great deal of them most likely just don’t care one way or another, I know. They are only fooling themselves and their actions show they aren’t fully succeeding in that.

This is just my opinion and I know from posts I’ve made on various sites that not everyone agrees with me. To me, what makes matters worse is the actions of the hosting sites encourage the pirates into thinking it’s okay.

Many of the hosts have rules in place that say it’s a violation of their terms of service to share copyrighted material. They state they will work with authorities and provide information about you and what your sharing if your sharing files that are illegal, whether they be in violation of copyright, child pornography or anything else illegal.

They are just covering their rear ends. I don’t doubt that they would do as they say but I do think they could do much more than they do to prevent illegal file sharing on their sites. I don’t know what the percentages are on how many illegal files they store but I’d bet my last dollar that copyrighted item’s are the majority of what’s stored on them and without the pirate activity many would soon go under. I bet the majority of people who join these sites never even read the terms of service. If they really didn’t want their sites used for piracy then the members reported for copyright violations would be banned with the first offense. Again all of this is just my opinion.

How does the saying go? “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time. But you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

Or as George W. Bush said, “You can fool all of the people some of the time and those are the ones you want to focus on.”

Sorry, I know I went off on a tangent.

Hey, Ilovetoread, this is great!!! May I read it on the air on Tuesday?