Imagine this, Jim, if you will. You go to work, you work hard, you do your job. Payday comes and your boss says Jim, you have no check, weren’t you working because it’s what you chose to do? Did you really expect recompense?

Yes, we expect to be paid for our writing, whether you like it or not.

And you’re still not addressing the major point – piracy is theft, no matter how you dress it up or try to confuse the issue with what ifs. It’s still stealing. For better, for worse.

And by the way, reading a book partially for free – that’s not downloading it or stealing it. You can do that through various sites.

I’m sorry that instant gratification seems to be your strong suit. Adults wait and pay for what they want.

If it were possible would all of you really want to restrict access to your works to the point that they’re accessible to relatively few people ?

Here’s a though excercise. Imagine all the people who have downloaded pirated copies of your works were unable to read them and only those who purchased it were able to do so. You would’ve sold the same amount of copies, but had less readership. Sure, in the real world, there are people who must have something and will purchase what they’re unable to download, but these people would’ve likely bought your book anyway.

That you won’t see a penny from people who don’t like your work enough to pay for isn’t the issue it seems. Whether they read a paragraph at a book store and put it down, read the entire book at a library, or pirate it, the fact is that they aren’t buying it and making your work unavailable in any of these contexts wouldn’t change that, except by excluding those that find your works in these places and DO buy them!

Sure, not everyone who reads your work will buy it, just like not everyone who listens to a song(whether on the radio or pirated) will purchase that song. You aren’t losing money from people who wouldn’t pay for your work anyway, whether thats teenagers, library-goers, penny-pinchers, or whomever. You are, though, gaining a fanbase who will talk about your work. The buzz created by such an audience does reach people who will purchase your book. I’m not the only person of this mindset. For example a Spanish judge determined the outcome of a case by the same logic: http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-may-boost-sales-111102/

There are artists, whether in music, literature, and even television/film who’ve embraced the realities of a digital age and worked with those realities instead of wasting their effort trying to wrestle with a challenge as fluid as water in motion.

Artists have released albums for free download, authors like Neil Gaiman have put up their works for fre and comic book artist Steve Lieber was fortunate to have his graphic novel pirated on an internet forum of comic enthusiasts.His sales skyrocketed; many of those who pirated the work (and would likely never have seen it had it not been pirated) decided to purchase it. That is fandom, the modern patronage.

I’ve personally downloaded a band’s album which they freely offered online and rapidly found them my new favorite, purchasing every album they’ve made, attending three of their concerts (every one they’ve had in my area), and encouraging all of my friends to listen to them. I would’ve never heard this bands songs and become a fan because the very fact that their music was available globally, for free, is what catapulted them to popularity. They were relatively unheard of, except in their region, until that point.

I’ve read authors works for free and enjoyed them so much that I’ve purchased every book they’ve written. As a matter of fact, I don’t think I’ve EVER purchased a book from an author I hadn’t read before without first reading that book, at least partially, for free !

Is it that hard to believe that there are people who embrace the ability to read or listen to something instantly, for free, but still support artists who they like ?

I’m not writing this to draw your ire or be a jerk, I’m writing it because I honestly feel that your mindset about electronic duplication of media is getting in your way.

Here’s the thing. I didn’t quite know how to respond right away because anything I said would be done out of anger. I don’t want that. Instead, I opened it up to some author/writer/reader friends and asked for their input, which I’ll copy and paste bits of below:

Julie
“Oh really? How often does he walk into a movie theatre and see a film for free, just because it’s the arts? Or go into a fine restaurant where they practice the culinary arts and say cook for me for free. We don’t have patrons anymore, in case you hadn’t noticed, and we work for a living, like everyone else. You can’t justify thievery by saying you have a right to our art, cause you don’t. You’ve missed the essential point of piracy – it’s still stealing – no matter how much you try to make it sound like it’s not.”

Tom
“The difference between borrowing a book from a library and pirating one is ownership. I return my library books and that is that. If I download a pirated copy, I own it then. Owning something I did not pay for is theft. Period.”

Laura
“There is a fallacy in the logic. Libraries were established to provide “free access to books,” but with very real limits. They have the physical scarcity limits- obviously a library can only lend out as many physical copies as they own. New releases frequently have waiting lists of several dozens of patrons, who must wait months sometimes until it is their turn with the new bestseller. This increases the chance that a patron may just go ahead and choose to purchase the book, rather than wait. Or at least pressure the library to purchase more copies. Either way, the number of copies in circulation is exactly equal to the number of copies purchased. This is NOT the case with e-piracy; circulation can be increased more or less infinitely without the author seeing anything back from it.

Even my library has limits to the number of e-book copies it has of books, and again one copy per loan…everyone else has to wait or purchase their own.”

The list goes on for a bit, but I know you’re not stupid. I also know that even you realize downloading is illegal and wrong. The only reason I can even think of you to have posted your comment was to get the ire of those who have been pirated by trying to legitimize it. Kinda worked. We just edited out the bad language.

Theres no material difference to you, the author. In either case, whether someone reads a book from a library, or a book that someone has purchased and scanned into a computer, you are not making money beyond the initial sale, but are propagating the ideas you’ve devised in your works to people who are interested and may continue to seek them out.

A person reading a book from the library is paying just as much to you as someone reading one they’ve downloaded: nothing. Public libraries exist because a lot of people think that information should be freely accessible to improve the sum of human knowledge and hopefully change the world for the better.

Someone downloading your book is no more stealing than someone checking one out from the library. To count every download as a loss is as foolish as counting every checkout of a book from a library is a loss. The arts are about patronage anyway, in the end. Not everyone who is interested by a work can support it, but those that do enable those who couldn’t to enjoy it.

Janice~