Posts Tagged Piracy

I have written in the past against DRM and methods of property protection that punish the consumer rather than the thieves, but my annoyance with DRM is in no way an endorsement of piracy, which is a huge issue, especially for the little guys.

And one of those guys has a book coming out this week. You might’ve heard of him, here and there.  Wil Wheaton.  Yes… that kid from Star Trek with the bad sweaters and really annoying sense of superiority.

Wil Wheaton may be a bit famous (or infamous).  He is somewhat like a demi-god among geeks. He, also, isn’t a fan of DRM, though I would understand why he might want to look into trying it, since his book, Just a Geek, has been pirated and offered up for free.

Now….this isn’t some tremendously wealthy celebrity or best-selling author for whom a bit of book piracy is just a drop in the bucket, because they’re making millions anyway.  This is a man who still has to work for a living, and and who just happens to do that work with his pen or in front of a camera.  His books are even self-published and promoted out of his own pocket, so any piracy directly affects him in a way that it never would a large corporation.

The same goes for the majority of authors and actors and musicians out there.  Because the majority of creative professionals are not wealthy. Most of us will never see even a shred of the type of celebrity that Wil might enjoy. We have to work for a living, and we offer up that work to the public, for your enjoyment.  If you do enjoy it, we ask a little bit of compensation. Not because we’re greedy bastards, but because we need that money to put food on the table and clothes on our backs, to feed our children, to pay for our shelter.  We may offer some content for free, and ask you to share it with your friends, because there’s no better advertisement than free advertisement.  But when we ask you to pay, all we are asking is compensation for our work, the same as you would pay farmer for his vegetables, or a butcher for his meat.

When you seek to profit from a pirated item, or when you purchase or download a pirated piece of work, that’s just like running into that farm stand and grabbing a bushel of vegetables and running off.  If the farmer’s a big industrial farmer, well, he may have several tons of vegetables to sell, and be able to shrug off the loss of that bushel, but if it’s a small family farm, the loss of even one bushel is a huge loss.  That’s the way it is for all of the other little guys out there too. Just because what we produce is something less tangible – a song, a movie, a book, an hour’s entertainment – doesn’t mean that we don’t need that money just as much or work just as hard to produce what we have.

So think about it, next time you head to your favorite torrent sites. You may enjoy the thought of “sticking it to the man” by pirating things produced by huge corporations, but sometimes the person you’re stealing from is the person next door.

Oh, and…if you’re a Star Trek fan? Head over and buy Memories of the Future.  It looks to be a good one.

Related articles by Zemanta

• an open letter to the guy who put just a geek the audiobook on his website for people to steal (wilwheaton.typepad.com)
• Just a Geek (oreilly.com)
• How much is that MP3 Download Worth? How about $80,000?!? (geardiary.com)