Busted!
Some little-known author goes on at length about the evils of e-book piracy, and why she won't e-publish, in an interview with a magazine:
Then her loving son Jo decides to add to the conversation:
D'OH! Why you little...!
Look here, Ms Rag: you wanna pirate stuff, you go right ahead. That's between you and your conscience. But you do not get to turn around and whine about the EVIL NASTY PIRATES stealing food from your table.
Stupid Euro-cunt.
“Piracy scares the hell out of me. I do not know what to say. I lose sleep at night over it,” said Ragde. “I have figured out that I’ve lost half a million kroner ($72,500) on piracy of my books, maybe more.”
“I can not stand the thought of someone stealing something. I look at Norwegian musicians who have to do live concerts. We have nothing to live on other than the physical product,” she said.
Then her loving son Jo decides to add to the conversation:
“You have a pirated MP3 collection,” Jo added, helpfully. “We copied the first 1500 songs from one place and 300 from another.”
D'OH! Why you little...!
“Pirated handbags? Yes, I do buy them,” she said. “I feel that the genuine Prada bags have such an inflated price.”
Look here, Ms Rag: you wanna pirate stuff, you go right ahead. That's between you and your conscience. But you do not get to turn around and whine about the EVIL NASTY PIRATES stealing food from your table.
Stupid Euro-cunt.
posted by Jar(egg)head at 12:27
2 Comments:
Here is one of the big problems I have with "intellectual property" It seems that the person who created it has ownership in perpetuity, yet a patent only last for a few years. Isn't the invention of something physical someone's intellectual property? Did they not have to create it out of nothing, yet they only can protect it for 14-20 years? Why does someone's scribblings, put in book form or set to music deserve more protection than say the guy who invented the adjustable wrench?
I'm sorry, but artists should NOT have more "property" rights than an inventor.
I can answer that question: lawyers. Most of the legal shenanigans around copyrights were created by RIAA lawyers. They've been able to progressively extend copyrights to ridiculous extremes. It's currently 70 years after the death of the author before copyrighted material hits the public domain. Which is ridiculous, of course, as it means an author or musician's grandchildren could live comfortably (or even in wealth, depending on the author's success), through no effort of their own.
I have my own views of what's in the public domain. Specifically, if the guy or gal who created it is dead, and their spouse at the time of their death is also dead, it's free game. That being said, I don't download music, since I pay for a Pandora premium account. I don't have a single book that I haven't paid for, though most of them I got at used book stores or through an online distributor like MobiPocket.
If the argument is made that redistribution of an ebook is piracy, it opens a huge can of worms. If I buy a paperback, read it, give it to Davis to read, then Davis' kids read it, then they give it to a friend, then that friend sells it to a used book shop... Well, you can clearly see the hole in the argument that swapping ebooks is piracy. The same concept applies to hard-formatted music.
All the hot air over piracy is just high-handed posturing as far as I'm concerned. If someone is really talented they'll make gobs of money at whatever they do, no matter how they publish -- and regardless of how their work is distributed or re-distributed.
Casual piracy certainly exists, and most people have engaged in it, (knowingly or otherwise), at some point in their lives. But classifying the result of such behavior as "lost profits" is like saying I lose money because I don't land a contract on every project for which I submit a bid; it's unhatched chickens.
Profit-by-lawsuit is not a valid business model, and it's yet another reason every lawyer on the planet should be flogged, tarred and feathered on a yearly basis.
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