On one of my e-mail loops a fellow Amber Quill author posted a link to this blog:
http://writersevolution.blogspot.com/2009/11/e-piracyyou-can-do-something.html
which contains some interesting information on how to combat e-pirates. It's worth taking a look.
Having followed a lot of discussions on how e-piracy affects authors, I've drawn my own conclusions on the best way to deal with them. Even though e-pirates are, in my opinion, stealing from authors, I tend to think the time spent tracking them down, joining their insidiouis little sites, posting cease and desist notices, getting into flame wars with them, getting banned form their sites, etc, also steals something valuable from authors. It steals our time.
As much as I hate to see authors' work [and my own] available for free on pirate sites to people who are actually dumb enough to think I'm wealthy and won't miss hundreds of dollars in royalties, I hate even more to give up my writing time, or time with family to pursue these people, many of whom are based outside the country and are technically not subject to many of the laws that govern intellectual property, not to mention common decency. My time is much more valuable than that. It's just too frustrating for me to spend hours or days hunting criminals on line. That's why this blog is interesting. It makes the process a little less intimidating and hopefully shows authors how to send information directly to the people who are better equipped to do something about the pirates.
What is your policy on dealing with pirates? Do you take time to hunt them? Do you join pirate sites so you can post cease and desist notices? Do you ignore them?
If you could do something to stop piracy that was guaranteed to work, what would you do? I would scour the pirate sites for e-mail addys and URLs of any users and fine each one of them the entire amount due to all publishers for each copy of every book downloaded. So rather than having to pay for one copy of a book illegally downloaded, a user would get hit with the bill for all the downloads from the entire site. Then let them prove which books they DIDN'T steal.
Yeah, it's a fantasy.
So that's my mini-rant for the day. Speaking of mini--
Mini-NaNo progress - NINE Chapters.
2 comments:
Everyone is out of work, perhaps your sales model is outdated. If the world is poor, we steal.
Write weekly books or smaller books or Kindle-books, or encrypted books, or switch to art or make movie-shorts on YouTube for profit.
I just noticed your comment, Searing - and while I understand that the economy has hurt a lot of people, what we need to do is concentrate on making changes that will cap the profits of the greedy upper echelons. Stealing from authors who make next to nothing isn't justifiable 'because the world is poor.'
We can make a difference if we stand up for the injustices that put 30% interest rates in the hands of credit card companies, and allow polticians to continually raise our taxes and tell us there's 'no other way to get by'. The reason the world is in the state it's in is because of the 'let them eat cake' attitude you espouse.
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