Since I’ve begun marketing Thermals more and more I run across articles written by other authors who are complaining about pirates cutting into their sales. I’ve long had an interest in the notion of how piracy affects markets, partly from my own long history of doing such things as copying games, recording music off the radio, and taping TV. Yeah, I’ll cop to it, I’ve been what people call a ‘pirate’… what’s more, I’ve been one since I was probably five years old.
Shocking, neh?
I’ll defy anyone who claims that they’ve never been a pirate. Oh, sure there are some people who’ve never downloaded a movie, or torrented an MP3, but a person who has lived in our technological society and never taped a song off the radio or taped a show off TV? They don’t exist. Everyone taped movies in the eighties and nineties, and if you lived through the seventies and eighties without taping a song off the radio or having one taped by a friend in your collection, well I call bullshit.
With all that piracy, how can we still have a recording industry? Why didn’t VCRs kill movie studios off just LIKE THEY CLAIMED THEY WOULD?
I think it’s almost a modern parable in that this very question made it all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, in which the movie studios wanted to BAN the sales of VCR type machines. When they got there they found themselves squaring off against, not a government representative protecting the rights of the people, no… they found themselves facing Fred Rogers, host of Mr Rogers neighbourhood. He told the courts, “… Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been “You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions.”
To others thinking about this issue, trying to decide what to do when you self publish, remember the words of a children’s tv show host. You can make healthy decisions, and more importantly SO CAN YOUR FANS.
The music studios, after years and years of claiming incredible losses due to the pirate ‘scourge’, have continued to post record profits year after year. Movie studios gross more and more money every year, paying for massive budgeted films that would have been unthinkable a couple decades earlier.
Publishers, both large and small, would do well to recognize that the losses other industries have claimed have yet to be substantiated. Whining about how much money you’ve lost doesn’t make it true, it just makes you a whiner.
Tenhawk AKA Evan Currie
Author, Thermals
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004URUXKQ?tag=fiwi0f-20
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/53324
