Yesterday, a discussion was raised about piracy of such things as electronic copies of books on one of my favorite blogs, The Quintessentially Questionable Query Experiment.
I was really -- sadly -- surprised at how many people commented with a general laissez-faire attitude along the lines of oh well, everybody does it... if it's going to happen, make the best of it, or (the saddest), if I do it and like the book, I'll go out and buy a REAL copy anyway (cue the CGI halo and vaseline on the lens special effect).
Yeah... well, I commented, too.
But I'd like to channel my inner-Paul-Krugman and gaze through my economist's spectacles for just a moment to provide, maybe, some sober perspective on the macro-effects of piracy as it relates to artistic expression and the evolution of human creative intellect.
Yawn.
I know.
But I love economic discussions.
I know, and have been told numerous times, that my books are out there on P2P, torrent sites, getting pirated by people.
Ahhh.... expanding literacy, one criminal at a time.
My adoring fans.
(does a princess wave)
Fuck you.
First, on the micro- and personal scale, which doesn't amount to much given the prevailing baa-baa-baa-ing of "everybody ELSE is doing it" sheep in society: My books nearly killed me to write them. I have a family to support.
A couple weeks ago, Robin Pecknold said in an interview (I think I read it in a British paper) that piracy helped develop better artists.
Robin, I really liked you before you said that -- hopefully you were misquoted.
In the interview, Robin seemed to be flaunting the fact that he's satisfied with the amount of money he's already made, which is a kind of screw-all-you-struggling-newcomers pronouncement that stinks of elitism and a lack of compassion.
Yeah, the world isn't perfect, but piracy, P2P filesharing, whatever you want to call it, just ends up making it more difficult for new, fresh, vital, and critical ideas to take hold.
If new voices in music, writing, whatever, are preemptively squeezed out of the free market of expression simply because they can't survive in a capitalist economy where it doesn't matter if people like Robin or Amanda Hocking or Stephen King can shrug off a few thousand rip-offs... well, collectively we all lose.
In the long run macroeconomic perspective, unchecked piracy will ultimately lead to uniformity and the absence of diverse perspectives.
It's simple supply and demand: when the price is very low, only the giant producers can afford to stock their shelves. One brand rules all. This may not be undesirable for such extravagances as electricity or drinking water, but when it comes to art... well, I have some concerns about that.
There are some really important reasons why humanity needs endowments and sponsorships for arts. But they are going away. We all know that.
And piracy will kill off the rest of the small, colorful fish in the sea.
Art will become McDonalds-ized and Googled and Microsofted and Wal-Marted; consolidated and churned out for the restricted, uniformed, shove-it-down-your-throat diets of the "everybody's doing it and I want to be a part of the great big giant everybody" masses.
Everything gets reduced to sameness.
Think about it.
Piracy kills the evolution of artistic expression.
Especially when "everybody" decides it's okay to do it.
Now go download, little sheep.
13 comments:
First of all I think you're absolutely right to be pissed, Andrew. You create some of the dopest art out there, that I know of, and I can't imagine how much of your heart and soul you pour into it.
Well I can imagine, but I can't know.
And I totally agree with the point you make about saturation and the struggling new artist not being able to survive piracy the way an established one can.
I think the point I was trying to make is this (and I didn't make it that well yesterday):
As creative people, I think we need to try to be creative about how we deal with this phenomenon. Because it isn't going away anytime soon, right or wrong. And the RIAA and the MPAA suing the shit out of end-users, right or wrong, was not the answer either.
I've actually got some ideas, but we'll have to talk about them face to face, when we meet, hopefully this fall in San Diego.
Piracy is bad. With that I agree. But I disagree that piracy will lead to the McDonaldization of art. I argue that, in fact, it's capitalism that leads to that.
Twilight sold millions. Which is why Barnes & Noble now has an entire section dedicated to YA Paranormal. Which is why people have to knock over five stacks of vampire books in order to get to one book like STICK.
Now it's dystopian literature. Publishers don't give a crap about art. They care about their bottom line. Maybe it used to be different, before they were bought up by media conglomerates. Maybe there used to be a place for art for art's sake. But that place is fading. When great books by great writers make it to the shelves, it's a freaking miracle if they're not crowded out by a hundred mediocre books filled with monsters and love triangles and Mary Sue protagonists.
As an aside, I'm not anti-capitalist. I'm actually pro capitalism. But it's effect on art is easily seen.
So I disagree that piracy will lead to the death of true art. In fact, I think that when there's no money at stake, when publishers aren't pushing authors to include the hottest, newest trends into their books, that writers will be able to really create.
That, of course, doesn't take into account the fact that people need to get paid and people need to feed their families. I haven't got good answers for that. In fact, I haven't got good answers for anything. I work a job during the day. I happen to like my day job so it frees me up to not have to worry about the money. I feel free to write what I want and if it sells it sells, if not, my bills are still going to get paid.
It would be nice if artists could create without worry and then be paid what their art is worth, but that's not capitalism. People buy what they want, even if it's crap, and publishers rush out to get more crap made to serve that need.
Which leads to the McDonaldization of art.
Piracy is simply uncool.
An interesting article on the role of piracy in helping books (I don't fully agree as someone who needs my books to sell in order to pay my rent, but I also know that I discovered all my favorite writers through borrowing books, not buying them at first). This does only seem to work if you have a good gimmick or are already famous.
I think piracy does devalue creative work(basically a 'screw you' to hard-working artists), as opposed to Creative Commons Licensing, which the author decides and controls.
Anyway, check out the article. food for thought: http://www.fastcompany.com/1753287/go-the-fuck-to-sleep-number-one-amazon-piracy-adam-mansbach
Reading that was like eating tiramisu. It was easy to agree with, yet it made me fidget in my chair(bed).
I tweeted this, but hardly anyone comes. It pisses me off. People must be scared of you, Andrew.
I don't know. Is it wrong for me to get irritated that so many people read and comment on my blog, even when I post nonsense, but real shit like this seems to get ignored?
I don't know, but it bothers me. I'm giving it another try, on The Facebook, with shiny graphics this time.
Piracy definitely upsets me. As I said on Matt's blog yesterday, it was a topic of discussion when I taught seventh grade social studies, and I was always blown away when the majority of my students did not consider it stealing. Whether or not you do it is one thing, but at least acknowledge what your doing is against the law, and unethical. Young people today are growing up with technological loop holes that get them out of paying for things. I don't know how we fix that, because even when we try (like when Metallica sued Napster) a new method is always introduced.
I have a bad habit of getting worked up over things I can't control, which is something I've been working on as I struggle in this tough economy. I do not support or agree with piracy. If someone approached me, I would do whatever I could to educate them on the severity of what they are doing. But I also know as technology advances, and as people seek to destroy the lives and careers of others, they will always find a way to screw the artist. My personal thought is society waited too long to address the issue. It's easier to fix things before they spiral into an epidemic. Now, so many people are guilty, it becomes one of those issues the law overlooks.
Everything gets reduced to sameness.
I love that line.
We know the reason "people don't come."
They, WE, tend to get stuck in happy writing land...until we are involved in something as heinous as piracy. I speak for myself by the way.
A great and talented musician who has been one since I can remember had some mainstream success with a metal band YEARS ago.
Fast forward to 2011 after pouring his heart and soul into his latest opus-it was heavily pirated.
What a shame. I don't think it will ever get the credit due. What's my point? He was pissed. He had every right to.
So do you. So do I when that time comes.
"It would be nice if artists could create without worry and then be paid what their art is worth-" Shawn, that is a great idea for a fiction story.
Of course, I agree with you.
Onward...I guess.
First off, I need to apologize for all my grammatical errors in my previous comment. I get worked up and don't pay attention. I'll probably make more mistakes i this post, but for Andrew's sake, I won't use any exclamation points.
There's giving your book away for free (or very cheaply) and then there's having your book stolen. I know there are people who won't agree that there is a difference, but there is.
If I had control over pricing, I would drop the price of my e-book to 1.99 to get the word out there. For me, getting my book out to people, getting my name out there, is more important than the money. I write because I love it, but I also love my books to be read. Keeping my prices high and protecting my books does me no good if no one is buying. I would give my book away for free if I thought it would bring in the readers (and wouldn't anger my publisher).
But when someone comes along and steals my book, for me it's not about the money I'm losing. It doesn't affect my ability to further create art. I know that those arguments are valid for some, simply not for me. What that theft does do is take money from my publisher. And they LOVE the money. I picture publishers like Scrooge McDuck, swimming in pools of gold coins and polishing them with dollar bills.
When someone steals from an artist, it sends a sign to the publisher that they need to further protect their investment. They need to put MORE DRM on the books, they need to sue pirates, they need to be less experimental.
To me, that's the big loss. As piracy rises, publishers will become more focused on locking down books than on taking creative risks to get books out there.
So maybe Andrew is right that piracy stifles creativity.
A couple of other points: DRM is NOT the answer. That should be considered a dirty word. I'm not going to go into detail in a public place like this as to why. but I happen to know that DRM never works, and actually makes hackers, coders, reverse-engineers, and pirate far more likely to get pissed at the owner of the copyright and do what they can to take them down.
These aren't necessarily good or bad people, but they are definitely smart as hell.
And more on that, I can only speak for myself, but IMHO it's a waste of time to blame the pirate. Sure it's wrong to steal someone else's work, and it's REALLY wrong to distribute it, but most of the people who do this kind of thing are not being malicious on purpose.
Are they lazy? Sure. Are they ignorant? Yes. But we, as creative people, can't possibly expect that kind of person to understand how much work, heart, sweat, blood and toil goes into creating something worthwhile. Into making art.
If you've never been published you have no idea how truly enormous a task it is. If you've never been to the studio to record an album you have no idea how much work goes into it.
We can't expect the pirates to understand or to educate themselves. It is we, I think, the creators of the content, on who the onus falls. You can't school everyone, but you can think smarter, and figure out new and inventive ways to teach people.
Disclaimer: I want to point out to other readers that I don't intend to equate myself with Shaun or Andrew. They're published authors who I happen to personally know are damned good at what they do. By talking about "creative people" collectively, I don't mean that I've experienced anywhere near as much as they have. I'm not saying I suck either, I just want to make that clear.
I have to agree and disagree with Matthew's last comment.
I agree that DRM is not the answer. When I buy a product, that product should be mine to do with as I please. If I buy a book, I should be allowed to mail that book to my dear old mom if I so desire. Similarly, if I buy a book on my Kindle, I should be able to send my mom a copy of that book.
DRM is not the answer. It punishes the wrong people. Those who want to get around it, are going to. There are whole communities who see it, not as a deterrent but as a challenge.
That said, stealing is still stealing. I don't think a person needs to know how hard I've worked on a book to know that stealing said book is wrong. Stealing a book written by that horrible man James Frey and his insidious fiction factory is just as wrong as stealing a book from a man with a family who is hanging his fate on sales from a book that he wrote on his lunch break at his soul crushing job over a decade.
While it's true that I had a deeper understanding for the value of a book once I saw all that went into it, it didn't change the fact that stealing is wrong. I think giving people a pass on pirating because I haven't shown them how much of me is in my books is like saying that stealing from Wal-Mart is wrong because I haven't spent any time with people whose jobs that hurts.
Morally, ethically, legally, stealing is wrong. And pirates know that.
When Napster was around and I was young and I pirated a ton of music, I KNEW that it was wrong. I did it anyway. Knowing some musicians didn't change my behavior, coming to terms with the fact that I was stealing did.
I agree that the music companies suing the crap out of their customers does nothing to endear them to those same customers, and that there should be more creative ways to combat piracy than the wholesale slaughter of said pirates' bank accounts. However, so long as piracy runs rampant, we'll never get major corporations to look favorably upon the type of innovative business models that would be better suited to the digital landscape.
Think about it like this: a kid comes along and steal my lunch every day. My big brother comes along and punches the kid in the face. More kids steal my lunch the next day. My brother punches them all in the face. Soon, he's spending so much time punching people in the face that he can't take the time to find out why all these people are trying to steal my lunch and how to stop them. Because at that point, the only thing that matters is protecting me and my lunch.
Does that make sense? I may have lost my train of thought somewhere along the way.
That totally makes sense Shaun, I just want to clarify that what I meant about the onus being on us is that you can't expect the pirates to change.
I don't mean at all that they should be given a pass. It's wrong. It's stealing. It's low.
I just think, and this is my personal opinion, that a lot of times you can be right, OR you can get what you want.
There are several different types of pirates and levels of involvement in file-sharing. The worst type are web-admins who run torrent tracking sites that horde literally petabytes worth of copyrighted intellectual property.
You can't beat those kind of people by telling them what they're doing is wrong. Or by suing them. Or by throwing something as inept as DRM at them, which will only make them laugh.
Because they are either sociopaths, or they simply don't think what they're doing is wrong, no matter who the content was created by or what it might mean to his bottom line.
I think the way to beat these people is to reach out to them on their level. If you accept that there is some validity to the argument that record labels and publishers get too much money, and artists not enough, and then you conceive of a model in which that scenario is changed, you might make a difference.
Obviously you can't change everyone, and people who think that all media should be free will probably never change, but I think we all might be surprised how many people there are out there, pirating, because it's convenient, not because they're actually bad people.
Anyway, there isn't enough hard data to say anything for certain, and we're all entitled to our opinions. This is only mine.
Just wanted to thank everyone for the intelligent debate.
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