Theft of books digitally is in no way the same thing as a library. The number of people who have to drive to the library and check out a physical book one at a time is not even remotely comparable to the thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people who can download the digital copy of a book from the comfort of their homes from a pirate site.
Every single one of those thefts negatively impacts the hundreds of hours that I spent writing and editing that book. I am not a millionaire. I am a writer who sweats every word out after she works a full-time day job. I am a writer trying to build an audience and maybe, one day, get to write full time. Every single sale matters to me. If you respect me as a person, as a writer, you will not steal my book. Period.
^An author’s perspective on the library/file-sharing comparison. At the end of the day, people who create things DO deserve to be paid for their work. Although I can get books digitally from my library, I’m sure that (completely legal) service is used a lot less often than pirating websites.
The issue of piracy goes way beyond whether or not it’s ethical to download things without any money going to the author. It would be great if everything was free and open to the public and I would support that idea 100%… if our economic system was set up in such a way that rendered piracy relatively irrelevant to the people depending on their art to make a living. (Pirating is one of the many reasons why being an artist is scoffed at as being such a bad way to make a living. Things shouldn’t be like that. If you want to make a living as an artist, you should be able to. Period.) Unfortunately, though, our economic system is not set up that way, and stealing from authors and musicians hurts them and keeps them working jobs that they probably hate and you probably want because, statistically, there’s a really good chance that you’re unemployed.
I know stealing things often feels harmless to people, but someone often is losing a job, losing money, or losing pay, because you decided to steal something.
*This does not apply to pirating from artists who make enormous amounts of money, nor does it apply to pirating things from companies that make enormous amounts of money. That is another ethical question altogether and one that I would prefer not to address at this time. Note that “pirating” is a key word, because stealing from stores is what gets those low-wage workers fired.
Here’s the thing though: if you create something expecting people to pay you for it, I will never pity you when people pirate it for their own enjoyment. Creativity is something to be shared, not sold. If you’re doing art for any reason other than the love of creating, you’re in it for the wrong reasons.
If you make something that you think people will love but you restrict access to it based on who can pay you and who cannot, you are the worst sort of wretched creature there is (not to put too fine a point on it).
The issues this discussion confronts should not be posed in terms of access vs. theft. Issues of compensation for content providers are better addressed by a new publishing model—a subscription service. Assume that only one-third of the US population has broadband internet service. That makes for about 107 million internet users. If this group paid US$15.00 each month for a subscription to an internet publisher than the pool of cash generated would equal one billion, six hundred million US dollars each month. An artist would receive compensation based on the number of downloads his/her work generated.
A subscription publishing service removes an army of middlemen presently acting as the gatekeepers (or prison guards) of art. Such a publishing model also relieves these middlemen of their role as the arbiters of public taste. For an artist, this brave new world poses great incentives and great challenges. No longer will an artist have to ask, “How can I be heard?” Rather, an artist will have to successfully answer the question, “How can I cut through the clutter?”
