Gaiman on Copyright Piracy and the Web
 

Good morning gideon, If you want to give away your own property as he did fine it's your choice. But having someone else give away your property for you is theft. Plain and simple.


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That doesn't work in porn.

I wouldn't read Neil Gaiman even for free ...

watch the video, he said he started by bitching about like you are doing right now

the giving it away for free was a TEST to see what the consequence of piracy was on his sales

and it resulted in a 300% increase.

he comes to realize that piracy is nothing more then people sharing a book they like


btw copyright infringement is never theft, it fraud.

Amen and quoted for truth

Don't be so arrogant as to tell me what to do with MY PROPERTY! ... My property my distribution decision. Period. Anything else is an excuse for the talentless, undercapitalized or criminal lowlife to steal others property.


Look out your front window, is your car there or is someone selling it? You would bitch, whine and call the cops immediately.

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What type of person is it that finds a new book, an new author they like, then reads the book, clearly this person reads a ton... I bet, most people like this own a TON of books and ebooks - they read alllllll the time, at home, on the bus, lunch breaks, ect...

Piracy does produce sales, that I know first hand... but it damn sure isn't created equal.

What it sounds more like this guy did nothing more than moved into a new market - a place where people read books - exactly like what would happen if he released into major stores across the Country - and very little to do if anything with actual Piracy.

no sales lost so its ok for someone to take his car without his permission for a free ride, as long as they owe vcr!

Better yet a taxi company uses it to make money. Is the car worth less every time they use it? Of course it is.


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1. your exclusive right (monopoly) is null and void for fair use so your right to your "property" is not absolute

2. if your work is such crap that you need a monoply to survive then you might want to look in the mirror when your calling someone "talentless"

3. if i got 300% ROI in my bank account when my "car" was stolen i would bitch or whine t all.

or course i respect fair use, so i don't bitch or whine at all.

Someone needs to tell the movie theaters that.....

Nothing anyone does in this Industry, not even the biggest player - could be a monopoly even if you tried to twist the meaning.

He didn't get a 300% ROI - his sales grew by 300% - at 1$ each that may only be a few 100 or 1000 bucks extra (non-recurring). Not really enough to pay back anything - but growth in sales either way.

Which if not all of these apply to you .... talentless, undercapitalized or criminal lowlife ?


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The thing is Neil has been an internationally published author since the 80s. I bought a copy of Sandman when I was 13, and he'd already been around a few years before that. People in the top of the traditional media pyramid get opportunities others don't. Sure he can capitalize on piracy. Random McNewbie the new author isn't gonna get the same kind of boost by just giving away his book though, because no one will value it without being a published work. And even if they do, he doesn't have any books in the stores waiting to be picked up!

And like the man said, doesn't apply to porn.

Sounds like Radiohead and the album In Rainbows. Sure they did well with it, but not every band has a following like Radiohead.

I think we can all agree that the "let them download it for free" model will only work for sales if you have a good product.

Didn't Radiohead have their tour bus stolen once? Fair use.. :1orglaugh

Everything is to do with having a good product.

Otherwise you won't make sales, won't make rebills and no one will be interested in you.

Doctorow says that obscurity is more of a problem for an artist that piracy. Interesting thought.

If no one knows who you are, no one can buy your shit, or pirate it. Eitherway, you make no money.

All he did was take he age old model that the music industry has perfected (well, at least until the last several years) and he applied it to books. He gave one of his books away for free for 1 month and saw a bump in sales from it. Great. That is just like a record label releasing a single. They play it on the radio, make a video you can watch on TV and many of them give you the single for free on their site. You hear the song, you like it and go buy the album. It's pretty much the same thing.

What he did is give people a taste, just as he says, most people hear about authors through friends and other people loaning them books or telling them about books. He didn't give away his entire catalog of books, nor is he giving away his new books. He sounds like he isn't caring if people do put up his old stuff for free out there, because he knows he can use that free publicity to sell his new stuff.

As others have said, he is also very well known and can do things like this. If some unknown writer put out two books, one for sale and one for free, most people would not download the free on nor buy the for sale one because they have no idea who he is.

Giving away something you own yourself is not infringement or piracy :1orglaugh

Good points, The porn equivalent is the 2-3 free pages before the join page.


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Larceny Lar"ce*ny, n.; pl. Larcenies. [F. larcin, OE.
larrecin, L. latrocinium, fr. latro robber, mercenary
The unlawful taking and carrying away of things personal with
intent to deprive the right owner of the same; theft. Cf.
Embezzlement.
[1913 Webster]

if you had 1/100 the marketing skill you think you do, you would know how easy it is to get found on the free torrent sites.

when you factor in how much the book publishers/music studio take you really don't need a big audience to make as much money as an established artist.


wow so the equivalent of giving away an entire book is 2-3 pages of 20 second clips.

you are really clueless about this issue aren't you.

You just rewrote what he said in a half comeback of nothingness. :thumbsup


Plenty of people have given far more away, some less, for the last 15 years.. just like authors, not all need to give away free content to make sales - more sales than those that give it away for free.

All I am saying is that Gaiman is an established author and that helps him greatly. He puts his book up for free on a website and there were likely a lot of people who like him telling their friends to download it. He has the advantage of being an established name. The argument is also made in this thread that a similar thing can be said for the success of the Radiohead record they gave away. They benefited greatly from 10 years and millions of dollars of marketing.

I understand that if you sell it on your own and keep the profit for yourself you can make some good money and not have to sell as much to do so. As much as an established artist? I guess that depends on how good you are at marketing it and how well your plan works.

Let's do some basic math. Say an established writer puts out a new book and it sells 100,000 copies in hardback. Assume that writer gets about 15% of the cover price in royalties so they are making around $3.75 per book (this is high, most authors will make around $2.00 per book sold, but we are talking about someone who is established and can negotiate a better deal). So they make $375K in sales. Assume they will sell three times that number in paperback and make about $1.15 per book. That means the paperback makes them another $345K. This doesn't count potential audio book sales or movie rights or anything else, just book sales. Total this established writer sold half a million books worldwide and made around $720K.

Now let's assume an unknown writer is going to sell their book via torrent. Maybe they give half of it away for free or they give one book for free in order to sell another. Whatever it is that they do they have a book they will sell and they will charge a little less for it because they are unknown and they will only sell it via e-book so they can keep almost all of the profit for themselves. So assume they are going to charge $17.95 for this book. Subtract 3-4% for credit card processing, site design, hosting etc. That means they will make around $17.45 per book sold. That is a very nice amount. This means they only have to sell 41,260 books in order to make the same amount as the established author does selling 500K books. Could it be done? I guess it is possible, but I highly doubt it. The unknown author not only has to market the book, but convince people to give them a chance. They have to convince people to read their book and not a book by some better known author.




Actually, when you look on the big scale of things, it is. When you look at his body of work he has about 17 books that he has written. 6 of these are regular book and he has written about 11 juvenile/young adult fiction books/collections. Add in the hundreds of comic books and graphic novels he has written and makes a full body of work. He gives away one book in order to sell the other 16 plus the comics. So it is pretty similar giving away short clips in an effort to sell the entire movie/site. He is giving them a taste of his work in hopes that they will buy all the other stuff he has to offer.

This is also an advantage he has over an unknown author when it comes to giving his product away. Even if we are just talking about novels, he can give one away in order to promote/sell the other 5. An unknown person likely only has 1 book done so they will have to figure out how to give it away and sell it at the same time.

I'm not saying an unestablished writer couldn't do it, I'm just saying that I think it would be a lot harder than you make it out to be. I would challenge you to show me one example of an unknown writer doing this and being largely successful with it.

Somehow, I don't agree with him, and I'm not interested in his books either.

While Gaiman has written some good stuff he doesn't know fuckall about what he's talking about. A)he's well published B)doesn't work in porn

Once again Gideon promoting apples and oranges analogies to rationalize theft/piracy.

Meanwhile Bit Torrents and users feeling long arm of law. Sweet.