Beautifully written article. One of my first ideological shifts happened when Napster was released. Bits flowing freely without being bounded by rules of the physical world deeply changed me and while later I do understand artists need to get paid and make a living, piracy and the pirating community is still very close to my heart. The amount of innovation which comes out of that space, is tremendous. The fact that zuckerberg could create trillions of dollar on free projects such as php and apache is not cherished enough.
I think we still haven't found a proper economy for the digital world. The fact that pirating game of thrones was a better option than waiting for it to be premiered in your region goes to show there is still a lot of work to be done in this area. If there wasn't piracy, free software, open source and american VC (the first few waves, not the last few), this industry wouldn't have grown at this pace.
The “artists need to make a living” narrative against piracy is pure deception. Truth is that most artists want nothing more than for their messages to spread as widely as possible, as that is also the most naturally profitable path for them in the long term. It’s only when managerial types get involved the need to turn a quick buck by denying the natural flow of information becomes a primary concern. So pirate away, knowing that nothing of value is lost.
> The “artists need to make a living” narrative against piracy is pure deception. Truth is that most artists want [...]
I'd like to offer a more moderate option--or perhaps just radical in a different direction.
Artists would like to make a living, and the "deception" comes from how that slogan is used to falsely present the powers-that-be as able, willing, and actively delivering on that goal.
Thanks for the clarification - I do not claim that artists don’t want to make a living. My point is that, too often, the “artists need to make a living too” narrative is used by the system that exploits artists.
Not parent poster, but I suspect the thesis can be rephrased like:
"Artists do want to make a living, however there's a nuance when it comes to achieving that. Finding enough solid supporters requires such a wide dispersal of their content that any 'anti-piracy' measures are almost always counterproductive, at least when it comes to the interests of artists as opposed to middlemen."
I self-publish my books. The audience is decent, I publish shortened audiobook versions for free, but frankly, I like the fact that the paper books themselves are copyrighted and no one can print them extremely cheaply and flood the market with them at my expense.
> I like the fact that the paper books themselves are copyrighted and no one can print them extremely cheaply and flood the market with them at my expense.
Having something that is paper doesn't mean that no one else can print them cheaply and flood the market. While it might not be at your expense - it certainly isn't something that is making you any money.
I don't self-publish on Amazon, though. I print my books in a local printing shop and sell them using my e-shop (Wordpress for blog, Woocommerce for e-shop).
I stopped self-publishing my books, because as soon as I offered PDFs to those who purchased my paper books the sales of printed copies tanked. Then nobody wanted to pay for PDFs and Amazon screwed my KDP sales (banned my book). The readers felt entitled to free copies and free consultation on the subject of the book. It's really depressing how entitled people feel to other people's creative output or knowledge.
It's important to note who is pushing the deception, here. Creative industry is composed of both labor (artists) and capital (publishers). I file artists under labor because their valuable economic resource is time. They make money when people pay them to make art. Unauthorized copying has harms, but the primary effect is that artists have to expect to be paid money up-front, since the only way they get profit participation on the sale of copies is if there's a strictly enforced set of laws to grant a monopoly on copying. That being said, money up-front is still a very common way for artists to get paid, so "artists need to make a living" is a half-truth.
Paying per-copy and agreeing not to copy for some fixed period is more consumer friendly than, say, everyone pooling their money into a giant one-and-done Kickstarter and just trusting that the end result will be good. If your work can be published serially, then something like Patreon might work, but that's impractical for a lot of larger projects. The consumer unfriendliness manifests in the form of risk: who is out the money if something turns out to suck, or worse, doesn't even get made. The traditional "sell copies with a monopoly" model means that if I don't like a work, I just don't buy it. We have reviews to inform people if a thing is good or not, but you can't review a finished work based off the Kickstart campaign. This results in a market dominated by scams of varying degrees, customers who are hesitant to put money into campaigns that might not produce, and artists that can only really make the business model work if they have a lot of social capital and reputation to stake.
I mentioned fancy capitalist words like "risk" and "market", so let's talk about the capitalist side of the business: the publishers. Or "managerial types", as it were. They do not make their money from selling the service of creating art, they make money from selling art that has already been made, which is capital. When Napster was telling people to stop paying for music and just steal it, the publishers shat their pants. An embarrassingly large part of the music business at the time was reissuing old acts on CD[0][1], and even new acts had to sell albums, which is why 90s listeners had to deal with a flood of albums with one good song and 10 terrible ones.
It's specifically the capitalist side of the business that got screwed over the hardest by Napster. What screwed over artists was Spotify, which made music profitable again for the capitalists by turning it into a subscription. A music Boomer[2] accurately summed this up as a faucet pouring water straight into a drain. This is the best way to devalue artists, because it doesn't matter what songs the artists make - just that the publishers control the flow of the songs.
The Spotify mentality has percolated into basically every other form of media over the last decade. It's why you will own nothing and be 'happy', and why every publisher CEO has a boner for generative AI, even as their artists are screaming their heads off about being scraped. Publishers have nominally been stolen from as well, but they don't care, because the theft is in their benefit[3]. It's the exact opposite of the Napster situation. What matters is not what will benefit the artists, nor what the law says. What matters is what will make them richer.
[0] This is also why the SPARS code was a thing for a few years - to distinguish between new recordings made for CD and reissues riding the hype of digital music.
[1] Metallica also found themselves caught on the back foot, mainly because they found out Napster users were trading pre-release soundtracks they'd made. Their reaction made them look like suits for a while, because Metallica had gotten popular through unlicensed copying, though I don't think this read was entirely fair.
I think we still haven't found a proper economy for the digital world. The fact that pirating game of thrones was a better option than waiting for it to be premiered in your region goes to show there is still a lot of work to be done in this area. If there wasn't piracy, free software, open source and american VC (the first few waves, not the last few), this industry wouldn't have grown at this pace.