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Author Q&A / Midlist Authors & Online Piracy
« on: July 31, 2017, 11:37:59 pm »The more time people spend consuming free media, the less time they spend consuming purchased media, the less money they spend. You can spike your samples any which way (the way IP foes do), cherry-pick countless happy scenarios, but it all comes down to this: people spending less, and content producers struggling more.This isn't actually how the market has evolved though. Consumers are spending just as much money as they ever have on legitimate media and the media industry isn't struggling. The only difference is how that money is being allocated. In the music industry, for example, people are buying less albums and singles. That's the big bullet point record companies cite. What they don't point out is that consumers make upo that difference and more with concert sales. This results in individual artists making more per capita today and the big losers are the record labels which historically have played the role of middle men. As I stated before the primary limiting factor of media spending isn't determined by anything media suppliers can manipulate. Consumers simply have a finite amount of disposable income and they spend a certain amount of that income on media.
Being a Yar is bad enough. Being one who thinks they're actually doing good, on the other hand...
I was always interested in how you specifically would view this considering the major themes of TSA. Copyright and IP isn't actually universal and has only been around for a few hundred years. It's original intention was a form of censorship. Creative arts have flourished before copyright and it flourishes today in markets with lax copyright laws. In the West we've been conditioned to view copyright as an intrinsic right when the historically it's actually the anomoly.
I hesitate to even continue this debate since you are my favorite author and it would be easy for you to conclude that I'm advocating "theft" of your work. I'm not. I'm just pointing out that the marketplace is ever evolving and we can't put the genie back in the box. Good to artists have always found ways to profit from their work before and after the Internet.