Top Photographer On Why He Doesn’t Care If His Stuff Is Pirated
From the article:
All of my stuff is pirated. Everything from my HDR Video Tutorial to eBooks to Apps. Fine. It’s all there on PirateBay and MegaUpload and all that stuff. Here are the reasons why I don’t mind:
His five points:
- It’s a cost of doing business on the internet (and indeed it is).
- People who don’t buy now, may buy later. (In my case, I don’t mind that the next generation grows up “knowing” I know my stuff.)
- “Pirates” are people too and not just in it for themselves. They may not be able to afford it right now.
- Pirates have friends with money and the piracy serves as publicity. (Well, d’oh but the RIAA/MPAA are totally unable to see that despite the RIAA members regular payola scandals where they pay radio stations to “pirate” their material, it’s just authorized at that point but functionally no different)
- As soon as he opened everything up under a Creative Commons license his business grew!
This totally parallels my experience. I know for sure that there are copies of the HD Survival Handbook and probably all my books published as unprotected PDFs, but I’ve made a very good return for the work I put into that book, and don’t feel the need to “stamp out piracy” even where I know it exists.