Comment Re: I'm betting that... (Score 1) 143
No no you've got it all wrong, evil capitalist companies have no interest in ethics, they should all become good marxists and get busy with the mass murdering.
No no you've got it all wrong, evil capitalist companies have no interest in ethics, they should all become good marxists and get busy with the mass murdering.
They hate him because of the petroleum dependencies in their retirement investments.
That's like saying someone can go out and write books, get them published and sell enough copies to make a decent living doing it.
Who said anything about making a living doing it? How about making what you can doing it, a pursuit aided not in any way by piracy.
I have a family member who is preparing to release a book at this very moment. Her literary agent's first action was to put together a marketing team to promote the book in order to grease the wheels in selling the book to a publisher.
Great, my maiden aunt is a kung fu ninja. Even if some very unusual literary agents organise marketing teams you can bet your ass they aren't doing it out of their own pocket.
Are you really one of those mindless idiots who jumps on the cock of the media conglomerates and believes that every connection to a torrent swarm is a lost sale?
Who really cares, stealing from authors in one way or another is as low as it gets.
One of the first books I got for free was a the first piece of Twilight fan fiction from an unknown author on Smashwords who was certainly not a well known, filthy rich author at the time. The book wasn't my cup of tea, but it seems to have worked out fairly well for the author.
Right, so now book piracy is actually helpful. Are there any further moral pretzels you'd like to wheel out, inquiring minds want to know.
This debacle was almost (almost) worth it just to watch the komrades losing their shit on slashdot trying to blame the fat cat CEO though. Worker protections are important but France is in a league of its own.
The problem is that everyone works from the assumption that capitalism is mandatory.
Just so I've got this straight, you're using a story about how a middling hard leftist legal system and business environment wiped out an open source company to take a poke at capitalism? Good job, and modded up to 5 no less.
As far as secondary revenue streams go, authors can license their IP to TV, Movie and Video Game makers or they can sell merchandise themselves.
That's a bit like saying coders can just make a game then license the IP to TV stations, moviemakers, writers and merchandisers as a secondary revenue stream. It happens but it's rare enough that it may as well not exist for most. Musicians on the other hand almost all play gigs (as well as being able to sell their music to videogame makers, TV shows and movies), and the movie industry practically invented merchandising as well as other avenues of income.
But that requires they build a fanbase. And in that endeavor, a literary agent is far more beneficial than an industry trade group
Literary agents liaise between writers and publishers/producers etc. They have nothing to do with building up a fanbase, most authors do all of their marketbuilding themselves, in their own time, on their own dime.
And it's been pretty well established that there's few (if any) people who pirate media that would run to Amazon or iTunes and buy something if they couldn't obtain it via piracy.
Certainly established to the satisfaction of people who pirate books anyway.
And most of the books I buy from new authors these days most often comes from authors who do things like release the first book in a trilogy for free or via word of mouth suggestions from people who are where I was in my teens and twenties and read stolen or borrowed versions of their books.
Freely released books are a very different matter to piracy, especially from creators who can least afford it.
I agree - the post wasn't in support of traditional publishing - but in this case they helped authors who weren't in their stable as well; I doubt the criminals only ripped off writers from large publishing houses.
Amazon's Kindle format is DRM-optional, and when the bookseller is telling people how to strip out the DRM it may as well not exist. Not that it matters in the slightest, that a book has DRM applied to it doesn't give criminals the right to profit from the hard work of others, which was the point being made.
Yeah by the standards of this article sound waves travel faster than light, at least if you're talking about their speed when passing through a sheet of tin.
Most ebooks don't come with DRM attached. The hysteria on display in the comments here is hilarious - scumbags are stealing the hard work of authors - many of whom are completely independent these days - for their own financial gain, and people are clutching their pearls that said scumbags got blocked. As much as I'm in favour of freedom of information I don't see why take-a-punt Pavel in Assbacketonia should be seeing a red cent for the hard work put in by hundreds of thousands of writers. There's no part of this ruling that will result in, or could be used to support, political or any form of suppression besides criminal.
Oh please, it's not the 1970s anymore. The majority (vast majority perhaps) of ebook authors are self published individuals who worked for months or years to produce their creations, only to have some yahoo in Eastern Europe swipe it for their own benefit. The "greedy media moguls" you imagine are less a part of the picture than ever before. And authors are the most vulnerable to online piracy - musicians can do live gigs, movies make it at the box office or through syndication - what other means does a writer have to earn money beyond direct sales? Live readings?
Can't that be said for everything?
No it can't, you illiterate dickhead relativist. Mosquitoes are genuinely useless.
Mosquitoes don't fill any ecological niche that couldn't be filled by a host of other species.
Some bugs just need to die.
No that pretty much means you lose that game. Although you can cheat of course, there are numerous cases of men working in fertility clinics that fathered hundreds of children, how's that for a life hack.
So, by that token, it doesn't even matter that we have "no-go zones" then, as the people in them don't get up to much anyway... Police presence or not...
Aha, so you admit you have no-go zones then.
New York... when civilization falls apart, remember, we were way ahead of you. - David Letterman