Dumbest idea ever to stop internet pirates

Continuing onto today's theme of torrents and pirates (see my post on how my favorite torrent client got banned over on Nerd Dreams), I recently read the dumbest idea ever to deal with internet pirates.

The idea was simple, just get all the content producers to commit to quit making stuff for ten years, so the pirates have nothing to steal. Brilliant, isn't it?

I just see a few problems with this plan. First off, some content producers' sole source of income flow comes from producing new content. I do not think that you are going to be able to convince them to go along with this plan.

Second off, some content producers are making way more than they are losing to piracy. Do you honestly think that you can convince everyone in Hollywood to quit making movies, television shows, and music for ten years?

Third off, in order for this to be effective, you would have to convince every content producer to go along with this idea. This includes content producers that have not joined the field yet...hmmm, I think that they may chose to use this as an opportunity to get their stuff heard without fighting the competition---it is called a monopoly.

Fourth off, you would have to convince those content producers that are beginning to figure out how to operate in this new envirnoment. There are some content producers (think pro-bloggers) that have figured out how to make money while giving their stuff away (go ahead, give this to your friends). I so doubt that you can convince them to go along with this idea.

And because of these reasons, this is the dumbest idea on how to deal with internet pirates ever.

Piracy Part 2

If you read my Golden Dawn blog, you have read some of my thoughts about the file sharing (torrent) community.

It may come to a surprise to several of you that I decided to commit piracy today. Yes, I have created a torrent of a book and posted it to one of the private torrent trackers (The Occult Bz).

In my defense, it is my own book that I decided to pirate. I own the copyright; I can give away copies if I want to.

Before finding the request last night for Golden Dawn Rituals Volume One: Neophyte Ritual Three Officer Version, I actually kicked away making a PDF of it and uploading it to that particular tracker. I always hesitated. I figured it would be viewed more as spam than legit until I saw that five people thought it would be a good file to share.

Honestly, part of it is that I wanted the upload credit. It is not much, but every little bit counts.

Then is also the fact that I got annoyed when I went to revise the book recently (spelling and grammar), and got nailed with the "Your book is 48 pages too short (because we have changed the rules) for the format that it was originally published in. And no, we are not going to let you chose a different printing style!" notice.

Plus, I suspect that the useful shelf life of the book is already over. Sales have dried up (though that might be because the book could not be printed, and no one thought to inform me).

Nevertheless, I wanted to keep that particular version of the Neophyte Ritual available, which is why I published it in the first place.

There is also the fact that I have noticed that the first PDF made of a book tends to stick around. Very seldom do you see an improved version of a file that entered the file sharing community.

And that is the really important part about what I did today.

When I made the PDF, I included a couple of links to my writing blog, my Golden Dawn blog, and to the lodge's (Bast Temple, BIORC, Denver Colorado) website. It is a trick I recently picked up.

If you are going to give something away, make sure that there is an ad inside the item.

I am not just a pirate: I am a self-promoting pirate.

Pirate Bay Trial

One of the news stories that I have been following recently is The Pirate Bay Trial.

I will admit that as a writer, I have mixed feelings about The Pirate Bay and peer to peer file sharing. On one hand, I do not like the thought that someone could rob me of potential income from my copyrights. On the other hand, there is a lot of junk published in the occult field that should not recieve the dignity of generating income for their creator.

Hopefully, I do not fall into that last category. But I probably do; remember I set the price of one of my works, the Three Officer Version of the Golden Dawn Neophyte Ritual, based on the fact that I figure that I would sell a single copy to a new budding lodge and then it would met a photocopier.

There is also the fact that many of the out-of-print books that I seek out end up going for hundreds of dollars on eBay. If they were really that special, the publishers would reprint them.

Now, I will admit using some torrents for video files. In my defense, I would like to point out that I could not find a copy of StarCops for anything close to a reasonable price.

There is also the fact that the fan generated content of Star Trek Phase II (formerly Star Trek New Voyages) is accessible though torrents. Of course, that is a non-profit operation, so they really don't care about peer to peer file sharing.

So maybe, I am a secret pirate supporter. Of course, this is like being a secret Regardie supporter. Some people understand it; other people will not.

Of course, the big argument behind the Pirate Bay trial is that the Pirate Bay is robbing movie, TV and music companies of income (I don't think that the publishing houses are terribly concerned with file sharing, but I could be wrong).

I am sorry, but the honest truth is that the companies are still not going to get the income even if they somehow manage to shut down all torrent sites. We will just have people doing this in other ways---"Bring your flash drives and I will give you a copy of the lastest season of Prison Break..."

We are living the opening days of a brand new business model (think of the days of rampant copying of other people work during the days of the early printing press). Newspapers, such as the Rocky Mountain News are going to fall due to losing classified ads to the internet, and mass media companies are going to have to figure out ways to sell their stuff on the internet despite the fact that the internet is as secure as an unguarded chicken in the same room as my cat.

Looking into my cracked crystal ball, I can make a prediction: twenty years from now, none of us will believe that the Pirate Bay was a real issue considering the new business model that we will end up with when media creators catch onto how to make money despite the internet file sharing capabilities.