On Piracy, Publishers, Distribution &c.

Legendary coder/troll Xah Lee wrote:

But, writing a good book, thinking and writing a good song, producing a movie, usually costs thousands or millions of dollars. Writer takes years of training, paying for college, etc. Same for software programer and song writers, singers. Money is the primary incentive we produce. If producer can't make any money because whatever he produces can be freely obtained on piratebay, would we still have much good books, songs, or movies?

However, i think much of these file-sharing sites, and to some extend the Free Software and Open Source movements, are scumbags in society who just passed alone and seized a opportunity for their own “right” to get things for free.

I certainly won't say that piracy is ethical.  That would be absurd.  But I think he is missing a key problem here.  Publishing is a business, and in most of the cases today. it is a big business in which the producers of the content, be it books, music or movies, receive little compensation for their work.  The middlemen take the majority of the profits.  Much of pirate ideology is fueled by the fact that the main beneficiaries of the work are not the ones who made it.

Now, there is one thing that nerds get wrong all the time, and this is a point Peter Thiel has made many times.  Distribution is actually a hard skill and it requires hard work.  It doesn't do itself, or we'd have the best products out there rather than the ones that are most popular.  Nerds don't think they should have to be bothered with it and this limits their success.  Whether or not there is even a market for good products rather than ones that will sell is another question and not worth getting into here, for now.

Publishing requires printing/manufacturing physical works, marketing them, bringing the actual products to warehouses and stores, and the like.  This is all real work in the real world.  So we can't fault publishers for taking some money from this, if the creators don't take that responsibility upon themselves.  But can we say it's justified for them to take 80-90% of the profits?  It doesn't matter yes or no, because they have already done it.

That's why I find it hard to get worked up about piracy.  What always happens in American business is that the suits get too greedy and hoover up all the money for themselves, leaving nothing for the people who actually create things.  If they could contain this behavior, there would be fewer people looking for back channels.  But they just can't.

If you are a creator yourself, consider taking more responsibility for the distribution and cutting out the middleman.  Yes, it's more work and harder, but it has been done before, even before the days of the internet, and the internet has made the process much easier.  The aforementioned Mr. Beale has basically done this and been successful at it.  Of course, you can never win in this world — people call him a grifter.  But if the alternative is working a corporate job I can't really blame guys like Beale or Bronze Age Pervert for going the "grifter" route rather than putting up with that garbage.