Piracy is advertising?

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1. donald patriquin says

   June 26, 2011 at 7:41 pm

   Neil Gaiman expresses an interesting point of view, which in essence says it is all right to do something illegal to a person – i.e. rip off his books – if it eventually brings gain to that person. Well, he may not say it is ‘all right’, but he certainly lets anyone off the hook for having done him an illegal favor! There is little doubt that he has benefited from such ‘advertising’, but it would indeed be a mistake, and an outright violation of one’s intellectual property rights, if people were to feel “the more piracy the better”. But isn’t that the reductio ad absurdum of what he is saying?
    
   This being said, ‘copyright’ is not quite as simplistic as Mr. Gaiman may imply in the space of three or four minutes. When his books are illegally translated in Russia it is true that this amounts to advertising- but only in Russia. If, for example, Reader’s Digest were to create a condensed version of his book in America without proper permission I wonder if he’d tell his lawyer to look the other way. When an artist has created a critical mass she or he can be much more lenient when it comes to ‘advertising’ done in this manner- i.e. illegally. I doubt there would or even should be a line drawn between ‘serious’ music and not-serious (?) music; artists in both categories would love to go viral!  

   Certainly up and coming composers – in any camp – can take a leaf from Neil Gaiman’s book and give away free copies all over the web, and so on. But for someone else to do it? OK only if you can turn a blind eye to morality.  The time may well come when people intent on exploiting others in such a way will have the politesse to actually ask for permission. Depending upon circumstances and an understanding as to how ‘advertising’ works, the answer may well be ‘sure, go ahead’ and everyone involved will benefit. But if the response is negative surely that must be respected.

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2. John Howell says

   June 26, 2011 at 1:10 pm

   Philip et al.

    

   So maybe what he says is good for writers who don’t already have best-sellers.  But isn’t that the equivalent of asking up and coming bands to play “for all the great exposure you’ll get,” while it’s the bar owners who say that who are actually making money off them?

    

   And does this really apply to “serious” composers, as opposed to pop groups that hope against hope to be the newly discovered group that goes viral?

    

   I don’t know the answers, just the obvious questions.

    

   All the best,

   John

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