You still want this to be "getting mad at pirates for stealing books" and that's not it. That's not it at all. This is "getting mad at tech billionaires for making it easier to steal stuff they don't even own." My regrettable roommate down in LA issues takedown notices for a living. That's it. That's the gig. He works for a firm that, for a set amount of money, will police various forums, youtube channels and other internet watering holes for content they're paid to police. If the bots his company employs sees that content, he fills out a DMCA notice with a few clicks and the content comes down. The whole process is automated except for the part where he clicks on stuff, I believe because there has to be a human doing the clicking according to law. This means that he does things like issue takedown notices for the Lakers, but not the Kings. He pulls Lady Gaga content off of Facebook, but not Youtube. It comes down to who pays him. If you're getting paid for it, you come up with a system and you apply it. If you're not, you're screwed. So Lady Gaga has a lot more of her stuff taken down than some dude with a Soundcloud. What we're looking at here - what you're personifying - is outrage at an individual author saying "you're stealing my content" because we're so used at our justified rage at anyone who says "stop stealing my content." And yeah - back in the day? I had to go to Blockbuster and rent some DVDs to grab clips to put in the screenwriter's vanity reel because Disney hadn't so much as thrown a DVD at him. I have another friend who had to ask how to grab a copy of his movie off of Amazon because outside of the $5k they paid him for the screenplay, he didn't even have a name to contact. I have another friend who got 6700 largely negative reviews on IMDb for a movie he produced before the movie came out because one of his distributors leaked it on The Pirate Bay. Things are fucked up all over, for sure. I mean, Dan Ariely features a lengthy discussion he had with someone who pirated Predictably Irrational in his book The Honest Truth About Dishonesty in which the pirate is congenial and friendly and engaging right up to the point where Ariely suggests that based on the strength of the conversation, maybe the pirate should buy a copy. You can be mad about the imbalances in the system, the wealth concentration, the unfairness of contracts. But can you be mad about that and also be mad at the authors when they point out that they'll take whatever money they can get? Because the argument you're making: Is that the world is a better place if nobody gets paid at all: Those ways DON'T FUCKING EXIST. The reason the internet hipsters end up screaming at authors on Twitter is because if they all scream together loudly they can only hear the arguments of their fellow screamers. So here you are, bringing in San Francisco, The Koch brothers, Generation X and Patrion into the mix when what we're talking about is libraries.Does the system really work if the 50k advances are now 5k, though?
I can think of a lot of other ways where publishers and authors could negotiate compensation for labor where no one goes uncompensated for their labor, but it appears that authors would rather fight tooth and nail for a chance at $2 an hour and will rabidly defend the system that allows them to continue to do so.
The reason the internet hipsters end up screaming at authors on Twitter is because they're tired of Gen X blaming all of society's problems on them instead of blaming the people who actually built the system or doing anything to improve the system they are in.
Let's not lose sight of the forest for the trees here - Chuck Wendig is currently being pilloried by all corners for tweeting — uhh hey hi THIS IS A PIRATE WEBSITE. It’s not legit! WTF are you doing?! You're now in the process of re-imagining the entire publishing industry so that you can still be mad at Chuck Wendig, lone non-member of the Author's Guild, over a lawsuit by the four largest publishers in the world against a tech millionaire's shady copyright end-run. My buddy Doug? Up in the New York Times saying the exact same thing and nobody has shit to say about it because he has the wisdom to not be on Twitter. You're now bent over so far backward to justify your dudgeon that you're taking the rhetorical position that libraries are bad.Dear @NPR
I am all for access to information and entertainment, and remind folks that libraries here already allow you to take out e-books, even while their brick-and-mortar locations are closed. I used to work for a library system here in Pennsylvania, and libraries all around the country deserve their time to shine in this crisis, as we realize what vital institutions they are, both intellectually and as a service to the community.
The capital-P Problem is that the economics of authors, publishers, booksellers and libraries is something that authors, publishers, booksellers and libraries have hashed out since before Gutenberg while the lower-case-P problem is that shouty people on the Internet think things they like must always be good. This war has been fought before. Back when people thought that Google wouldn't 'be evil' they scanned everything they could find under the aegis of expanding and preserving knowledge. Back then, everyone was mad at the Author's Guild because Google couldn't 'be evil' they said as much. The authors lost, after ten years and lots of money, and then tried again with HathiTrust, which they lost again. And here we are again, arguing about what fair use is and how to compensate artists and really, what it comes down to is the publishing industry has kind-of sort-of figured out how to make things work when the Internet swoops in and says "yeah we're not doing that anymore" without any real consideration for the impact on the people whose lives they're changing. Creative destruction and all that. Rah rah Shumpeter. But music became a thing you couldn't make a living at because of that creative destruction. Writing has, too - remember, this battle was first fought in 2005. And yeah - it's super dumb that you have to jump through someone else's shitty DRM in order to enjoy your content and there bloody well should be a better way but when there are stakeholders attempting to protect their own interests the results will be awkward, slow and unwieldy. Let's circle back: Penguin Random House makes $3.3b a year. Everything they published when they started in 1927 is four years from public domain, yet "libraries" were 2600 years old when they were founded. There's an either/or assumption in the argument for digital books that's based on... nothing. There's no basis for it. There's the inherent idea that you either have libraries or you have hard core capitalism and there's no middle ground and the thing that bugs me is whenever an author or a musician says "they're stealing my work" the Keyboard Kommandoes rise up to argue the impossibility of physical media in the Age of Spiritual Machines or some shit and it's not the subject at hand. My beef? Is the knee-jerk need to say "fuck this guy" about someone who is thoughtfully attempting to defend his livelihood in the face of an Internet temper tantrum. Because we should be better than this. It's deeply disheartening to me that a guy who writes shit-tons of semi-okay sci fi is the Worst Person on the Internet but the guy who sold Alexa to Amazon so he could buy a bookselling conglomerate so he could offer to post used books online for a bounty is Dudley Goddamn Do-Right. And all of it - all of it - is intellectually justifying our base instincts. I think libraries are good, but they're definitely bad for long-term profits of the publishing industry.