Gaiman on Copyright Piracy and the Web
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters use it as the standard example of an author who found piracy helped rather than hurt sales.
What it is
Neil Gaiman tells the Open Rights Group how the internet and piracy affect books and publishing. He describes how free web copies of his books boosted sales.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2011 to 2014.
What Hacker News said
Recommends jjcm · 2011-03 · on “Amazon shuts down Lendle”
It's a shame that they did this. I think Neil Gaiman summarized the wonderful benefits of using the web as a lending tool for books. He has a fantastic interview clip regarding his outlooks on piracy of his books that you can view here: [this video] Here's the transcript, emphasis mine: When the web started I used to get really grumpy with people, because they put my poems up. They put my stories up. They put my stuff up on the web. I had this A.) a belief, which was completely erronious, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn't tell them to take it down you would lose your copyright - which actually, is simply not true. And I also got very grumpy because I felt like they were p
Recommends Cowicide · 2014-11 · on “Spotify CEO Responds to Taylor Swift”
Agreed, the part where he says, "... Piracy doesn’t pay artists a penny – nothing, zilch, zero." - I involuntarily muttered, "Bullshit." out loud. He should probably listen to Neil Gaiman's story on how piracy can, indeed, make artists money: [this video]
Cites cf0ed2aa-bdf5 · 2012-01 · on “Paulo Coelho advertises on Pirate Bay front page ”
Neil Gaiman has the same opinion as well: [this video] I think one of the effects we can observe here is cognitive dissonance. If people pirate a book or a movie or an album they like but did not pay for it they will have to cope with cognitive dissonance. A lot of people with then buy the book they downloaded to 'make up for it' and/or will as Neil suggested buy the future books of the newly discovered author. The web is a great place to discover new things and it seems that Paul Coelho and Neil Gaiman really see the upside of having their works out there on the web for free and embrace it.
Cites btilly · 2012-09 · on “How Copyright Enforcement Robots Killed the Hugo Awards”
The streamer may or may not be incompetent, but the copyright bot issue is real. I am not a lawyer, but my reading of [LINK] section g.2.C is that they are legally NOT ALLOWED to put the material up until 10 days after receipt of a counter notice if they wish to maintain their DMCA safe harbor. If my reading of that statute is right (I'd give that about even odds - but feel free to read it for yourself), even a competent streamer would have had to do the takedown. The statute does not say how quickly the takedown has to be, it merely says "acts expeditiously". So any competent provider will have an automated procedure, and once that procedure is triggered, that's it unless the copyright hold