OpenRightsGroup
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 4 months, 2011–2014
4:21 · 366K views · Feb 3, 2011
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.
HN commenters use it as the standard example of an author who found piracy helped rather than hurt sales.
4 comments from Hacker News
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 pirating my stuff, that it was bad. And then I started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. One of which was [that] places where I was being pirated, particularly Russa where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia it would sell more and more copies. I thought this was facinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. We took American Gods, a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely fr
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
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 holder takes it back, or 10 days passes. I just love the irony that it is Neil Gaiman who it happened to. He has long been a vocal proponent of copyright maximalism, and his positions on this are sufficiently extreme that I refuse to ever again buy anything that he has written. Update: I've left the last paragraph untouched, but I decided to look for Neil Gaiman in his own words on copyright. And I ran across this video which demonstrates that I'm remembering his "grumpy" period but he's since been educated that "online piracy" is not so bad. I'm glad I found this out. I'll have to start buying his books again. (Yet another example of how I can form an opinion, and hold it for years after the facts behind that opinion stopped being true. If I didn't do this kind of follow-up research, I would hav
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.