Piracy for a while was an internal conflict to me. The idea of sharing things like music, whilst wrong, was just so much as social norm, it didn’t feel wrong. That all changed for me when I started at SitePoint and saw things from the producers perspective. Then I co-wrote my own book at it became much much more real for me. I’ve never tried to hide the fact that our books are scattered all over file sharing networks, nor was I ever happy about the DRM entanglements we had on our electronic products (long gone now), but I was a little shocked when I got this.
We’ve be trialling PiracyGuards, to monitor our products on common piracy networks. We got our first report today and nearly 500 take down notices had been issued. I knew that our books were out there, but this shook me up a little.
I’m interested to hear you’re own thoughts on piracy, doesn’t matter if it’s from a consumer or a producers perspective.
The reality is that more people pirate our books than buy them, I don’t know to what ratio – I probably don’t want to know. And many many people have always claimed, the more that’s pirated the more that sells, but I’m still not sure how to take that. Love to hear your input.