It’s beyond doubt that piracy hurts authors.  Unfortunately, no one’s yet been able to quantify how much.  And just as it’s hard to prove a negative, no one can really determine whether or not it’s a one-to-one correlation between illegal downloads and lost sales.  I’m operating on the generally-accepted idea that the majority of “pirates” would not have purchased an ebook if they weren’t able to get it free.  I’m also operating on the assumption that most people don’t go out of their way to get something for nothing unless they are either hard-up, or just assholes.  In small-scale marketplaces, and in much of the world, and for much of the world’s history, “value” is a fluid concept.  My own experiences in countries outside the US, and at small market venues like flea markets, yard sales, bazaars, and other individual transactions, along with the haggling scene in Monty Python’s Life Of Brian suggest that this is not an unusual state.  Bargaining, dickering, haggling, back-and-forth–are all dialogues that help interested parties determine agreed-upon value of something.  Value that both parties in the transaction can live with, if not celebrate.

This to me suggests that there are some parties out there who find no value in an electronic file.  But there are many, many parties who do, and those are the parties I care about reaching.  Of course, I can ‘t do that if I can’t feed my cat.  The problem is, essentially, how to compensate authors of creative works without punishing those who want to compensate while at the same time penalizing or neutralizing those who actively work to deprive the authors of said compensation.  I’m not talking about somebody who emails a copy of one of my ebooks to their best friend in an, “OMG you HAVE to read this!” email–hell, I want to find those people and shake their hands.  I’m talking about wholesale pirates–people who go out of their way to actively divert customers away from a legit venue and into a not-so-legit one.  People who chop and scan books or burn pirated DVDs extracted from the factory prior to shipment of the release in mass quantities.

One of my key thoughts on the matter is this–most people won’t pirate if it’s easier to find something legitimately.  And more significantly, if people feel the cost of acquiring that something is fair, they will pay it.  But that’s the key, isn’t it?  The value of that something has to be a fair and reasonable value, and neither fair nor reasonable is easily quantifiable.

Quantifying the effect of piracy on the ebook market in simple financial terms also presents an incomplete picture.  We can’t really understand a way around piracy until we understand better the full value of a creative work, and it can’t be accurately measured in simple sales.  And we will lose the battle against piracy if we choose only to measure it in financial terms, and ascribe its only value in the commercial.  If one thinks of a lost ebook sale, what comes to mind is a single copy of a book, say, a mass-market paperback.  Valued at 4.99-8.99, it most tangibly represents what we tend to think of as a book, and it most tangibly also represents about six ounces of pulp paper, cardstock, ink, and glue.  If someone walks out of a store with a paperback stuffed up their shirt, they’ve walked off with about six bucks worth of raw materials.  It’s the intangibles that count, and the intangibles that make up the majority of the book’s actual value.  Enough people believe that a book is the sum of its raw materials and some vague quantity of “a little more” for what’s on the pages.  We know different, and so do they, if you get them to think about it.

Getting them to think about it is the hard part.  Artists do not have that much value in our culture.  Mention that you want to be an artist to your relatives in the tender college years and you’ll get a variety of responses, most of which will encourage you to study something “worthwhile” or “more reliable.”  Mention that you want to make a living off artistic pursuits, and you’ll be encouraged to find a “real job” you know, just to “fall back on” (translation, you’re expected to fail, and on the off-chance you do succeed, you won’t see enough money to be a contributing member of society and you’ll therefore become a drain on it).

Part of the problem is that art is so tied to commercial endeavors, at least in the publishing world.  In the past, there existed an idea of patronage–an artist’s expenses were subsidized by a patron (aka a wealthy noble)–the artist’s food, shelter, materials, and equipment were paid for, leaving the artist free to create works which were shared with the public, and in so doing, bestowing upon the patron the respect and accolades one would receive for enabling the continuation of the arts.  Oftentimes, in payment for the patronage, the subject matter of the artist’s work could be directed by the patron, mutually beneficial for both individuals to a certain extent, and potentially censorious in another.  If it became enough of a problem, though, an artist could find a new patron more receptive to his or her subjects of interest.

I have no interest in being a kept woman, any moreso than I am currently kept (by people I’ve either married or given birth to).  I do, however, have an interest in being both read and fed.  I can’t change the way our culture views art and the creation thereof, but I can think about trying to encourage a few minds at a time to think about where the real value is in the things they own.

I’ve been reading a lot of tech blogs, since as a longtime geek, I’m more comfortable with the Silicon Valley side of things, rather than the Madison Avenue end.  I’ve read Cory Doctorow’s thoughts, and a few of his books, too.  I’m reading Lawrence Lessig right now, in an attempt to better understand, and maybe envision, a way that the wild, wild west spirit of the internets simultaneously shatters conventional business practices and yet seems so easily killed by them.  And what it will all mean to the artist–the author, the musician, the photographer, the graphic designer, the creative-class whose “product” is so easily convertible to new paradigms, and so ripe for being taken advantage of in those new paradigms.  Traditionally, the artist has labored under some version of patronage, whether it be a single individual or small group bankrolling an 18th century poet–keeping him in quills and parchment and a meal or two every so often in exchange for odes to the Patron’s largesse, philosophy, or skill with the ladies; or the distributed patronage of our current system of royalties from sales.  Both these systems force the artist to walk fine lines between commercialism and artistic vision–directing the art towards serving either the patron or the self, but never fully one or the other.  Of course, the bottom line is not “is my artistic vision as a writer free and unfettered,” but more, “can I continue to feed my spawn through this super-awesome job of making shit up and writing it down and showing it to other people.”

Now, I’ll be honest here.  I’m of two minds on this.  One part of me says, “Hell yes, I want to be the next Nora Roberts or Jenny Crusie.  Hell yes, I want those six- and seven-figure advances and be able to whistle a sweet little tune of avarice every time I step into the shower.”  The other part of me simply wants enough to keep my kids in shoes, keep the bill collectors off my damn lawn, and have a little extra left over for ebook downloads at the end of the month, while the accolades and maybe just a little bit of fame swirl around my ankles, occasionally rising to knee- and maybe thigh-level when I do something extraordinary.  Just enough to give me a warm feeling, not enough to turn me batshit-crazy because I can’t handle the fame and the pressure.  The question is–are either of these two scenarios feasible if digital book file sharing is in play?

Now the first thing off the bat that I want to say about this is–I want to table the discussion on the morality of file sharing for now.  I see it falling into the same broad category as after-market swaps of other goods, in spite of its virtuality.  I see both sides of the argument and find points of agreement in both.  But the bottom line is that with as much resources as any industry spends on crushing its undermarket, there will always be in existence that same undermarket.  Crack down on electronic file sharing and you get someone scanning in a print book.  Crack down on scanners, and some enterprising soul with time on their hands will hand-type the whole damn thing into a file.  Cut off their fingers and they will memorize it, recite it word-for-word, and perform free for either podcast or live performance, even if it’s to just a handful of other people.  People are creative, and that’s not going to change.  Possession is partly a consensus of perception.  So with that in mind, how can an artist still find recompense for sharing his or her work with other people? Does art have tangible value that can be used to generate sustainable artistry (ie, enough for an artist to live on so that s/he can continue to create)?  And the multi-part question that asks, is the value of that art diminished by the undermarket, in what ways, and in what ways is it or can it be enhanced by that undermarket?

My instinct is to say that file sharing is part of human nature (there will always be somebody looking for sumpin’ for nuthin’), and that a system of success means working with that aspect of human nature rather than in opposition to it.  Like the US’s idiotic “abstinence only” sex-education policy that completely disregards humanity’s formidable biological urge to fuck like bunnies humans and thinks that overblown horror stories, promise rings, and the vague threat of the belief that a big beard in the sky will shake a finger at you is going to block the urge of millions of years of successful evolution (which doesn’t require belief to exist, happen, and keep happening as we speak).  I’d rather work with that, or work around it, than butt my head up against it in futility.

The question of how to do that is anybody’s guess.  Doctorow et al are doing important and creative experiments with literature, Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Radiohead are doing the same with music.  At some point, the paradigm shift will spit out an answer that will assign a real value to each step in the system, and some of those values will be at zero, others will be in the negative.  Something will be in the positive, because I don’t think people will stop listening to music, reading, making music, or writing anytime soon.  The question is how will doing it for love play out against needing to survive.

Time will tell.