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I’ve received some skepticism, sometimes based on first-hand accounts, about my theory that pirates will donate to support you if you just ask and make it easy for them. It’s based on the idea that no, they actually won’t.
This strikes me as unlikely. No pirate, hell, no person has ever publicly stated that they don’t believe people who work so hard to entertain us should receive no money in return, and that they’d certainly give money to an artist they support. I don’t think this isn’t happening because all of those people are lying. I think it’s happening because of a lack of education.
The phenomenon of indie artists putting a big “donate” button on their site is a relatively new one. It’s a reflex for many people to buy a movie from Amazon or buy a game from Steam. Donation is a bit more disjointed and confusing, and not everyone knows where to go. If it was downloaded from The Pirate Bay, there’s even more disconnect from the creator’s website. That’s what my new For a Living project is looking to remedy.
Go to the project’s page to download a graphic that you can place in your movie, game, or other form of visual media. It’s like an FBI Warning, except not about how stuff is illegal and instead about how food costs money.
I’m not sure how the same could be applied to music. Podcasts have audible credits and copyright information, so it’s an easy translation. For a music album, doing this on every song would get annoying. Fortunately, a lot of other factors are making it much easier for indie musicians to benefit from file-sharing, so there’s not a lot to worry about.
Piracy happens for two reasons: people don’t have a lot of money, and 90% of everything is crap (or DRM’d, but that makes it crap). Therefore, by getting everything free, you won’t lose any of your hard-earned cash on that 90%. Unfortunately, because no money is going to the creators of the other 10%, they won’t continue making things for everyone to download free.
Large corporations have come up with a solution: go into the manufacturing business. They are now Digital Rights Manufacturing companies, creating new rights for themselves using a revolutionary new process known as “fellating lawmakers”. Their revenue stream comes from licensing these digital rights at high prices, and suing people who don’t pay. But it’s too expensive for indie artists and creators, and it doesn’t win you any friends.
Because of this situation, indie game developers are doing horrible things like experimenting with in-game advertising. I’m not saying this as a knee-jerk reaction to the horrors of annoying ads bombarding us. I’m saying this as a knee-jerk reaction to the horrors of depending on the advertising industry for revenue.
Think about it: TV series with devoted fanbases are cancelled because they don’t make enough ad revenue. Millions of websites depending on Google AdSense would go broke if their accounts were inexplicably terminated (I’ve read about this happening before but can’t find a link detailing it. Maybe I’m typing the wrong words into Goo…gle…wait a minute). And remember when GameSpot fired Jeff Gertsmann when their advertisers didn’t like his reviews? For people who call themselves indie, it’s not very indie-pendent.
The best way to be indie in any medium, be it game development, filmmaking, music, writing…hell, even running a business in general, the only party you should be depending on is individual people. Some may know them as “customers”, or “users” who “generate content” on your “social media application”, but let’s avoid such corporate-speak, as it makes baby Jesus cry and is killing America. But there’s still the problem of how exactly to make money on individual people anymore. In a world where art is hard work and people don’t seem to want to pay for it, one man will stand up to explain his opinion. That man is me. Reread the previous two sentences in a movie trailer guy voice, then click the jump-cut-continue-reading thingy:
Continue reading ‘The Indie Paradox: Paying Rent Without Depending On Corporations’
What better way to segue out of my recent torrent (pun very much intended) of anti-copyright, free culture hippie posts than to talk about an excellent documentary which I’d never have seen if it weren’t for the horrible, illegal practice of pirating movies on the high seas Internet? Blue Gold is a film I heard about when TorrentFreak reported the fact that the director was embracing the piracy of the movie, happy that more people would see the movie, and can they please donate. That’s not what the movie’s about, though. It’s about how the dwindling water supply on Earth could make us slaves to corporations if we don’t do something about it. Have a look at the trailer:
The film is excellent, showing why the water’s disappearing, why it could kill us all, how governments and corporations (the line is blurry) are exploiting it, and how we can fix this whole fiasco. It proposes “the blue alternative,” which is a bunch of simple ideas that can be used to help rainwater get back into the ground and heal the disrupted natural cycle, among other things. I guess now we have to go blue as well as green. Can’t we just simplify it and go turquoise?
Colorful buzzwords aside, everyone should see this movie. It’s available free on The Pirate Bay, and you can buy the DVD or donate from the official site.
Intellectual Property Law Has Gone Quite Far Enough and Is Now Hereby Null and Void
A court has ruled that it is legal to remove works from the public domain and put them back under copyright in the United States.
Okay. That’s it. I can’t take these ridiculous decisions anymore. I’ve been thinking this for a long time, but now I’m just gonna come out and say it:
Intellectual property law in the United States no longer serves the public, and until it has been reformed to do so, it is to be ignored.
We the people of the United States of America have the right, and duty, to disregard and oppose these unconstitutional sections of the law. They no longer serves to, as stated in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution, “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” The law in its current incarnation actively impedes the Progress of Science and the Arts, and the limited Times are now so lengthy so as to be effectively unlimited. Copyright, patent, and trademark law together not only no longer matches the description in I.8.8, but it in many cases violates the First Amendment.
I believe in the necessity for there to be laws which promote the progress of science and art, and grant the creative persons responsible for such advances the exclusive right to claim a reasonable level of authorial control for a limited time. The former need is not being met by the law at all, and the latter is incidentally met in an unsatisfactory way by the current overarching and easily-abused law. But by upholding the current useful portions of the law, we validate the entirety of it.
As a citizen of the United States, I hereby declare that I do not consent to governance by Intellectual Property law, including, but not limited to, the current laws pertaining to copyrights, patents, and trademarks. I encourage the like-minded people of the United States to join me in affirming our non-consent, and continuing to do so until the law once again serves the public good as outlined in our Constitution.
In regards to my own work, I would appreciate it if the spirit of the Creative Commons licenses I release them under were respected, but please do so out of goodwill, and not out of a false sense of legal obligation to do so.
To the extent possible under law, Zacqary Adam Green has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Intellectual Property Law Has Gone Quite Far Enough and Is Now Hereby Null and Void and the header image preceding it. This work is published from the United States. Not that any of this matters as of this writing, of course, because copyright is null and void; I’m just saying this for when one day it’s valid again.