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.
Furries and the Art of Surviving in a Post-Copyright World
Let’s be realistic here: copyright is dead. At least, it’s dead in the sense of “the right to make copies.” Once a piece of media is digitized — be it textual, visual, audible, or interactive — copying it costs exactly zero dollars (or -45,000 euros at the current exchange rate). Because of this, the perception of art not as a product but as information is rapidly reentering the collective human psyche after about 100 years of technical difficulties.
So this means artists who hope to make a living will now have to rethink their business models, because basing your livelihood on the assumption that all people will pay you for the privilege of merely experiencing your work is on par with Young Earth creationism in la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you factor. But never fear, artistic community, because a ton of niche nerd fandoms have come to terms with that assumption since the heyday of Usenet (because many of them probably had a hand in inventing it). They all operate with similar conventions, but because everything is better with cartoon purple foxes, the example I will explain is the furry subculture.
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