On Piracy

My opinion on piracy has very little weight in the world, so I usually don't talk about it. Thankfully there are well-known authors who think like I do, so I need only link to them. :)

Here's Neil Gaiman explaining how he realized that his sales increased as a result of his books being pirated:




And here's Cory Doctorow explaining why he puts up free downloads of his traditionally published novels on the internet. This is, I think, the most important bit: "For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity (thanks to Tim O'Reilly for this great aphorism). Of all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it[...]"