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“When the web started, I used to get really grumpy with people because they put my poems up. They put my stories up. They put my stuff up on the web. I had this belief, which was completely erroneous, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn’t tell them to take it down, you would lose your copyright, which actually, is simply not true. And I also got very grumpy because I felt like they were pirating my stuff, that it was bad. And then I started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. One of which was… places where I was being pirated, particularly Russia where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia, it would sell more and more copies. I thought this was fascinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. We took “American Gods,” a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. You could read it and you could download it. What happened was sales of my books, through independent bookstores, because that’s all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent I started to realize that actually, you’re not losing books. You’re not losing sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, “Well, what about the sales that I’m losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?” I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. Which is, I’d say, “Okay, do you have a favorite author?” They’d say, “Yes.” and I’d say, “Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands.” And then, “Anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands.” And it’s probably about five, ten percent of the people who actually discovered an author who’s their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and they treasure the fact that they got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that’s how they found their favorite author. And I thought, “You know, that’s really all this is. It’s people lending books. And you can’t look on that as a loss of sale. It’s not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free.” What you’re actually doing is advertising. You’re reaching more people, you’re raising awareness. Understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and of what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. Allowing people to read things. Allowing people to see things that they would never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that’s an incredibly good thing.”

—Neil Gaiman on Copyright, Piracy, and the Commercial Value of the Web (X)

Besides having to resort to someone like Neil Gaiman, whose voice and authority on the endorsement of ‘piracy’ certainly must count towards our argument, there’s really an even simpler thing which he completely ignores. Books already are free. We have things called libraries which allow us, for a necessary period of time, to have a free book. 

The argument for that service is even simpler. It’s the reason why institutions like democracy collectively pool resources together in order to provide a service: because we declare that the service has value, one that is so great to society, that we will (ostensibly) burden the very minor cost of supporting libraries so that every last person is not denied access to that enormous resource of knowledge. It’s a fundamental guarantee of the promotion of our culture, however much we starve and denigrate it today. 

‘Piracy’ is the declaration of that value manifest, only electronically, and throughout the entire world. The internet itself was not supposed to be a commercial enterprise. Our realistic ability to manifest the value that we place as a society on the free exchange of knowledge is severely hampered only by our willingness to serve, or inability to combat, the groups that seek to control it for commercial interests. 

Edit: To be honest, I’m actually kind of appalled that Gaiman’s argument exists solely on economic grounds. So you know what, because of that, just like the economic-argument that the Viet Nam, or Iraq, or Afghanistan wars are/were wrong because they’re costly, screw this guy. People overwhelmingly disapproved of all of those, and the world overwhelmingly approves of the internet and the free transmission of information: if you can’t acknowledge that, you’re one of them.