As I like to point out, it's not just our friends in the music and video industries who are suffering due to piracy. Another group being hit is authors. One author's group, the Romance Writers of America (RWA), are fighting back with an education campaign to let authors know their rights and how they can defend them. They've created a site that includes among other things a sample DMCA takedown letter as well as a database of file-sharing sites where unauthorized versions of the authors' works are likely to be found (some such as esnips and Scribd I was familiar with, but it was saddening to see how many more there are).

The fact that people are uploading and downloading these copyrighted novels begs the question; if you're a fan of romance novels, why do you want to deny the author her rights and her income? With music, people blame the "evil" record labels. Do romance readers have some particular beef with the publishing industry? Some musical file-sharers also argue that musicians "make enough already," even though most recording artists don't even earn a full-time living from their craft. Guess what — the same is true of romance authors.

Bottom line, there is no excuse for distributing or downloading someone else's work without their authorization; no rationalization can justify it. Kudos to RWA for providing resources for authors to combat piracy, but these authors shouldn't have to create a daily routine of monitoring sites and writing takedown letters; they should use that time to write fiction, which is so much more fun to read.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 at 2:30 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under copyright opponents, education, p2p, piracy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.