It’s been proven time after time that piracy is almost always an issue with availability and convenience, rather than people looking to get a free lunch.

Music piracy is basically non-existent these days with Spotify and Apple Music. There was a time when movie piracy nearly died when Netflix was the only game in town.

Comics aren’t any different. If you can spin up a service that is as good or better than what the pirates are offering, in a way that is accessible to English markets, you will see a massive drop in piracy from western audiences.

There are a lot of really shit takes, and the article mentions one of them. “If someone is going to pirate they had no intention of buying it in the first place.” Point me to the location where I can buy it legally in my language, you prick. Can’t? Then get the fuck out of here with your bad faith dribble.

Yes, people should be compensated for their work, but if their work is never going to be available in a region then any distribution in that region is not a loss of revenue or profit, especially when said distribution costs literally nothing. You are confusing missed opportunity with materialized profit.

This is the cost of releasing content that is not universal. You need to accept the fact that if you are not going to service a population, someone else will.

Huh. Never heard of it .Now, im gonna pirate it just for the sake it.

We used to have japanese sites where you could watch a few ads, and maybe pay for premium for extra content and earlier access, and otherwise read manga for free, but then VISA and Mastercard shut down those sites because they contained adult content.

If we want easier access to anime and manga, we must first start with slapping a giant anti-trust lawsuit on these companies while Japan implements their new law forbidding payment processors from being able to pick and choose the content they allow.

Being real, I personally choose to respect an author’s wishes regarding piracy of their work.

However, any time I’m on my author account, and someone asks where they can find my stuff, I don’t just link to the Amazon page; I also say that all of it is out there on soulseek for free.

Which, I say that on this account too, but I keep the two separate, so it’s kinda meaningless on this one lol

No bullshit, when my old books got put into the shared folder of a friend by mistake, I didn’t care anyway because they flopped when published because of multiple reasons, but they were/are essentially dead for me.

But then, a few months later I get an email asking about the third book, and where can they find the finished version.

There’s been a trickle of those ever since. At this point, more people have read my old books via soulseek than when they were in print. And, those readers have converted to actual sales of the stuff I’m still writing. I have family and friends that were given free copies of all of it that have never any of it. I ain’t mad about it, most of them aren’t into the genres I write in.

So, I can honestly say that the entirety of my very limited fan base comes from piracy, and that I’ve made actual money because of that. Less than $20, but still

I know that doesn’t scale for a lot of authors and artists, and that there’s a big swath where piracy actually does reduce their ability to make a living at it, which is why I don’t pirate from authors that have said they don’t like it.

But, for real, it isn’t like there aren’t upsides to it as well.