“Hello, Sears? I need repair on my washing machine. No, I didn’t buy it. I just stole it out of one of your stores. Even so, I’m demanding that you help me and provide warranty service.”
\n
\nNo, I’ve never stolen a washing machine. I’ve never stolen anything, other than Wayne’s girlfriend back in the 1980s. At least, he accused me of “stealing” her, although it was her decision and not his.<\/p>\n
When it comes to theft, however, I’m pretty familiar with it. My books are stolen every day of the year. They’re not purloined from a bookstore, although that might happen. No, thieves steal them by using bittorrents on the Internet. Often they’re not aware of what they’re doing, which is no excuse.<\/p>\n
Just last week, I received an email from a self-confessed “little old lady.” She was having trouble with her Android phone and couldn’t find the answer to a question in my book. She wrote, “I downloaded your book.”<\/p>\n
Now lots of people “download” my book. I assume it’s an eBook, one that they duly paid for. So I wrote back, “I provide support only to people who buy my books.”<\/p>\n
For a moment I thought I was being rude. But no: I had to know whether or not she was a legitimate reader. I will offer help and assistance to somehow who checks out one of my books from a Library, but a thief is a different matter.<\/p>\n
At least she had the honesty to reply and say, “I read a recommendation for your book and so I found a free<\/em> copy on the Internet, which I downloaded.”<\/p>\n No help for you.<\/p>\n It’s amazing. Sometimes I wonder — but not often — how much money I don’t make because scumbags on the Internet steal my stuff. And I’m not alone.<\/p>\n Music. TV shows. Movies. Artwork. Lots of material is pirated — outright stolen from the artists who create it. Our loss is our income, but also the incentive to create new stuff.<\/p>\n In an interview recently, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd said that he was happy to be in the Music industry from the 1970s through the 1990s. He actually made money from his work. Today, he lamented, artists make a few hundred dollars where he made thousands or millions. The rest of the money goes to the eggheads who make the apps or run the online services. And no money comes from anyone who plows the bowels of the Internet for a “free” copy of something they’d otherwise have to pay for.<\/p>\n Seriously: What’s the incentive to create anything when jerks on the Internet just steal it?<\/p>\n I’ll continue my anti-Internet rant on Wednesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Not when you steal my book.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7476"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7476\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7486,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7476\/revisions\/7486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}