pardon my absolute lack of pity

[acroyear]

about this kid that decides to break copyright law on a scale the record industry can only dream of, gets prosecuted, and decides that death is better* than indentured servitude as he would have to pay off a huge fine and/or jail for the rest of his life, and deciding to do so even before actually appealing to a judge for leniency which is often granted in copyright cases.

really.  i don't care.  he wasn't a hero, he was a thief who got caught.

Is there a problem in that publishers often don't redistribute royalties to the authors?  of course there is.  in some cases it is contractual (the author accepts the initial advance in lieu of fighting for accounting which often doesn't amount to much).  in other cases, yes, the publishers are being jerks through bad accounting practices.  this latter case happens in ALL the creative industries, from records that never recoup in spite of selling hundreds of thousands, to Lord of the Rings never making a profit on 1 billion in ticket sales collectively.

but if one is going to practice civil disobedience to raise awareness for an issue, one should accept the consequences of that.  Any 'academic' should know that, from Emerson, to Thoreau, MLK Jr, and even Jesus, all of whom accepted the jail time that came with the disobedience they practiced.

This kid didn't.  he cut an ran.  he wasn't a hero, he was a coward.

and I have no sympathy at all.

--
* I'm aware that he suffered from depression, as is the case in most suicides, and that the prosecutors involved ignored that and refused to come to some arrangement, but all things being equal, the law is the law.  He simply shouldn't have done that if he wasn't able to deal with the inevitable consequences of prosecution.

Comments

Mister Spelling Pedant says:

[thatliardiego.livejournal.com]

"in lieu of fighting.

You're welcome. That is all.

Re: Mister Spelling Pedant says:

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

updated. not that google cache will notice.

[vconaway.livejournal.com]

You're assuming he didn't see his own suicide as an extension of his civil disobedience, a tactic to raise awareness, such as the self-immolation that triggered the Arab Spring.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

it is still cowardice. 'free the bits' does nothing to solve the copyright law's inherent problems (including the lack of 'for a limited time'), the abuse of power by publishing corporations, or the lack of per-use compensation to artists.

if it was my papers he threw out there into the either without MY permission, i'd be pissed off at him rather than just apathetic. If I put my work on JSTOR, I agreed to the terms of doing so, regardless of if they were fair or not - I would have had alternatives including self-publishing.

I decide the value of MY work and how I choose to get it out there, not some kid with a depression and a grudge.

So again, I couldn't care less. It actually would increase my impression that it was cowardice, dying for a cause that would be better served by living to see it through to a *just* end. The people out there illegally dumping academic pdfs are just compounding the issue - again IT ISN'T THEIR'S TO DUMP out there.

The comparison to Arab Spring is hardly valid. An academic who agreed (by their own choice) to a contract that isn't necessarily in their optimal economic interest (but still have jobs and careers) is HARDLY the same thing as being born into a society where dictators decide if you will even get through the day without being arrested and tortured as being 'anti-government' merely because you accidentally started whistling a Bruce Springsteen song.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

"I decide the value of MY work and how I choose to get it out there, not some kid with a depression and a grudge"

and you as effectively a self-publishing artist should understand that aspect of this. yes, the 'standard' record label contracts are inherently bad for artists, but your dislike of them doesn't mean you have the right to dump a thousand albums on bittorrent, nor that doing such a dumping really raises attention to the lack of balance.

[vvalkyri.livejournal.com]

Except that the injured party tried to decline to press charges, and announced this week that they would be making 4.5 million articles free to the public.

.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

said announcement was made after the suicide.

at a rate of 2-3 a week means that it will take...[paper napkin calculation]...a little over 79 years to release them all. I won't hold my breath.

and since 4.5 million (that the party will release) is about the same as 4.5 million (already out there somewhere), the result is that they're just giving up control over what they already don't have control over.

thank goodness for small favors...