Pirate Yourself, Become a Best-Seller

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "It sounds like a dotcom-era business plan: 1) give it away, 2) ???, 3) make pots of money. Author Paulo 'Pirate' Coelho leapt out of obscurity and onto the best-seller list by giving away his books on the Net. The best-selling author of 'The Alchemist' will even help you pirate his books via his blog. His publishers were not pleased, but then his books went from selling 1,000 copies to 100,000 and then over a million. He gives special credit to pirate translators who are making his work accessible to a wider audience and convincing more people to read his book."

Comments

Mal Reynolds from Firefly said it best....

[JBHarris]

About fifty percent of the human race is middle men and they don't take kindly to being eliminated.
--Malcolm Reynolds, Captain of Serenity

This is the where the music labels and book & video game publishers fit. Think about it when you see the RIAA fighting to survive. That is their purpose. The tubes have made them non-important. If your only purpose for existing was being made irrelevant by some new technology, wouldn't you fight that with everything you had? I'm not saying I agree with it, but it certainly gives you insight into the reasons "WHY".

Brad

Same for Education

[XxtraLarGe]

This is what I've been saying for a long time to the people I work with. I work for a medium-sized community college, and one of my jobs is creating media for our online classes, videos, podcasts, narrated powerpoints, etc. We have so many instructors that are worried about protecting their "intellectual property," as if it was academic gold. I tell them make you stuff open, share it with the public. Who cares if somebody at some other college uses our stuff? That only makes us look better. The one guy we have here that is actually doing what I'm saying has TONS of chemistry videos on Google Video, and as a result receives feedback from all over the world, and has been asked to speak at a few conferences because of it.