andrewducker

I'd entirely agree, which is why I generally don't like attempts to sway debate a certain way by appeals to emotion. For example, if you had mocked the first option in the poll rather than the third, that would have been another way of doing it.

I'm sure it's genuinely upsetting if you are/aspire to be a respected author, able to give up the day job and earn money by selling witty literate crime novels (or a musician selling your amazing genre-defying tracks etc) but are stopped from doing so by the rampant piracy online.
However, I think casting the debate in terms of the actual creators makes it difficult to have useful discussion, because it can reduce the force of any argument in the same way that overly emotive anti-piracy awareness campaigns do, purely because you can be seen as having resorted to such means.

and whose rhetoric is so low that it stoops to equate copying of files to theft, murder, and kidnapping.

I don't personally find that the relative wealth or poverty of the author is a factor in my decision to buy their book. If the artist making a living did have an impact on my purchases, I would probably not have bought a Margaret Atwood book recently (since she seems to be doing pretty well for herself) but would have bought something by someone more obscure who might actually need the money.

On the other hand, I would like it if there was a clear way to see where your money was going and where it was coming from. TV shows detailing (in the credits, or even at the start) how they were funded ie whether by advertisers, sponsorship, product placement and notes on mp3 retail sites detailing how much money went where would be great.

Short of a totally locked down internet, incentivising paying for content is about the only way that would make sense to me to do it, but it's hard to do that with purely digital books, music, tv and film. Paying for early access to new TV show episodes, for example, would be difficult to do without it resulting in those new premium access episodes being pirated just as soon as they are available for paying customers. The more difficult companies try to make it to pirate their content, the harder it is for ordinary consumers to actually, well, consume said content in a legal fashion.

Of course, if you wanted to recast the entire discussion, I suppose rampant piracy could be beneficial to the creative industries in some ways. If making money becomes more difficult, then sales (or the potential for high sales) could stop being a metric by which things are judged/funded. If sales weren't seen as a marker of whether something is a success, perhaps there would be a move away from mass-marketed lowest common denominator products and towards narrower-focussed niche products or products created to try and garner critical acclaim rather than sales.

Or I suppose TV companies could deliberately "pirate" their own shows, but leave the adverts in and embark on a massive seeding campaign across torrent sites, so that viewers watching the supposed pirate versions would still see the adverts which make money for the show's creators!

Can't speak for others but when I talk about content creators making a living it's an appeal to quantity & quality. </p>

I think a system where content creators or artists can't make a living or aspire to making a living means a reduction in the amount of content created and a reduction in the quality on offer.

I want content created by someone who spends every working hour on it. I'm happy to pay. I just require a way of directing & aggregating my share.

I want content created by someone who spends every working hour on it.

I'd rather read/watch/listen to something that was good. Whether or not the person spent all day on it or did it part time is neither here nor there to me. I honestly have no idea whether most of the books I read are written by authors who write full time. I know that a few specific ones are or aren't (and don't see a difference in quality) but I don't know about most.

I certainly don't subscribe to some kind of punk purist idealism where "selling out" or being professional is always bad, or that artists should struggle in order to be "real", but I don't see that quality necessarily follows from the lifestyle of the creator. Quantity perhaps, but then a reduction in the possibility for quantity could lead to a corresponding increase in the pride/care taken over the quality of what remains.

Some genres/types of media do have fulltime work from the creator(s) as a necessity though, I fully accept that (large scale film productions, constantly touring stadium acts, most episodic format TV dramas) and most of those and some others also require complex distribution networks

I’m going to out on a limb here and suggest there is a correlation between doing the job professionally and quantity and quality.