Right on Scarlet Imprint!
Regular readers here know my stance on piracy of published materials. Fuck you, pirates. I will personally hang you as a warning to other would be pirates. You're not captain jack sparrow, you're a pasty-fleshed dweeb with enough money for a computer and a scanner, and as the Scarlet Imprint post says, you can fucking afford to pay for the books. You're just a dick. And not the cool Black Brother kind of dick, you're the steals-from-the-poor dick.
Thanks to Jack for pointing me to that post. Neat to see other magicians pointing out how stupid it is to steal from a magician. And yes, Jack, I would love to read an article exploring the "intrinsic links" between capitalism and piracy.
Head for the Red: The ongoing adventures and insights of a magician's attempts to accomplish the Great Work.
*Grin.* You realize you're about to hate me, right?
ReplyDeleteBut here's my thing: we're all occultists. We can start working together. The old business model? It's broken. It can't be repaired. There is no undoing new techne. It demands that those who will survive to see the second half of this century in print adjust accordingly.
Do I want to see those publishing today survive to see the next three decades in print? Fuck yes. Do I think most of them won't, because they're stuck in the dark and pretending they can duck reality? Uh, yeah.
SI is damn good. But they've unfortunately also made some critical mistakes, and ones that I'm not sure they're even aware of yet. We shall see.
In the meantime, I've got a good week's worth of writing to get to in the next few days. So at least there's that.
*knuckles cracking*
ReplyDeleteWe'll probably hate each other right proper by the time the allusional dust settles. But it will settle, and it'll be fun to spar with someone with talent, wit, and intellect for a change.
"I believe this gauntlet belongs to you?"
Here Here.
ReplyDeleteI fail to understand why someone would rather have an e-book stolen, without character or spirit than a hard/true copy.
I fail to see why someone would steal a piece of art/wisdom which they intend on using for their growth, especially when the act of it causes others to loose out.
I fail to see the logic behind, "I am distributing information freely, charging for knowledge is evil" Especially when it is available at small cost and doing so stops the creation of new idea's and information.
Piracy is bullshit, in all its forms, its a way of hacking life and saying "fuck this crap I want it easy, I don't have anything to learn from the trials behind it".
Idiots.
F.S.
The reflexes from my debauched college days just served me well. Without thinking I just scrambled from my table and jumped behind the bar.
ReplyDelete(And I'd start collecting bets, but I give this bout roughly even odds.)
Remember: Keep it clean! no fire balls beneath the belt, boys!
From my experience, those without the wherewithal to pay for an item, book, training, etc. don't have the wherewithal to use what they have wrongly received.
ReplyDeleteI have known a number of people who were information junkies, pirating everything they could but all of their MP3 audio courses and ebooks sat, clogging their hard drives and accomplshing nothing.
It is more likely than not that anyone who pirates an ebook is unlikely to be a customer anyway.
On fewer than a handful of occasions have I seen those who pirated information use it for some productive purpose.
How many books does anyone really need? Isn't the ability to concentrate on one particular thing an intrinsic part of effective practical magic? As the Arbatel says "learn much, but not many things, because a human understanding cannot be alike capable in all things, unless it be such a one that is divinely regenerated." The workaday rational mind desperately wants to stay in the driver's seat, and as long as the would-be magician remains rooted in his or her comfortable armchair, reading, the dominance of the rational mind isn't seriously threatened (I believe the Arbatel warns against procrastination, too).
ReplyDeleteMuch of magic, moreover, grew up an era when getting a book meant sitting down with a borrowed original copy and a huge stack of parchment. Think of the time and effort involved in making your copy of a grimoire! And the expense! The price of even a small book's worth of blank parchment would have been up in the three, or even four, figures in modern terms. Surely, just copying out your text, word by word, line by line, would be both an initiation (akin, perhaps, to lectio divina!) and a substantial sacrifice.