Sure, we all love free. Free is great, right? Except when it hurts others. You think pirating a book doesn’t hurt anyone? Wrong. Of all published authors in this world, about 1% of them make what Danielle Steel, Nora Roberts, Jeffrey Archer, and James Patterson do. The rest of us are trying to make a living doing what we love.
5 reasons Megaupload and all like-pirating sites need to be closed down:
Pirating hurts more than simply Hollywood, large music companies, or giant writers.
Authorities seized computer servers that held enough information to “store 50 Libraries of Congress, 13.3 years of HDTV video, or ‘approximately half of all the entire written works of mankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages,’ according to Carpathia Hosting, the company that owns the hardware.” [quote from here.] That’s definitely more than just Hollywood!
Viruses, tracker cookies, and nasty bots lurk in free download sites. And do you think they care if your computer is infected? Nope, so long as you continued to pay their fee.
Who wins from this? Those responsible for charging you that fee for supposed ‘free’ material.
If piracy continues, it won’t be cost effective for authors to continue to write. Hence no books, free or otherwise.
Piracy supports criminals, and who really wants to support criminals? They make money off other’s hard work (commonly called stealing)–do you really want to support criminals? Who knows where that money is going?