Piracy Statement

First up I don't like the term "piracy". Bleh. But language is fluid and you all know what I mean, so let's go with it.

Real pirates, like these guys, are evil. They're not Jack Sparrow, they're not Captain Hook, they're murderers and rapists and kidnappers and deserved to eat a Tomahawk missile in their sleep. They're scum. They're villains. They're evil. They're not some kid who just wants to read the next Harry Potter book for free or whatever.

I've never understood musicians, writers and artists who get all messed up about digital piracy. It just strikes me as entirely retarded, especially if they're not in full compliance with every piece of software, hardware, music and movies they've ever seen or owned. I'm sure their $2,000 copy of Adobe Photoshop is fully legitimate now and was when they were 14, and I'm sure they've never downloaded an MP3 in their life.

I see this crap everywhere. I see rap artists thumbing their nose at society, waxing lyrical about sticking it to the man, pimping hoes, glorifying robbery, murder and pushing drugs, while at the same time appearing bereaved that their latest forgettable album appeared on The Pirate Bay the day after it appeared in iTunes. I see armies of cocaine huffing, hooker bashing, Harvard educated RIAA trust-fund babies who've never wanted for anything in their life but a full head of hair, going on about how Limewire costs them the GDP of the entire world ($75,000,000,000,000 dollars) in lost revenue and also, simultaneously, claiming to have had one of their most profitable years ever. How do you even rationalize that kind of blatant, intrinsic wrongness?

Fuck those guys.

I don't give a shit if you got my book from The Pirate Bay. The first one is free. The later ones cost $5 to buy and are available in DRM free PDFs, or even DRM free plaintext if you really want it and you're Richard Stallman. If you make $20 Aussie dollars an hour, pretty close to minimum wage, then $5 represents about 15 minutes of your time. If you spent more than 15 minutes bringing up the highly overloaded Pirate Bay page, finding a correct torrent, loading the torrent into uTorrent, downloading the file, moving it around on your NAS, putting it into iTunes, getting the book's coverart then syncing it to your iPhone, then yeah you pretty much just robbed yourself.

Just saying. You're probably saving money by buying it vs pirating it. This is why CD's shouldn't be so fucking expensive.

But hey, a lot people have genuine and interesting philosophical beliefs against paying for services rather than physical objects. Other people are unemployed (or underemployed) and couldn't afford the book anyway. How both these types have high-speed internet is a mystery for the ages, but for those people, well, go forth and torrent... I don't care. I just ask that if you believe all that crazy crap and do like the book, then subsequently you think I deserve some kind of reward for creating it, I beg you not to compromise your principles. Instead, just donate $5 (or whatever) to Child's Play, run by the infinitely-more-talented-than-me dynamic duo of unfathomable awesome which is Penny Arcade.

Seriously, these two guys do so much good work in the world, generating literally millions of dollars every year for sick children, that they deserve your money far more than I ever can. Tycho is basically my idol as a writer; he's the man I want to be right down to his molecular composition. If I had but the power I'd assume his form like some kind of twisted Australian doppleganger, claiming his perfect mind, his perfect body, for my own. His body with his... his bare, ripped chest, his inviting lips that whisper the sweetest nothings to me right as I'm going to sleep, arms that are gentle and tender, wrapping around me, comforting like a warm blanket and a cup of lemon tea...

I'll be in my bunk.

...

Ahem.

Anyway. The important thing is to not kill yourself if you pirated my book because you weren't sure if it was shit or not (just in-case you couldn't tell from the first book -- it's free after all). If you decided it was shit and not worth a couple of bucks, that's cool, I'm totally up for constructive feedback. Just e-mail me. If you decided it was good, well you can just buy a copy on iTunes or Kindle and be awesome.

-- Dave.