The larger topic here (the RIAA and the "evils" of downloading music for free) is somewhat off-topic except for this little bit from an article by Janis Ian titled "The Internet Debacle" just published in the Portsmuth Herald which I quote at length here (though it's a pretty long articel overall):
Or take author Mercedes Lackey, who occupies entire shelves in stores and libraries. As she said herself: "For the past ten years, my three "Arrows" books, which were published by DAW about 15 years ago, have been generating a nice, steady royalty check per pay-period each. A reasonable amount, for fifteen-year-old books. However... I just got the first half of my DAW royalties...And suddenly, out of nowhere, each Arrows book has paid me three times the normal amount!...And because those books have never been out of print, and have always been promoted along with the rest of the backlist, the only significant change during that pay-period was something that happened over at Baen, one of my other publishers.
That was when I had my co-author Eric Flint put the first of my Baen books on the Baen Free Library site. Because I have significantly more books with DAW than with Baen, the increases showed up at DAW first. There’s an increase in all of the books on that statement, actually, and what it looks like is what I’d expect to happen if a steady line of people who’d never read my stuff encountered it on the Free Library - a certain percentage of them liked it, and started to work through my backlist, beginning with the earliest books published.
The really interesting thing is, of course, that these aren’t Baen books, they’re DAW - another publisher - so it’s ‘name loyalty’ rather than ‘brand loyalty.’ I’ll tell you what, I’m sold. Free works."
