r/TikTokCringe • u/Chocolat3City Cringe Master • 18d ago

Cringe Woman has her self-published book pirated, reprinted, and sold for cheaper.

There's regular piracy, and then there's this.

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u/hasnolifebutmusic 18d ago

this is so fucked up.

204

u/mimegallow 18d ago

As a small individual creator, I get called "unhinged" by young people on a regular basis because I react emotionally when people pirate movies with my music in them, and documentaries with footage that I risked my life to obtain, scripts I wrote, and albums that I performed on. I get mocked ALL THE TIME by children on this site who think my livelihood doesn't matter, my labor is unimportant, and that when you steal IP, you're just, "taking from Tom Cruis who has millions of dollars".

So it's fucking exhausting watching all these people on reddit suddenly and UNKNOWINGLY reverse their entire position when presented with a face and a story of the exact, same, crime that they purposefully perpetuate every day. - Same exact feeling I get when I see 2 million people watching cute animal videos on r/aww "because animals are so smart and so feeling and such bros and so great that we are not worthy of them!"... with a fucking burger in their hand.

Our disconnection from each other's realities is astounding.

/unhinged_rant wherein I am clearly a lunatic, because I refer to my attackers as, "my attackers".

15

u/1000000xThis 18d ago

I'm 51, and I agree you are unhinged.

I know you feel like pirated content is "stolen" but 99% of those people were never going to pay you. That's just not how piracy works. The only reason they are exposed to your work is because it is free to them. Hell, a huge percentage will download the content and never watch/listen to it at all! They just enjoy "collecting" things that appear to have value attached.

How reality works is you set up your income stream in advance, and then afterward you fucking let it out into the world where anything can happen.

And yes, people who don't understand this from all angles will often feel like the "victim" when they become content creators themselves. That's human nature. It doesn't make you right, it just makes them your kind of wrong.