Paulo Coelho Supports E-Piracy

[goinghome]

I can post the whole blog since he thinks it's ok to read/listen online once credit is given! Paulo Coelho, best-selling 'inspirational' author, says:

"When I was active on Myspace (I am not anymore), “Fly me to the moon” (Frank Sinatra) was deleted from my profile.
So who deleted the song? The answer is simple: greed and ignorance.
Greed that does not understand that this world has changed. Ignorance that thinks that, if the music is available for free, people are not going to buy the CD.

A] some will say :
you are rich enough to afford having your texts here for free.
It is true that I am rich (as were Frank Sinatra, and his heirs), but this is not the point. The point is that we want to first and foremost SHARE something. If you go to most of the pages, what will you see? Fantastic pictures, great blogs, amazing photos. For free. My texts are for free here. And you can reproduce them anywhere provided that you name the author.

B] The industry will say:
artists cannot survive without being paid.
But the industry is thinking on the opposite direction of our reality today. I follow Hilal on Twitter (even if she tweets once a year…). Hilal is from Turkey, but lives in Russia (and she is the main character in ALEPH). She first read a pirate edition of “The Alchemist”. Hilal download the text, read it, decided to buy the book. Up to today, I have over 12.000.000 hard copies sold in Russia, and counting.

C] I also decided to create “The Pirate Coelho”, an non-official fan page that allows people to download the full texts in different languages. I am selling more books now than ever. (Where is it? Well, not difficult to find…)

D] How did all these social communities start?
At first it was just wanting to chat with another person. But chatting isn’t enough – we have to share the music, the book or the film that we love. When there was no law against it, this information was exchanged freely. Finally, when the entertainment industry caught on, the repression began.

E] Art is not an orange.
If you buy an orange and eat it, you have to buy another one, and then it makes sense that oranges should not be given for free, because the consumer consumes the product. Art is about beauty. Music is about beauty. If I visit a page and I like the music, I am sure I will buy the CD, because I want to know more about the work of the artist.

F] A woman went to a market and saw two jars.
She asked the vendor for the price:: “ten coins”, he answered.
The woman was surprised: “but one of these jars has been painted by an artist!”
The vendor replied: ” I am selling jars. Beauty has no price.”
http://paulocoelhoblog.com/2011/04/2...in-my-profile/

[Dave]

E is kind of dumb because you don't buy a CD to learn about an artist, you google them.
F doesn't work because blank canvas is not the same price as a painting. (sometimes it's more)

But the real question is, "Do you have an obligation to pay for every song you hear?" Let's not lie that people go buy the CD. I buy the CD if I like the artist and it's a good package. I don't download much music anymore because I can usually just hear it online somewhere and I don't feel like collecting thousands of files anymore. But I used to download a lot and most of was stuff I'd already bought and still own, but not in digital format. I have thousands of vinyl lp's and boxes of cassettes, lots of cd's too, but sometimes it's easier to download a copy than to convert your own files.
Now, no one LOST anything because I wasn't about to go buy all that stuff anyway. I couldn't afford it. But why should I be deprived of hearing it? I really don't see that.

The music business has stolen from artists from the start and this whole downloading thing is not an issue because the artists don't get paid. Some of them don't get paid anyway, because their contract didn't include digital and the rights were sold for half a cent for a download or something. Anyway, I'm rambling but the point is that art should be accessible and artists should also be supported, but equating art with a commercial enterprise is true in some instances and false in others, and really the guy misses the point. We're not obligated to buy every song we ever sang along with on the radio and the business has changed. That time when artists could become very wealthy was a rat passing through a snake, it wasn't an ongoing guaranteed thing. And the business sold consumers a LOT of crap that you had to buy to hear and then could not return. So they screwed themselves. And it's okay to download. Go see the artist in concert as they are more likely to get some of the cash that way, or buy from artists that are trying to sell their own music. The other ones probably aren't going to get your money anyway.

[Raphael Lambach]

Paulo Coelho is awful. I can't agree about anything that comes from self-helping author. I don't believe he knows about he's saying. If you read any book from him (which you should be ashamed of) you noticed that all books are based on unreal facts or expiriences. PC was songrwritter on 70's. He wrote many Raul Seixes' lyrics, most of them about cosmics or anarchist expiriences as "Sociedade Alternativa" (Alternative Society) or "Eu nasci há 10 mil anos atrás" (I was bron 10,000 years ago). PC gained much money with Raul Seixas' musical partnership. Paulo and Raul was adepts of Aliester Crowley a man who named himself as The Beast 666, and many songs are about mystical rituals, drugs experiences and you name it.

[Dave]

Paulo Coelho is awful. I can't agree about anything that comes from self-helping author. I don't believe he knows about he's saying. If you read any book from him (which you should be ashamed of) you noticed that all books are based on unreal facts or expiriences. PC was songrwritter on 70's. He wrote many Raul Seixes' lyrics, most of them about cosmics or anarchist expiriences as "Sociedade Alternativa" (Alternative Society) or "Eu nasci há 10 mil anos atrás" (I was bron 10,000 years ago). PC gained much money with Raul Seixas' musical partnership. Paulo and Raul was adepts of Aliester Crowley a man who named himself as The Beast 666, and many songs are about mystical rituals, drugs experiences and you name it.

Just my opinion, buddy, but this is about how you feel about his political and personal philosophy. That's relevant when you judge a person's character or personality, and I did learn from what you wrote. Thank you. But I disagree with your method of judging his comments on sharing* based on his personality rather than arguing based on the merits of his arguments.

*When I say "sharing" I'm choosing to use that rather than the misleading term "e-piracy." Semantics.