Colleen Doran and Techdirt redux

There is an excellent follow up to my Colleen Doran post on live journal that effectively says it all, in a fairly short period of time:

What sort of fandom demands so much from creators without being willing to meet them halfway, or in fact, to even so much as click a link or type a URL? Whatever Colleen Doran's failings may be as an Internet entrepreneur, how much more the failings of the fans who let their own apathy and greed prevent them from supporting things they say they supposedly like?

and its interesting that, in the comments section of my post, the writer of the Techdirt post, Tim Geigner, tries to get out of how harsh he was to Colleen. Tim tries to get people to back off by saying, in effect, "look, I write fiction too. I'm in the same boat as you guys." Except that its not the same boat. Never will be. Different people have different levels of financial commitment and time commitment, and there simply isn't an excuse for the level of anger towards Colleen in the comments section, nor for the level of snarky sneering towards someone who hasn't somehow "monetized" the internet properly.

There is no single justification for hating on an artist who is tired of getting ripped off. None. They have a right to be angry. And a right to want to be paid for their hard work. Because it is hard work, and it takes time, and there are only so many hours in the day and so many years in an artist's life to do the work.

Why does everyone want to try to defend the pirates and not the artist? No one else here has potentially been wronged, not the scanner of the work in question, not the person who downloaded the jpegs, not the server host, not the website owners. No, the only person with any skin the game at all is the artist and no one at Techdirt wants to stand up for them. "Well, what we write can be posted anywhere and we won't have a problem with that."

"I can't be a racist. I have lots of black friends."

Defend the person who is getting hurt here, without mealy mouthing about losing your free download privileges. Go download someone else's work who doesn't care that you're doing it. Go buy something from their store. You like to consume content over the internet? Put you damn money where your mouth is and go buy something to support the artist. For once.