Chuck Palahniuk Apologizes For Blaming Piracy For His Business Partner Stealing His Money

from the it-really-was-stealing-this-time dept

Chuck Palahniuk has long been a personal hero of mine. Back when I fancied myself a fiction writer, I gobbled up his books, engrossed in the characters he was able to create. It was only years later, then writing for Techdirt, that a chip in my impression of Palahniuk emerged when he started his habit of blaming his finances on the piracy of his works. Palahniuk claimed that piracy was responsible for his "dwindling income." This, despite selling a ton of books and movie options, sounded strange -- especially given that book piracy is much more limited than things like music, movies or software. Where was he getting it from?

Well, Palahniuk himself answers that question in a recent blog post on his site. It turns out the idea that piracy was to blame for his money troubles came from the accountant in charge of his royalties at his literary agency. That same accountant, it turns out, has now been charged with defauding the agency out of millions of dollars. Palahniuk now says he knows exactly what dwindled his income and it wasn't piracy.

On the plus side I'm not crazy. For several years my income has dwindled. Piracy, some people told me. Or the publishers were in crisis and slow to pay royalties, although the publishers insisted they'd sent the money. You may have read about this over the weekend in the New York Post. All the royalties and advance monies and film option payments that had accumulated in my author's account in New York, or had been delayed somewhere in the banking pipeline, it was gone. Poof. I can't even guess how much income. Someone confessed on video he'd been stealing. I wasn't crazy. If you've written to me chances are that your letter passed through the hands of the accused. He'd collect the mail and forward it to me. He seemed like a good guy. Like a prince of a guy. Like man-crush material. And then he wasn't.

And so now Palahniuk says he is close to broke. It's a heartbreaking story, for sure, to have a great author in financial ruin because of the fraud perpetrated by another. But one thing worth calling out here is that piracy has become so prevalent a scapegoat in the copyright industries today that someone as intelligent as Palahniuk accepted it as the reason for not being paid, even when he claims his mental warning bells were going off roughly all the time. This is the danger in industry groups scapegoating piracy as the world's greatest evil. And, frankly, how much daylight exists between Palahniuk's story and that of all those deprived of income through the magic of "Hollywood accounting", through which even the guy who played Darth Vader can't get residuals from Jedi over claims that the movie has somehow not been profitable?

Not much at all, I would argue. It ought to be enough to counter the claims that piracy is responsible for the woes of content creators by simply pointing out that it just isn't true, but we would do well to understand that the industry mantra blaming piracy is in part responsible for artists like Palahniuk buying into the hype and being swindled.

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Filed Under: blame, chuck palahniuk, piracy, royalties