The Whovian Hub

So, here’s the thing. Big Finish is a pretty small company, and every time someone pirates a an audio story it’s taking money away from them. There’s no other way of looking at it; that’s just the truth. The morality of it is somewhat beside the point; I’m not trying to stand up on a soapbox and say that if you have pirated Big Finish (which, simply as a matter of statistics, people must have done here) you’re a bad person, because that’s a silly approach to take. 

This is the reason why Big Finish CDs and downloads cost what they do; I personally do find them to be pretty expensive, so when I am buying them, it’s only a select few, and it’s only the stuff that’s in the sales. There’s no way on earth that I’d ever be able to fund a consistent Big Finish collection or subscription - but if I were to pirate them, other people would lose out (because it would mean the stories end up being more expensive) and the Big Finish team involved would lose out, because this is their actual livelihood. Big Finish has to put their prices up to deal with the cost of piracy; they’ve made efforts to reduce their costs, but it doesn’t work while this sort of thing is going on.

On their website, it says this:

We estimate that Big Finish loses up to three-quarters of its potential revenue to piracy, and we will seek to prosecute anyone identified as a bootlegger or pirate. The maximum penalty for offences of audio piracy is 10 years imprisonment and/or an unlimited fine. The Proceeds of Crime Act legislation now also enables confiscation of assets and goods. Please remember that piracy affects us all. The more people who make a legal purchase of a Big Finish CD or download, the greater the opportunity for price cuts and special offers for our loyal listeners – and you’ll be funding new productions too!

And on his tumblr, Rob Shearman - @shearrob - said this:

But the truth is that as it gets easier and easier to download, so the likelihood of Big Finish being able to support that gets ever smaller. It isn’t cheap to make even a single story. And one day Big Finish will end - and it won’t be because the BBC took away the licence, or the Doctors decided not to record any more, or because the writers ran out of stories (never that!). It’ll be because the well-meaning enthusiasm of fans who sincerely love Big Finish will bankrupt it. Anyway, no more from me. I don’t sit in judgement. I really don’t. But when people give me stats about torrenting, and links to sites which pontificate that the industry as a whole will benefit from it - I just think, as ever, that it’ll be the smaller companies who’ll get crushed by this brave new future.

Like, yeah, I get it, of course I do; we all love Doctor Who, and we all want to listen to the new cool thing from Big Finish.

But it doesn’t matter if they can’t sustain themselves, does it? I mean, their Saphire and Steel was cancelled because of the effects of piracy, and they’ve said that the Doctor Who range isn’t actually significantly more secure.

Bluntly, what it comes down to is this:

If you think Big Finish is too expensive, buy it in the sales. Don’t pirate it, because that will only drive the price up.

It’s not a system of trades; you can’t say that you buy what you can afford and just pirate the rest, because that is still damaging. Buy what you can afford; don’t buy the rest.

If you appreciate the work that the people at Big Finish are doing, and want to support them, don’t pirate the stories, because they won’t get money from it.

So, you know. From one fan to another. Please, support the people at Big Finish, because they do what they do for us.

I just snapped up all the main range stories on sale that I didn’t already have.