Avast Ye Pirates!
Piracy and theft of our instructional videos by trans people over the last year or more has decimated the small income we once received from video sales, which once funded the thousands of pages of free online resources we provide at TSroadmap.com, Genderlife.com/forum, HairFacts.com, HairTell.com and more, as well as the activist work Andrea and I have devoted countless hours and dollars toward.
After much soul searching, Andrea and I are seriously reconsidering the devotion of any time, money or resources toward further development and maintenance of these free resources for the trans community. The theft of our little video projects and distribution for online download has consumed more than 90% of the revenue from those sources: unlike “stealing” a 99¢ song from Britney Spears’s multi-million dollar empire, even a single theft of one of our videos by online piracy erases a percentage of income equivalent to one month’s web hosting fees for TSroadmap, an invaluable resource for many of the 4,000,000+ annual visitors in desperate search of information and support, alongside the forum at GenderLife and the other resources we offer. And that’s just the web presence.
Fortunately, our multimedia skills allow us to make a good living as mainstream providers and processors of mainstream content… a goal toward which we would like to devote more time and energy in any case. But if you, or someone you care about, values the work we have done with a Who’s Who of national service organizations, or if you value the transition resources we provide, please consider purchasing one of our videos at the GenderLife.com shop or making a donation to help keep these resources available. It has simply become impossible to maintain focus on them without your support, and they will fade from availability and upkeep if we feel that the community no longer values them.
Thank you so much, especially to those who support, and all our best wishes!
| Print article | This entry was posted by Calpernia Addams on May 18, 2010 at 4:44 pm, and is filed under Activist. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |






about 1 year ago
THAT’S TERRIBLE! It seems like most people who use the internet expect to get everything for free, and they don’t even like to look at a few ads to help pay for what they are getting!
I’m really worried that pretty soon you and Andrea are no longer going to be able to do the cool media work you both have been doing for the past decade, and you two are going to be forced to make cereal commercials and other mainstream junk!
I hope people start to put more money into your PayPal “Tip Jar”! (Especially the people who STOLE you and Andrea’s work!)