Quinn: The Ethical Piracy Boiling Point Has Been Reached

Like everyone over Christmas vacation, I got a lot done, and (like everyone over vacation) I didn't quite get EVERYTHING done that I wanted to do.  I love the last two weeks of the year partially because I check out from work and don't do anything related to my day job, and instead do a bunch of projects that I've put off, that I haven't had time for, and that I can finally make time for.  I have talked about this many times, but I'm very focused on resolutions and achieving goals, and I think part of that comes with momentum coming out of the last two weeks of the year, feeling the sense of achievement that you realize when you are doing things that for months you've thought of just in passing.  It means that you start January with a speed, and hopefully can maintain that for a long time until the to do list gets clogged up again.

One of the things that I wanted to do more of over break was watching television, which I am absurdly behind on right now for 2025 series, and a show that I intended to see (but didn't) was Heated Rivalry, which I will surely make time for in January.  The show is getting really solid reviews both from lusty fans and from critics alike, and it feels right up my alley.  I have, however, been watching the press tour featuring Hudson Williams & Connor Storrie, two absurdly good-looking newcomers who have been delightfully lascivious about their characters in interviews, and showing a maximum amount of chemistry offscreen that, if the reviews are any indication, they'll bring to their show, which was already renewed for another season.  It is not surprising, given the newness they both bring, that they would jointly cash in on another project (gotta strike while the lightning is hot), and so they were signed on as celebrity voice actors for the novel Ember & Ice on the erotica audiobook app Quinn.

Williams & Storrie are not the first celebrities to provide voice work for the app (Jamie Campbell Bower, Andrew Scott, and Tom Blyth have done work on the app as well), but given their celebrity is white hot right now, the two of them appearing on Quinn kind of broke the internet.  The Quinn app collapsed within the first 24 hours of the audiobook announcement, seeing record traffic on the site.  It also saw a number of people online talking about pirating and how to get to listen to the product for free, to the point that one of the employees of Quinn (which, she claims, only has 11 employees in total) went viral for chastising people for wanting to take this content without paying for it (you can seen this video here).

The response to this was fascinating to me, and why I'm writing about it before having either watched the show or listened to the audiobook (which, I'll own, I probably won't-I don't really like audiobooks which is a discussion for another day, and if I did listen, it would almost certainly be just to listen to these two actors specifically if I become properly enamored with Heated Rivalry).  Comments ranged from agreement with the employee (her username is Michaela Amanda) to people complaining about the economy & not being able to afford the product.

The latter is, honestly, something you see on virtually every video or commentary online right now.  Unemployments numbers are high, and with tariffs, a number of products ranging from electronics to food staples to home repair supplies are considerably more expensive than they were a year ago.  People are definitely in belt-tightening mode, and in some ways have been since the Covid-19 pandemic quarantine ended.  But this sort of bizarre obsession with chastising advertisements or new products with complaints about the cost is omnipresent online.  Every time there's a new product introduction from a company, or a new commercial for an upcoming sale, or talking about seeing a move or concert, or a cooking video that has ingredients that cost more than bread & milk, or literally anything that might cost some money, you will see dozens of comments in the social media posts complaining about the cost, and how this is completely unaffordable.

And it's gotten to the point where, quite frankly, it makes no sense, and feels like people just complaining to complain (and in the process just being wrong), with the Quinn app being perhaps the best example of this.  In the United States, in order to use the Quinn app for one month, it costs $8 (I'm aware this is slightly different in foreign markets, but it's not that much different in most of them).  $8 is not a lot of money-you would pay considerably more than that to buy a book or to legally watch the TV series Heated Rivalry on HBO...this is a pretty cheap investment if you are truly interested in listening to this story read by these two actors.  It should not require you to have to add in the proviso "I'm aware some people aren't financially in a position to buy this"...it's not a yacht or a trip to France or even a remodel on your house.  This is $8...it's not that expensive, and if people truly cannot afford to spare $8, they likely are not spending a large amount of time on Twitter & TikTok.  You should pay for it if you want it so that the writer, actors, and employees of Quinn can continue to make this available for their listeners.

Amanda pointed out (correctly) that this is not Netflix, but even if it was, I think we've lost the plot a little bit here about what the consumer is entitled to owning.  This is not healthcare or food or housing or clothing or education...it is not something that you must have to live.  It is an erotic novel read by two actors you hadn't heard of a few weeks ago, that costs less than a couple of gallons of gas.  I feel very strongly that we should give access to arts & culture to all citizens (I support free museum nights and public libraries for all), but come on here-pretending it is a hardship to be able to afford this is such a shift in the Overton Window on affordability that it makes arguments about things that are actually unaffordable (like healthcare & college education) feel disingenuous when you complain about them in the same breath.  You don't need this story to live, and this story is being provided at a very fair price.  Complaining about the cost to access or pirating it comes across as super lazy and insulting to the people who created it.  

Piracy conversations have entered a grey area in recent years with subscription services creating essentially an artificial iconoclasm, making TV series and movies completely unaccessible to the public by legal methods, and I think that the ethical implications of that conversation are worth having, but this is not that-this is accessible, affordable, and something you should have to pay to listen to if you want to hear it.  If you don't want to pay for it, that's certainly your right, and if you think $8 should be spent somewhere else, then do that (part of life is admitting you can't afford everything you want)-but pirating it doesn't make you the good guy.  It makes you the bad guy, and those artists you claim you love...you're making sure that THEY aren't getting the money they earned if you steal from them.