- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
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Yeah, kinda funny how it’s OK when there’s a bunch of neoliberal gangsters like larry summers behind it, right?
A sad day
You know, this thread really needs a list of of the publishers responsible for this travesty.
“Publishers Hachette Book Group Inc, HarperCollins Publishers LLC, John Wiley & Sons Inc and Penguin Random House LLC” - According to Reuters
Of course those Penguin fucks are involved.
Welp, hope they’re backed up somewhere in an uncentralised, segmented, shareable form where people can still access them from the internet.
There’s a Minecraft server that has books and articles stored. it’s called The Uncensored Library, (visit.uncensoredlibrary.com), and they have various articles and books that are free to view. The Uncensored Library was created by Reporters Without Borders. If I were the people of the Internet Archive, I’d be talking to the folks in the RSF about porting some of their content to this virtual library.
It only contains a relatively small collection of banned reporting from various countries, not the whole Internet Archive, and only in the form of in-game books, not anything really usable IRL. It’s neat but basically a promotional project for RWB.
Maybe I’m just seeing potential where there isn’t any, but I really think if the people of the Archive could find a way to get their stuff stored in TUL, or perhaps build a Library of their own, the publishers couldn’t go after them then, because to the outside observer, all they see is a buncha dudes playing Minecraft.
It’s just not practical – no Minecraft server or map can realistically hold all the books in the Archive, or even just the 500k that were removed. Even if it could, you’d only be able to read them by literally taking your avatar to the book object and reading it in the tiny in-game interface.
The Minecraft thing is just a gimmick to promote awareness of press freedom and censorship, not a plausible way to deliver books to people. If the IA wanted to “set books free” they’d be better off using torrents or something like Libgen (and even then they’d still be criminally liable for making the files available, even if the publishers couldn’t stop the files from being shared further).
Maybe the fact you have to be there and read it while connected is the secret sauce to prove that it’s a “real” library, meaning they have a fixed number of copies (max players connected to the server at any given time) and that helps them get protected the same way a real library is?
Doubt thats the point. I mean, real libraries at this point also lend out e-books, and i dont think they have an upper limit. Probably more to do that libraries (or the cities that finance them) have deals with publishers, and IA doesnt.
YMMV, but my local library system has a limit on the number of e-books that can be checked out at a time. Some e-books they only have 1 or 2 “copies” of, other they have 20+ “copies”. Seems dumb to me that there’s a limit, but I’m sure they’re forced to do it for a reason.
IRL. It’s neat but basically a promotional project for RWB.
you could easily stuff a script to rip the books out and stuff them into usable formats pretty easily, minecraft worlds are just a list of files.
Though i haven’t verified this, and i’m not going to so.
I had a look at this map and ifirc the problem is that the Minecraft books have a very small word limit. Only a few hundred words. You cannot even put a full article on a Minecraft book, let alone an actual book.
It was rather underwhelming to be honest.
yeah that sounds about right. Limiting engines be limited after all
There are a lot of books that are out of print, especially reference books. And if you look for them on Amazon or eBay, they’ve been snapped up by scalpers who are reselling them for obscene profit.
Either make the books available for sale or quit complaining about “copyright infringement.” But whatever you do, quit hoarding knowledge like a dragon sitting on a pile of gold.
Exactly. Copyright should be nullified if there’s no longer first party sales.
We should also go back to the original copyright duration: 14 years with an optional, one-time extension for an additional 14 years.
Copyright should be nullified if there’s no longer first party sales.
Then everything created before now will compete with new copyrighted creations.
In a lobbied environment such a thing can’t exist.
Probably some elaborations about what exclusive rights can and can’t be should have been put into US constitution (because US is the main source of this particular problem, though, of course, it’ll be defended by interested parties in many other countries), but that was written a bit earlier than even electric telegraphy became a thing.
They really couldn’t imagine trying to destroy\outlaw earlier better creations so that the garbage wouldn’t have competition. Printing industry back then did, of course, have weight in making laws, but not such an unbalanced one, because the middle class of that time wouldn’t consume as easily as in ours (one could visually differentiate members of that by normal shoes and clothes), and books were physical objects.
Yup, copyright wasn’t an issue because producing books was expensive enough to discourage copycats. The original copyright act I’m referring to was passed in 1790, which was actually passed a year before the Bill of Rights was ratified (you know, freedom of speech and all that). There was a lot of contention around the Bill of Rights, with many saying they were self-evident and didn’t need explicit protection, and I’m guessing the Copyright Act was similar in distinguishing what should be a regular law and what needs an amendment.
It was probably discussed in the constitutional convention, but probably dismissed since the constitution was intended to define and restrict government, not define what citizens can and cannot do. I think that’s the appropriate scope as well, I’m just sad that we’ve let the laws get away from us.
I think that’s the appropriate scope as well, I’m just sad that we’ve let the laws get away from us.
I don’t.
You are right in the sense that it all comes down to the society having such laws or not having them (as in rioting till something changes?).
But in the sense of forces nudging these laws in one or another direction, anything that causes a constant one-sided drift when left to usual laws should be moved to constitutional ones.
The only difference in the US code vs the Constitution is the difficulty of passing or revoking them, and we’ve done both (alcohol prohibition). That cuts both ways. Progressives will decry the 2A, and conservatives seem to hate the 14A, and both seem to hate the 1A (at least the speech bit).
What we should instead do is adjust the barrier to passing laws. It should reaquire 60% in the Senate to block a House bill, and it should pass with 40% support. Perhaps 60% should be required for the house as well, idk. There should also be limitations on the content of bills, so fewer omnibis bills and more smaller bills (one idea is to force legislators to swear under oath that they understand the bill). That should allow popular legislation to make it through easier.
Regardless, we need to overhaul our IP laws and return them to their original purpose: helping smaller creators to compete against larger players.
There should also be limitations on the content of bills, so fewer omnibis bills and more smaller bills (one idea is to force legislators to swear under oath that they understand the bill). That should allow popular legislation to make it through easier.
That is the hardest problem to solve fundamentally IMHO. The package bills.
Which is why some people give up (or lose their mind) and become 'sovereign citizens" or ancaps.
If something does not sell anymore, automatically should go public domain or open source. Games, for example.
We live in a system that actively prevents humans to get more knowledge, go figure.
We live in a system that monetizes everything, then seeks to restrict access to those things in order to profit.
Knowledge is just one casualty.
Scarcity is money and if there is no scarcity laws will be bought to to artificially create said scarcity.
No one is preventing you from visiting a library, which would be a fesible alternative.
However, not a simple solution for everyone in every country. Knowlegde should be a free and shared common good.
That depends on where you live. The Internet Archive is far more accessible than a good library, for much of the global populace.
And my library doesn’t have every book I want to read.
He’s also a corrupt cop, but I repeat myself.Meant to reply to the comment above yours.
That depends on where you live.
Yes, I know. That’s why I said:
However, not a simple solution for everyone in every country.
It’s not even limited by country. There are far too many places in well resourced countries that don’t have access to good (or any) libraries.
Well, except scumbags like eric adams, NYC’s bought-owned-and-operated-by-real-estate-interests mayor.
He’s also a corrupt cop, but I repeat myself.
Libraries where good for before the XXI century. Nowadays the amount of content they had is pretty small. Most libraries don’t really has anything but the more famous books.
They became community hubs that offer more than just books. Even ebooks albeit that being weirdly capped by publishers as well.
They do much more than public opinion would make you believe.
True, but that doesn’t change the fact that specific books can be hard to find. Libraries are great, but they don’t solve the problem IA solves.
We got a nationwide network of specific books. You can order books to your local library if you are a little patient. They might not have a lot of selfpublished books but that is a problem of scale and negotiating power of publishers.
That’s pretty sweet! I grew up in an area with a county system, so you could get books from anywhere in the system (a dozen or so citires serving >1M people).
My current library is just our city, but I can go to a few other cities to check out books, but I can’t use holds there unless I pay $2-3/item to have it delivered to my library. We have a statewide ebook/audiobook network (serves 3-4M people), so that’s nice.
i would fuck with public libraries if they had stocks of educational material, as well as communal spaces, which they generally do so.
No one is preventing you from visiting a library, which would be a fesible alternative.
actually blatantly wrong, public libraries are slowly dying and losing funding.
I was looking for resources for a custom LLM and noticed they had a ton of copyrighted books and wondered to myself how the heck that was legal
I guess this answers that
Just like regular libraries have copyrighted books: they lend them to one person at a time.
They definitely weren’t monitoring the one at a time rule… I downloaded the file and now have it forever
Sounds like a you problem. ;)
How does that make sense? How does putting a “Download PDF” button on their site with no restrictions make this a “me” problem?
You should obviously delete those downloaded files like a good boy.
Which IA failed to do, which is why they got sued, and why they can’t lend those publishers’ books at all anymore.
I have no sympathy.
Just want to let you know why you’re being downvoted. It’s not because you’re wrong. From a legal perspective you’re right. This court case was decided this way because you’re right.
But that last line about having no sympathy. There’s a meme for this.
“You’re not wrong. You’re just an asshole.”
It’s an asshole perspective that the IA dearly needs to listen to. Don’t poke a bear when you have so much to lose. Doesn’t matter if you’re “in the right”. The history books are littered with the corpses of righteous people.
Let the EFF handle the quixotic battles, it’s what they’re best at.
“No one should stand up for new rights. Don’t rock the boat bro.”
Your mindset is the road to a dictatorship.
What does the Mafia do? Show up, “Wow you got a lot of valuable things here Be a shame if someone broke them. Best listen to us.”
The Mafia leverages potential of damage to existing value to extract cooperation.
I see very little difference here between the Mafia and the plaintiff.
IA definitely has too much to lose to afford picking fights. They got off lucky only having to remove the books. If they had been fined for many counts of copyright infringement, we could have had another library of Alexandria burning situation.
Yes, let’s just completely misrepresent someone and pretend it’s a quote! That’s fun!
There are effective ways to challenge laws and to push for new rights. Loudly shouting “I don’t care about your rules, just try and stop me!” was not an effective way for IA to try and do this.
Furthermore, IA constantly misrepresenting the problem and why they were sued in all their blog posts and press shit also does not help the cause.
It’s a law in desperate need of abolishment, but this is not how you go about changing it.
This also was not an effective way for them to ensure these books would continue to be available digitally for the public. They could have quietly leaked batches of the content that only they had out to the ebook piracy groups in a staggered fashion to help obsfucate where it was coming from, then hosted a blog post telling people how to pirate ebooks and where, with a cover your ass disclaimer that everyone needs to abide by their local laws.
By any metric of success, the way they handled this set them up to lose from the start, and jeapordized one of the most important public resources in the current era. This would be understandable from some small operation of like 5 people trying to digitize shit, not from an organization as large and old as IA.
I’m not the person who said he had no sympathy, but that is why I have little sympathy about all this: They don’t deserve this outcome, I wish they had won, and I hope the law gets overturned or revised… but they absolutely should have know better that to try and do this the way they did. They fucked around and found out. This coild have ended so much worse for them.
You somehow overlooked the second paragraph in my comment. I explicitly said the opposite of that.
I had nothing to say to that. I agree with it.
One paragraph discusses action, the other discusses philosophy. I only took issue with your regressive philosophy. I’m open to correcting misunderstandings, elaborate if you feel I continue to miss something.
Omg this can’t be any more unrelated. Hyperbole much?
“Societies with rule of law are dictatorships. How leaders are selected and the existence of fundamental Constitutional rights is not a factor.”
How you like them strawmen?
It’s a quote of an opinion, so in general I ignore them. I’m usually more interested in distilling ideas constructed with some line of reasoning.
But I guess we can look at this one. Find it’s essence. Tho it doesn’t seem very deep…
“Societies with rule of law are dictatorships. How leaders are selected and the existence of fundamental Constitutional rights is not a factor.”
So in short.
Having laws at all is a dictatorship.
Yeah, that is one of the opinions I’d ignore. It’s easy to have that opinion inside the walls of a lawed society.
Luckily it is valid to respond to an opinion with an opinion, and mine is that I imagine everyone (except the strongest with the most resources) would abandon that perspective as soon as they lived in a world with no laws.
“You’re not wrong. You’re just an asshole.”
I made my peace with that a long time ago.
You should strive to improve as a person rather than be content being a stagnant asshole
I know who I am.
But you should know who you could grow to be.
you can still be an asshole, and have sympathy for the loss of accessible educational material strictly for the purposes of monetization. Unless you are one of these publishing companies, in which case you probably won’t be on the internet for very long.
Isn’t it “asshole” to consume copyrighted works for free?
Not for over half a century, once Disney lobbied the US federal government to extend temporary monopolies to egregious lengths. The point of intellectual property rights is to build a robust public domain, so every year of every extension is a year denied to the public.
This has been forgotten or ignored by the ownership class with Sony and Nintendo prosecuting use and public archival abandonware games the way Disney goes after nursery murals.
So no, we would be better off with no IP laws all than the current laws we have, and the ownership class routinely screw artists, developers and technicians for their cut of their share of the profits in what is known as Hollywood Accounting. And the record labels will cheat any artist or performer who doesn’t have a Hammerhead Lawyer (or bigger) to ensure their contract is kosher.
So no. Come with me to Barbary; we’ll ply there up and down. 🏴☠️
Preach brotha, PREACH!!!
No. Here, let me introduce you to things like libraries, and education.
And, again, he’s not an asshole for being right. He’s an asshole for having no sympathy for the loss of what should have been an archival giant.
That depends on if you see the current copyright system as far to start with. The current system is a far cry from how it was created and was co-opted by companies like Disney to maintain monopolies on their IP for MUCH longer than the system was supposed to protect.
This. If I’m not mistaken, the system was meant to operate like a hybrid between patents and trademarks. Iirc, things weren’t originally under copyright by default and you had to regularly renew your copyright in order to keep it. Most of the media in the public domain is a result of companies failing to properly claim or renew copyright before the laws were changed. My understanding is that the reason for this was because the intent was to protect you from having your IP stolen while it was profitable to you, but then release said IP into the public domain once it was no longer profitable (aka wasn’t worth renewing copyright on).
Then corpos spent a lot of money rewriting the system and now practically everything even remotely creative is under copyright that’s effectively indefinite.
It wasn’t just “the corpos”, you can basically tie changes to the copyright system back to Disney trying to maintain a strangle hold on their fucking mouse.
“With 3 simple circles, I dominate the planet!” ~ERB’s depiction of Walt Disney.
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As a published (if hilariously unsuccessful) author; no, no it isn’t.
I have talked to a few published authors (most unsuccessful) and listened to a few successful published authors, and they all say the same as you. Some of them (esp. successful) give away free books on their website. They just want people to read their books.
The ones complaining here aren’t the authors, but the publishers.
Yeah, even the big names tend to not care much as long as nobody else is profiting off of their work. Agents and publishers, they tend to get right snippy about piracy lol.
Mind you, there is a segment of working authors that do suffer in their ability to go from a part time, almost hobbyist situation into a proper career of it. They tend to see the lack of sales as more of a problem, but they tend to be younger and didn’t ever see how impossible breaking in to traditional publishing was. It’s easy to look at your self published income and think “oh, if people had to buy these, I’d be making a living at this instead of it being barely enough to cover expenses for writing”. But, most of the time, back before self publishing was actually a valid and useful route, they wouldn’t have been selling anything, they’d be hoping for an agent to get their first sale for them.
And I’ll never tell anyone that they can’t profit from their own ideas and labor, and expect anyone consuming it to pay up. Authors that object, that’s fine by me (and I actually don’t pirate their stuff). But like you said, most writers would rather someone read and enjoy for free rather than not read at all.
Unequivocally no.
No.
Copyright is bullshit, so no.
Copyright serves a very useful purpose. It’s just been twisted into something it wasn’t meant to be.
You misunderstand me. When I say, “copyright is bullshit” I don’t mean that I don’t like it, or that it doesn’t work. I mean it’s bullshit in the same way that the crystal healing or mushroom cancer therapy is bullshit.
You cannot steal an idea, it’s impossible. So creating laws that punish people for doing things like copying a digital file doesn’t make sense. Copyright supposedly was created to create an incentive for artists and inventors to make cool and enriching stuff.
But what it actually does is protects business savvy people and allows them to game the system, get first mover advantage over all others, and then punish any potential competitors in that space.
As if nobody was creating artwork or inventing useful devices before copyright law came into being.
Just because something is useful doesn’t make it good, atomic bombs are useful, factory farming is useful.
I think the only thing people should be protected from as a creator is fraud. You can copy a person’s works and modify or distribute them in any manner you see fit, as long as it’s clear that you are not the original creator. You cannot claim to be them or to be affiliated with them unless you actually are.
That is what the principle of copyleft is all about. If copyright worked in principle, then you should see millions of individual creators enriched and protected by it.
But you don’t see that, instead, a few giant mega corps and super wealthy tycoons own and control enormous swaths of “intellectual property” and small time creators struggle to make ends meet and are sued into oblivion by the same powerful groups.
Sure it’s great for boosting wealth and GDP, but that boost does not apply to most of the population, it applies to the tiny elite that has now captures enormous segments of the market and fight tooth and nail to keep it that way.
Copyright is structurally flawed, it doesn’t work because it cannot work. It’s fundamentally based on a the nonsensical concept of “intellectual property” which as I said at the beginning, is bullshit.
Exactly. Copyright used to last 14 years and required an application for a one-time extension. Let’s go back to that.
no?
Redistributing them, especially for money, maybe.
They should have known better…
“Because what is legal is always right.
And what is right is always legal.”No?
In a fascist state, your mindset is welcome, “Well they broke the rule, they must pay,” but do you never abstract one more level? Is the rule itself breaking something?
Those who downvote you say yes. Nuance is important. The rule has two main affects that I see.
- Direct effect (the goal) :Publishers maintain a monopoly on bookselling low value books, the structure of their business preventing any competition.
Okay lets think about #1. Is that good or bad?
- Indirect effect : the members of that society now have a restricted access to knowledge.
Okay lets think about #2. Is that good or bad?
Being critical in thought enough to recognize the flaws of the first quote is key.
This isn’t about right or wrong though. It’s explicitly about whether or not they broke the law.
They did. They did so loudly and proudly. This is why we are here, where they lost the legal battle.
If someone is pointing a gun at you with their finger on the trigger, and you say “Just try to shoot me! I dare you! You know you won’t you little chickenshit.” then you should have a pretty good expectation to get shot.
Everything else is valid, but significantly less important. IA has to operate in the rules that currently exist, not what the rules should be. There are better ways to get bad laws changed than to dare someone to find you guilty of them.
Maybe this case will be the first building block towards overturning the asinine digital lending laws. I would love if it was, but I’m not holding my breath.
It would be more accurate if you said, “This is not about right and wrong (for me).”
If you say it’s not about right and wrong, dead stop, then you are pledging full faith to the institutions, the very ones we are critiquing.
Basically, you are dismissing my opinion as misguided, dismissing me as missing the point and I am telling you it was expressed exactly as intended.
In short, you are arguing on the wrong conceptual meta-level for me to respond without dismissing my own claim. If I take as True that “this isn’t about right and wrong” (it is), then I am setting aside the power I have in a democratic society to say, “Fuck this I’m changing it.” Maybe we’ve just been stuck in gridlock politics, with a ruling class that strips and monetizes every aspect of humanity that the society today doesn’t realize the power citizens wield.
Not sure. Been fun to think and share thoughts with you though. Thanks for your time and have a nice night.
An impasse is a perfectly acceptable outcome on a sane platform like Lemmy.
That is what happens though, it’s clear about that.
They claimed to use the same protections as others. Is there a more accurate article about how their lending was faulty?
During Covid, they lent out multiple copies of the same book when they only had physical access to one copy. It would be like your local library making Xerox copies of their collection and handing them out. There’s no protections for that.
Not sure about an article, but they themselves announced that their emergency covid library would not set limits on the amount of copies that could be checked out. That’s literally the law they broke, that it has to be 1 to 1 outside of any other agreement.
They should have poked the bear with a separate legal entity so the obvious resulting legal loss wouldn’t effect their core operations.
I support the idea as long as it’s for dead authors/out of print books, but from what I understand they were just letting people ‘borrow’ anything? That’s just stupid (if idealistic)
(citation needed)
McNamara seemed to suggest that publishers would have been further enriched if not for IA providing unprecedented free, unlimited e-books access.
— https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/book-publishers-with-surging-profits-struggle-to-prove-internet-archive-hurt-sales/, linked in a link in the article
FWIW I didn’t downvote you for this. I read the Ars article and saw the bit about them making it unlimited during the early pandemic days, but it seemed to imply that is was above board during other times. So if the whole case hinges on their actions during lockdown when people lost access to their own local libraries it becomes a letter vs spirit of the law thing to me personally. They broke the letter of the law, did they break the spirit of it? Was what they did immoral? The justice system isn’t perfect and as a society we continually refine and redefine our laws and have been forever. The state of Louisiana just signed a law into effect that requires poster sized copies of the Ten Commandments be posted in every classroom, kindergarten through college. If someone breaks that law, what side of history will they be on?
If unlimited lending was something that IA was doing all the time, I can see it both ways. If it was for a few months during lockdown, then I think the court got this wrong.
Unfortunately, that’s like saying everyone has the right to read any book that IA usually archives for free at any time. Do I agree with that? Yes. Does it hurt intellectual property? Yes. There’s obviously evidence that readers used the service a lot. I agree with the principle, but they should’ve just temporarily “merged” with public libraries and increased borrowing limits for books in stock, not allow everyone in the United States to just get a book as long as they have less than 9 other books as well.
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I’m no computer scientist, but I have a suggestion:
Also change the folder name to “Homework”
My Homework is over 100GB
GB? Amateur.
100gb is about 20 dvds give or take.
You could fit thousands of books in that space however
I hope they remove them like how Apple removed deleted texts.
Also the “deleted images” years back from icloud
😂
I wish the cost of internet access decreased to match decreased available content. Internet shrinkinflation?
With pacbell’s interwebs, you get 30 email addresses, and a free subscription to Yahoo’s front page!!! Hurry!
What you need is the innernette
So OpenAI is next to stop using those too?
No. That would involve the general public maintaining a consistent position.
I want knowledge to be free. That means free. That means governments, businesses, NGOs, your local church sewing circle, AIs/LLMs, refugees living in tents, convicts, children, and any other humans or human organizations or anything humans built.
I am willing to accept a LIMITED duration copyright and patent and private science publication system if it could be reformed such that it the brains behind it were paid and couldn’t legally sign away their compensation. Given that we as a society aren’t willing to build this the best course of action is to actively work to break copyright
Wouldn’t the attacks on openai be the same as these ones. Like if I was large media company wouldn’t I want my media to be vilifying AI because its the same principal and mechanism as training AI. They can kill two birds
Hopefully they have an offline backup in storage somewhere for when the current shitshow ends
(Unplugs external drive)
“I deleted them.”
“You deleted all of them?”
“Yep, not on the website anymore. See.”
“Ok… Good… But I’m watching you.”
Well they have no reason to delete them as they “own” the copy they have. They just need to take them offline until they get through the appeal or lose and have to keep them on a p2p torrent aspect instead of through their site. That sucks
If anyone wants my ebook library just let me know.
Ditto. I have everything from Apache web server guides to Apache helicopter service manuals.
Time to create some torrents? Let’s see them fight with the Netherlands on what’s seeding in Europe lol
The internet archive plans to appeal the ruling, so the fight is hardly over at this juncture.
Would be interesting to see where it goes.
This means there is still time for data hoarders to react?
The Supreme Court and you know how they will rule.
