Comment by tolmasky
7 years ago
If we merely had the same copyright we had when the country first formed, this entire "your books turn off thing" would possibly be completely acceptable: a subset of works would be onerous and somewhat annoying for 28 years, after which you could literally do whatever you want with them. Key here is that this means that within your lifetime this would quite possibly be the case. This also means that a very large variety of still-somewhat-recent works would be public domain, and thus creating tools to read them would be profitable. Right now, a "public domain" Kindle would be for what, works that are over a hundred years old or something? Few people will ever encounter public domain works they want to read so it's as if everything fits the rent model.
The crazy thing is that everything is more amenable to "sharing" today, it is merely legal structure that prevents it now. Arguably the true utility of a library is that it would be (or would have been) absurd to duplicate a physical book for every person that wants it, and then when no one was actively reading them they'd take up a crazy amount of space. This is still true today! This world should be strictly better than the past. But instead we have nostalgia for libraries, not due to any essential reason, but because we've created an artificial environment where it is more appealing to potentially wait for a copy of something to become available vs. instantly duplicating it.
It could be longer than 100 years. I recently tried to find a copy of an article published in 1932. I can't find any version online and the nearest print version is in a library 1,000 km away. I asked the library if they could scan it and email it to me and they said no, it's still covered by copyright. This work was published early in the author's life; she died in 1983. So the Berne Convention would protect this work for 101 years after publication, and the domestic copyright will last for 121 years. I will be in my 60s before the copyright expires on a work published when my grandfather was born.
Similarly, works published in 1935 & 1941. For at least one, nearest copy is 1000km away.
They should be out of copyright by now. They are not.
Well I can’t even read my own research paper (lost my tex source and final digital copy when both hard drive and backup drive failed within the same hour). I know for a fact that it is archived and basically exactly where but it’s beyond either one of an abusive layer of bureaucracy or a paywall, whichever I would choose to go through. Not that it’s worthy of anything or even remotely interesting but it tells a lot about the absurdity of it all.
Count yourself lucky. Most of us developers cant even read the code we wrote in a professional setting once we leave a company.
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Can you get it off SciHub?
> when both hard drive and backup drive failed within the same hour
That is basically the horror scenario of backup'ing, since you don't usually protect against that kind of failure: the probability of it happening just seems too low. It's similar to having a limit to your attack model when securing your data/accounts/... against attacks: you can try to protect against a governmentally funded cyber attack on you personally, but you probably won't succeed and it's very surely not worth the trouble if you're not a very influential or otherwise important person.
In this case, the usual retort would of course be "why didn't you have a backup in 'the cloud'?" I have for part of my stuff, but not for all. I feel you.
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I’m guessing an inter library loan wasn’t possible?
What are you looking for? There’s a decent chance someone here lives near a copy.
The article is Joan Robinson, 'Economics is a serious subject: the apologia of an economist to the mathematician, the scientist and the plain man' (1932). It's footnote 1 in Coase's 'The nature of the firm,' which I was prompted to read in more depth by a recent HN comment, so it's not an especially obscure document! The university library I spoke to does do inter-library loans, but I need to find a local library that will take one out for me. I haven't got around to doing that since I moved states 18 months ago, and I'm no longer affiliated with a local university. It's a pain, but something I probably would have resolved sooner if there weren't so many books digitised in the various proprietary databases!
> If we merely had the same copyright we had when the country first formed, this entire "your books turn off thing" would possibly be completely acceptable: a subset of works would be onerous and somewhat annoying for 28 years, after which you could literally do whatever you want with them
Also, the US didn't respect any other country's copyrights or patents so anything published outside the US would be free immediately.
Yes, I believe Charles Dickens was the first to near simultaneously publish in both the UK and US.
Cant imagine the US letting other countries get away with that now.
A story I heard about Dickens was him landing in the US and finding his latest book already in print there, unauthorised.
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>>>a subset of works would be onerous and somewhat annoying for 28 years, after which you could literally do whatever you want with them.
Unfortunately, what would probably happen is more like what is happening to video games now; they are no longer profitable to publish, don't exist in an easy-to-backup, easy-to-share format (like an epub file with no DRM, for example), and so are essentially lost to time. If an ebook that no one can access is suddenly in the public domain, that doesn't help anyone one iota.
The AAA-class games with a budget of a blockbuster movie? Well, I'm fine with them following the movie locked-up route.
New and original indie games? New Portal? New Monument Valley? Maybe even new Doom? I bet they would live with shorter copyright; Doom was released as free software much sooner than after 28 years.
The Doom source code was released, the game itself (notably, the IWAD files) was never released as free software.
Surely then you want them in the public domain sooner to prevent that. Sourcing a 28 year old pc to read some 'ancient' format is workable. Finding a 100+ year old pc to do the same seems less workable.
I thought all the console games get dumped so they can be emulated?
If/when Stadia and the like take off, and streaming-only games appear, we can forget about that too.
By the way, this is just one of the many reasons why I think that streamed games are very much an anti-consumer move and should not be paid for in any circumstance, to prevent normalization.
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You can thank Disneys lawyers and lobbyists.