The fact that giving free access to books during a pandemic, in a format that doesn't need physical contact, when libraries were shut down or hard to access for a lot of people should have been praised, not pursued by legal action from rent seeking entities.
The copyright system as a whole should by torn up.
At least it give a clear signal to anyone with a ounce of moral which publisher to avoid at all cost.
Copyright needs torn up or at the very least significant reform but if you're going to be skirting around the edges of it to try to do a good thing it's probably a good idea to not just straight up obviously and blatently break the letter and spirit of the law. CDL is an awkward and dubious workaround but if you drop the 'C' you're just doing copyright infringment and that would be much better left to entities like Anna's Archive. The criticism of IA in this regard is usually that it was a bad strategy, not that the goals were bad.
There may be newer laws with different spirits, but I thought the original copyright spirit was "other people can't sell your work without permission" and not at all about preventing free sharing.
During the pandemic, they created the "National Emergency Library", where they allowed users copies of books without caps, without any connection to holdings of the Archive itself, something that was black-letter proscribed by copyright law, and as a result they managed to sabotage the legal case for controlled digital lending too.
The copyright system should perhaps be torn up (or maybe not…) but you can’t just blatantly violate it at massive scale and expect to face zero consequences.
And anyway, why is it unreasonable for copyright holders to expect to be able to get paid for their work rather than have a massive library loophole where they just never get paid as long as you're a nonprofit?
Here you go, you can steal beer from my store as long as you’re a nonprofit organization.
> For a decade, the Archive had loaned out individual e-books to one user at a time without triggering any lawsuits. That changed when IA decided to temporarily lift the cap on loans from its Open Library project
So stupid. They had a working system that they blew up through their own actions and now the library is dead.
IMO the only two reform the copyright system needs are DCMA takedown abuse and copyright term length. All the other concepts of copyright make perfect sense. If I create something I should be able to consent to giving or not giving it to someone.
A lot of the software engineers on this forum wouldn’t like what happens to their profession without copyright.
More and more authors of nonfiction today make money from a number of channels other than actual book sales. The book only serves as a promotional tool for their personal brand, and is only a collection of previously published blog posts or magazine pieces. This already started due to changing consumer behaviors and declining interest in books, so by the time piracy has come on the scene, the shift had already largely occurred.
I worry 'hacker' news is going to become more and more 'normie' steadily moving farther and farther away from Barlow's declaration of independence of cyberspace cypherpunk ethos
It's easier to make money when you comply with The Man
you realize that HN has always been deeply business oriented, with it's root in the startup scene through the connection with YC? the hackers I believe is reference to pgs essay Hackers and Painters: https://paulgraham.com/hp.html
When I made this criticism before of IA, I was told that that was ridiculous since the publishers had it out for IA before the COVID-19 emergency library. That may or may not have been true, but the publishers did not sue IA despite OpenLibrary existing for years before COVID-19. Publishers didn't pull the trigger because they were afraid of losing. It was a MAD situation, and IA unnecessarily triggered a nuclear war that they lost.
The fact that giving free access to books during a pandemic, in a format that doesn't need physical contact, when libraries were shut down or hard to access for a lot of people should have been praised, not pursued by legal action from rent seeking entities.
The copyright system as a whole should by torn up.
At least it give a clear signal to anyone with a ounce of moral which publisher to avoid at all cost.
Copyright needs torn up or at the very least significant reform but if you're going to be skirting around the edges of it to try to do a good thing it's probably a good idea to not just straight up obviously and blatently break the letter and spirit of the law. CDL is an awkward and dubious workaround but if you drop the 'C' you're just doing copyright infringment and that would be much better left to entities like Anna's Archive. The criticism of IA in this regard is usually that it was a bad strategy, not that the goals were bad.
There may be newer laws with different spirits, but I thought the original copyright spirit was "other people can't sell your work without permission" and not at all about preventing free sharing.
1 reply →
During the pandemic, they created the "National Emergency Library", where they allowed users copies of books without caps, without any connection to holdings of the Archive itself, something that was black-letter proscribed by copyright law, and as a result they managed to sabotage the legal case for controlled digital lending too.
The copyright system should perhaps be torn up (or maybe not…) but you can’t just blatantly violate it at massive scale and expect to face zero consequences.
And anyway, why is it unreasonable for copyright holders to expect to be able to get paid for their work rather than have a massive library loophole where they just never get paid as long as you're a nonprofit?
Here you go, you can steal beer from my store as long as you’re a nonprofit organization.
> For a decade, the Archive had loaned out individual e-books to one user at a time without triggering any lawsuits. That changed when IA decided to temporarily lift the cap on loans from its Open Library project
So stupid. They had a working system that they blew up through their own actions and now the library is dead.
IMO the only two reform the copyright system needs are DCMA takedown abuse and copyright term length. All the other concepts of copyright make perfect sense. If I create something I should be able to consent to giving or not giving it to someone.
A lot of the software engineers on this forum wouldn’t like what happens to their profession without copyright.
So how do authors make money? Going on concert tours? The copyright system needs reform (Mickey Mouse for example) — but the system protects creators.
If there were no copyrights, no author would make any money.
Put it another way - how many authors are making money off of books they wrote >10 years ago?
And how many actually make a living off of writing books? The authors I know all have jobs.
More and more authors of nonfiction today make money from a number of channels other than actual book sales. The book only serves as a promotional tool for their personal brand, and is only a collection of previously published blog posts or magazine pieces. This already started due to changing consumer behaviors and declining interest in books, so by the time piracy has come on the scene, the shift had already largely occurred.
> If there were no copyrights, no author would make any money.
Cory Doctorow showed that this isn't true.
2 replies →
I worry 'hacker' news is going to become more and more 'normie' steadily moving farther and farther away from Barlow's declaration of independence of cyberspace cypherpunk ethos
It's easier to make money when you comply with The Man
you realize that HN has always been deeply business oriented, with it's root in the startup scene through the connection with YC? the hackers I believe is reference to pgs essay Hackers and Painters: https://paulgraham.com/hp.html
3 replies →
When I made this criticism before of IA, I was told that that was ridiculous since the publishers had it out for IA before the COVID-19 emergency library. That may or may not have been true, but the publishers did not sue IA despite OpenLibrary existing for years before COVID-19. Publishers didn't pull the trigger because they were afraid of losing. It was a MAD situation, and IA unnecessarily triggered a nuclear war that they lost.