131–140 of 150 posts
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Authors think they're better than musicians it seems.. .
Actually as an author I am very sympathetic to what happened to musicians and I desperately hope it doesn't happen to us too.
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> It would be horrible if their solvency and future relied on the outcome of the inevitable lawsuits to follow I wonder if the wheels are already coming off. Otherwise it seems a bit excessive for IA to suddenly bet the whole house on this.
> Otherwise it seems a bit excessive for IA to suddenly bet the whole house on this. What is the proper and proportionate response to a pandemic? I think that no-one knows, and, if I were in their shoes, then I'd rather history see me as the one who went too far in pursuit of the public good than the one who didn't do what I could have for fear that it was too much.
What people think after you're dead shouldn't outweigh the public good in this.
They have a responsibility not to recklessly take on existential risk; it's in the best interest of their cause that they continue to exist. This is doubly true in a time of crisis where people need stable institutions to rely on.
> What about those who say we’re stealing from authors & publishers? Has any normal human being who is not a publisher or an author actually made this claim?
I'm not a publisher or an author (I'm an SRE, I've never made income from the sale of anything I have copyright from, and I've many times been on the side of fair use as a hobbyist musician) and I'm willing to make that claim. It's as straightforward, IMO, as the claim that not tipping is stealing. Yes, technically, it's merely not giving them money that they expect, it's not taking money they already have. But the p…
This is what I'm unsure of. I feel like most people have used a library at some point in their lives, and most people don't seem to disagree with the concept of a library (at least, they never seem to think they did anything wrong when they visited the library as a four-year-old and read "Pat the Bunny" for free), so I am trying to determine if the qualms are with the particulars of TheArchive's implementation, or if people suddenly change their minds about things when they suddenly have a financial incentive to think otherwise.
From my perspective, the reading experience on TheArchive's lending experience is sufficiently degraded that I am unlikely to choose it over other options. I tried looking up Endymion by Dan Simmons to see if I could check it out and read on my Kobo. Firstly, I can't without a great deal of difficulty, due to the DRM. Secondly, what I check out is not the same designed-for-ebooks format I would get if I actually bought Endymion from the publisher. It's instead an EPUB/MOBI generated from OCR of their page scans, rife with formatting and typographical errors. Yuck. So my only other option is reading the raw image/PDF scans, in the browser. Which I really can't imagine doing for 12 hours unless I truly have no other options.
Which is to say, I don't think the "piracy" claim holds water, because the experience is so much worse than the regular purchase route that I'm not sufficiently dissuaded from buying the book if I can read it on TheArchive instead.
Dear Internet Archive: Not only do I support the measure you have taken and feel that it falls within the bounds of pro-social fair use, but I applaud the measures you have taken that are so important in this extreme time. Furthermore, if any court finds that your action was not appropriate, I will urge my lawmakers to craft a specific exception to copyright law to support the internet archive lending at all times, n…
Why stop here? Let's give everyone free food and housing too. They're even more important. Call it "social fair use." Remember: authors have to eat and sleep too. If they don't make money from their work, they'll do something else.
Yes, you're right. Let's do this.
This is more or less what governments are supposed to do in the time of trouble like these: make sure that people who lost the means of supporting themselves at no fault of their own don't starve and are not left in the streets en masse. If that implies giving them free food and free shelter, then it should be done. If your government leaves people to die of hunger in the streets instead - you have a really shitty government, please get a new one.
Heck, even the most right-wing governments, like the US one, are distributing free money (which converts into free food) right now.
Seriously, if you think that letting people read an out-of-print book or two for free while quarantined is somehow bad or immoral, I think you should recalibrate your world views.
Dear Internet Archive: Not only do I support the measure you have taken and feel that it falls within the bounds of pro-social fair use, but I applaud the measures you have taken that are so important in this extreme time. Furthermore, if any court finds that your action was not appropriate, I will urge my lawmakers to craft a specific exception to copyright law to support the internet archive lending at all times, n…
Declaring this "pro-social" doesn't suddenly make it legal. It's clearly not any more legal then lending out a single copy of a DVD to one million people via BitTorrent. I get that it seems generous to give away these works. But they simply weren't theirs to give away to begin with. If you want to lend out 1,000 copies of book, first you have to buy 1,000 copies of said book. I'm disappointed with Internet Archive. T…
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I'm not a publisher or an author (I'm an SRE, I've never made income from the sale of anything I have copyright from, and I've many times been on the side of fair use as a hobbyist musician) and I'm willing to make that claim. It's as straightforward, IMO, as the claim that not tipping is stealing. Yes, technically, it's merely not giving them money that they expect, it's not taking money they already have. But the p…
So, here's my question: which part specifically about the arrangement do you take issue with? Are you against libraries in general? Is it specifically the idea of digital lending that you feel is going over the line? Is it the unrestricted digital lending as part of COVID-19 that crosses the line? This is what I'm unsure of. I feel like most people have used a library at some point in their lives, and most people don…
First, authors get revenue from books in libraries. When you read "Pat the Bunny," the library had to actually own a copy - and in particular your local library had to own a copy, meaning thousands and thousands of copies got sold to libraries. For each physical book, only one 4-year-old at a time could read it, so for popular books (e.g., when you turned 14 and had the same summer reading list as everyone in your school district) each library tends to buy many copies.
So, yes, libraries don't implement a strict "each person who wants to read causes the author to get paid" property, but they do provide a meaningful balance between getting paid for writing a popular book and also making books available in a cost-effective way to large numbers of people. Authors get quite a bit more than $0, even if they don't get money from each reader. And I think that's a good place to make the argument that these aren't lost sales - libraries make books available to people who often otherwise wouldn't pay for them and wouldn't read them.
Second, authors know how libraries work. They've been around forever. When you decide "I'm gonna have a career based on writing," you know approximately how the market works. You know that if you write a book that's about as good as this other book, you'll get this much in revenue from purchases by readers, that much from purchases by libraries, etc., and you expect that to be reasonably stable. The Archive is changing the economics suddenly, and at a particularly bad time to have your career's economics change. I know for my part that I'd be upset if some random non-profit said "During this time of crisis, we've found a possibly-legal way to allow companies to not spend money on SREs and we're gonna do it," and I don't think, just because I don't know how that could possibly work, that my livelihood is inherently more worthy of stability than the livelihoods of authors. (And I'd still be upset with the non-profit even if I didn't think it was realistic that my company would go for that option.)
As a consequence, my feelings are a lot different here with regards to works published by someone who makes a living doing something else like being a professor, and happens to write books, than works published by someone who relies on copyright for their living. I'm also okay with, say, Sci-Hub, because while it threatens Elsevier's business model, it doesn't (as far as I know) threaten the livelihood of researchers themselves.
The website for Controlled Digital Lending justifies the practice in two ways (https://controlleddigitallending.org/): one, it preserves the market properties that libraries have previously relied on, and two, it specifically solves the problem of books unavailable in e-book form. I'm fine with both of those, particularly because they both address the question of whether the author/rightsholder needs to consent to this use. (Because it preserves the market properties the impact on an author isn't different, and in the case of abandoned works, the author or published might no longer be around anyway, and unofficial e-books certainly aren't messing with an existing market.) I am also fine with uncontrolled digital lending with the consent of the author - if the arguments you're making about it not affecting the market hold up (and I think they do, to be clear), why not simply invite authors to join on an opt-in basis?
(I suspect I'd even be okay with it if they said, hey authors, you don't have the rights to make e-books of your work, but that's okay, we have this legal workaround we're willing to try. If you want people reading e-books but your publisher isn't cooperating, we'll fight the legal fight alongside you.)
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Again - if that argument holds up, why is it reasonable to sell paper books for significantly more than the cost of reproduction? What's magical about the $0 price point? If it costs $5 to print a physical copy and you're okay with stores selling copies for $25, why is it a problem for stores to sell e-books for $20? In the pre-e-book world, libraries could always copy books on their own . They could say, we're buyin…
>Again - if that argument holds up, why is it reasonable to sell paper books for significantly more than the cost of reproduction? What's magical about the $0 price point? If it costs $5 to print a physical copy and you're okay with stores selling copies for $25, why is it a problem for stores to sell e-books for $20? You can sell them for whatever people will pay for them. You can sell the bandwidth for the eBook fo…
A huge issue with it is that the creative bears all the risks of chargebacks and payment processor issues. Chargebacks can eat up funding tremendously quickly, and can lead to being banned even from the service that manages patronage for you. And using services like paypal is another existential risk; paypal can freeze or ban you. If anything a publisher's check is more stable.
There's also issues with how much earnings can fluctuate for small creators based on whale donors. People who donate large amounts each month can really hurt small creators if they withdraw. Selling books for example kind of limits the impact of any one sale since all are the same price.
Oh, and patron stuff is bad overall for creativity. A lot of it is porn, a lot of it is just rewarding successful people already, and the demands of self-marketing and maintenance take a lot of time away from the artist to make stuff. It's the same with "indie" culture, it wound up being spamming things like harem gamelit or series books, because that's really what the financial system rewards now.
I think eventually it's just going to implode.
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> I'm disappointed with Internet Archive. They're opening themselves up to a huge lawsuit, and I'd hate to see their mission derailed because of it. Not only that - if this goes to court, there's a really good chance that the concept of Controlled Digital Lending (i.e., libraries lending out scans backed one-to-one by physical books, which many libraries including Internet Archive have been doing for a long time befo…
"Not only that - if this goes to court ..." They gave authors the ability to opt out. From the FAQ: "If I am an author and I do not want my book to be temporarily available during this crisis, how can I remove my book from the National Emergency Library? Authors who do not want their books in the National Emergency Library should send an email to info@archive.org with “National Emergency Library Removal Request” as t…
There are lots of children still going to school, and there's no simple way for them to obtain books that previously would have been available for free. It is sort of a reading emergency! Now where I live the library system is awesome, and I found the selection was way better than Barnes & Noble. Libraries purchase a lot of books every year and it's no small amount of money. That being said it's also wasteful for man…
Having a home library has many more functions than just storing books you've once read. It's a signaling device; it's a way to show your character:; it's a way to have a possibility to share materials with others; it's a way to show your children your values; it's a reminder of things you've learned; it's soothing for many to have books around; they can be a useful reference or inspiration; ... Books are not just a t…
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But sucks they neglected gifcities. It hasn’t worked for a while https://gifcities.org/?q=dog What happened?
There's a contact email at the bottom of https://gifcities.org/?about-gifcities Maybe just ask them?