341–350 of 358 posts
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UK libraries buy the books and pay additionally for every lend, as it should be.
" ...as it should be. " Hey, don't try to convince me. I spend most of the hundreds of dollars I pay for books every year at used book stores and things like estate sales. I am literally Satan.
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Why does the business model have to be based on counting copies of information being made (and hamstringing technology to serve that purpose)? What about patronage? What about public performance? What about merchandising rights? (I actually have very little beef w/ Trademark law. It seems like it's functioning well and provides value to society.) What about the idea certain livelihoods and classes of works just go aw…
You're admitting what most anti-copyright people don't want to admit – if instead of bookshops we only had the Emergency Library, certain classes of works would indeed go away, including most good fiction, not to mention history, biography, reportage etc. You say that's "just what happens" like it's some ineluctable natural process, but none of this is preordained. The traditional model has a lot of defenders – inclu…
Unlikely and definitely unproven. Historical precedent rather shows that at least 96 % of the books would be produced even without copyright, given less than 4 % bothered to register the copyright when it was mandatory. And less than 1 % of the 4 % required a copyright term longer than 14 years. https://archive.org/details/howtofixcopyrigh00patr/page/104/...
If tomorrow Congress repealed the Berne convention and shortened the copyright term to 5 years from publication, in order to make the Internet Archive's "National Emergency Library" permanent even without fair use, probably a good 99.9 % of the works would still be produced.
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> I have a problem with copyright being transferable. The purpose of copyright is to encourage the creators. If you transfer a copyright or license it out, its term should get shortened dramatically. "Congratulations--you got a payout. Now make something new." That would devalue the copyright and creators would get compensated less. This also applies to a lesser extent to your other problems. Copyright outliving the…
> That would devalue the copyright and creators would get compensated less. This also applies to a lesser extent to your other problems. Copyright outliving the author increases the value of the copyright even when the author still lives. Um, tough? The point of copyright isn't to create a perpetual rent ... it's to incentivize new creation. For example, George R. R. Martin might actually finish his books rather than…
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At even small scales, simply printing a book costs close to nothing. I don't think that's true. As far as I'm aware, we're talking dollars, not cents. For mass-market paperbacks, it's less than that, but that's the opposite of small scale.
What I should've said is smaller scales. But yes you are right that it's still going to cost a few dollars , but if it was actually legal to just produce your own copies surely we would see tons of printing shop specializing in very small printing runs that minimize costs. Right now its very expensive to only print a few copies because no business model makes sense at that scale unless it's plain copying which is...…
what would they print? they don't have the original "master" file for the book, scans look bad and take time and OCR-ing a scan is error-prone
honestly i don't find this convincing... i think if small-scale printing made economic sense (and was something people want), you'd see bootleg books, despite the illegality. digital piracy is mostly illegal and that hardly stops people
So what? If you offered a reason for why this particular article was better, then your comment would have added value. Otherwise it seems like a poorly paid social media worker at the nytimes spamming here.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23381481.
So what? If you offered a reason for why this particular article was better, then your comment would have added value. Otherwise it seems like a poorly paid social media worker at the nytimes spamming here.
This is quite the dilemma.
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> That would devalue the copyright and creators would get compensated less. This also applies to a lesser extent to your other problems. Copyright outliving the author increases the value of the copyright even when the author still lives. Um, tough? The point of copyright isn't to create a perpetual rent ... it's to incentivize new creation. For example, George R. R. Martin might actually finish his books rather than…
The rent seeking is effectively the incentive for new creation. By creating something, you can then rent seek to get compensated. Any reduction in the ability to rent seek is a reduction in compensation, and thus in the incentive.
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They're also a library, and copyright law has broad exemptions for libraries that enable them to scan books for preservation purposes. So it's not clear that the "tangible medium" issue matters here.
There's an ongoing lawsuit involving a non-profit offering free live TV using what appears to be a loophole in the copyright laws. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locast That particular loophole probably doesn't apply there, but similar ones might.
Also at EFF: https://www.eff.org/press/releases/eff-joins-locast-defense-...
I'm an author. Anyone know the most effective way for me to protest this with my publishers?
Authors should ideally never give exclusive rights to publishers, because publishers invariably abuse them (as in this lawsuit). There are some countermeasures. https://www.authorsalliance.org/resources/rights-reversion-p... https://sparcopen.org/our-work/author-rights/