It was surprisingly difficult to find links to these supposedly-infringing libraries run by the Internet Archive. Here they are:
Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive
351–358 of 358 posts
Re: Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it different than corn and wheat? All industrial farms are monocultures.
Corn and wheat are essential food items. There is no "digital alternative" to corn and wheat. No one should need to buy a physical book/newspaper in this day and age. These wood pulp tree farms are producing luxury consumption items for the middle and upper class. Working class people don't read physical newspapers
> Working class people don't read physical newspapers
Sounds like something worth fixing. Expanding libraries is one way to do so.
Back in the day, the Communist Party of Italy had legions of volunteers engaged in teaching people how to read, distributing the party's newspaper. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Literacy_Campaign
Re: Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, no. That is not what scarcity means. If we had an economy where you could replicate cars, food, houses, spaceships and so on for free, that would be post-scarcity, even though it takes some work for it to be engineered at the beginning. Bits on a computer that can be reproduced forever are not scarce.
Your comment illustrated the problem quite well. Your list of things are physical objects. Some people don't seem to value the effort required to create new ideas. Hence, they are seen as "free" and not worth anything.
Ideas have a marginal cost of zero. Therefore, it doesn't make sense to monetize them on a per-unit basis. In that sense, copies of ideas are not scarce.
A car is not just an object, a car is also an idea. It's a design, the engineering of its parts, the implementation of its constructions, the code needed to make it work, and so on. And yet if we could replicate it for free, achieving a marginal labour cost of zero, then it would not be scarce anymore.
Re: Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was in Morocco when we signed copyright restrictions, and I can assure you 95% of the pressure is from United States, and it is in the interests mainly of the US and it's allies. As far as it reflecting European interests, the Berne convention is against European interests as it pertains to US copyrighted work as it offers them less protection than US works and forces a higher standard for US copyright than domesti…
Understood and accurate so far as I'm aware. As my other response notes, the tradition of copyright maximalisation began in Europe in the 19th century before being adopted by US interests in the 20th. Nationalistic attribution of traits answers far less than monopolistic power expansion.
I agree wholeheartedly, the tradition of copyright maximization has its origins in capitalism and value extraction, as such it follows the siege of global capitalism as that is where the interests in the commodification and extraction of value from intellectual property originates from. So it naturally began in Europe, then in the US, and maybe shortly in China? We will see.
Re: Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Too bad nobody ever managed to prove this actually works.
There are quite literally millions of examples. Anyone who has a copyrighted work and has made money from it is an example.
There are absolutely valid questions around how much diminishing that compensation affects innovation, and around the marginal value of each year of copyright validity.
The way I envision it, there is a baseline of innovation. I.e. innovation that would occur with or without copyright. For each year added to copyright length, I assume that some amount of compensation to the copyrighter is added (although the marginal compensation likely follows a bell curve). There is also some degree of cost, as other people are unable to innovate on top of those copyrighted works.
I think we can both agree, there are people who innovate because of the potential compensation. There are also people who will not innovate because of the lack of compensation. The lack of investment and innovation in antibiotic medicines is a good example of this.
The question is the optimal balance between compensating people who innovate and allowing other innovaters to build on prior work.
Re: Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment illustrated the problem quite well. Your list of things are physical objects. Some people don't seem to value the effort required to create new ideas. Hence, they are seen as "free" and not worth anything.
Ideas have a marginal cost of zero. Therefore, it doesn't make sense to monetize them on a per-unit basis. In that sense, copies of ideas are not scarce. A car is not just an object, a car is also an idea. It's a design, the engineering of its parts, the implementation of its constructions, the code needed to make it work, and so on. And yet if we could replicate it for free, achieving a marginal labour cost of zero,…
The implication of what you're saying is silly. Yes, making a marginal copy of the latest Star Wars film is nearly zero. However, the first instance cost $275,000,000 to create. We split the cost across each unit because if we didn't, the movie wouldn't exist, because nobody would buy the first unit.
You are getting too caught up on the fact that some things have low marginal costs to produce that you're entirely neglecting that overhead costs are a thing that also exist.
Even for something like Linux, there are gigantic overhead costs. The vast majority of Linux commits are made by people sitting at their paid job. Those lines of code are not free, they are financed by the companies who are willing to pay Intel/IBM/RedHat etc for their products and services.
Re: Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
Too bad nobody ever managed to prove this actually works.
There are quite literally millions of examples. Anyone who has a copyrighted work and has made money from it is an example. There are absolutely valid questions around how much diminishing that compensation affects innovation, and around the marginal value of each year of copyright validity. The way I envision it, there is a baseline of innovation. I.e. innovation that would occur with or without copyright. For each…
No, millions of existing copyrighted works are not automatically examples of works which would not have been created without copyright. Compensation is also not synonymous with exclusive rights.
Academics have already calculated the optimal balance, in particular the optimal copyright term. It's probably in the region of the original 14 years instead of the current ~150. https://rufuspollock.com/papers/optimal_copyright_term.pdf
Re: Publishers File Suit Against Internet Archive
#358I'm an author. Anyone know the most effective way for me to protest this with my publishers?
Join the Authors Alliance, they have ideas. https://www.authorsalliance.org/ 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/
thank you so much!