Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site

It's also perfectly reasonable to distribute that information widely and without limits. The fact information is valuable to someone doesn't make it scarce. The harsh reality that creators need to face is that only the first copy need be paid for.

> I'm sure you wouldn't argue that anyone can watch a movie for free just because someone else made it

I would. Instead of charging money for copies of a movie, film makers need to figure out how to get paid before the movie is made. Creation must act like an investment, not a product. Maybe the answer is crowdfunding? Whatever it is, it needs to pay the creators before they start working so that the final result can be released into the public domain immediately.

> People have a right to own and control the distribution of their works that they invested in creating.

That's nothing but an illusion. Once the information is out there, it can no longer be controlled. People will copy it, distribute it, edit it, create derivative works, memes... And there's next to nothing creators can do to stop it. The work becomes part of mankind's culture. People infringe copyright every day without even realizing it.

"Creators have the right to control..." sounds like a neat idea on paper but it completely breaks down when put into practice. When authors try to "exercise control over their content", we end up with websites which disable right click and create annoying pop ups when we try to copy paste. It's completely ineffective and serves only to annoy people.

The only way to control information is to control all the computers that process it. Currently, it's impossible but not for lack of trying. In order to prevent infringement, the copyright industry is prepared and willing to sacrifice computing freedom: their ultimate goal is to prevent us from running "unauthorized" software. Programs that do subversive things like copy movies or play movies without checking for a valid license first would not be signed by the authorities and the processor would then refuse to execute such code. Therefore, the copyright industry is an existential threat to hackers and the free and open source software community. I'd rather sacrifice the entire copyright industry than computing freedom.

I actually said that copyright itself is neither moral nor immoral, which is a completely different statement.

Any particularly copyright law can be as immoral as you want it to be, but the idea that somebody can retain rights over content they create is not immoral. You could easily create a society that didn’t have such rights, but the outcome would certainly be much less content, and much more restrictions put on it. You complain about copyright destroying video games history, but copyright is the only reason that history exists to begin with.

Your examples harmful copyright abuse are irrelevant first of all because they are not copyright able. The alphabet can not be copyrighted, and neither can an idea (that would be a patent, which is again a completely different thing).

They are made even more irrelevant by the fact that such “harmful” applications of copyright are not relevant to this situation. The copyright in question is not of a word, or the alphabet, or an idea, or the work of some long dead author. The copyright in question here is entire recently released books.

The idea that somebody who writes a book, or creates a movie, or a video game, can retain exclusive rights over its distribution for a certain period of time is not generally classified as copyright abuse. To characterize it that way is a very extreme, niche position.

2. Sure, 15% of all academics going poof is the exact same thing as the Library at Alexandria burning down.

3. Those are two separate examples

4. You are replying in a thread about how the internet archive making copies of books and allow people access to those is getting them shut down, would you then argue that the Library at Alexandria is also largely meaningless?

I don't agree. People should be paid for the work they do, yes, but look at all the crap we've had to put up with for trying to restrict an infinite supply. The right model is to pay people to do work, not to pay them for having done work. Yes, it's hard to transition from one model to the other, but the inability to control copying in the Internet age is a simple fact. Gravity makes flying airplanes hard, too. Deal with it.