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EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

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Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#161

Post by xhkkffbf »

myself248 wrote: post #123
garmaine wrote: post #105

Well EFF won’t be getting any more donations from me, just like I cut off IA when they started this. Don’t ask for money to fight a legal battle where you are so obviously in the (legal) wrong.

How do you go about challenging a corrupt and unjust law, then?

There's a bit of disagreement on that. I'm an author. Copyright allows me to make a living writing. The law may have issues, but my copyrights do not stop anyone else from writing their own books or creating whatever they want.

Unfortunately, the standard model for paying for book writing by selling copies to all readers is at odds with your conception of what a just world might be.

I've seen communism. I've seen wacko central power systems. To me, copyright is not corrupt and more just than the other systems.

But you're free to weigh in and explain out you would do it in a more just way.

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#162

Post by MereInterest »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #158
MereInterest wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree completely on most items, except that copyright is not a natural monopoly. There isn't a high barrier of entry to printing a different book, nor is there a very limited supply of printing presses. Copyright is entirely a government-granted monopoly, intended to serve the public good by promoting good writing. In cases where it doesn't serve the public good, it is reasonable to reduce the strength of copyright…

Exactly. Anti-copyright people love to claim the book author has a "monopoly." But it's only on their own book. Nothing stops someone else from writing a competing book. It's kind of like saying a car owner buys a "monopoly" by purchasing a car. Yeah, only the owner can drive a particular car, but that's not what the word means. Yet people persist with this phony gambit.

tilts head You start off by saying "exactly", but then go assuming that I said the opposite of what I said. To state it clearly, copyright is a monopoly. Patents are a monopoly. That these are government-granted monopolies enforced by law, rather than a natural monopoly caused by scarce resources, does not make them any less of a monopoly.

The car analogy does not apply, primarily because cars are fungible. Books are not fungible, unless they are printings of the same book. Cultural ideas are not fungible.

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#163

Post by enriquto »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #159
enriquto wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it was quite boneheaded to do this legal experiment under the same corporate umbrella as their archival work. I disagree. This is a wickedly good idea, and a very good hill to fight on. It is not a "legal experiment" but a major battle against evil people. Everybody loves the Internet Archive, it is our sacred castle. If a decisive battle is to be won against the publishing parasites, it may be likely this one, and…

Dude: I'm an author. The books I write pay for the food that feeds my family. Are you saying I'm evil for asking to be paid for my work? I can tell you that if the IA/EFF prevail, professional authors will disappear and the only people who will get to be artists will be those with trust funds and rich spouses. Is that what you want the world to become? Do you really think artists are evil for wanting to be paid?

> Are you saying I'm evil for asking to be paid for my work?

No. I love and appreciate the work of authors, and I spend more than 1000 EUR per year in books. I systematically buy technical books that the author offers for free on their website. For the authors of the free software that I depend on, I try to donate if it is possible.

To answer your question very clearly: you are not evil by asking to be paid for your work. That is a very reasonable thing to do! Can you please point me to your books? I will likely buy them (if they are tangentially interesting to me).

All of that will not change the fact that sharing books is not stealing, and that using the verb "stealing" for the act of sharing is a callous manipulation of the language, even if it is sanctioned by law.

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#164

Post by jonny_eh »

gamblor956 wrote: post #114
markvdb wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a real cost to government and society enforcing the copyright monopoly for the copyright owner. So why not have the copyright holder pay for upholding copyright? Imagine differential pricing for enforcing copyright on a work depending on parameters: - grow with every passing year - change with the level of protection required - zero for public domain and free (BSD/GPL/permissive CC style licensing) - symbolic…

The copyright owner pays the costs of enforcing copyright already...

But that doesn't allow someone to violate the copyright, due to the potential risk, like a troll jumping out from below a bridge. It'd be better if there was a way to easily check if a copyright was being actively paid and maintained.

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#165

Post by ALittleLight »

HideousKojima wrote: post #144
ALittleLight wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am made worse off if you steal a copy of my book though. Suppose I sell the book for X dollars and the probability that any person without my book will buy it is Y. People who don't have my book have a value to me, specifically, YX dollars. When you steal my book, you directly cost me YX dollars, which is probably an infinitesimal amount, but if everyone was allowed to freely copy the book, then it would be approxi…

You're assuming that Y is evenly distributed amongst all people, which is absolutely not the case. For example, I did most of my game pirating back in high school, when I didn't have a job (nor a car to get to a job and I lived out in the sticks) and had nothing but an allowance from my parents of ~$20 every month. So the maximum amount I could theoretically spend on games per year? $120. The retail value of all of t…

I'm not assuming that at all. My model is extremely simplified so it would fit into a comment, but it doesn't need to be that simple for the general idea to hold.

Suppose you pirated a thousand games and would've legitimately purchased one. Your piracy then represents a theft of one game. Since there's no way to tell which one game you would've bought, we could simplify it to say that stole one one thousandth of a game from each publisher (assuming they were all unique publishers).

In reality, I think it's really hard to know what you would've done without access to piracy. It's almost certainly not "buy all the games" but it's also probably not "buy zero games".

I also pirated a lot of things when I was in college - partly because it was cheaper, and I was very cheap, and partly because it was easier than actually getting some things. One thing I try to do is separate my own personal bias (it can't be bad because I did it) from what seems like the clear harm and moral reasoning I laid out above. You're taking from the publishers, even if only small values, and if everyone did what you did, publishing couldn't exist as a business.

I think it makes sense that poor people would steal more frequently. They need to. It also makes sense that younger people would steal more frequently - they are less mature, think less about others, and less about the consequences. Given that, it doesn't surprise me that you and I both pirated more while younger. That said, even though it makes sense, that doesn't mean it's right.

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#166

Post by mellosouls »

hyko wrote: post #57

How do we back up the Internet Archive? If they lose this case then it will be like losing The Great Library of Alexandria. This is our culture. This is our heritage! Edited to add: when I say “back up”, I mean preserve the data and the archival mission (minus the legal quagmires). The technical challenges can be solved, and we should do this before it’s too late. It seems there was a previous effort, but it has lost…

There are many other digital archives, and that is how the "single point of failure" problem you envisage is solved.

The Internet Archive is AFAIK the biggest, and the first - the important thing is for others to continue its good work (many have done this for years) - and not for us to rely too much on it or any other single archiving initiative.

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#167

Post by ALittleLight »

uluyol wrote: post #160
ALittleLight wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am made worse off if you steal a copy of my book though. Suppose I sell the book for X dollars and the probability that any person without my book will buy it is Y. People who don't have my book have a value to me, specifically, YX dollars. When you steal my book, you directly cost me YX dollars, which is probably an infinitesimal amount, but if everyone was allowed to freely copy the book, then it would be approxi…

No, because potential sales are not sales. You never had the XY dollars to begin with. This is what separates IP theft from physical property theft.

I never said they were sales. I explicitly differentiated them from sales. They are potential sales, valued at YX and potential sales are what you lose. A sale has a value of X dollars.

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#168

Post by WaltPurvis »

enriquto wrote: post #147
WaltPurvis wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not cute. It's incredibly appalling to compare the institution of slavery to people who pirate books simply because they want the benefits of authors' work without compensating those authors.

I'm not making that comparison. I'm not even saying that I disagree with your view on copyright. I'm just setting up this correspondence to show that the argumentation that you use is not valid.

Fine, but there is nothing at all invalid about my argument, because all I argued is that infringing copyrights is defined as stealing property under US law. That's not even an argument; it's simply a statement of fact. Unless you're talking about my statement that musings about how it shouldn't be considered stealing are irrelevant to the fact that it is, which is also not an argument, just a statement of fact. (Those musings are misguided as well as irrelevant, but I didn't advance any argument about them being misguided.)

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#169

Post by Mindwipe »

HideousKojima wrote: post #144
ALittleLight wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am made worse off if you steal a copy of my book though. Suppose I sell the book for X dollars and the probability that any person without my book will buy it is Y. People who don't have my book have a value to me, specifically, YX dollars. When you steal my book, you directly cost me YX dollars, which is probably an infinitesimal amount, but if everyone was allowed to freely copy the book, then it would be approxi…

You're assuming that Y is evenly distributed amongst all people, which is absolutely not the case. For example, I did most of my game pirating back in high school, when I didn't have a job (nor a car to get to a job and I lived out in the sticks) and had nothing but an allowance from my parents of ~$20 every month. So the maximum amount I could theoretically spend on games per year? $120. The retail value of all of t…

> So the probability of me paying for any significant portion of the games I pirated was effectively 0

It was literally 1 in 10.

Which is a very long way from 0%.

Re: EFF and heavyweight legal team will defend Internet Archive against publishers

#170

Post by AnthonyMouse »

dingaling wrote: post #132
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> EFF is on the wrong side of both the law and common sense here and they will lose no matter how much they pay their legal team. I don't understand how people have such certainty about this. You have a situation where there are libraries who have bought millions of books from authors/publishers. The authors have been paid. Then, there is a pandemic and the libraries are closed, so the public has lost access to all t…

> Giving them back access to the books they've paid for is obviously wrong? That's a weak argument. Buses were parked but I couldn't just go and take one from the yard for a journey despite having 'paid' for it from public funds.

Fair use applies to copyright and not buses.
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