191–200 of 275 posts
It's a political takedown, plain and simple. It's much harder to gaslight the public when an archive of your taken down tweets, stealth edited or censored articles, etc is a single hyperlink away from being re-surfaced.
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If you steal my book, I don't get paid as much for the work I put into the book. So I am very clearly and obviously worse off. I find it really, really strange that some people find this hard to understand. And your "crowdfunded patronage" model is still copyright, it's just copyright with a different revenue model.
> And your "crowdfunded patronage" model is still copyright, it's just copyright with a different revenue model. I was thinking it would go something like this: I write a book. I decide that I want to make $100,000 from the book, so I put up a Kickstarter for that much. Once it hits the goal, I release the book into the public domain. Before then, I don't publish the book at all. Unless your definition of "copyright"…
It’s not comparable to physical items. For those, even if the promises aren’t kept, what is promised is generally clear. Usually the Kickstarter is just to bootstrap the production with the intention of future sales so there are incentives in place to make a quality product. And if I want the product I can either donate to the Kickstarter or pay for the product afterwards. In no case can I just get a free one.
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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%.
[I typed this up as a reply to a comment that has now been flagged. I think it's a conversation worth having, so I'm putting it at the top level instead.] I'd argue that "intellectual property" is fundamentally different from physical property, and can't really be "stolen" per se. If I steal your car, I have a car and you don't have a car. If I "steal" your book, we both have the book. I'm better off, and you're no w…
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…
Now, our society has decided that in order to give an incentive for people to buy books, we will make it illegal to copy books. That is arbitrary, and purely an economic decision.
If I go to a library that holds your book and memorise it, have I stolen it? What if everybody who ever wanted to buy your work decided they'd rather just read it once at a library? Is it stolen? Of course not.
When you purchase a book, you are rewarding the publisher for their time and materials in physically producing the book. The author already made their profit when the publisher bought the rights off them. If a publisher wishes to enter into a royalties agreement instead, they do so at their own risk. Society should not protect the royalty system, which I believe is unfair compared to the flat-rate payment anyway. For smaller authors, a publisher will usually work out how many copies they think they can sell, and give the author an amount proportional to that. They then bare the risk of selling less, and are exposed to the opportunity of selling more. The author has received their reward, and the publisher must do their best to sell them.
[I typed this up as a reply to a comment that has now been flagged. I think it's a conversation worth having, so I'm putting it at the top level instead.] I'd argue that "intellectual property" is fundamentally different from physical property, and can't really be "stolen" per se. If I steal your car, I have a car and you don't have a car. If I "steal" your book, we both have the book. I'm better off, and you're no w…
You say "of course", but let's examine that. Consider the free software movement. I work full time on D, and anyone can use D for any purpose they want to and don't owe me anything. Just like all the other open source software out there.
And yet, OSS is thriving and is often best-of-breed.
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. Internet archive didn’t just steal from ‘publishers’ they are also stealing from authors big and small. You don’t get to give out free digital copies of books to people without permission and expect to get away with it. This exact digital/physical equivalence idea has already been through th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Violating copyright and stealing are fundamentally different things. If I steal your tv, you no longer have a TV. If I pirate a book, all existing copies of the book still exist. If you price a book above what I'm willing to pay for it, I'm never going to buy it. Ever. If my willingness to pay is "$0", then you can't even argue that the creator has lost revenue if I pirate it. I was never going to buy it - it's too e…
By spending the time to acquire and consume a copy of the content you have proven that your willingness to pay is above "$0". Granted, perhaps not _much_ above 0. But still evidently above 0. edit: Even if your "consumption" is merely acquiring and storing (or even acquiring and immediately discarding)
I'd love for the Internet Archive to prevail here, but honestly it was quite boneheaded to do this legal experiment under the same corporate umbrella as their archival work. At this point they should proceed with a damage mitigation strategy of selling off their servers and storage to a second entity at fair market value (maybe "Archive Cloud"), and renting continued access. This way even if the IA organization is ba…
There's another last ditch option though - IIRC, IA has copies in US, Canada, Netherlands and Egypt. Let's say that some government where an IA server is hosted is convinced to nationalize the server. They have legal authority - there's much legal latitude for acting in the name of national security, and there's an obvious case to be made here: if we consider disinformation to be a security threat than a server hosting reliable and trusted internal history is an obvious asset (e.g. [0]).
Such an act would easily override any legal attempts by the publishers, and can be pushed for even after a conviction and bankruptcy and without involving the IA foundation at all.
The danger is that post-nationalization the information would not be considered reliable - this can be ameliorated if the servers are immediately rerendered to a private party, but it's enough of a downside to make this a last option to push for. That said, I suggest keeping this option in mind.
[0] https://theconversation.com/dominic-cummings-how-the-interne...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Violating copyright and stealing are fundamentally different things. If I steal your tv, you no longer have a TV. If I pirate a book, all existing copies of the book still exist. If you price a book above what I'm willing to pay for it, I'm never going to buy it. Ever. If my willingness to pay is "$0", then you can't even argue that the creator has lost revenue if I pirate it. I was never going to buy it - it's too e…
Your philosophical musings are not uninteresting, but they are irrelevant to the fact that violating copyright is defined as stealing property under US law. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-11...
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That's what makes it not theft. Theft deprives the person of the original. If I have two books and you take one I have one book. If you buy one of my books and give it out, I did not have any of the books I had stolen from me.
Theft does deprive the victim of something. As I've written above, piracy is theft as it deprives the victim of potential sales.
Where it gets really muddy is whether copyright infringement causes any harm at all. We've had interest groups claiming millions of dollars worth of potential sales lost and we've had studies showing that actually piracy may be a net benefit to creators due to increased market exposure.
All of this pontification can be put aside though. China does not enforce copyright or most other IP laws, and yet has a thriving entertainment, engineering, literary, etc. industry. So clearly IP protection is not critical for innovation or a healthy industry, as interest groups here would have us believe.