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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

#221

Post by bawolff »

bluesign wrote: post #126
Gaelan wrote: post #84

[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 think another analogy can be better. Imagine I want to fly somewhere, plane is half empty, I am going there and sitting. Don’t have ticket. (Imagining no enforcement) Should I? Eventually this plane will fly there, my effect on cost is ignorable, I will be better, airline will not be worse.

I think this is an interesting analogy (maybe even better would be bus fare for a city bus).

However marginal cost is not zero for the airline. Fuel costs money. There are limited seats on the plane. The marginal cost of copying a digital book is actually zero.

However, even if marginal cost was 0 (lets say a movie theatre that is empty), it does somehow still seem wrong if its physical in a way i can't easily distinguish from the digital case.

I suppose maybe the difference is, that if i own a piece of land, i should have the right to prevent trespassing so i can enjoy the land without being harrased. Being able to charge admission is an extension of that. But the intellectual case, someone reading my book doesnt prevent me from enjoying reading my book myself.

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

#222

Post by Thorentis »

WalterBright wrote: post #195
Gaelan wrote: post #84

[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…

> Of course, we can't just abolish copyright with no replacement; it's certainly necessary to reward the creation of this work somehow. 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-…

I am a big supporter of copyright reform. However, I think we do need some nuance when it comes to comparing OSS and multimedia/creative work.

On OSS, the only people working on it are people that a) volunteer to work on it b) people that are paid by a larger organisation to work on it (e.g. given x hours/week to work on OSS).

In film/TV, people do not volunteer to act, or edit footage, or operate cameras. Yes, there are indie films, and indie creators. They're all over YouTube. But big budget AAA effects cost money, and somebody has to pay for them. There has to be an incentive to create this content that is monetary.

Now, I am personally in favour of reeling back copyright to only protect the profiting off of work (i.e. only the original creator can sell copies of their work for a limited period of time), but anybody is free to reproduce without profit. And then after x period of time (10 years for instance), anybody is free to also sell it or use it in commercial works/adaptations.

I see no societal benefit to content creators being rewarded in perpetuity. You wrote a great book? Cool, you can profit from it for 10 years as a reward for your work. After that, you can make money doing speaking tours, or interviews, etc. Guaranteeing royalties for a book that I can go and borrow from a library, or for a film I can go watch at a friends place, for longer than around 10 years does not make any sense.

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

#223

Post by bawolff »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #149
Gaelan wrote: post #84

[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…

What if I just borrow your car when you're sleeping? You lose nothing. What if I break into your house and use your TV while you're at work? You lose nothing. What if I set up a tent on your lawn and take it down whenever you want to play frisbee? You lose nothing. What if I grab some girl's butt at a dance club? She loses nothing. As you can see, requiring an act to explicitly deprive someone of property is a slippe…

> What if I set up a tent on your lawn and take it down whenever you want to play frisbee? You lose nothing.

Much of northern europe has a "freedom to roam" making this explicitly legal and acceptable (within certain limits).

Nobody is saying that all law should be based in property. There are plenty of laws that aren't based in property and that is ok. E.g., we don't say murder is wrong because it deprives someone of property.

> There are dozens of examples of "borrowing" that just aren't done in polite society because the owner doesn't want them to be done.

And there are many examples of "borrowing" that are considered acceptable in polite society regardless of the "owner's" opinion. There are more factors in play then what the originator of the idea thinks of the matter.

> Piracy hurts the author's ability to sell books. Free copies just have that effect. Every normal human understands it

So? Society is not under a general responsibility to make people money. You can say the same thing about many acceptable activities: Negative critical reviews hurt the author's ability to sell books. Negative reviews just have that effect. Every normal human understands it.

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

#224

Post by M5x7wI3CmbEem10 »

Gaelan wrote: post #84

[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…

weren’t there unintended consequences in the pharmaceutical industry for shorter patent windows? they would modify a drug ever so slightly, but enough to patent it again. I could imagine a similar consequence for shorter copyright windows.

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

#225

Post by pasquinelli »

dctoedt wrote: post #107
Gaelan wrote: post #84

[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're channeling Thomas Jefferson, who himself channeled a Zoroastrian idea. Jefferson said: "... no one possesses the less because everyone possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me receives [it] without lessening [me], as he who lights his [candle] at mine receives light without darkening me." [0] The flaw in this concept is the free-rider problem: 1. Not all new IP can be created as a side projec…

seems like a basic problem with our economic system if there're useful things that need to be done but no one is able to do it without it costing them. or, if most ip isn't useful, then why do we need to incentivize it so much?

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

#226

Post by TouchyJoe »

m0zg wrote: post #191

Y'all are focusing on the wrong thing. This is categorically not about "library" or whatever they are being sued for right now. That's just a smokescreen. 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.

I sympathize with the desire of average joes to take down footage of their smelling hair and rubbing people the wrong way. We need the internet archive.org. Some of the best website are only to be found there.

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

#227

Post by TouchyJoe »

nitrogen wrote: post #47
evgen wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a just world, the management team that decided to risk the future of the Wayback machine so that they could take advantage of a global pandemic to strike a blow against copyright would go to jail. They must be stopped and prevented from doing more damage to IA!

No good deed goes unpunished.

Why is knowledge artificially limited by all these paywalls and people holding literature and books hostage to their financial interest? What is better a world where a poor kid can read any book ever published or a world where you can only read the books that you can afford. Most technical books are expensive.

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

#228

Post by WalterBright »

Thorentis wrote: post #222
WalterBright wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, we can't just abolish copyright with no replacement; it's certainly necessary to reward the creation of this work somehow. 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-…

I am a big supporter of copyright reform. However, I think we do need some nuance when it comes to comparing OSS and multimedia/creative work. On OSS, the only people working on it are people that a) volunteer to work on it b) people that are paid by a larger organisation to work on it (e.g. given x hours/week to work on OSS). In film/TV, people do not volunteer to act, or edit footage, or operate cameras. Yes, there…

> But big budget AAA effects cost money, and somebody has to pay for them.

On the other hand, why does society need movies that cost $100 million to make? (Much of that being what the stars cost.)

> In film/TV, people do not volunteer to act, or edit footage, or operate cameras.

Programmers didn't do it much for free before OSS.

> Yes, there are indie films, and indie creators. They're all over YouTube.

Exactly.

> There has to be an incentive to create this content that is monetary.

Does there? Before OSS, people said the same thing about software.

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

#229

Post by Siira »

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncen...

The IP apologists have successfully lodged a massive noncentral fallacy of “unauthorized information copying = theft.” As anyone with a gram of brains can see, the force of direct arguments against piracy is much less about their consequences and instead focuses on just putting piracy in the category of theft. Categories though are but arbitrary social constructs used as a shortcut in thinking.

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

#230

Post by dang »

thrownaway954 wrote: post #209
boomboomsubban wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If something is beneficial for everyone involved, why should it be illegal?

how old are you? teenagers think like that.

Personal attacks are not allowed here. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd appreciate it.
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