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Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

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311–320 of 438 posts

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#311
post #210

Excellent. I hope more and more people start to see how absurd and evil the concept of "intellectual property" is. It should be totally rejected and any form of keeping useful information for yourself should be shunned and tabooized. In todays world, many have been programmed to believe that the would could not exits without such immoral restrictions, which is horrible.

I can't imagine getting rid of it completely would have good effects, as it would make any large scale production impossible. You might still get a few blog post, but getting books produced will be tricky and something big like a movie might be outright impossible. This is doubly true in the modern digital world were everything can be copied in a fraction of a second and where the piracy site, not the authors, will b…

> something in the realm of 20 years should be enough.

God no. Right now, we'd be getting remakes from every piece of pop-culture that was semi-popular in the 80s-2002 time frame. Not just movies, but TV series, books, theatre, musicals, ...

Sure, copyright should be shortened, but I don't begrudge (eg.) a one hit winner making money off their hit decades layer. Life of artist is reasonable, I think. They take a gamble on a profession with risky pay-out; if it works out at least once for them, let them reap the benefits.

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#312
post #290
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why the count is relevant here. Both are valid words.

But automatically replacing a valid word with a less-common valid word that makes less sense in the context is not something predictive text should do.

You are presuming it was an automatic replacement. Some still type entire words via a thing called a keyboard, on a computer, others manually pick words to finish, from suggestions, not automatically.

Beyond that, google searches are not indicative of current usage, in SMS/messages, emails, etc. Google search spans all webpages, and many text pre-web too.

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#313
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried to do lossy compression of epubs with some lines of bash scripts; i.e. removing the images and fonts that were not needed. Many epubs could be downsized to a third of their size, but then I found a book that needed the supplied fonts and gave up. When doing lossy compressions can not have those kind of bugs. What I also found was that many of the images in the epubs were already unuseable and nothing like…

I don’t understand this. Are they epubs of comics or something? Epubs are already compressed (zip).

Good compression of lots of epub files can likely be way more efficient, as deduplication/compression algorithms can be run on lots of books at the same time. Especially so with a good dictionary.

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a jumping-off point for thought: Piracy-by-default would work very well in a world where access to a work is not charged, but the social custom is that revenue is collected via pre- or during-production crowdfunding You may see lower revenues, but how much cost is currently poured into resolving licensing / investing in DRM / etc, all for works to be pirated anyway?

While that is not fundamentally impossible, Star Citizen is so far the only crowdfunded thing I know that managed to collect AAA-game levels of money. Pretty much everything else isn't making nearly enough to actually finance the project and requires more funding outside of the crowdfunding. Furthermore, a lot of successful crowdfunding is build up on prior copyrighted work. People spend money on Star Citizen because…

You can't look at current crowdfunding levels in a world where the crowdfunded product is the exclusive "IP" of those receiving the money and then assume that tells you anything about a different world where there is no copyright and pre-funding creators is the only way to get new content of a certain scale. Or in other words: you're arguing that not having copyright would not work in a world built around copyright.

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what they said. They said "the power distribution is so skewed against actual people the current system must be destroyed as a matter of principle". What about that is hopeless? It offers a clear escape and very little ambiguity. If anything, it should be energising to a casual reader.

He said "If you as a private person own a patent, you are losing it anyways...because you cannot fight some mega corporation in court to defend it. It's too expensive, and the biggest corps just take what they want due to having more financial resources" IOW he didn't say what you claim. Plus he gave no way forward to achieve his goals, and am I not in any position right now to Bring Down The Man, much as The Man may…

Within the larger context of this thread, the intent was clear. You yourself were responding to a post that gives this necessary context: Intellectual property is absurd and evil. The poster you reply to tells you why it is absurd and evil. Those two things together lead you naturally to the conclusion that it must be abolished.

As such, I would say what they said is absolutely what I claimed. I just explained it in plainer terms and without requiring you to (re)read the rest of the thread.

Edit: The fact that you summarised "this system must be destroyed" as "hopeless" says something about your own fundamental hopelessness and despair. Which you kind of ironically attributed to someone else.

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine getting rid of it completely would have good effects, as it would make any large scale production impossible. You might still get a few blog post, but getting books produced will be tricky and something big like a movie might be outright impossible. This is doubly true in the modern digital world were everything can be copied in a fraction of a second and where the piracy site, not the authors, will b…

> It could also result in far more draconian DRM, as that would be the only way left to protect your work. There is no way to protect video, audio or text from being copied. DRM just prevents low effort consumer copying.

And without copyright, modified playback systems with the restrictions removed could also be freely distributed so DRM becomes even less effective.

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#317
post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

15 years period should be enough. If you haven't contributed anything to society within the past 15 years, why should you get to live off the 1 thing you did? Shouldn't you be incentivized to be productive? That's the point of copyright law in the first place after all.

It's extremely easy to say what you say without having written a book. Harry Potter into public domain I'm prob OK with but some people put years of their life into technical books. My father did. EDIT: ach, didn't read your post propely - first line says " I'm also write technical writing (including academic publications)" so you have a strong position to hold your view - sorry (deleted)

Some people put years of their life into fixing plumbing, should they and their heirs also profit from that plumbing?

I'm all for finding ways to reward people for creating things but that should not include restricting what others can create.

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#318

One of the projects on my secret TODO list is feeding Libgen into Elastic Search to get a cross referenced full text search. For now the hardware is prohibitively expensive, but time is on my side. I'm sure redundantly indexing a few 10s of TB will become trivial before the end of the decade.

I suggest you just do it. You can generate the indexes on some cloud VMs and save them. It would cost under 100$.

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Should I be disallowed to commercialise it? I believe you are mis-phrasing the question. What you're actually asking is: > Should the state criminalize and punish people who make copies of my work, to facilitate my commercial activity with it? And our answer is "No". You can go ahead and engage in whatever commercial activity you like, based on open access to your work.

That's a constructive answer, so thanks, although I have to ask your view of how BSD was used by apple to build a massive fortune but without paying significantly back to the BSD community. Overheard from an IP lawyer I stood near to once - something about f/oss software being incorporated into commercial products being a big issue (for the free stuff, not the company doing the 'stealing' of it). Your view?

The way I see it the problem in both cases here is that the company is using stuff created by others but not giving the same freedom to users of ther derived work.

Without copyright this situation is a lot more equalized as now you can have people make modified versions of macOS and redistribute those legally - yes, not having source access makes that more difficult, but not impossible and even if you did need the source, it only has to leak once.

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#320
post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can I freely use your toilet then? your electricity? No because once you used them I don't have them anymore. There's a reason IP has different rules than physical property. > You pay for the plumber, why don't you pay for entertainment? Ok, that's a more appropriate analogy, but then again, should my plumber get a recurring fee for the work they already did, when I use the faucet to give drinks to my friends?

> No because once you used them I don't have them anymore. I mean entering your house, doing my business in your toilet and leave. I won't take your toilet with me, I'll come back when I need it again. > when I use the faucet to give drinks to my friends? But your friends all have their own house with their own plumbing they paid him for, so he can continue making a living from his craft. Writing a book takes months…

> I mean entering your house, doing my business in your toilet and leave. I won't take your toilet with me, I'll come back when I need it again.

If your use of my toilet doesn't affect me in anyway then I don't see why I should have a problem with that. If we are talking about you stinking up the place, using all my toilet paper and blocking the john whenever I need to go then we are talking about something very different from "IP".

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