361–370 of 438 posts
Somewhere around last year they had datacenters burning down due to a natural disaster, but I'm hoping they can recover. It's an amazing project.
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Kudos to you, but I would probably be wary of admitting to participate in the illegal book piracy scene unless your pseudonymity is really tight. Thanks a lot for helping out, though.
Without knowing what book it is who would sue? I doubt the FBI is investigating random HN comments for literature piracy.
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What on earth does "reputable" mean here? Total compliance with the regulatory capture of publishing companies? Full support of the landgrab claims of the Disney corporation et al? You don't have to be an anarchist to look at the status quo and think some amount of civil disobedience is the correct, proper and right thing to do. Also believing that a claim, fully Disney supported, that such an amount of civil disobed…
Not all authors and not all publishers are alike. It is easy to cherry pick a few very bad apples, like Disney (especially since much of their success can be attributed to retelling stories from the public domain) or those who are actively anti-library (from the perspective of property rights, at the level of a physical book or purchased ebook - not the right to make and distribute copies). On the other hand you also…
I said "some amount" and you don't disagree. We're not discussing what that precise amount is or how it should be targeted, that's a different discussion and can be framed in multiple, competing ways.
Feel free to lay out what you think is the correct amount and correctly targeted but even if you are wildly wrong in your thoughts, your being wrong doesn't make anyone else with differing thoughts about that amount and targeting disreputable, even if they are for some other reason.
There is a legitimate argument that the law should always be followed and any law-breaking is inherently disreputable. It's not my argument although I acknowledge it and isn't fashionable nowadays given how that must be applied to, for example, the civil rights movement & Dr King.
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I get what you're saying by this, but I think OC is just being practical. This is the world we live in. It's shit and I hate it, but if you want something done, 9 times out of 10 you need to consider these questions
Maybe if you read the right books you would cultivate a worldview where you don't "need to consider these questions" so much. Maybe if more people died that we would even help build a world like that.
no one worth agreeing with starts a sentence with >Maybe if you read the right books
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> 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.
> based on open access to your work Can I freely use your toilet then? your electricity? You pay for the plumber, why don't you pay for entertainment? Scientific knowledge must be open, but most copyrighted work is entertainment.
You can freely use the design of my toilet, certainly.
> You pay for the plumber, why don't you pay for entertainment?
I pay for physical objects that are made for me, like books; and I pay when people come play their music (even if payment is not mandatory).
But TBH - I don't think that's the appropriate moral basis for things. For example, we don't pay for the huge amount of work our parents do for us; nor for the not-for-profit activities we often rely on etc. I would much rather support a non-exchange-based social arrangement.
Enabled users: 5629
Active today: 986
Active this week: 2542
Active this month: 4228
Torrents: 566598
Total Size: 23.40 TiB
Retail Torrents: 421313
Creators: 401395
Seeders: 2421540
Leechers: 232
Snatches: 16523563
Transferred: 398.22 TiB
The only problem is that there is so many books and so little time :( , which might be a far bigger problem than book accessibility. To find the time to read them.
There is at least 1/8 of books that I would love to read. But I don't have the time to actually pull it off, even if I am not doing any social networking etc., but the amount is really huge. Maybe, for a startup, someone could index all the content, not only share it.
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> based on open access to your work Can I freely use your toilet then? your electricity? You pay for the plumber, why don't you pay for entertainment? Scientific knowledge must be open, but most copyrighted work is entertainment.
> Can I freely use your toilet then? You can freely use the design of my toilet, certainly. > You pay for the plumber, why don't you pay for entertainment? I pay for physical objects that are made for me, like books; and I pay when people come play their music (even if payment is not mandatory). But TBH - I don't think that's the appropriate moral basis for things. For example, we don't pay for the huge amount of wor…
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That's already the case minus the last ~70 years or so. The overwhelming majority of our knowledge is in the public domain, in particular cultural artifacts. It's a nice sentiment but like, people can already go to gutenberg.org and download pretty much most important works of literature in existence and most books have like 5k downloads so there's that.
gutenberg.org is dns blocked in germany. It's easy to get around this (when you know it), but some governments work actively against it....
- Gutenberg - Zlib - libgen
via o2 (not promoting them in any way)
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Insane in the abstract, but not exactly unfathomable. Who would make money off of that, and who else makes money off of it's absense?
No one would make money off of it. That is the point. There are innumerable things which are worthwhile which are not profitable. The idea that we do not do a world library of free digital copies of every book ever written really highlights the problem with the thinking your comment has demonstrated. The idea that individual pursuits must make a profit to be justified leads to us doing terrible things like: not makin…
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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…
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?