121–130 of 498 posts
I respect the copyright of publisher and author, I also admire people sharing expensive knowledge to those who do not have the ability to get one. This is a hard choice to me.
The American Empire strikes again. You'd think they would have seen this coming though. I think a long-term solution is a universal revenue-sharing programme - so like some portion of taxes is allocated to a universal repository, and then paid out to creators according to usage. No middle-men and no distribution issues, etc.
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Where is "not very pro-america"?! Maybe not the actual government, but from saving in dollars to travelling we are very pro-american. If we divide the world in pro-america, pro-europe, pro-rusia, pro-china, for us is Europe and America, and very far away the other options. So, bad luck for this guy. Bro, Che Guevara died decades ago...
Yeah, I was describing a perspective of a russia-born person who never actually travelled to the western hemisphere and whose knowledge of South American countries are formed by ambient osmosis, not active research. I know that no South American country supports the recent russian invasion (and thank god for that), but I was under the (apparently wrong) impression that there were non-trivial factions opposing the US.…
Of course there’s your standard disagreements between neighbors but, as far as I know, there’s no outright hostilities going on. Well, outside of some rebels and narco groups. Not like the 80s where the Soviets were stirring up trouble at least.
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>>Would you rather have funds allocated towards social justice or have them spent on intimidating foreign nationals I would rather the justice department, and labor dept choose their targets for non-political reasons, neither for "social justice" nor corporate protectionism
In 1993, the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action treats social justice as a purpose of human rights education The declaration was signed by the US as well. So social justice is an objective of US as a whole, as a democracy, as a Country, hence is not a political view since 1993 in USA.
It was never fully ratified [1]. It was ratified by Russia and, somehow, Afghanistan.
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That analogy doesn’t work when the marginal cost to do that work is literally zero, in fact he wouldn’t even know he’s performing the “work”
The error in this argument is assuming that the price of a good must equal its marginal cost. Software, for example, also has a marginal cost of zero -- it can be reproduced with the same technology as electronic text, and yet developing software is expensive, so the price of each copy is set above the marginal cost so that the developer gets paid. By denying the developer the right to set a price for their work, you…
I know this won't be a popular take on HN, but while I can understand and to a certain extent sympathize with pirating movies (the intentional friction and arbitrary geographic limitations on access imposed by the multinational movie-industry conglomerates), I can't see stealing some poor author's work in the same light. Sure, people get hung-up about DRM (which can easily be removed by widely-accessible tools), but…
Artificial scarcity is still bad. Imagine a world where books are free for everybody, not just for people who live in prosperous areas with good libraries. Would you then advocate making books nonfree thereby placing books out of reach for 2/3rd of the world population, which is more or less where we are today?
I know this won't be a popular take on HN, but while I can understand and to a certain extent sympathize with pirating movies (the intentional friction and arbitrary geographic limitations on access imposed by the multinational movie-industry conglomerates), I can't see stealing some poor author's work in the same light. Sure, people get hung-up about DRM (which can easily be removed by widely-accessible tools), but…
The price spike on comics and graphic novels after the comiXology acquisition by Amazon is over 150%...
According to the reviews, the previous version of the app was much better, but the current version is just a reskin of the Kindle app.
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I agree with you, but it's always easier to go after a centralized target who is doing a thing at scale. Is there a wage-thief who's doing it at scale?
> Is there a wage-thief who's doing it at scale? FAANG got caught having a wage cartel where poaching affected possible salaries between workers. They got a measly 50 million dollar fine. Wage theft pays off in america, and Amazon and Apple being trillion dollar companies proves it.
I remember Apple and Google did. Was there a broader conspiracy?
> got a measly 50 million dollar fine
This $415mm settlement [1]? Its suit covered ”almost 65,000 employees who worked for the seven companies between 2005 and 2010.” The fine was thus about $6,400 per covered employee (about $8k in 2022 dollars). The alleged cut to “potential employee compensation [was] 10 percent to 15 percent” [2]. That didn’t pertain to every single employee, so the actual cost per violation is higher. That doesn’t seem egregiously low.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...
[2] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/lawsuit-accuses-appl...
How much prison time they face? I'm not sad about them. They did it for the money, not because they believed knowledge should be free. They basically stole other people work and put their paywall to access stolen books. Total opposite of Libgen or Sci-Hub.
Their free model was much more than enough for a regular user to use. I mean 10 books download per day? I'm not sure if I personally would have had to ever exceed that limit.