Earlier quoted context omitted.
They charge for bandwidth, server cycles and rent.
So they don’t profit?
Who cares. Don't be a free-loader.
Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
191–200 of 498 posts
Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Couldn't agree more. It is disgraceful how our tax dollars are used to prop up failed business models and oppress the little guy. Just another example of how supposedly democratic states only serve the interests of the elite.
>It is disgraceful how our tax dollars are used to prop up failed business models and oppress the little guy U.S. Government Spending, FY 2022 Top 10 Spending by Category $ 1.22 T Social Security $ 914 B Health $ 865 B Income Security $ 767 B National Defense $ 755 B Medicare $ 677 B Education, Training, Employment, and Social Services How do you explain this data? Source: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-fin…
Genuine question: I always hear about the gigantic military spending in the U.S. I would've expected it to be on top of this list. It can't be only 7. no?
Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I do know that the writers and publishers have costs and they need to make money, but I don't agree with the fact that we have to pay to have knowledge. It's more like if we don't have money, we can't have knowledge. For all human history, access to knowledge requires wealth. Simple example — If I want to know how to fix a particular old refrigerator I bought second hand, I need to buy the manual. That said, I enjo…
Theoretically if Jesus duplicated fish and bread on an industrial scale, yeah, it would. Also, labor still needs to be put in to make the products, all piracy does is make it incredibly easy to make additional copies. There’s a reason musicians have to constantly tour and the middle class of music has entirely degraded since the 90s
if the people Jesus fed with the duplicated fish and bread were too poor to afford buying any food, is that still lost sales?
If some student in Rwanda downloads a copy of some obscure Springer-Verlag text (I'm picking on SV because their practices with research publications are just so cynically rent-seeking it's easy to criticize them) that costs five times his annual income and probably isn't even available for sale in the country, is that really a lost sale?
You brought up music - I'm an amateur/trying to get to semi-pro musician myself, and my current "business model" is basically the Patreon approach - make something people love, let them give you money for it. I'm also an ardent fan of several bands (Surfer Blood being one very notable example) whose work I originally discovered via piracy. Since that first listen at age 16, I've bought digital copies of their work on Bandcamp and have bought tickets to see them live. If I like the work I will do my best to support the creator. I don't see why some massive record company needs to take a 50% cut so they can pay their "Managing Director of Artistic Innovation" his seven figure salary.
The argument "a pirated copy is a lost sale" is false in the general case, as my aforementioned examples demonstrate.
Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#194Burn down the library of Alexandria because free access to information is too inconvenient
Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#195Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
The world starts caring when the Olympics or World Cup come to a country. I hadn’t even heard about Qatar prior to them hosting the World Cup.
The Olympics and World Cup have come to Western Europe (e.g. England, France, Norway, Spain) over and over again
Never been to Norway or Spain, but England and France are generally okay w.r.t. migrant labor. Not saying there isn't some hostility to foreigners, because ceterus paribus you'll get many more job interviews with a CV that says "Jean-Pierre Petit" than "Mohammed Karkar" in France, but there is no "temporary worker visa" that we can use to basically exploit peoples from poor countries. If you get a visa that lets you work, you generally get the same protections/wages as locals :)
Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#197A sad day for equal access to information. I’m glad that they made money from Z-Library, they deserve that money for the service they provided.
It’s some bullshit that they were arrested in Argentina on behalf of the US government. From what I can tell they aren’t even US nationals. I know the US scooping up foreigners and locking them away is nothing new (see: Gitmo) but it remains a travesty of justice nonetheless.
Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#198Me and my colleagues will be affected by the end of Z library and co related projects. Here in Brazil and for sure in most second and third world countries, people don't have money to spend in books. You can argue that people can go to the library, but in most cases it's even expensive to take a bus or taxi even a Uber. I'm a law student at an university in brazil. Law books are really expensive. Even though my unive…
What could be more Brazilian than law students breaking the law in order to be able to understand the law? Sounds like those specimens collectors from the 19th century that helped on the extinction of species (e.g. dodo bird, great auk) by collecting and embalming them for "preservation".
In most countries downloading a book is not illegal. What might be illegal is to distribute copyrighted material. I say "might" because often distributing is not even illegal. Sending to friends and family without making money is usually not illegal. And how do you determine "friends"?
Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#199I 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…
Not sure the authors are getting much money, compared to the publishers. Perhaps it depends on the nice - I heard sci-fi is rather low margin, whereas academic publishing tends to be rent-seeking.
Still, with the world wide web, it's possible to cut out the middleman, get the book and directly support the author is he puts a Stripe button on his site. Not sure why we need the publishing company middleman anymore.
Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#200Me and my colleagues will be affected by the end of Z library and co related projects. Here in Brazil and for sure in most second and third world countries, people don't have money to spend in books. You can argue that people can go to the library, but in most cases it's even expensive to take a bus or taxi even a Uber. I'm a law student at an university in brazil. Law books are really expensive. Even though my unive…
I was looking for a book a while ago, it was something like $150 in the U.S. Out of curiosity, I looked up the price in other countries. It was 150 times the exchange rate. 150$ for a book is a lot of money even in the U.S. How do publishers expect other countries to pay the equivalent of 150$ (in local currency)? In many places $150 might be half the monthly salary or worse. I understand publishers and authors need…
There is frequently a system where they sell an international version of the book for significantly lower cost. In order to prevent americans from simply purchasing the international version, it will often have substantial differences. So simply looking up the price of the same book may not show you what would typically be paid in another country.