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Z-library founders arrested in Argentina

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Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina

#261

Post by dartharva »

trabant00 wrote: post #59

What happened to "you get what you pay for" and "if you're not the customer you are the product"? We already know what happens with free content on the internet: it turns to shit. And no, wikipedia or open source are not models you can apply to most books. The ones you can, we already have them: free programming books and the sorts. Do you want books to be the next low effort, low quality, ads ridden, ideology pushin…

> Do you want books to be the next low effort, low quality, ads ridden, ideology pushing, click bait, spam, micro transactions, gambling medium?

Were books and works that came before copyright law was invented "low effort" and "low quality"? What kind of mental gymnastics does it take to equate IP laws with creativity? It's rather with and because of copyright laws that literature and educational content have gone down the drain. It's now that many books get written with the sole intention of it getting consoomed by as many people as possible, riddled with dark patterns and cringy styles. Information and ideas are NOT your private property if you make them public.

Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina

#262

Post by primroot »

zb1plus wrote: post #71
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #21

A small thought experiment: - Book sales in 2021 were about _9_ billion dollars. [0] - Wage theft in the US is estimated at _50_ billion dollars. [1] Can you imagine if the resources of the justice and labour departments would prioritize citizen wage over publishers' revenue? Would you rather have funds allocated towards social justice or have them spent on intimidating foreign nationals completely outside US jurisdi…

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.

"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all." - Adam Smith

Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina

#264

Post by Balgair »

josh_fyi wrote: post #111

I was delighted when my book showed up on Z-library! I of course was never paid for authoring that book; indeed I paid a subvention to publish it with Harvard University Press. At some point, the rights were sold to the giant publisher Brill, which was charging $30 per chapter for a book that has no value by chapter. Luckily, some kind soul at University of Marburg uploaded it and Library Genesis still has it. https:…

Reminds me of how Orwell preferred to write introductions to 1984 only for illegal reprints behind the iron curtain. I can't find the exact quote but he said that he'd write it for that audience alone as he knew without a doubt that they would read his introduction. If I ever actually write a book, I hope I have enough courage to do the same and only write introductions for cracked copies. You know the audience actually cares if they are willing to risk the fuzz just to read.

Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina

#265

Post by phpisthebest »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #145
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> declaration was signed by the US It was never fully ratified [1]. It was ratified by Russia and, somehow, Afghanistan. [1] https://indicators.ohchr.org/

That's hardly news. But you're looking in the wrong place. It was called the "Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action" it was not an agreement to be ratified, but a course of action for the UN members to follow, which includes the US. Of course in United States social justice is seen as a political stance, it's not surprising from the country that has signed and not ratified - Convention on the Elimination of All…

>>USA is the country that ratified fewer treaties.

yes, by design. We have a strong belief in our Sovereignty, We the people have no desire to be ruled by the UN or treaty, and International Treaties are generally viewed unfavorably by the public (correctly so). In fact most Citizens of the US (including myself) hold the UN in utter contempt and would support a withdraw (including our money) from the UN

Also no Treaty supersedes our Constitution.

Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina

#266

Post by dmitriid »

Barrin92 wrote: post #177
connorgutman wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very simple actually. You (and most of HN) live in a tech industry bubble. Living wages in the U.S are terrible and disposable income is non-existent. I work a 9-5 just like everyone else but when it comes down to it I don't have the money to buy new books. I can either buy used paperback from a second-hand store, go to the library, or pirate an epub. None of these options pay the original author and are effecti…

If you're pirating Stephen King or a 300$ textbook from a guy who has tenure at Harvard I doubt anyone probably including the author cares but a fair amount of authors aren't making any more than you make. Friend of mine published her own graphic novel basically living in her parents attic and a day after it was out someone had ripped it and thrown it on a comic piracy site. That's not ethical. If you live on a 12-15…

Time and again it has been shown that pirating doesn't hurt sales because it is rarely if ever done by people who would've paid for the stuff anyway.

Moreover, making stuff easily accessible (e.g. Steam, Nerflix) reduces piracy by orders of magnitude.

Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina

#267

Post by Mezzie »

rg111 wrote: post #238
phpisatrash wrote: post #167

Me 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…

> You can argue that people can go to the library, Where I grew up, my town library did not have any tech or programming books. Forget new jornal issues or cutting edge science books. "Just go to the library" is such a first-world-and-megacity thing to say.

Even in the first world in a giant city it can be crap advice.

I wrote a paper in library school about how the Vancouver Public Library failed to offer anything of substance to intermediate language learners (with a focus on Mandarin materials because of the high Mandarin speaking population) - if you're a person learning Mandarin to communicate with immigrant populations there, you skip from basic travel phrasebooks to videos/movies in Mandarin for Chinese audiences.

Public libraries aren't great at serving the long tail or more advanced interests for various reasons. And academic institutions usually have rules preventing use of their materials by people not affiliated with the school.

Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina

#268

Post by ketzu »

generationP wrote: post #134

Cheap bet: We won't hear many authors rejoice over this. As an example, Stephen King's pinned tweet is concerned with a very different kind of theft ( https://nitter.it/StephenKing ). In academia, this is slightly narrowing our choices (not much because Z-Lib has never been the main source). As for the books we can't read... well, we won't then. At this point, it's the books competing over our attention, not us scram…

Am I misunderstanding something, or is this tweet circling the completely wrong part? Revenue vs payment is completely meaningless, because it is low due to advance payments.

The 'important' part is revenue after profits vs royalties, or profit sharing, which seems to be around 8.3%.

Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina

#269

Post by PuppyTailWags »

connorgutman wrote: post #224
Barrin92 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're pirating Stephen King or a 300$ textbook from a guy who has tenure at Harvard I doubt anyone probably including the author cares but a fair amount of authors aren't making any more than you make. Friend of mine published her own graphic novel basically living in her parents attic and a day after it was out someone had ripped it and thrown it on a comic piracy site. That's not ethical. If you live on a 12-15…

I appreciate your sentiment, and trust me I really do want to support people like your friend, but no I literally do not have any money for recreational activities (and if I did I would buy a videogame or boardgame because it would last longer). I make $13.50 / h (which is above minimum wage here in Arizona) and go to school full-time. Rent is $1,000 (absolute cheapest I have found in my college town), groceries are…

Checking out from a library and grabbing a pirated version are different in that checking out from a library generates demand. The library may respond by buying additional copies of a given work, and you can put in requests to your local library to buy work if they don't currently stock it. Even if a library refuses to buy the work, it's common for libraries to loan works to each other-- so a library from another city or further out may buy the book and let you borrow it for example. It all generates demand for libraries to buy more.

Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina

#270

Post by rex_lupi »

dchuk wrote: post #219

(Hypothetically) Couldn’t this concept be built out in a much more decentralized way, where there’s a desktop app you install that is basically a BitTorrent client and a search interface, and then the app synchronizes with all other desktop apps to keep a SQLite database updated with all of the book meta data, and then each user also contributes some amount of disk space (let’s say 1gb) that the app automatically man…

There's IPFS
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