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Z-library founders arrested in Argentina

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Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina

#471

Post by Mezzie »

kennend3 wrote: post #469
Mezzie wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm actually not Canadian, I just did my MLIS there. ;) It is odd that your small towns don't have some kind of consortium agreement. There are benefits and drawbacks to having separate versus consolidated systems. Consolidated systems would, as you note, be more efficient in terms of staff costs and probably allow for materials to travel more easily. On the other hand, a consolidated system can end up only really se…

> But ugh on the building rationale. Without knowing what the building was like before, I can't comment too much (e.g. if there was mold/water damage/etc.) but that does seem like an odd use of funds. There was no library there before it was built.. Right next to city hall at a cost of millions of dollars. Sure, cities need to build and grow but this was a terrible use of money and a decade later it is still an albat…

Sounds like your town has a government/mayor that really wants to look good to their peers (other municipal/small town mayors and city council members) rather than serve their population. Those types of buildings get features in all their stupid trade magazines, etc. And then the gov officials use them to hobnob with each other.

My bet on the Chinese books is that it's one of the librarians' special interests. It's not uncommon to have some % of the buying budget set aside for staff recs (that allows for some inclusion of things people may not have known they'd like), and if the system is small enough for one person to be doing all the buying, she might have overspent on her interests.

The cynical answer would be that the librarian wants to have the books so she can write an article on foreign language collection development and angle for a job elsewhere: Very few small town librarians grew up in their small towns and it's a very gentrified profession. She might be angling for a position at the VPL or TPL systems.

Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina

#473

Post by dredmorbius »

phpisthebest wrote: post #314
dredmorbius wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who was it who loaded that term? The social justice advocates, or their opponents?

Both. Just like many other political labels, they start out as one thing then more and more people start using the labels and soon their orginal meaning is lost and have become something else This is caused by both advocates and opponents of the various causes, positions, and world views

Dating back to 1824, the term social justice refers to justice on a societal level.[11] From the early 1990s to the early 2000s, social-justice warrior was used as a neutral or complimentary phrase, as when a 1991 Montreal Gazette article describes union activist Michel Chartrand as a "Quebec nationalist and social-justice warrior".[1]

Katherine Martin, the head of U.S. dictionaries at Oxford University Press, said in 2015 that "[a]ll of the examples I've seen until quite recently are lionizing the person".[1] As of 2015, the Oxford English Dictionary had not done a full search for the earliest usage.[1] Merriam-Webster dates the earliest use of the term to 1945.[6]

...

According to Martin, the term switched from primarily positive to negative around 2011, when it was first used as an insult on Twitter.[1] The term first appeared on Urban Dictionary in 2011 and on the Something Awful forums in 2013.[7] According to Know Your Meme, the pejorative term "keyboard warrior", which describes a person who is unreasonably angry and hides behind their keyboard, may be a precursor to the "social justice warrior".[7] The negative connotation has primarily been aimed at those espousing views adhering to social progressivism, cultural inclusivity, or feminism.[12][1][2] Scott Selisker writes in New Literary History that the SJW is often criticised as the "stereotype of the feminist as unreasonable, sanctimonious, biased, and self-aggrandizing".[12] Use of the term has also been described as attempting to degrade the motivations of the person accused of being an SJW, implying that their motives are "for personal validation rather than out of any deep-seated conviction".[3][9] Allegra Ringo in Vice writes that "in other words, SJWs don't hold strong principles, but they pretend to. The problem is, that's not a real category of people. It's simply a way to dismiss anyone who brings up social justice."[9]

The term's negative use became mainstream due to the 2014 Gamergate harassment campaign ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice_warrior>

Numerous sources cited, notably:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/10...>

https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/what-does-soci...>

https://web.archive.org/web/20160102031743/http://recode.net...>

See also "Social Justice": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice>

Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina

#474

Post by the_arcadian »

null_object wrote: post #9

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…

Media publishers (and I use the term in the broadest sense) knew, going in, that the Internet was designed to distribute and copy information, in many cases completely anonymously. But they embraced the platform and chose that business model because they knew that it would lower their costs dramatically, even once piracy was taken into account, and they've been largely successful.

Also in my experience CEOs really know their businesses, which makes me think they also understand the economics and dynamics of piracy to a greater extent than the rest of us, even pirates. From what observe, I think that they see pirates largely as hobbyists and influencers rather than lost customers or individuals out for economic gain, and are really only concerned with piracy at scale, like in this Z library case.

Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina

#475

Post by dmitriid »

kgwgk wrote: post #468
dmitriid wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So it's rarely done by people who would've paid for the stuff but it's mostly done by people who would have paid (just not as much)? No. People who would pay actually pay for stuff, and very few of those people pirate. People who pirate would not pay for that stuff anyway. The "omg pirating makes it impossible for people to sell their works" has been proven to he false many times over .

> People who pirate would not pay for that stuff anyway. How can then Steam, Nerflix, etc. reduce piracy by orders of magnitude? That means that at least 99% of the people getting stuff without paying would instead... pay?

No. People who wouldn't pay otherwise now have easy and relatively cheap access which reduces the friction so much, it doesn't make sense to scour the web for keygens and cracks and what not.

Now, with a gazillion streaming services we'll see piracy ruse again because of friction and cost.

Or, simply, these services brought in the otherwise non-paying crowd.

We already had this discussed and explained many times over. Why are we at it again?

There was a study commissioned by the EU in 2013 that additionally confirmed this and previous studies. But it was withheld https://consent.yahoo.com/v2/collectConsent?sessionId=3_cc-s...

Quote: "In 2013, the European Commission ordered a €360,000 ($430,000) study on how piracy affects sales of music, books, movies and games in the EU. However, it never ended up showing it to the public except for one cherry-picked section. That's possibly because the study concluded that there was no evidence that piracy affects copyrighted sales, and in the case of video games, might actually help them."

Overall the question is complex, and this is a good study: https://www.ivir.nl/publicaties/download/Global-Online-Pirac... which shows that it's not clear-cut, depends on income and availability etc. And that piracy may have both negative impacts (4% fewer visits to cinema) and positive impacts (increased visits to life concerts etc.)

However, quote, "an increase in illegal consumption over time is found to correlate with an increase in legal consumption and vice versa". The reason is: most decisions are done on the spot, and consumers chose the path of least resistance.

Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina

#476

Post by duxup »

Balgair wrote: post #264
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 actua…

Is there much risk just in reading a cracked book!

Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina

#477

Post by culopatin »

ketzu wrote: post #268
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%.

Imagine working really hard to put content out and you have to agree to a deal of 8% you, 92% the one just distributing it for you. It’s like when artists were complaining that Spotify wasn’t paying them enough when in reality is their label sucking most of the earnings.

Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina

#478

Post by franga2000 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #470
franga2000 wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Tor, the location of the the servers and the identities of the operators are protected. No way for the feds to find them even if both are well within their jurisdiction. Unless the operators make a big mistake, the site should stay up and even if it goes down, there are plenty of other pirates around the world with full copies of the data that could replace the site.

The systems still must exist somewhere in physical space, connected to a public IP network. They require maintainers to continue operating. Bills must be paid. At some point, one or more of these individual SPOF requirements will fail, at which point the service will have failed. There may be other degrading failures prior to this if the system is complex: https://how.complexsystems.fail/ > I'm ... disappointed that…

How is that in any way conflicting with what I wrote? Of course the servers need maintenance and all of that - Tor is what allows the people doing that maintenance and funding to stay outside the reach of law enforcement even if they are on US soil.

Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina

#479

Post by dredmorbius »

franga2000 wrote: post #478
dredmorbius wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The systems still must exist somewhere in physical space, connected to a public IP network. They require maintainers to continue operating. Bills must be paid. At some point, one or more of these individual SPOF requirements will fail, at which point the service will have failed. There may be other degrading failures prior to this if the system is complex: https://how.complexsystems.fail/ > I'm ... disappointed that…

How is that in any way conflicting with what I wrote? Of course the servers need maintenance and all of that - Tor is what allows the people doing that maintenance and funding to stay outside the reach of law enforcement even if they are on US soil.

That presumes the adminstrators exist, given that the site's two principals have been arrested. I refer you again to my initial reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33647659>

Unless you're privy to other information.

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