91–100 of 215 posts
I wonder why the very concept of public library is not illegal at the first place.. I mean, imagine this concept is being popularized at first in the modern era. I'm pretty sure there's a huge opposition, using the very same argument as digital pirates & AI art debate : "It could damage author's income! People will just go read it for free in public library instead of buying it! Public library is morally wrong and sh…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My layman's understanding of copyright law says you didn't commit a crime, but whoever sent you the book did commit a crime. My understanding is that it's not illegal to download a book, it's illegal to distribute a book. (Or other copyrighted work.)
No, it is illegal to download (make a copy of) the book. To be legal, you would have to merely view the book without making a copy. This is the operating principle behind all those video streaming sites. This isn't a comment on what OP should have done.
A question about z-lib, libgen, and regular libraries Suppose I check an e-book out of my local library. Because Reasons, the library doesn't "own" unlimited "copies" of the book, so each "copy" can only be checked out to one patron at a time and if there are enough holds then a patron can't renew a checked out book. In short, ebooks in libraries are just like regular paper books, except to you don't have leave your…
Now, I think this question is nuanced. For example, let's take Harry Potter. That book has sold millions. In my mind, J.K. Rowling has already been rewarded by humanity for her work many times over, so if you were to pirate her book then I think that is a far lesser evil than pirating a book written by an author who has barely made any sales.
Basically, I view the question of piracy as follows: (a) have we rewarded the author enough for that specific work? and (b) if not, then it's not right to pirate their book, and I should buy it. I think everyone should ask themselves that question.
The same with movies. Marvel movies are a money-making machine and they have more than enough money to keep them going. An indie film much less so.
The question of whether an author has been rewarded enough is tricky. For example, if Elon Musk wrote a book, I would have no problem pirating it in a microsecond because society rewarded him enough. But maybe that's not so clear-cut because the editor might be poor. Thus, I think it's safer to go on the basis of sales rather than the wealth of the author, except of course if the author is self-published. In that case, if they are rich, then who cares. Of course, what is rich? Well it's hard to give exact numbers but if they have 10 million dollars that's definitely rich enough.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve dived deep into IPFS and built several prototypes on top of it. It ended up not being performant enough for me, and that was after heavily modifying the codebase so that it was true p2p browser & server (their webrtc transport had a lot of issues and they didn’t seem too interested in it, but my needs required it as a backbone). The security was also a concern, and the scaling had issues. Pinning millions of sma…
Honestly I think Consensys/IPFS/Libp2p is just some corporatized way to derail real P2P and decentralization. Their libraries are total garbage. Lots of complicated code that simply doesn't work. No documentation. I mean look how much IPFS and Libp2p is pumped but IT DOESN'T WORK. IPNS is a joke. All way overengineered crap that does everything but actually nothing. Look at the $$$ and pedigree behind Consensys it's…
ConsenSys was founded by Joe Lubin, and is the corporate entity behind MetaMask, Infura, etc. It counts MasterCard and JP Morgan as investors.
Protocol Labs was founded by Juan Benet and is the primary sponsor of IPFS and the dev team behind Filecoin. They're funded primarily from the private token sales of FIL.
Agree with the sibling comment that the focus on modularity and solving "all of the things" rather than focusing on adoption seems to be a pattern with Protocol Labs, though I'm a big fan of what they're trying to build.
I wonder why the very concept of public library is not illegal at the first place.. I mean, imagine this concept is being popularized at first in the modern era. I'm pretty sure there's a huge opposition, using the very same argument as digital pirates & AI art debate : "It could damage author's income! People will just go read it for free in public library instead of buying it! Public library is morally wrong and sh…
That is a crude rendition of the AI art debate, and also of piracy. A public library buys the book. Many people can read it, but it guarantees one purchase, and often many libraries will buy the book. It also limits the amount of readers to those who live relatively nearby. Books were also traditionally written with the ideas of libraries in the author's mind, and also many authors benefited themselves from libraries…
Is the catalog on IPFS different to the catalog available via one of the libgen front-ends? I just performed a search on both for one title and it found it right away on a libgen front-end, but not here.
Is the catalog on IPFS different to the catalog available via one of the libgen front-ends? I just performed a search on both for one title and it found it right away on a libgen front-end, but not here.
Libgen is not the same as Z-library, there are many books on Z that are not available on libgen.