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Judge decides against Internet Archive

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Re: Judge decides against Internet Archive

#791

Intellectual property is an unnatural, made up construct that will one day be seen as ridiculous as absolute monarchy is today. If we are going to allow it and penalize people who are doing natural human things like sharing with friends, there has to be a specific benefit to society in every instance. For example, pay taxes on copyrights and patents, increasing every year to reflect disturbance caused to society.

"Intellectual property is an unnatural, made up construct" So, what laws and constructs of civilized life are not an unnatural made up constructs? You seem to be suggesting there is some natural law that excludes things like intellectual property. Which natural laws, specifically, are you talking about?

Real physical scarcity is that law. Intellectual property is logically reducible to ownership of numbers. Some numbers are illegal for man to know. You can't write down some numbers on a piece of paper without someone else's permission. Or maybe you can but you can't give the paper to someone else. That's how stupid all of this is.

Re: Judge decides against Internet Archive

#792
post #642
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting, from that section: Nor does IA’s promise not to lend simultaneously its lawfully acquired print copies and its unauthorized reproductions help its case. As an initial matter, IA has not kept its promise. Although the Open Library’s print copies of the Works in Suit are non-circulating, IA concedes that it has no way of verifying whether Partner Libraries remove their physical copies from circulat…

Oh, then this case was found on the facts. (They are doing a thing that pretty clearly violates fair use.) I like the IA, but I’m happy this was the screw up. It should greatly weaken the precedent this ruling creates.

If this were the only argument, I would agree with you. However, there’s other arguments, many of which are quite general in nature.

Re: Judge decides against Internet Archive

#793

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, IA has followed a similar tragic arc as Google Books, another martyr to the dream of a truly 21st century library. What's most tragic about it to me is that that vast majority of works affected are "zombie" copyright works that have no actual commercial value. Someone, somewhere holds the copyright, but no one has sold a copy in years or decades. For the sake of protecting the tiny sliver of commercially valuabl…

Seriously. Has there been any kind of movement towards a law that would automatically put zombie works into the public domain? It really doesn't seem unreasonable that if a book, film, recording, or video game hasn't been generally available for sale over the past 5 or 10 years it becomes public domain. Use it or lose it, in other words. Although it might really only apply to past works. Because while physical books…

Just shortening copyright would mostly mitigate this issue. If it was 10 years after creation then the most you have to wait is a decade. It may be nice to also have a specific exception for "abandoned" works but at least 10 years would be a solid fallback with no need to do difficult research like finding the authors and if they have died or proving that a work qualifies as abandoned.

Re: Judge decides against Internet Archive

#794
post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, IA has followed a similar tragic arc as Google Books, another martyr to the dream of a truly 21st century library. What's most tragic about it to me is that that vast majority of works affected are "zombie" copyright works that have no actual commercial value. Someone, somewhere holds the copyright, but no one has sold a copy in years or decades. For the sake of protecting the tiny sliver of commercially valuabl…

Zombie works are free to share if there truly is no rightsholder pressing claims.

But there is always a risk that the rights holder rises up from the grave and sues you. With proper abandoned work exceptions you would be safe as long as the rights holders are not currently distributing.

Re: Judge decides against Internet Archive

#795
post #408

Initially I'm enraged against the publishers, the judge and the system in general as many of you, but they are not the issue, while I can't talk on behalf of IA, I don't see this as a fight against the publishers, but a fight against broken business models flourishing because and protected by broken laws meant to protect earlier broken business models The current law is broken, we know that, but most of us don't gras…

[deleted]

Re: Judge decides against Internet Archive

#796

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Piracy (stealing) _has_ to cause loss of revenue. It’s right in the definition. There’s no way around it. There’s also a moral component to all this. Regardless of the calculus, if a creator says they don’t want to give their product away for free, that they’d like to be paid for every copy, we should respect that.

> Piracy (stealing) _has_ to cause loss of revenue. It’s right in the definition. There’s no way around it. No that's not, that's an urban legend, feel free to point me to some aggregated research studies proving this, the copyright lobbies never managed to prove that during multiple decades. Repeating something over and over again on TV by paid lobbyist doesn't make it true, you have to prove it. > Regardless of the…

If I produce a song and sell 1,000 copies for $1 each, but 1,000 copies are stolen by people who don’t pay me $1 for their copy, I get $1,000 instead of $2,000.

That’s just how the math works out. Same as any other form of theft.

Re: Judge decides against Internet Archive

#797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Piracy (stealing) _has_ to cause loss of revenue. It’s right in the definition. There’s no way around it. No that's not, that's an urban legend, feel free to point me to some aggregated research studies proving this, the copyright lobbies never managed to prove that during multiple decades. Repeating something over and over again on TV by paid lobbyist doesn't make it true, you have to prove it. > Regardless of the…

If I produce a song and sell 1,000 copies for $1 each, but 1,000 copies are stolen by people who don’t pay me $1 for their copy, I get $1,000 instead of $2,000. That’s just how the math works out. Same as any other form of theft.

To start with, most of the copyright holders are actually dead since copyright right now is very long. That's going to be hard to state that you are preventing new Beatles songs by pirating the Beatles, they are not going to produce any new songs, regardless of what you do.

Then in economics, free is different from any other price (even 1 cent), they have different behaviour and cannot be used interchangeably as demonstrated again and again during research. So no, your example is wrong, those people wouldn't have bought the song anyway and the total revenue from those people would be zero.

Re: Judge decides against Internet Archive

#798

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we don't replace the current flavour of democracy with something better there won't be much society in a few years (10s, 100s). The next level beyond democracy is tiered, time-limited, and retractable sortism [1]: some kind of a return to roots (Athenian democracy), but with a twist. A quick way to sketch it would look like this: (i) no functionaries: run all the administrative jobs not in an office by Margaret an…

> If we don't replace the current flavour of democracy with something better there won't be much society in a few years The current flavour of democracy is already not democratic as practiced in most countries (perhaps Switzerland is an exception). In the US it's career politicians with little accountability, billionaires and huge coporations with huge influence, paying politicians, media owned by said millionaires o…

>fossilized two party system supported by all kinds of powers and structures that the voters aren't allowed to change

The original system wasn't two party. In fact, the first Chief Executive (President of the United States) on leaving Office, specifically warned the populace against anything remotely resembling the formation of political parties.

The populace quickly ignored that advice, and carved up the country between Federalists and Anti-Federalists who either vied to achieve the Supreme Seat of Power to enact their Will, or hold that Seat so no one would be able to avail themselves of it.

Re: Judge decides against Internet Archive

#799

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, authors should be glad to be paid $7.99 - once - every time they write a book, and be happy about it. Anything further is just proof of their obsolesence.

I would like to watch a Star Trek episode featuring you as the misguided extremist trying to destroy replicators because they put cooks out of jobs. Give it a few years and I'll be able to prompt GPT-9 for exactly that. At any rate, the future is here. You're free to stick your head in the sand if you wish, but most of us think it's a lot of work to do all that digging, and frankly a little silly.

And if we lived in a fictional post-scarcity economy where money didn’t exist, you might have a point. Meanwhile, in the real world, people generally like to earn a living.

Re: Judge decides against Internet Archive

#800

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to watch a Star Trek episode featuring you as the misguided extremist trying to destroy replicators because they put cooks out of jobs. Give it a few years and I'll be able to prompt GPT-9 for exactly that. At any rate, the future is here. You're free to stick your head in the sand if you wish, but most of us think it's a lot of work to do all that digging, and frankly a little silly.

And if we lived in a fictional post-scarcity economy where money didn’t exist, you might have a point. Meanwhile, in the real world, people generally like to earn a living.

We live in a non-fictional post-digital-scarcity society. It is unfortunate that we're still trying to fit the square peg of capitalism into this round hole, but we'll adapt as a society eventually, even if it involves people like you kicking and screaming as they're dragged into the present.

Again, you're free to stick your head in the sand and pretend otherwise, but that just seems like a lot of work to me.

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