There is no greater folly of contemporary human society than the purposeful restriction of such vast and easily shareable repositories of knowledge. Perhaps these schemes made sense in the past but with the advent of the internet and independent groups willing to fund all hosting fees, we should move to models of publishing that do not require this restriction of information. Library genesis exists but necessarily mu…
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We are communicating on a tech stack that TBL gave away freely.
Copyright is communism, it is the exact opposite of property rights.
Who's been jailed for singing Happy Birthday? How many people have been jailed for copyright violations at all? If you're arguing that copyright length should be shortened, I strongly agree. If you're arguing that we should eliminate copyright completely because we should only regulate things you would immediately throw people in jail for, I strongly disagree. As a society we need to be able to regulate some behavior…
No one. Copyright infringement is not a criminal court matter; it is a civil one.
Why does Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer (for example) show up in their 1300 banned books list? It’s not under copyright and is available on Gutenberg. Is this some legal angle I’m missing which benefits the plaintiffs in some way?
A republication of something in the public domain can be copyrighted.
Not sure why this is being downvoted because it is correct.
The product of public domain materials can be copyrighted. For example, if someone were to publish a new book of Tom Sawyer whose text is in the public domain, that book can be copyrighted. Everyone can still publish their own new books of Tom Sawyer using the public domain materials, but noone can copy that book of Tom Sawyer.
So the wife that supported the author can't profit off their assets? The author can't pass on this to children? Should we do the same thing for other property like land and money?
This kind of hectoring discourse is aggressive and rude. You can do better. Authors that get paid can certainly leave the assets they received to their families. They could also transfer ownership of unpublished intangible assets. More than that sucks the general public into a quasi-contractual relationship with a posthumous person; I disclaim fiscal obligations of strangers toward ghosts.
But it's not hectoring (and was not intended to be rude). Authors build things. Just like people who build companies, houses, inventions, etc. There are a lot of theories of how ownership happen, but many (at least in the US and Europe) come from some for of the labor theory of ownership. We own the things we put labor into and create. Unless you have a competing theory of ownership that explains why other assets can benefit the family of those who create things of value after death but not works of art, music, writing, etc., you haven't really made a cogent argument. Calling me rude is just an ad hominem argument, which we shouldn't entertain as serious.
> I’m saying we should legalize the giving away of all books, but must rearrange society to ensure authors and all people still have the support the previously got from the existing system. There’s no way to implement this without taking away the freedoms of the author to choose how to distribute the fruits of his labor. Just because you think the world would be a better place if they all did that does not mean it’s…
In practice, almost no author gets to choose how the fruits of their labor are distributed. Their rights are gobbled up immediately by one of the big publishers, who then dispose of their captive intellectual property as they see fit.
I believe in hundreds, maybe thousands of years, after humanity has finally evolved past our current monkey mentality, future historians will look back at this time period in awe: "They had the technology to make the sum of all human knowledge available to everyone... And they blew it! Further, they had the means to feed everyone, clothe everyone, house everyone, but they just walked away in the other direction, pure…
Europeans and Americans are now taxing green technology, which they said in the past they want, because it is built in another country...
Because they don't want to be dependent on another country for energy infrastructure.
> "I understand that publishers and authors have to make a profit, but most of the material I am trying to access is written by people who are dead and whose publishers have stopped printing the material," wrote one IA fan from Boston.
This really is the crux of the problem. Copyright should be "use it or lose it." If you don't make your books readily available, then you should have no right to demand copies of your book be removed from places like IA. It's not like these publishers are losing any money from books that literally nobody can purchase.
Should it be legal for IA to offer this, especially for older and out of print books? Yes, almost certainly. Is it legal? No, not as the law currently stands. You can support Robin Hood, but you shouldn't be shocked when Robin Hood is caught and sent to jail. It was a mistake and a huge legal risk for IA to do this. It could easily have brought down the whole organisation, and all that they've archived to date. I wis…
> Should it be legal for IA to offer this, especially for older and out of print books? Yes, almost certainly
No, not “almost certainly.”
I think they pushed the limit of what should be legal, especially since they were digitizing print books and lending those out as ebooks.
There is no greater folly of contemporary human society than the purposeful restriction of such vast and easily shareable repositories of knowledge. Perhaps these schemes made sense in the past but with the advent of the internet and independent groups willing to fund all hosting fees, we should move to models of publishing that do not require this restriction of information. Library genesis exists but necessarily mu…
Most financially successful humans only care how to increase their already huge amount of money. they do not give a flying fuck about advancing humanity as a whole.