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Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

arstechnica.com

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Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#271

Post by theendisney4 »

ysavir wrote: post #204
vineyardmike wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify has a free tier where you can listen to any song for free. YouTube lets you watch almost anything for free. Both of these also pay the creators . There are many more services peddling free content and even covering hosting costs. Libraries are free . We have plenty of completely non-hypothetical non-society-overhauling ways to access information for free. Lots of information is free, lots of it is accessible.…

You're comparing to the free tiers of Spotify and Youtube, which in effect is saying that we should put ads into our books.

I thought the same but imagine we put books in our ads(!) The newspaper is a pretty low effort barely useful thing. We could chop a book by its charters, put ads on every other page and stuff the 20 chapters into peoples mailbox. One per week. They are more likely to go on shelves than the current product has odds for eyeballs before bedding the litterbox.

An idea so terrible it might just work.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#272

Post by geysersam »

throw10920 wrote: post #248
geysersam wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US book market is 0.5% of the GDP. The government could subside every author with the same salary they make today and it would only be a small fraction of the amount we spend on the military.

The US subsidizing the book market would be an incredible waste of my taxes, given that the majority of published works are fiction, political drivel, and non-fiction memoirs that provide near-zero value to "humanity" that the root poster is clutching pearls about. The IA's collection of books they had to remove almost certainly has the same composition, and therefore the same loss in value (roughly zero) after being…

This view is staggering and would (imo) fit well in a comical/dystopic novel by a sufficiently misanthropic author

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#273

Post by Tomte »

snvzz wrote: post #201
andybak wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've no idea what you're trying to say.

Likely a reference to an old search engine (altavista), which of course sucked next to google. Yet, it ironically gave better results than Google does today.

No, to Astalavista, which was also a search engine, but for pirated and other illegal stuff.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#274

Post by theendisney4 »

throw10920 wrote: post #248
geysersam wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US book market is 0.5% of the GDP. The government could subside every author with the same salary they make today and it would only be a small fraction of the amount we spend on the military.

The US subsidizing the book market would be an incredible waste of my taxes, given that the majority of published works are fiction, political drivel, and non-fiction memoirs that provide near-zero value to "humanity" that the root poster is clutching pearls about. The IA's collection of books they had to remove almost certainly has the same composition, and therefore the same loss in value (roughly zero) after being…

Give people a book coupon? Then they can chose what they think important?

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#275

Post by m3kw9 »

ryandrake wrote: post #80
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #25

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…

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…

The country that allowed replicators would be no.1 fairly quickly

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#277

Post by throw10920 »

theendisney4 wrote: post #274
throw10920 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US subsidizing the book market would be an incredible waste of my taxes, given that the majority of published works are fiction, political drivel, and non-fiction memoirs that provide near-zero value to "humanity" that the root poster is clutching pearls about. The IA's collection of books they had to remove almost certainly has the same composition, and therefore the same loss in value (roughly zero) after being…

Give people a book coupon? Then they can chose what they think important?

There's no need.

Memoirs, political books, fiction - no need for the taxpayer to subsidize, people can buy themselves.

Actually useful technical material: already available for free on the internet.

Poor people are not dying on the streets because they can't read the autobiography of the latest president. Tax dollars going to that instead of climate change or cancer research or something similar is incredibly immoral.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#278

Post by KerrAvon »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #235
xattt wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially when another country is undercutting domestic production of others in order to impose an Orwellian ideology.

I think the truth is we just failed to invest in the manufacturing tech and now they’re beating us in the market, so we’re taxing them to make it hard for them to compete. I’d way rather we just invest and outcompete them. I don’t think they’re intentionally undercutting us they just have lower costs from decades of investment that we haven’t been doing ourselves.

The USA absolutely fucked manufacturing into the sun, but that doesn’t come back overnight, and China cheats in ways that we can’t. You have a comment below that seems to indicate you have no clue how bad they have it vs US blue collar workers. You might want to do some reading on that before pontificating on this subject.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#279

Post by JoshTriplett »

geysersam wrote: post #243
Aurornis wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we should move to models of publishing that do not require this restriction of information. It’s interesting how this comment veers into a completely hypothetical overhaul of society in which money doesn’t matter, for reasons which of course are hand-waved away. On one hand: Sure! Sounds great! If someone can reinvent all of society in a way that everyone is free to do whatever they want and not worry about getting…

The US book market is 0.5% of the GDP. The government could subside every author with the same salary they make today and it would only be a small fraction of the amount we spend on the military.

This is true of many, many careers: if you take that career in isolation, you could fund just the people in that career at their current salaries, for a tiny fraction of GDP. That doesn't scale to the entire populace, and there's no good justification for subsidizing this group and not others.

UBI, on the other hand, is entirely feasible, not least of which because it ditches the completely infeasible "at their current salary" in favor of "enough to live, not enough that most people won't want more". And you'd create substantial growth via startups and other creative endeavors. UBI gives everyone the option to try experiments that might not pay off right away.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#280

Post by JoshTriplett »

throw10920 wrote: post #249
hliyan wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of the problems being discussed in sibling comments can be solved to an extent if we limit copyright to its original 14 years. That number was decided in a much, much slower age (1790). In today's world, 14 years should be ample time to monetise most creative work.

Yes, this is the correct solution - reduce copyright term . I don't know if I agree that 14 years is right, but I'm sure that pretty much everyone can agree that 1 year is too short, and 60 years is too long.

1 year is 1 year too long, but reducing to 14 years would at least be an improvement over the current effectively perpetual system..
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