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

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

#341

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

kibwen wrote: post #130
throwAGIway wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an author sells the rights and does, should the buyer automatically lose what they bought? Sounds like that would severely decrease what authors can earn, especially older ones.

There's no reason that "selling copyrights" needs to a be a thing. If the author themself wants to profit from their work, sure, but once they die, that's it, and there's no excuse for it to not be in the public domain at that point.

> If the author themself wants to profit from their work, sure, but once they die, that's it, and there's no excuse for it to not be in the public domain at that point.

So if Disney wants to make a TV show out of your novel series and you turn them down, I suppose they now have an alternative way of making the problem disappear and getting the outcome they wanted...

Joking aside, this idea really seems to create a perverse incentive to make authors die sooner.

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

#342

Post by johnnyanmac »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #287
chii wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Copyright is literally the opposite of property rights. Why is that? Property rights, like copyright, is merely a societal construct that have been agreed upon (via legislative processes). There are countries today that does not respect copyright (or impose their own copyright rules), just like they do so for property rights. Therefore, this copyright is _exactly_ like property rights. In fact, copyright is slightl…

Property rights solve the problem of physical goods being rivalrous. We can't both eat the same portion of food; if one person has it another doesn't. Information is not rivalrous in that way: an additional person having it doesn't take it away from anyone else. Many people can read the same (e-)book. There are other reasons why societies originally granted a completely artificial temporary monopoly on information: t…

>Information is not rivalrous in that way: an additional person having it doesn't take it away from anyone else.

Not literally, but in every other sense, yes. It does. You make a great idea, and someone with more money, time, and resources will mass produce your product. They become ubiquitous with the product and the creator is now disincentized from sharing more potentially great ideas.We use copyright to make sure creators aren't disincentized.

The problem isn't scarcity, but falls into the same core issue. Lots of people want thing, but the owner wants either security or compensation that it's their thing.

>Emphasis on "might" want: it's not obvious that that's the correct tradeoff today

I'd still say so. More so today than before where it's only gotten much more expensive to live. Now we go to people outcopying each other and the creator is simply homeless.

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

#343

Post by MiscIdeaMaker99 »

lupire wrote: post #142
hysan wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question since I don’t know much about inheritance. Don’t things like houses, stocks, etc get taxed in certain places? Whereas I don’t think copyright does? In a way, that is similar to having to give property away upon death (can’t pay the tax, forced to get rid of it).

Income is taxed, obviously. Copyright is taken away, originally after 14 years, now 70(?) years. After the death of the creator

What if the author/copyright holder is a corporation?

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

#344

Post by eat_veggies »

WalterBright wrote: post #334
eat_veggies wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can force starving people into unfair arrangements where the choice is between getting screwed or dying of hunger. You can use the existence of starving people as a threat to keep your work force in line. Sometimes it's not even the starving people that you're making money off of, but their minerals and land. There are a lot of ways to profit from suffering. And sometimes it's not even about profit—it can just fe…

> You can force starving people into unfair arrangements where the choice is between getting screwed or dying of hunger. History shows us that if you want to force starving people to work for you, you also need to shoot the people who refuse. See the Soviet gulags, and the Nazi slave labor camps.

Indeed the arrangement is violent and enforced with terrible violence, and in no way is this incompatible with profits.

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

#345

Post by tsimionescu »

WalterBright wrote: post #300
deaddodo wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Star Trek Replicators were invented today, we're so stupid we'd outlaw them. You're so optimistic to think the law would even be this fair. More like limit access to corporations as "the only custodians responsible enough to wield them", while still allowing the developing world to starve and further increasing their profit margins simultaneously to decreasing working wages and employment levels.

You cannot make money off of people who are starving.

If they're literally at the point of starvation, maybe true - though famines often happen when people simply can't get access to food, even if they have the resources to buy it. So, bringing food to a starving area is unlikely to be bad for business.

However, the more important point is that you can surely make money off of people by becoming their only source of food/money - i.e. they would starve without you, so they accept whatever trickle of resources you deign to assign. This is extraordinarily common throughout history, coupled with a threat of violence that all states use.

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

#346

Post by vwkd »

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…

> In such an economic system, the need for automation would be obvious and once implemented, all people would receive the benefits of automation. This would include such a wide allowance for leisure and free time that authors would no longer need to restrict access to their books to extract profits from their value their shared knowledge creates. All people would be free to do what they will.

Oh, hello there, dear communism. Same dream, same problems. No, this time around you don’t work either.

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

#347

Post by johnnyanmac »

kibwen wrote: post #174
encomiast wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Enough with this nonsense. A book isn't a family business, it's not the family home, it ain't the family farm, it's an artifact that you produced once, it makes no sense to inherit the right to copy it . We allow inheritance to exist because it creates social good by facilitating community continuity. And the best social good when it comes to copyright is to let it expire as soon as possible; let's be honest, "until…

A book is knowledge, knowledge can 100% be a family businesss to be continued. I don't see it as any different from a family restaurant protecting their recipes in an otherwise cutthroat industry.

The terms is too long as is, but I see no reason to not have any posthumous transfer period so the family can figure out what they want to do with their knowledge.

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

#348

Post by johnnyanmac »

kibwen wrote: post #181
encomiast wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We allow inheritance to exist because it creates social good FWIW, this is also why we have copyright. In fact, this is explicitly why we allow copyright in US.

> this is explicitly why we allow copyright in US The founders of the US intended copyright to last for 14 years, with the ability to renew for a single extra 14-year extension. Like patents, copyright was intended to expire quickly in order to serve the good of the public. Thank Disney for fucking that up for everyone. You have refuted your own argument.

We can agree 95 years is too long and also not want to abolish the whole system and let everyone use knowledge immediately without proper compensation.

Nor encorugae assassinations by having stuff go public domain immediately upon death.

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

#349

Post by edwr »

spankalee wrote: post #321
JoshTriplett wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I just don't understand this take. Why should authors not be able to reap the economic benefits from their work? Someone write a novel and everyone else should be able to copy it? It just doesn't make sense to me. Why wouldn't this line of reasoning apply to physical property? Why can't I just go live in any house I want? Take any car I want?

Physical property is zero-sum. If someone else is driving your car, you can't drive it. If you copy my PDF, I still have my PDF and can use it exactly the same. I'm only deprived of a hypothetical profit I could have made by selling that PDF to you (if you would've paid for it).

Imagine I believe that depriving people of hypothetical profits is morally wrong. By the same logic, libraries are stealing from authors by depriving them of potential sales. Peaceful protesters are stealing from retail businesses by obstructing hypothetical sales. Municipal water suppliers are stealing from bottled water companies by depriving hypothetical sales.

My logic wouldn't have internal consistency with societal norms unless I accepted that creative production is somehow unique and special, and warrants special rules to protect hypothetical profits with the threat of lawyers and state-backed violence.

Still, let's assume I agree. There are many scenarios, illegal under intellectual property law, where the author/creator isn't deprived of anything, even a hypothetical profit. Consider that copyright lasts for 70 years after the death of the author. For 70 years, the author isn't deprived of even hypothetical profit, because they're already dead.

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

#350

Post by zjuventus14 »

mardifoufs wrote: post #268
thedevilslawyer wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Absolutely. 2. Information and knowledge is for all. 3. The line to draw is 10 years to commercialize, and then release into public domain. Statute of Anne was 14 years ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne ), but 10 is better for today's age.

Should GPLv3 code be licensed to the public domain after 10 years too?

I mean the goal of GPLv3 and other copyleft licenses is to ensure that innovation building on the licensed work is also made available so others may continue to innovate, no? In my mind reducing copyright terms is aligned to that goal. You can disagree with that goal, but I don’t see anything inconsistent about reducing copyright terms and allowing copyleft to extend for a longer period.

Even so, I think in most cases if a piece of software has been unedited for 10 years it’s either feature-complete or obsolete. If it’s been under development for those 10 years, the original version being released into the public domain probably isn’t a significant threat to innovation by way of closed source improvements being made.

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