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

> make every thread on HN

Only in response to posts that extol the virtues of collectivism and/or how bad freedom is. It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it :-)

> Tell me your secrets Walter

Too bad it seems to be a secret that free markets are far more successful. My dad was a finance professor at a college in his later years. He said students would tell him from time to time that they had never heard of a case for free markets before. Isn't that amazing for people that lived their whole life in a free market country?

I remember one person complained to me that I was "ramming freedom down his throat!" It boggles the mind.

Note that I don't attack or berate people. Only ideas.

dang knows about me. You can ask him.

In my view, we don't reward labour, we reward its output. And unlike a physical object or consumable material, the utility of this type of knowledge seem to lie in its novelty (i.e. it's not already available elsewhere). Happy to be corrected.

That's the thing, though. IBM faded into... A 62B earnings call for 2023. I sure wish that's how I could fade if I sold out.

Not being in the limelight doesn't mean these old juggernaut aren't still making more money than some small countries. Very few companies that you feel are "dead" are truly in dire straits financially. They've mad their money and still make a non-negligible amount today in the background

> Should we apply that logic to gplv3 code too?

Well the GPL code was never being sold in the first place, so these rules might not apply at all. And it's still available the same way it always has been, so that suggests no need for intervention. Alternatively it would make sense to treat source code differently from books and photos and music and movies.

> lose its license after an arbitrary period of time

Of course GPL code would become public domain after an arbitrary period of time, that's how public domain works. In the year 2024, why shouldn't anyone be able to reuse 1997 linux code or pieces of windows 95 in their own programs?

There will always be nigh-altruistic people, but I'm talking more in tiers than absolute:

1. How many people can and do become experts?

2. How many of those experts interact at all outside of their career? Even just posting about work rants on social media?

3. Of 2), how many take the time to author any sort of content on the side? From an unknown blog to a conference talk to podcasts, contributing to open source,, etc. we can break this down further to those who do it outside of the company sponsoring them to do so.

4. Of 3), how many go on to extensively share knowledge? In things like journals or technical deep dives or books? Things that take months of the writing process to formalize

5. And lastly how many of 4) would happen without any sort of incentive structure? No grants, no compensation, no time off work to do this, etc.

I'm mostly talking about group 5 here, and then dividing it into 6) how many of those would then be okay with people (mostly other companies) immediately implementing those ideas, potentially making millions while they may not even get shallow platitudes of thanks? It feels like exploitation of their knowledge, and depending on the product it may indeed be) have some ethical quandary the creator fundamentally disagrees with. But it's for "the advancement of humanity" so the just need to accept that and let people extract their knowledge.

>? It seems to me that a lot of those experts become experts despite the incentive structures that they are in

It'll vary by industry, yes. I'm sure authors don't write expecting to make the next Dune. But in the context of this audience: I have definitely seen enough discussion here and on other social media that I wouldn't be uncomfortable asserting that a good 70% of tech workers would not be here without high compensation to education ratio (and I apologize for not providing any hard evidence, this is simply a gut feeling from my own statistical samples from years of discourse). Many people are indeed here for the money first and foremost.

>Maybe if we could let people do what they could become an expert in, we would all be better off.

I don't disagree, I'd love a post scarcity society that doesn't need to perform labor to survive. But that's an even loftier goal than abolishing copyright.

I can see other crowds completely disagreeing with the notion of "not all knowledge is equal", however. Definitely a savory group out there that believe that everyone needs to contribute to society somehow and not "leech off our taxes".