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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

#411

Post by Jensson »

mandmandam wrote: post #395
WalterBright wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm sure your "dirty job" makes sense to you , and it's clear you even feel very righteous about it. Be that as it may, ideological crusades such as this are explicitly disallowed on here. "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity." Dang has been very clear on that, many times - whatever he "knows about you". You really think it's "impossible" for a corporation with St…

> Be that as it may, ideological crusades such as this are explicitly disallowed on here. "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity."

That goes for both sides, every time someone repeats the meme "capitalism bad!" they are perpetuating their own crusade, at that time the gloves are off and it is free to engage with them. You can see it in this thread where people started out by trash talking capitalism, at that point it is ok to go and defend capitalism according to HN guidelines even if you do it in every thread where people start attacking capitalism.

Its those who start attacking capitalism everywhere that needs to stop if this happens too often, since they are almost always the instigators.

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

#412

Post by throwthrowuknow »

geysersam wrote: post #333
JoshTriplett wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 curre…

A reason for subsiding this group but not others is that our economic system is so bad at utilizing the potential of their work. It's literally free to distribute all books/newspapers/magazines to all people in the world. Why aren't we? It's common to have state intervention in markets that are unable to utilize resources efficiently on their own. About UBI, sure! The point of my comment was that this isn't a "fancif…

How would you determine if someone qualifies as an author deserving full salary? Can I become an author by simply meeting a word count quota? What prevents a large portion of the population from quitting their jobs and becoming authors instead?

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

#413

Post by sneak »

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…

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

#414

Post by throwthrowuknow »

throw10920 wrote: post #277
theendisney4 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 immora…

There were a vast number of technical books on the internet archive, that was mostly what I used it for. They’re not easily accessible elsewhere, maybe pirated from random torrent sites but they’re not discoverable or easily searched.

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

#415

Post by Kye »

Dalewyn wrote: post #154
Kye wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep. It's one of the more important parts of copyright! Nobody will ever hear about most stuff in the public domain. Letting people benefit from hauling it out of obscurity with updates is good for the commons. Disney took it to an extreme, but I probably never would have heard of the stories they pulled from if someone didn't make hit cartoon movies based on them.

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

#416

Post by throwaway14356 »

WillAdams wrote: post #35
pessimizer wrote: post #23

With this judgement, does this force them to write a tool that determines whether a book is in print or not? Are there any good webservices, or will they just have to scrape Amazon, etc.? I've noticed a lot of their lending library is definitely out of print; is "out-of-print and public domain" just the ars writer's interpretation of the judgement? If it isn't, a tighter awareness of what is in print and out of print…

[flagged]

while it is also true that it is harder to get money for any print if there is anything else available at all.

It makes it beneficial to not reprint anything or otherwise be available.

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

#417

Post by throwthrowuknow »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #330
incompatible wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should we turn information into a "product", introducing scarcity where none is required? It's just a misguided attempted to force every part of society into a capitalist system, regardless of whether it makes any sense. It will probably fail in the long run anyway, since who wants to pay for something that they can get for free, even it involves circumventing the rules. How many here would pay $30 to take a casu…

>Why should we turn information into a "product", introducing scarcity where none is required Because expert information comes from experts who are paid a lot to do stuff not involving the authoring of their ideas. And we need to incentivize them to get said valuable information. How many people here have some novel expertise in their fields? How many would help produce technical articles pro Bono? Or for pay but end…

It’s a shame we still haven’t built a simple, universal direct payment system that anyone can use to send money to anyone else. By simple I mean my grandparents can figure it out themselves so don’t say bitcoin.

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

#418

Post by throwthrowuknow »

hliyan wrote: post #384
johnnyanmac wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between perpetuality and "1 year is too long". A year may barely be enough time to get your IP to market. Meanwhile competitors will outproduce you, sit on it, and flood the market. >Another way to look at this: unlike physical property, what you pay for is the novelty. And that wears off. In my eyes, I pay to show demand to the creator to keep doing this thing. We can certainly argue if authors…

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.

Not novelty otherwise random text would be valuable.

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

#419

Post by bongobingo1 »

adrianN wrote: post #288
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah some Ferengi actually did this in an episode of TNG! They showed up on a random planet with a replicator and then used their ability to produce anything as a means to subjugate the population.

I believe that was Voyager and the Ferengi were stranded in the delta quadrant after the incident with the stable-on-one-end wormhole in TNG. Imo it wasn’t the worst strategy in their situation. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/False_Profits_(episode)

Fun episode title.

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

#420

Post by Jensson »

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…

> If Star Trek Replicators were invented today, we're so stupid we'd outlaw them.

History shows the labor unions and leftists would also be against replicators. We see that today with how people are very against AI advancements that would put artists out of jobs, they would rather halt progress than lose their jobs.

Of course corporations that stand to lose out are also against it, but don't kid yourself labor movements are just as greedy and anti progress when progress would inconvenience them.

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