251–260 of 459 posts
I can read the books and acquire the knowledge from my kindle. If Amazon removes it, I can just pirate it?
I get the theoretical argument but as a very pragmatic person it just seems like tilting against the windmill.
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Yes, exactly as I stated --- there are few guarantees in life. So use your best judgment and place your bets accordingly. Personally, I'm betting on those who are highly incentivized and have the resources and structure needed to sustain reliable service.
Who is more highly incentivized than oneself, to keep their valuable data and treasured memories safe and sustained?
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I personally prefer owning my content, physical books, and having local copies. But if I’m being honest, I think this claim that if you don’t own the book you don’t have the knowledge and society will turn into digital feudalism is hyperbole. Knowledge is proliferating faster than ever, becoming more accessible than ever, and it’s easier than ever before to get the info that you’re searching for, even in this streami…
I think when people say "digital feudalism", they usually mean that the spaces where we do things digitally are increasingly owned by private entities that operate them for their own benefit. It's an analogy which can't be expected to align perfectly with historical feudalism.
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I see this claim often but bypassing DRM is an inevitability to the point where it's commonly done within hours of a new release simply for the fun of doing it. And to quote Gabe Newell (founder and owner of Valve, the company that operates Steam): > "We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem," he said. "If a pirate offers a product…
If you have 2 options, get the product for paying a market price, and get the product for free, I think 90%+ of all humans will get it for free. The only thing stopping them is friction and consequences. I’m not as optimistic as you, that the only reason people pirate is because it’s available in their geography (why not use a VPN and buy it then). Some people will pay for stuff, I never use pirated stuff, but I’m pr…
You are just pessimistic.
Afaik more or less the same thing happened with spotify and music pirating
No you never owned them, only a really permissive (for amazon) license that permitted access to them.
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> Information is proliferating and is more accessible, but a huge amount of that information is lies and manipulation I'm not sure that really counts as knowledge. I don't think that's any different to any other period of time when communication was suddenly able to expand. Gutenberg's press didn't come with an automatic lie detector that meant the printed word could only contain true facts and nothing else. Instead,…
it has never been easier to poison the well of knowledge at the scale possible today. the internet enabled instantaneous dissemination whatever version of reality tickles your fancy. the effort required is also minimal. This has never been possible in the past.
Is there something materially different here with the internet? Are we now entering an era of too much free speech? Is it now too easy for us to communicate with each other? And if so, what's the cutoff? What arbitrary barrier would we need to put in place to make the internet more like the printing press and safe to use again?
It's "skin in the game." Right now, cloud services fail horribly at much of what they promise or merely imply; safety, security, long term availability, etc.
And so, to make them not fail at this, they must be punished when they fail at this. The other side of this coin is probably "you have to pay them," but that's not so bad either.