541–550 of 559 posts
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It's possible. My only experience is with vintage newspapers that were allowed to dry out, and then when trying to open them just shatter like a carbonized volcano scroll.
Though newspapers are printed on some of the lowest quality paper possible, so they're probably suffering from other issues than just dryness.
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Well imagine you write a book in your 20s or 30s and it only becomes popular after a couple of decades. The publisher gets to pocket all the money. Somebody decides to make a movie based on your book? You get nothing at all from it... The movie bit would be problematic even for books that were reasonably popular at the time. e.g the Witcher adaption came out almost exactly 20 years after the last book, for GOT it was…
This is an edge case. The vast majority of intellectual output loses value extremely fast. If a new Kafka comes along and their writing becomes popular 30 years after publication, they will have 0 issues getting a fat contract for a new book. Justifications for copyright are always built on edge cases, seemingly moral justifications of an empirically immoral practice. Yes, it'd be nice if a single handicapped mother…
How is it empirically immoral? Historically it was one of the best things to have have happened to creative professional in history. Before it writer could make a living by publishing books unless he was independently wealth or had wealthy patrons to support him.
> Justifications for copyright are always built on edge cases
No they are based on the assumption that humans are generally rational and more likely to create content if they can make money by doing that.
> The vast majority of intellectual output loses value extremely fast.
Well that's great.. but then it means that your argument is mostly pointless since if that content has no value why are you bothered by the author retaining the ownership of it. Who would benefit from it entering public domain?
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No, we're just telling you your moral intuition is absurd.
Yes, clearly it's completely absurd to think that shredding rare books to more cheaply train LLMs is anything but a moral good, which is why there is this entire thread is full of people jumping through hoops to explain how it's technically legal (and therefore fine) and "you wouldn't have bought those books anyway" (I suppose we don't have the choice anymore!) and, most amusingly, "they're actually becoming digitize…
To the extent the information in a book is something to preserve, this scanning is a good thing.
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Well imagine you write a book in your 20s or 30s and it only becomes popular after a couple of decades. The publisher gets to pocket all the money. Somebody decides to make a movie based on your book? You get nothing at all from it... The movie bit would be problematic even for books that were reasonably popular at the time. e.g the Witcher adaption came out almost exactly 20 years after the last book, for GOT it was…
So? Imagine you build a house and it only increases in value after you sold it? Imagine you invent a new kind of computer memory and it only becomes wildly profitable after the patent expires. The purpose of copyright is NOT to let the original author capture all value of their creations. And even independently of copyright "with the blessing of the original author" IS a selling point that will give authors ability t…
How is this relevant? We are not talking about the author selling the copyright of their work and then someone making more money than they did from it...
> The purpose of copyright is NOT to let the original author capture all value of their creations.
What is it then?
> And even independently of copyright "with the blessing of the original author" IS a selling point
Well that gives way less bargaining power to the author and even if they get paid anything by the corporation profiting from their work it would be much less than if they retained copyright.
> And any new works they create will automatically gain much more attention after their past works become popular
Well if you are happy to work for free while someone profits from your effort for "exposure" that's something you are free to do.
> without restricting everyone else's speech.
How is copyright restricting anyeone's speech? Everyone is free to create original content if they want to.
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Well, an oracle except for that part in the same book where unlimited access to the internet made all children prodigies self-motivated by their love of learning.
I don't know that that's an accurate description of the circumstances in the books. They were born into a world of ever-present and almost-ubiquitous connectivity, and heavily encouraged to string together modular black boxes to build new things. This didn't make them prodigies, it just kept them from falling behind. They lived in a world where even the physical shape of their schools wasn't stable and reliable. When…
The form and maybe even the content of electronics in school may echo, sure, but the results sure don't.
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If Elon Musk is dying of thirst then the price of that glass of water is set at (pinky to side of mouth) one million dollars.
Doing that would be considered deeply immoral and sociopathic in any sane culture. Do you really want to live in a society that finds such attitudes acceptable? Instead of blindly jumping on a manipulated outrage bandwagon, people would do well to maybe read some of those old books, not even the rare ones - they tend to contain plenty of parables and stories explaining basics of morality and civilized conduct. We use…
Me, as a software engineer, will do research on a company to determine how much they can afford to pay me before giving them my salary range.
And almost every SAAS company charges people differently depending on their needs, even if the underlying software is identical between customers.
So no, I don't think it's inherently immoral to charge different prices to people depending on their ability to pay or use cases. It can be, but it's not a defacto standard.
And the competition, so they dont have to shred 2 or more copies?
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A friend proposed that copyright should just die with the author and / or their spouse and I'm left agreeing. I want books and music to be less strict on copyright. Some of my favorite YouTube channels break down music and songs, and go as far as recreating beats / tracks from famous hip hop songs, but someone at a record label company dings every one of their videos, they can barely sample a few seconds, its VERY CL…
> copyright should just die with the author That would have a few undesirable consequences... for example, you wouldn't hire a 70 year old writer for your commercial project no matter how brilliant they are. The complexity of our legal system is in many cases justified. The problems are often the numbers (duration of copyright protection etc.)
And yet, practically all over the world, 70- to 80-year-old men are being hired for leadership positions to run the world. Regardless of how brilliant they are.
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I think this misconstrus what public domain is. It provides a freedom to circulate, but not access to the material. It is not a public owned resource. Turning a copy over to the public or state might be an interesting requirement for obtaining a copyright, but instituting that fix for new works now would have a 70 year lag time. Think of it this way, if I copyright a book and put it in my dresser for 70 years, that d…
>Turning a copy over to the public or state might be an interesting requirement for obtaining a copyright This has been a requirement in the US since 1790. It is called mandatory deposit: https://www.copyright.gov/help/faq/mandatory_deposit.html They don't keep every book though.
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Easier to send them through a duplex scanner (or put them in a flatbed one if they are fragile). Cheaper than buying the automated ones with the page turning robot arm. I have done it at home for my books since the mid-00s.
Do you purchase every book two times, or do you have a home devoid of physical books that you enjoy? Genuinely curious
Most books I would rather have a digital copy. I had four or five book cases full of stuff and it makes moving difficult.
I originally started scanning 20 years ago when it was more difficult to find PDFs of basically whatever you want. Now it is only random old books I find at the used shop or online for cheap and somehow cannot get from archive.org or elsewhere.