111–120 of 582 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should an author be forced to give away their work for free? They can already choose to give it away for free if they wish. We already have the Creative Commons licenses, and there are many open textbook projects.
Dead authors can't choose to give away their works, they're dead. Yet someone still owns the rights 60 years later.
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Why should an author be forced to give away their work for free? They can already choose to give it away for free if they wish. We already have the Creative Commons licenses, and there are many open textbook projects.
Dead authors can't choose to give away their works, they're dead. Yet someone still owns the rights 60 years later.
Oh this appeal to the public, pithy empty words about openness and shit. Here's the plain truth: IA ran a gigantic book piracy site during covid. They should've known they won't get away with it. I remember several authors begging them not to do this because it affected their income. I personally thought it monumentally stupid to put the Wayback Machine at risk. They said, there are enough physical books in closed li…
This isn't about their pandemic actions, this is about the controlled digital lending they did for like a decade before COVID. If it were just over the emergency library, the court would end the restrictionless lending and likely issue a fine. Instead, the court ruling was that CDL was illegal, and only mentioned the National Emergency Library to say "as CDL was already illegal, it was also illegal." There also would…
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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"Such a system exists. You can publish a book and give it away freely. But few do. This is book communism and fails for the same reasons as regular communism. It is in nobody’s interest to do any hard work. If you don’t reward great effort, virtually nobody provides it." Why does open source / free software exist then? "Nobody puts in hard word if it's not rewarded" hasnt the cURL guy been maintaining cURL/libcurl fo…
Open source covers a very tiny set of use cases for software. How many paid products have an open source competitor at all? How many have a credible competitor (GIMP isn’t a credible alternative to PhotoShop for the people who pay for it for example). It is far from rendering paid software obsolete. And not nobody. Virtually nobody. Yes open source exists. Out of the hundreds of devs I have worked with, I know one wh…
I'm not sure how we could figure out the numbers, but this just doesn't feel right. A lot of important and key paid products have open source alternatives. Some examples:
* Windows/macOS -> Linux
* Microsoft Office -> LibreOffice
* Adobe Illustrator -> Inkscape
* AutoCAD -> FreeCAD
* SecureCRT -> PuTTY, Urxvt, etc.
* Maya -> Blender
* ESXi -> Proxmox
* VMWare Player -> VirtualBox
Whether they're "credible" depends on the user and their use case. I'm sure there are plenty of things the paid products do better than their open source counterparts, but at the same time, there are likely plenty of users who don't need those features and are perfectly fine with the free alternative.
I don't doubt there are more closed source projects than open source, or that there is closed software with zero open source alternatives - just that the claim that open source is a tiny set of all software use cases doesn't seem right.
>> It is in nobody’s interest to do any hard work. If you don’t reward great effort, virtually nobody provides it.
> And not nobody. Virtually nobody. Yes open source exists.
In 2018, GitHub reported on their blog [0]:
> Today we reached a major milestone: 100 million repositories now live on GitHub. Powering this number is an incredible community. Together, you’re 31 million developers from nearly every country and territory in the world, collaborating across 1.1 billion contributions.
I think it's safe to say there's more than virtually nobody doing hard work in the open source world and creating gratis software.
Oh this appeal to the public, pithy empty words about openness and shit. Here's the plain truth: IA ran a gigantic book piracy site during covid. They should've known they won't get away with it. I remember several authors begging them not to do this because it affected their income. I personally thought it monumentally stupid to put the Wayback Machine at risk. They said, there are enough physical books in closed li…
This isn't about their pandemic actions, this is about the controlled digital lending they did for like a decade before COVID. If it were just over the emergency library, the court would end the restrictionless lending and likely issue a fine. Instead, the court ruling was that CDL was illegal, and only mentioned the National Emergency Library to say "as CDL was already illegal, it was also illegal." There also would…
My impression is that publishers were willing to look the other way when IA was distributing a small # of rare/out of print books, but once IA's homepage became unlimited copies of Harry Potter they felt like a line had been crossed.
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The best part had to be the whole moral grandstanding they had when doing it. Controlled digital lending was tolerated. It was never legal. I can't buy a bunch of DVDs and start a streaming service even if a each copy can only be watched by a single person at a time. It really sucks since they do a lot of good work aside from this.
Nitpick - I think if your DVD streaming service is free and single-person only, then you probably can - it would qualify under space or time shifting concepts. I don't think you have the right to monetize a DVD you purchase in general in the US, though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't about their pandemic actions, this is about the controlled digital lending they did for like a decade before COVID. If it were just over the emergency library, the court would end the restrictionless lending and likely issue a fine. Instead, the court ruling was that CDL was illegal, and only mentioned the National Emergency Library to say "as CDL was already illegal, it was also illegal." There also would…
IMO it's telling that publishers ignored the controlled limited lending that as you mentioned had been going on for a decade before COVID, and didn't file a lawsuit until IA started doing unrestricted lending. My impression is that publishers were willing to look the other way when IA was distributing a small # of rare/out of print books, but once IA's homepage became unlimited copies of Harry Potter they felt like a…
The NEL was a PR boon for publishers, allowing the narrative to be "the IA deserved it for the few weeks they allowed a couple hundred copies of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe be unfairly borrowed." But it's irrelevant to the actual lawsuit.
Should it be legal for IA to offer this, especially for older and out of print books? Yes, almost certainly. Is it legal? No, not as the law currently stands. You can support Robin Hood, but you shouldn't be shocked when Robin Hood is caught and sent to jail. It was a mistake and a huge legal risk for IA to do this. It could easily have brought down the whole organisation, and all that they've archived to date. I wis…