181–190 of 981 posts
We all like hating big corporations, especially Meta, and people seem to use this as an opportunity to advocate for punishing them. I think it's wiser to advocate for changing our IP laws.
Big corporations all like hating their consumers abd legal laws. You love committing crimes it seems.
Based on the encyclopedic knowledge LLMs have of written works I assume all parties did the same. But I think there is a broader point to make here. Youtube was initially a ghost town (it started as a dating site) and it only got traction once people started uploading copyrighted TV shows to it. Google itself got big by indexing other people's data without compensation. Spotify's music library was also pirated in the…
I'm pretty much at the point now where I don't buy the "copyright incentivizes creation" argument any more. Copyright, like advertising, incentivizes creation by enormous corporations, but also like advertising it incentivizes creations that overwhelmingly have little value.
Creative individuals don't need copyright to be incentivized to create—they need a safety net that gives them the freedom to spend time on the creativity that naturally wants to bubble out. If the goal is to encourage creativity, copyright is a lousy and enormously expensive substitute for Universal Basic Income.
We all like hating big corporations, especially Meta, and people seem to use this as an opportunity to advocate for punishing them. I think it's wiser to advocate for changing our IP laws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Death
While Aaron Swartz was bullied to suicide, these corporations will walk free and make billions. I say give every tech CEO the Swartz treatment, then change the law.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
" If you plug a laptop into a closet at MIT to download some scientific papers you forfeit your life." This is exactly what I immediately thought while reading the article. It almost feels like the legal system only punishes general public, while most of these guys are above it.
Airbnb and Uber have showed us that laws matter only to the extent that the political will to enforce them exists. Throw enough lawyers and lobbying money at the problem and the laws can simply be re-written to be friendlier to your business model.
We all like hating big corporations, especially Meta, and people seem to use this as an opportunity to advocate for punishing them. I think it's wiser to advocate for changing our IP laws.
Big corporations are too big, they should just not exist. When you have corporations more powerful than the government of the biggest states, it's a bug, not a feature.
The IP laws may need rethinking. Saying that they should disappear because big corporations are above the law doesn't help, though. First kill the big corporations, then think about fair laws. Changing the law now would not change anything since those corporations are already above the law.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I truly hope Meta has a serious security issue that burns their company to the ground. That said, I want them to burn for the right reasons. Downloading data that should be available to the public is not one of them.
Exactly. Everyone should have the right to have access to this.
In particular, people often cited the case of authors who had died leaving a family in destitution, and claimed that copyright extension would be a fair way of preventing this, but in most cases the remaining family had never held the copyright; the author had initally sold the reproduction rights to a publisher who had then sat on the work without publishing it. The author, driven into penury, was then induced to sell the copyright to the publisher outright for a pittance. So in such cases a copyright extension only benefited the publisher, and indeed increased their incentive to extort the copyright.
We all like hating big corporations, especially Meta, and people seem to use this as an opportunity to advocate for punishing them. I think it's wiser to advocate for changing our IP laws.
Libgen is a civilizational project that should be endorsed, not prosecuted. I hope one day people will look at it and think how stupid we were today to shun the largest collection of literary works in human history.
I think you’re overstating its importance. The internet already makes it possible to order almost any book in existence and have it arrive at your doorstep within a week or so, or often on your ebook reader instantly. And your local library probably participates in an interlibrary loan system that lets you request any book held by any library in the country for free . LibGen gives you access to a much smaller body of…
2. DRM is built in to most purchased ebooks, which means you can’t consume the book on any device. “Illegal” tools exist to circumvent this.
3. Large ebook stores - like other digital stores - essentially lend you a copy of the book. So when they are forced to pull a book, they’ll pull your access too.
Of course, now that the big players have consumed/archived the entire book dump, they can go ahead and kill it to prevent others from doing the same thing.