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Pirate library operator arrested, study canceled for 330k members

torrentfreak.com

21–30 of 64 posts

Re: Pirate library operator arrested, study canceled for 330k members

#21
post #2

> Copyright Crime Special Unit It's amazing that people have somehow been convinced that it's sane not only to throw others in prison for copying files but also to have special police for it.

Drug and Copyright Enforcement Agency?

I always thought that one reason to go after marijuana was that it was something that one could easily "grow at home" -- eg, make a copy. Alcohol and hard drugs typically required a lot of equipment or expertise.

..and in a dystopian future there will be an agency to remove any unauthorized knowledge (gained from pirated sources) from ones' brain.

Re: Pirate library operator arrested, study canceled for 330k members

#22
post #5

In South Korea, educational inequality due to inability to afford educational materials has been an issue for many years. The argument against piracy is that people have the right to be compensated for their work. Consider this argument in the context of medical services. The extreme pirate position is equivalent to expecting doctors to provide cosmetic surgery for free. The extreme industry position is equivalent to…

would you say the cost of copying a pdf file is similar to the cost of several hours in a surgical theatre?

Re: Pirate library operator arrested, study canceled for 330k members

#23
post #13
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is important to note that authors are not compensated when you buy access to an academic article in a journal. In fact, since the authors both do the work of creating the content and peer-reviewing submissions, they must also pay the journal in exchange for doing this work. Think of it like the patient paying the hospital, the doctor paying the hospital, and in exchange the doctor can do their work at a prestigiou…

Journal articles represent an extreme where sharing is most ethical. An opposite extreme would be something like AAA games. In the range between are things like monographs, textbooks, literature, etc.

> textbooks

Textbooks are not that distant from academic publishing in terms of the rent seeking that goes on. Textbook publishers essentially bribe academia for the right to rip off their students by providing courses with testing and academic services that are tied to a license in a new textbook that the student is required to buy.

Re: Pirate library operator arrested, study canceled for 330k members

#24
post #2

> Copyright Crime Special Unit It's amazing that people have somehow been convinced that it's sane not only to throw others in prison for copying files but also to have special police for it.

You would think we as a society should crack down harder on theft and robbery but here we are subsiding the rich on copyright laws

Re: Pirate library operator arrested, study canceled for 330k members

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with copyright is that gives the owner too many other rights that can be summed up as a right to also prevent distribution. This creates an imbalance. The owner should only be given the right to be compensated; but other rights should be stripped. For example, why not to require the right to publish a book to always be a public offer that any publisher can join on the same terms?

How should such a publisher set the price?

The author sets the price. Specifically, the price the publisher -- any publisher -- pays the author to make a copy. Publishers can add a margin to this to cover distribution costs, but then they're in competition with other publishers and customers can buy from any of them.

No other contractual terms. The author only sets the price publishers pay and that price is the same for every publisher. Authors can sell directly to the public but still can't impose any additional license terms nor sell for a lower price than the one publishers pay. Individual members of the public can also make copies on their own as long as they pay the fee.

Then any publisher that wants to publish the work simply does so and pays the author the author's fee, which the author can only change once a year and only change uniformly for all publishers.

Re: Pirate library operator arrested, study canceled for 330k members

#26
post #2

> Copyright Crime Special Unit It's amazing that people have somehow been convinced that it's sane not only to throw others in prison for copying files but also to have special police for it.

Unless big tech does it I guess

That's easy: government should serve the needs of people, not companies.

It's not hypocritical to want a different set of rules for companies.

Re: Pirate library operator arrested, study canceled for 330k members

#27
post #13
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is important to note that authors are not compensated when you buy access to an academic article in a journal. In fact, since the authors both do the work of creating the content and peer-reviewing submissions, they must also pay the journal in exchange for doing this work. Think of it like the patient paying the hospital, the doctor paying the hospital, and in exchange the doctor can do their work at a prestigiou…

Journal articles represent an extreme where sharing is most ethical. An opposite extreme would be something like AAA games. In the range between are things like monographs, textbooks, literature, etc.

>An opposite extreme would be something like AAA games.

There's further extremes still: sharing a game made by a solo-developer who's only compensation comes from sales is less ethical than sharing a game made by a team who were paid a salary while they worked.

Re: Pirate library operator arrested, study canceled for 330k members

#28
post #10

Access to education and information should be free - or at the very least a lot less broken than it is today. https://annas-archive.org/torrents

I really would love to help out, but I don't have 650TB of storage laying around :( The logistics of this archive are quite crazy; most 2-4U JBODs I worked with hold like 24 or 45 SFF SAS disks. Standard size (unless things have changed) for 10k sff sas disks seems to be about 1.2TB, so you'd need 544 of these to build a raidz big enough. So we're talking 12 4U jbods, well over a full rack. I guess I can just hope so…

> Enter how many TBs you can help seed, and we’ll give you a list of torrents that need the most seeding! The list is somewhat random every time, so two people generating at the same time will still cover different parts of the collection.

I don't think you need 650TB!

Re: Pirate library operator arrested, study canceled for 330k members

#29
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless big tech does it I guess

That's easy: government should serve the needs of people, not companies. It's not hypocritical to want a different set of rules for companies.

> a different set of rules for companies

That is sort of the problem we find ourselves in.

Re: Pirate library operator arrested, study canceled for 330k members

#30

>The Ministry of Culture and Sport says others involved will be tracked down and given lessons in copyright law. This is way too soft of a punishment. If people can get away with attending a lesson there will not be enough risk in the risk reward analysis people do before violating people's copyrights.

Wait until you see the price of the textbook.
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