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I would rather see my books get pirated than this

janefriedman.com

261–270 of 517 posts

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the ends justify the means, matey? Have you considered accessing freely-licensed content instead, and supporting authors who believe in the freedom movement, such as Creative Commons? How would you feel, if you were an author, and people openly advocated piracy, such that you were deprived of sales, and earning an honest living?

> Do the ends justify the means, matey? Commenter's point was that it's obviously easier to pirate. This is exactly the point; As an author, I'm upset that the system is like it is, I'm not upset at the many people who are undoubtedly going to pirate my work if it's difficult to get, whether it's right or wrong. No Author finishes their work and declares, "Now, let me make this as difficult as possible to purchase."…

>No Author finishes their work and declares, "Now, let me make this as difficult as possible to purchase." It's the PLATFORM.

IMO, the logical conclusion here is obvious: copyright should provide the author with the right to money, but not with the right to control actual distribution - we should be legally allowed to send the author $X in the mail and then torrent the thing.

This notion that the author should control the means of distribution? It's a historical artifact of old technology when publishing literally meant printing presses, and setting up a competing printing press without the author's authorization was an expensive choice that was inherently, obviously a means to rip off the author.

IMO, every ISBN should have the author's bank account number next to it and obtaining a copy of the ebook should be as simple as sending $X to that bank account, then finding a torrent by ISBN.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#262
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend looking into adblockers! uBlock Origin is the best one.

Most people don't run an adblocker on their phone, and these torrent sites would cease to exist or become malware sites themselves if enough users used adblock. Let's not kid ourselves- these site runners are not Aaron Swartz.

So what? If you are looking for an epub file, but instead get an exe just don’t run it. Mobile OSs are quite good at security, but even desktop has largely grown up to the task now.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#263
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> deprived of sales but the post above explain an arduous process for a purchase, and i would expect that there's not an insignificant number of people who would've given up in the middle. So do you also feel that you need to make the same complaint of a lost sale to amazon? Why target pirates specifically? Whether they _consumed_ content or not, is irrelevant - in both scenarios, you would've "lost" a sale.

Have you considered accessing freely-licensed content instead, and supporting authors who believe in the freedom movement, such as Creative Commons?

I’m not sure that most books are at all fungible. Also do many book authors actually publish under Creative Commons?

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#264
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the ends justify the means, matey? Have you considered accessing freely-licensed content instead, and supporting authors who believe in the freedom movement, such as Creative Commons? How would you feel, if you were an author, and people openly advocated piracy, such that you were deprived of sales, and earning an honest living?

I am morally opposed to most IP laws and believe they are categorically illegitimate.

I think IP laws are one of the best things that ever happened to human civilization and are responsible for a significant proportion of progress over the last 200-300 years.

Even if at this point they are a bit too excessive in some cases.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do the ends justify the means, matey? Commenter's point was that it's obviously easier to pirate. This is exactly the point; As an author, I'm upset that the system is like it is, I'm not upset at the many people who are undoubtedly going to pirate my work if it's difficult to get, whether it's right or wrong. No Author finishes their work and declares, "Now, let me make this as difficult as possible to purchase."…

>No Author finishes their work and declares, "Now, let me make this as difficult as possible to purchase." It's the PLATFORM. IMO, the logical conclusion here is obvious: copyright should provide the author with the right to money, but not with the right to control actual distribution - we should be legally allowed to send the author $X in the mail and then torrent the thing. This notion that the author should contro…

This is actually a great starting point IMO.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most annoying is piracy that Amazon could prevent with the work of an intern. Do tell. In the gigantic ocean that is Amazon's marketplace, what do you suppose a single intern could do that would not be immediately circumvented?

Check to see if the name of the person uploading the book matches the author.

Downvoters need to explain the downvote.

It seems more complicated than that - Publishers (representing more authors), pseudonyms (and pluri-pseudonyms) etc. - but not dramatically so. A battery of people (human level intelligence) will check to validate the "upload" process, and automation aided.

Already now: what checks that John is not selling Jack's work? The mechanism is similar.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#267
post #44

I think this is the future of computers for people. they will open their phone and say "hey siri get this book or computer or car" and the browser will show them a bunch of made up products generated by an AI and they'll get the product drop shipped from china and it'll be a shitty counterfeit just like the $5 256GB USB drives. But they won't know because when you look for reviews, the review websites will also be ge…

Yeah, until someone creates a website that just ships the products they say they have, and people type in the URL for the site directly and shop there? If online shopping were truly such a terribly scammy UX in 100% of cases people would stop using it or shift to shopping from trusted sellers who recognize the tremendous amount of value they can capture by not scamming people.

Imagine like an LLM trained on everything you've ever done since birth included as part of the data set. and then one of those for each other person in the world. they could slice and dice you into a thousand different groups.

at some point technology is going to stop being something that we interact with through a screen and a keyboard. Google maps will be there, where ever you go, all the time. No more getting lost or wondering where anything is located. You will just know. or at least, be told.

Something else to consider is the fallibility of human memory. As we generate more information we're gonna have to start abstracting and delegating some of those storage and retrieval tasks to the computer, trusting it completely. Today maybe you can remember things but what about your parents?

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#268
post #44

I think this is the future of computers for people. they will open their phone and say "hey siri get this book or computer or car" and the browser will show them a bunch of made up products generated by an AI and they'll get the product drop shipped from china and it'll be a shitty counterfeit just like the $5 256GB USB drives. But they won't know because when you look for reviews, the review websites will also be ge…

Your first paragraph is just Amazon today. They don't need AI for people to make up products and send you garbage. They probably will use AI for reviews, but they already have fake reviews that reliably fool people, so this isn't much different. If it gets so bad that Amazon's bottom line is threatened, they'll actually crack down; they're assholes, not business-suicidal. "The entire internet will just be a computer…

I'm talking about the quality of the food here.

as for the rest of the post, the application is not limited to consumer products. Imagine the 2016 election season in 2056. or another covid pandemic.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#269
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Delightful experience. compare this with the piracy option: search for torrent or download link, click, wait for download to finish. Upload to device. Read and enjoy.

> Search for torrent or download link, click, Hope that you didn't click a sketchy ad that looks just like the download link, because the site didn't police any of its ads.

> Hope that you didn't click a sketchy ad that looks just like the download link, because the site didn't police any of its ads.

That only happens once. Maybe twice. Most people learn.

Re: I would rather see my books get pirated than this

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Step 1: go to amazon on a real computer and find book Step 2: click buy Step 3: in the post purchase confirmation it says "Want to start reading right away?" and a dropdown of your devices with a deliver button. It's a kids device they (and you) don't want your kid to be sent 50 shades of gray accidentally. The other flow is buy book. Go to kindle, "sync and check for new items". But again, it's a kids book, don't wa…

I am sorry for being so flippant and unreasonable expecting to buy a digital book using my smartphone in 2023.

> I am sorry for being so flippant and unreasonable expecting to buy a digital book using my smartphone in 2023.

I feel that you are being unreasonable: you willingly bought into a closed ecosystem, and now you're mad that other people are not part of that ecosystem.

What did you expect?

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