271–280 of 614 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean if I poke an angry drunk and he beats the tar out of me, the angry drunk certainly deserves criticism but all of my friends will be "WTF why did you go and poke him?"
Publishers acting as angry dunks, checks out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dahl (or his publisher) changed his own book , the initial back story of the oompa-loompas being problematic. This was 10 years after publishing when someone pointed out it wasn't a great depiction. https://www.roalddahlfans.com/dahls-work/books/charlie-and-t... But it is weird that they can go into your device and change it now. Don't love it. If they made Version 2 available at the same time.... I have Body Count's…
Yea, I think the argument about publishers choosing to release new, edited versions of older books is a silly one. We should let the marketplace and the marketplace of ideas sort it out. But, the fact that they changed digital copies that were previously purchased is insane. The companies that do that should be pilloried and shamed for such an action. Frankly, I’m no longer participating in digital purchases for musi…
Some publishers maintain a list of "corrections" - some only update a digital copy on a new edition of a print copy, and some update them as they go. I've done a print-on-demand book at it technically has something like 50 revisions but only one is marked in the book itself as 'significant' - because why not update the source PDF when you can just click a button?
A similar thing is happening with software; DooM has had people carefully inspect the various different versions and patches released; but now massive games are mostly online and version differences are lost to time; even if you know the changelog you can't ever actually experience the old version anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why should tax dollars be used for this? Because: > We already have laws for historical landmarks. These laws ensure the protection of things of societal significance
The Statue of Liberty is an historical landmark. Random Geocities pages are not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I keep seeing this really bad take repeated on this site in the absence of more nuanced, informed legal opinions. Whether CDL is legal under Fair Use or not was/is legally unresolved. Whether it's legally permissible to copy a printed material and distribute that copy as though it were the printed material was/is unresolved. Lots of organizations have been skating along under one interpretation of Fair Use as a worka…
It's not the Internet Archive's job to be the first one to try to resolve fair use questions like this, and attempting to do so put the organization's orginal core mission at risk. They should have let someone else take the risk, and continued archiving the internet. That is all that most of their supporters expected of them, for good reason. Their attempt to pivot toward being a generic, universal library was bad sc…
I appreciate the metaphor with the Library of Alexandria, but TIL that it may not have burned catastrophically and may have been rebuilt after: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria “Despite the widespread modern belief that the Library of Alexandria was burned once and cataclysmically destroyed, the Library actually declined gradually over the course of several centuries. This decline began with the…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliotheca_Alexandrina#Intern...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Statue of Liberty is an historical landmark. Random Geocities pages are not.
Individual Geocities pages are not valuable landmarks, but Geocities as a whole - the aesthetic, the community, the history - is definitely something to preserve. And the cost of saving all of Geocities is a tiny fraction of any physical monument.
Copyright law needs to change. Back in the day, a copyright measured in decades made sense, because it took that long to promote and distribute a work and derive reasonable profit from it. Today that process takes days, maybe months (apart from the rare work that languishes, only to be "discovered" later). Copyright should be much shorter -- a couple years at most -- with renewal available if the creator really belie…
I don't think I agree with this. Novels can take years to write, and to have their copyright expire after only a few years may not be enough for the author to write another book. What would be the motivation to write a series if the series isn't worth printing after only a few books? It goes doubly if the novel might be up for a movie or a TV adaptation: the game of thrones tv adaptation didn't happen until much late…
That said, I'm sympathetic to creators; I've written several (unpublished) novels myself.
Most novels don't support the authors that write them. There's no argument to be made that Jane Doe's 20,000th-ranked novel makes her nothing in the third year instead of three dollars.
At the other end of the scale you have George R.R. Martin. I'm sure he would be fine with or without the revenue from HBO's GoT. That said, in that particular case I think it's likely that HBO would want his blessing in any case -- especially since he hadn't written the ending yet. Without his cooperation, would people have been as likely to watch knowing the ending was made up by someone else?
So then you have the mid-tier authors -- a misnomer since really you're talking about the 99.9th percentile, where GRRM is the 99.9999th. But in any case, I still think that the vast majority of the revenue from a novel generally comes in the first 2-3 years. If losing that last, let's say 5%, makes the difference between success and starvation, that seems like a rare case to me -- even for authors who write slowly.
As for retirement, I'm not sure how to answer except to say let's pick an author who is clearly self-supporting, but not GRRM: Piers Anthony. He's still cranking out Xanth novels (last I checked). Do you suppose sales from his Battle Circle books (published in the '60s and '70s) are contributing materially to his retirement? Ha, I just checked and he's up to 45 books in the Xanth series. :-)
Someone needs to start a competing Internet Archive, which only archives, you know, THE INTERNET, and not xbox games, warez, movies, music, books, etc. The overreach at IA is much bigger than it looks on the surface. Go look at the things people are uploading there.
And a faster, more reliable (in terms of percentage of 5XX responses) one would be nice. Right now Wayback Machine performance leaves a lot to be desired. I end up using archive.is whenever possible.
Yes, I donate to Internet Archive, don’t chastise me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Whether it's legally permissible to copy a printed material and distribute that copy as though it were the printed material was/is unresolved. That's what IA wants to believe. But it's just not the case that legal points aren't "resolved" or "tested" unless exactly the same situation shows up in court and gets ruled on. The law works in large part by analogy. Strong enough analogies can be predicted. Here's from th…
I listened in on the opening arguments. Judge Koeltl asked repeatedly for examples of prior cases analogous to the current one. ReDigi came up then, as did HathiTrust, but neither are exactly analogous to Controlled Digital Lending. The most similar case might be Author's Guild v. Google Inc., which was well covered by The Atlantic ( https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t... ), but even that cas…
This isn't a combo I think I've seen or read from other lawyers. Does it mean "identical"? Again, that's not what's required to make a point "settled"...or an outcome predictable.
The trial court opinion distinguishes Authors Guild, Google Books, Sony, and TV Eyes very explicitly in its opinion, starting on page 19. It's hindsight now, so worth fewer points, but I'm not the only one who thought distinctions based on "not giving out full copies" and "providing equipment" were coming.
The trial court did not say the Internet Archive isn't a nonprofit, a charity, or tax-exempt organization. The question under fair use analysis isn't whether the infringer is commercial or not, but whether the use is. It also comes up under other factors, such as effect on market.
The first and only mandatory piece of reading for discussing this case right now is the trial court opinion. Summary judgment was only possible procedurally because the two sides of the lawsuit agreed on the facts, only differing on how law applies to them.