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Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

arstechnica.com

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Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#281

Post by cratermoon »

theendisney4 wrote: post #274
throw10920 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US subsidizing the book market would be an incredible waste of my taxes, given that the majority of published works are fiction, political drivel, and non-fiction memoirs that provide near-zero value to "humanity" that the root poster is clutching pearls about. The IA's collection of books they had to remove almost certainly has the same composition, and therefore the same loss in value (roughly zero) after being…

Give people a book coupon? Then they can chose what they think important?

Oh, yes. Great idea. https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/citizen-coup...

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#282

Post by TaylorAlexander »

ModernMech wrote: post #270
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t really understand this logic. Are you saying that multi generational projects are… well I don’t really know what you’re saying. When the world was dominated by the divine right of kings, and changing that was going to take hundreds of years… should people not have discussed what to do to move down a better path? My plan as a robotics engineer is to prove that open source robotics can be a viable industry by b…

> My plan as a robotics engineer is to prove that open source robotics can be a viable industry by building open source farming robots (see my profile) so that a generation of children grow up understanding that community owned community built robotics are a perfectly viable option, and we don’t need venture capital for robotics infrastructure development. Super solarpunk, I love it.

Yusss thank you! I love it too. I’m workin on it right now. :)

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#283

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

zer00eyz wrote: post #217
coliveira wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europeans and Americans are now taxing green technology, which they said in the past they want, because it is built in another country...

Chinese cars? really? They are at best a hazard. The Chinese government dumped tons of money into every one of those cars, they are being sold at a loss. Not because it's good for any one, rather because china fucked up. Every single one of those cars is a state funded fire hazard about to go on the road. EDITL: cause looking up data is hard apparently: western data: https://www.edmunds.com/electric-car/articles/elec…

The problem is the wheels fall off in a fender bender and there's only a 50% chance the airbags will deploy when needed.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#284

Post by throw10920 »

geysersam wrote: post #272
throw10920 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US subsidizing the book market would be an incredible waste of my taxes, given that the majority of published works are fiction, political drivel, and non-fiction memoirs that provide near-zero value to "humanity" that the root poster is clutching pearls about. The IA's collection of books they had to remove almost certainly has the same composition, and therefore the same loss in value (roughly zero) after being…

This view is staggering and would (imo) fit well in a comical/dystopic novel by a sufficiently misanthropic author

Accusations of sexism, especially false ones, are categorically inappropriate for HN. Please never do this again.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#285

Post by Ekaros »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #25

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…

Maybe we should do software first. I see no reason why I should not get copies of all binaries and all source code for any and every service I use upon request. And even copies of databases backing them when requested. Then I could simply replicated it in my own environment or roll up competing service. And as for data, what is privacy anyway. If you want the data be private don't generate it... /s

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#286

Post by jjmarr »

rwasco wrote: post #162
badlibrarian wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really don't need to be a lawyer to understand the extent to which Internet Archive really screwed up here. For starters they lost on Summary Judgment, which means they couldn't come up with a single issue of fact that the judge thought deserved a trial. Read the Order, the Judge obviously has it straight. Then check archive.org's Form 990s and see how little money they run on, how much they pissed away on legal…

I disagree. Brewster demonstrated real courage. The world locked down u necessarily precisely because the population has not been getting smarter the past 50 years because copyright has poisoned our information wells. This is a fight worth having. It's time to abolish copyright.

If you want to fight that fight, instead of putting hundreds of thousands of books on the internet, you start with a few books and get sued over that. That way, if you lose, the actual damages are minimal. Right now, the Internet Archive could go bankrupt because of the millions of dollars in potential damages now that they've lost.

Finding representative cases to fight over and create precedent is a common strategy that exposes you to less risk if you lose.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#287

Post by JoshTriplett »

chii wrote: post #236
rwasco wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyright is literally the opposite of property rights. Just because people call it "property rights" does not make it true. It's as false a term as calling the events of 1939-1945 "World Peace 2".

> Copyright is literally the opposite of property rights. Why is that? Property rights, like copyright, is merely a societal construct that have been agreed upon (via legislative processes). There are countries today that does not respect copyright (or impose their own copyright rules), just like they do so for property rights. Therefore, this copyright is _exactly_ like property rights. In fact, copyright is slightl…

Property rights solve the problem of physical goods being rivalrous. We can't both eat the same portion of food; if one person has it another doesn't.

Information is not rivalrous in that way: an additional person having it doesn't take it away from anyone else. Many people can read the same (e-)book.

There are other reasons why societies originally granted a completely artificial temporary monopoly on information: the theory that it'll incentivize the creation of more works, which is a thing the society might want more than they want the ability to copy and modify and remix it on day one.

Emphasis on "might" want: it's not obvious that that's the correct tradeoff today, in a world in which we have not merely the printing press but digital information that can be trivially copied and modified, and a society of people who all have the tools at their fingertips to use that information to create and remix and do wondrous creative things with all of culture.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#288

Post by adrianN »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #251
deaddodo wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Star Trek Replicators were invented today, we're so stupid we'd outlaw them. You're so optimistic to think the law would even be this fair. More like limit access to corporations as "the only custodians responsible enough to wield them", while still allowing the developing world to starve and further increasing their profit margins simultaneously to decreasing working wages and employment levels.

Hah some Ferengi actually did this in an episode of TNG! They showed up on a random planet with a replicator and then used their ability to produce anything as a means to subjugate the population.

I believe that was Voyager and the Ferengi were stranded in the delta quadrant after the incident with the stable-on-one-end wormhole in TNG. Imo it wasn’t the worst strategy in their situation.

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/False_Profits_(episode)

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#289

Post by sitkack »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #261
Aurornis wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we should move to models of publishing that do not require this restriction of information. It’s interesting how this comment veers into a completely hypothetical overhaul of society in which money doesn’t matter, for reasons which of course are hand-waved away. On one hand: Sure! Sounds great! If someone can reinvent all of society in a way that everyone is free to do whatever they want and not worry about getting…

I don’t really understand this logic. Are you saying that multi generational projects are… well I don’t really know what you’re saying. When the world was dominated by the divine right of kings, and changing that was going to take hundreds of years… should people not have discussed what to do to move down a better path? My plan as a robotics engineer is to prove that open source robotics can be a viable industry by b…

I think yours is a noble goal that many do share, even if they don't openly express it.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#290

Post by geysersam »

throw10920 wrote: post #284
geysersam wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This view is staggering and would (imo) fit well in a comical/dystopic novel by a sufficiently misanthropic author

Accusations of sexism, especially false ones, are categorically inappropriate for HN. Please never do this again.

Sexist? That was not my intention. I meant misantripic in the sense of:

> 2: marked by a hatred or contempt for humankind The moral corruption he saw around him made him misanthropic.

Also I didn't mean the commenter was misanthropic, but that the view they held would fit a misanthropic authors novel as part of their satire.

Maybe you thought I wrote "misogynistic"?

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