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Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library Harms Authors

authorsguild.org

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Re: Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library Harms Authors

#31

Post by mark_l_watson »

ddevault wrote: post #17

How much of your annual $100-$500 membership dues are you waiving in the light of the difficulties you explain your membership as facing in these dire times? Screw copyright and screw this rent-seeking noise. Self-publishing is rapidly becoming the norm, and who knew - authors are seeing way higher returns on it. Copying e-books incurs no material cost and therefore charging for it is not justifiable.

Way back when, I wrote ten books for traditional publishers like Springer-Verlag, McGraw-Hill, etc. I switched over years ago to self publishing on leanpub.com, using a Creative Commons non commercial share license, with free updates. I don’t earn quite what I used to but the freedom to write exactly what I want with no pushback from publishers on what they predict will sell, and the ability to effortlessly push book updates to readers makes the switch very worthwhile.

Writing is also a great way to meet interesting people and expand a personal network. Whenever I meet someone who has an interesting job and/or interests, I almost always suggest that they write at least one book.

Re: Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library Harms Authors

#32

Post by derefr »

ipython wrote: post #16

Oh my god this attitude absolutely infuriates me. I just assisted my kids’ piano teacher in organizing an online virtual piano festival. The technical piece was easy- set up a google form where students could submit their information and a video of their performance. The hard part? In an in person festival, the student hands their sheet music to the judge sitting in the room before performing, so the judge can track…

I guess the implication is that the exact approach you were originally taking in the in-person version of the festival, wouldn’t have been allowed by the IP authors if you’d have asked them.

Which is a great reason to just boycott their works, get every piano school to stop using them, and thus starve them of all royalties.

Re: Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library Harms Authors

#33

Post by wbl »

ipython wrote: post #16

Oh my god this attitude absolutely infuriates me. I just assisted my kids’ piano teacher in organizing an online virtual piano festival. The technical piece was easy- set up a google form where students could submit their information and a video of their performance. The hard part? In an in person festival, the student hands their sheet music to the judge sitting in the room before performing, so the judge can track…

Don't most violin students play pieces from before 1923?

Re: Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library Harms Authors

#34

Post by mark_l_watson »

ghaff wrote: post #29
ddevault wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I am. The math is obvious, though: if you distribute $X to Y people, then distributing $X to Y-1 people will result in everyone (or at least someone ) making more money. With the wide availability of publishing-as-a-service, Amazon listings and personal website sales, and so on, it makes little sense for most new or small-to-mid-time authors to go through a middleman. Then the bigger authors (1) have more to gai…

It's somewhat more complicated than that. There are other factors. 1.) Publishers do provide editing, etc. services that authors would otherwise have to pay for out of their own pockets. That may or may not be a worthwhile tradeoff. But, between forgoing and advance and paying for services, authors are probably at least a few $K out of pocket if they go their own way. To the degree that things like book tours/promoti…

My wife is my editor, so I am lucky. She does sometimes provide editing services to other authors for a modest fee; email me if you need an editor. re: 3): this is a big drawback of self publishing. When I wrote for conventional publishers it was always a thrill to see my books in Barnes and Nobles, etc. But, but.... the ability to make frequent improvements to eBooks and effortlessly push changes to readers trumps all the advantages of conventional publishers.

Re: Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library Harms Authors

#35

Post by ipython »

derefr wrote: post #32
ipython wrote: post #16

Oh my god this attitude absolutely infuriates me. I just assisted my kids’ piano teacher in organizing an online virtual piano festival. The technical piece was easy- set up a google form where students could submit their information and a video of their performance. The hard part? In an in person festival, the student hands their sheet music to the judge sitting in the room before performing, so the judge can track…

I guess the implication is that the exact approach you were originally taking in the in-person version of the festival, wouldn’t have been allowed by the IP authors if you’d have asked them. Which is a great reason to just boycott their works, get every piano school to stop using them, and thus starve them of all royalties.

I agree but these clubs of piano teachers are very conservative (in the meaning that they don't want to rock the boat) and it's hard to get the sort of collective action required to effectively economically boycott these publishers....

Re: Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library Harms Authors

#36

Post by ipython »

logicallee wrote: post #26
ipython wrote: post #16

Oh my god this attitude absolutely infuriates me. I just assisted my kids’ piano teacher in organizing an online virtual piano festival. The technical piece was easy- set up a google form where students could submit their information and a video of their performance. The hard part? In an in person festival, the student hands their sheet music to the judge sitting in the room before performing, so the judge can track…

Did they want money too? How much?

I don't know, we ended up just eliminating the sheet music from the judging of the festival because it was just too much to figure out in a compressed timeframe.

Re: Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library Harms Authors

#37

Post by catalogia »

arpa wrote: post #5

Well, thank you authors guild, for pointing me to the great library. 'Tis a shame you are people who would see the great library of alexandria burn in the sake of profit.

To show my gratitude to the author's guild, I'd like to point out that Library Genesis exists and is pretty great. Unlike the Internet Archive, they don't bother paying lip service to cretinous publishing industry lawyers; 'lending' is fully unrestricted year round. Up-to-date URLs to mirrors can be found on their wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis

Re: Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library Harms Authors

#38

Post by ghaff »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #34
ghaff wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's somewhat more complicated than that. There are other factors. 1.) Publishers do provide editing, etc. services that authors would otherwise have to pay for out of their own pockets. That may or may not be a worthwhile tradeoff. But, between forgoing and advance and paying for services, authors are probably at least a few $K out of pocket if they go their own way. To the degree that things like book tours/promoti…

My wife is my editor, so I am lucky. She does sometimes provide editing services to other authors for a modest fee; email me if you need an editor. re: 3): this is a big drawback of self publishing. When I wrote for conventional publishers it was always a thrill to see my books in Barnes and Nobles, etc. But, but.... the ability to make frequent improvements to eBooks and effortlessly push changes to readers trumps a…

I don't really disagree with any of that. I've done both ways and I'm not sure I'd go with a traditional publisher again unless doing so fell in my lap for some reason.

Another thing I find for tech-related books--which is what I do--is that if I do things myself, I control the length whereas publishers generally have a minimum number of pages in mind which may be more than the topic really warrants. And a final point is that, as an individual, I have more flexibility in just giving copies away (especially ebooks) if I did the book mostly for promotional purposes.

Re: Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library Harms Authors

#39

Post by coldpie »

pontifier wrote: post #25

I have to say I agree with the authors guild on this. There must be rules concerning intellectual property. Laws are the rules our society lives by, and when a prominent public organization decides to willfully break copyright law in this manner it harms everyone. Copyright law is messy and there are many unintuitive parts. Educating people about the details is difficult and this change they have made is essentially…

The current effectively-infinite length of copyright is brand new, it was only put into place in the 1970s. The original length set in 1790 was 14 years, optionally extendable to 28 years. Under those terms, the first Harry Potter book would have entered the public domain in 2011, or in 2025 at the latest. Copyright should be a balance between the rights of the creator and the rights of the public. Right now it is wildly out of whack, with basically all rights given to the creator in perpetuity. We are robbing ourselves and our future generations of our own culture. In my opinion it is perfectly ethical to ignore it. If we can't fight back legislatively, we will find other means.

P.S. you cannot 'steal' intellectual property. That is a fiction you have bought into.

More on the history of copyright here: https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2020/shrinking...

Re: Internet Archive’s National Emergency Library Harms Authors

#40

Post by coldpie »

mjd wrote: post #24

These are the same assholes that sued Google in federal court, claiming that even if Google provided only snippet results in searches, the very act of Google holding an archive of copyrighted books, and allowing it to be searched, was itself infringement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,... . Fuck them.

There's a Contact Us link at the bottom of their website. Let them know how you feel about their hoarding of human culture.
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