31–40 of 44 posts
At some point in the future, people will look back at things like this in utter confusion - jail-time and a massive waste of police resources in order to stop people from sharing books…
If you're an author whose livelihood depends on sales, would you still call it sharing?
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It makes a lot more sense when you realize that the machinery of the state (including especially law enforcement) exists solely to preserve and maintain the existing socioeconomic order and not to, you know, enforce laws or protect the public. The system is working as designed. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. It’s everywhere. https://youtube.com/watch?v=A0wMSNlBBjc
I'd rather have someone maintain existing socioeconomic order than a total breakdown like, e.g. Haiti where random gangs control the city.
Also if you were on the very bottom of the socioeconomic order, maintaining it would take on a different meaning.
Banning sites that share books. I guess they have already addressed all the illegal pornography, music, pirated soccer games, terrorism, offshore gambling, harrassment, credit card fraud, antiseminitism, homophobia, body shaming, fake news, doxing, zero day sales, and every other great evil on the internet. It has been a long journey, but now that all those are dealt with, we can now crack down on people wanting to r…
Careful now. Literacy is a noble goal, but piracy is still a crime. Once you start taking down sites for things that aren't crimes, everything's fair game.
Considering current events in Israel and the absurd PR war on social media, it doesn't take much for even a Jew to earn the anti-Semitic achievement right now.
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Austria might be neutral on warfare and multi-national defense agreement (not a member of NATO) but I think that's a separate issue from copyright law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Neutrality
They may not be nato, but australia is part of the five eyes and the new submarine tech deal. Australia is very big on multi-national defense.
If it was actually about Australia, it'd be wholly and totally unsurprising - we don't defend our citizens. Ever.
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They may not be nato, but australia is part of the five eyes and the new submarine tech deal. Australia is very big on multi-national defense.
Austria != Australia If it was actually about Australia, it'd be wholly and totally unsurprising - we don't defend our citizens. Ever.
Banning sites that share books. I guess they have already addressed all the illegal pornography, music, pirated soccer games, terrorism, offshore gambling, harrassment, credit card fraud, antiseminitism, homophobia, body shaming, fake news, doxing, zero day sales, and every other great evil on the internet. It has been a long journey, but now that all those are dealt with, we can now crack down on people wanting to r…
> antiseminitism, homophobia, body shaming, fake news, doxing Careful now. Literacy is a noble goal, but piracy is still a crime. Once you start taking down sites for things that aren't crimes, everything's fair game. Considering current events in Israel and the absurd PR war on social media, it doesn't take much for even a Jew to earn the anti-Semitic achievement right now.
Why spend so much effort taking down societally good sites rather than taking down real criminals?
There’s many laws not worth their enforcement costs. These seizures are some of the only legal actions which are just emblematic of pure corruption. The government serving the interests of middlemen whose primary impact on science is making it less accessible and charging rents on it. It’s a hellish parody of copyright law. If I worked for Elsevier I’d feel worse about what I did for a living than if I worked for Mar…
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They aren't worried about people sharing books at this point, or at least they shouldn't be. They're worried about people building their own models. Here's something I'd pay for (probably with some sort of sketchy crypto, sadly): send me a huge-ass hard drive (or array of drives) with a complete mirror of Z-Library, Library Genesis, and sci-hub on it.
That will be a very reasonable thing to expect in a few years. Based on the rate of advancement of memory density and LLM tech I wrote this [0] a while back. Containment of "the human corpus" (all significant written works since antiquity) is a lost cause for the authorities. Stunts like this Australian thing are symbolic rituals by the dying publishing industry against a downhill battle. For a brief window you'll ha…
You mean OP's Austrian thing? Or something else? Australia's the one with the kangaroos and Austria the one with famous painters.
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They aren't worried about people sharing books at this point, or at least they shouldn't be. They're worried about people building their own models. Here's something I'd pay for (probably with some sort of sketchy crypto, sadly): send me a huge-ass hard drive (or array of drives) with a complete mirror of Z-Library, Library Genesis, and sci-hub on it.
Isn't anyone capable of building their own models technically sophisticated enough to get around basically any normal anti-piracy measure? Or for that matter has already downloaded all the books?