Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

pilimi.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 438 posts

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#331

Post by jdright »

Beldin wrote: post #311
grumbel wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't imagine getting rid of it completely would have good effects, as it would make any large scale production impossible. You might still get a few blog post, but getting books produced will be tricky and something big like a movie might be outright impossible. This is doubly true in the modern digital world were everything can be copied in a fraction of a second and where the piracy site, not the authors, will b…

> something in the realm of 20 years should be enough. God no. Right now, we'd be getting remakes from every piece of pop-culture that was semi-popular in the 80s-2002 time frame. Not just movies, but TV series, books, theatre, musicals, ... Sure, copyright should be shortened, but I don't begrudge (eg.) a one hit winner making money off their hit decades layer. Life of artist is reasonable, I think. They take a gamb…

So shitty remakes is the reason why general poor population can never have access to information and education? Gotcha.

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#332

Post by slightwinder »

plmu wrote: post #210

Excellent. I hope more and more people start to see how absurd and evil the concept of "intellectual property" is. It should be totally rejected and any form of keeping useful information for yourself should be shunned and tabooized. In todays world, many have been programmed to believe that the would could not exits without such immoral restrictions, which is horrible.

Interesting to call it evil, when your whole reasoning is driven by pure greed. I guess you don't see greed as something evil? Or do you think there is a human right to consume? That everyone has the right to experience and own everything for free, what others have created and worked hard for?

Anyway, "intellectual property" has proven to be a driver of quality, as the earned money gives liberty and time for the creators. I don't see how this is a bad thing. Sure, there are warts in the system and we should get rid of them, but not by removing the whole good side.

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#333

Post by MYEUHD »

zasdffaa wrote: post #217
plmu wrote: post #210

Excellent. I hope more and more people start to see how absurd and evil the concept of "intellectual property" is. It should be totally rejected and any form of keeping useful information for yourself should be shunned and tabooized. In todays world, many have been programmed to believe that the would could not exits without such immoral restrictions, which is horrible.

I've just spent 2 years writing something which ain't got anything else like it. It was technically pretty difficult and needed a lot of background knowledge. Should I be disallowed to commercialise it? I partly get where you stand but if I was in a society that you seem to endorse my first question would be, other than for the love of doing it, why sink so much effort into a thing only to get nothing back. It almost…

You could offer a PDF version for free. And charge money for a printed version. It would probably result in more sales.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23073126

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#334

Post by II2II »

harry8 wrote: post #102
II2II wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point is worth noting that there are reputable sources for free books, such as public libraries and Project Gutenberg. I realize that neither source will satisfy many of the people on HN, simply because there is a need for current technical books.

What on earth does "reputable" mean here? Total compliance with the regulatory capture of publishing companies? Full support of the landgrab claims of the Disney corporation et al? You don't have to be an anarchist to look at the status quo and think some amount of civil disobedience is the correct, proper and right thing to do. Also believing that a claim, fully Disney supported, that such an amount of civil disobed…

Not all authors and not all publishers are alike. It is easy to cherry pick a few very bad apples, like Disney (especially since much of their success can be attributed to retelling stories from the public domain) or those who are actively anti-library (from the perspective of property rights, at the level of a physical book or purchased ebook - not the right to make and distribute copies). On the other hand you also have authors who have reasonable views of copyright and even give away their books. You also have publishers who are willing to have their books lent by libraries or don't place artificial restrictions on consumers when it comes to ebooks.

Of course, access to publicly funded research is another issue altogether (and one that should consider patents as well as copyrights).

The question becomes, how many of those targets of "civil disobedience" have earned that privilege and how many are simply collateral damage? Also, ideally, civil disobedience should be aimed towards changing laws rather than people simply taking what they want.

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#335

Post by lovelearning »

plmu wrote: post #210

Excellent. I hope more and more people start to see how absurd and evil the concept of "intellectual property" is. It should be totally rejected and any form of keeping useful information for yourself should be shunned and tabooized. In todays world, many have been programmed to believe that the would could not exits without such immoral restrictions, which is horrible.

I think making books, and knowledge in general, available to everybody is an essential public service. At a time when disinformation is so widespread, actual data and understanding are essential weapons against it.

In that sense, these piracy sites are acting like global public libraries open to everybody with an internet connection.

At the same time, I feel the authors, researchers, editors, and other support staff that gift the world with knowledge should be rewarded for their effort.

It'd be great if there's an honor system that enables readers around the world to pay them some amount to show gratitude.

The current system is of two extremes -- either first pay the price set by the publisher to even browse a book (and that price is ridiculously high in underdeveloped countries), or get the full book without paying anything.

There should be a spectrum of rental and gratitude amounts in between. The publishers themselves can together set up such an online library to make it all legal. Not only will they help humanity, but they'll also get some of the revenue they're currently missing out on. A balance seems to have been struck in the music business with most of it being legal and accessible nowadays. They should do it for books too.

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#336

Post by scoot »

zasdffaa wrote: post #217
plmu wrote: post #210

Excellent. I hope more and more people start to see how absurd and evil the concept of "intellectual property" is. It should be totally rejected and any form of keeping useful information for yourself should be shunned and tabooized. In todays world, many have been programmed to believe that the would could not exits without such immoral restrictions, which is horrible.

I've just spent 2 years writing something which ain't got anything else like it. It was technically pretty difficult and needed a lot of background knowledge. Should I be disallowed to commercialise it? I partly get where you stand but if I was in a society that you seem to endorse my first question would be, other than for the love of doing it, why sink so much effort into a thing only to get nothing back. It almost…

> I've just spent 2 years writing something which ain't got anything else like it.

With grammar like that, it's probably just as well.

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#337

Post by stavros »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #162
stavros wrote: post #120

I see things like this, and I wonder why the following software doesn't exist: I want a piece of software to which I can add a collection of files, say multiple TB. The software will then behave a bit like a BitTorrent tracker, and know which peer has which files. A peer joining this swarm will be able to say "I want to donate X GB of space", and the tracker would tell it "OK, then download and seed these files, whic…

It's proprietary, but it sounds like you're describing the "Google File System". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_File_System For your idea, once all the local storage everywhere is filled up with evenly distributed redundant copies, and then a new file is added, would peers arbitrarly choose other files to delete in order to make room for the new file?

Yes, it's very similar, though would work slightly differently (BitTorrent under the hood, whole files instead of chunks, etc).

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#338

Post by Aachen »

Tepix wrote: post #281
Aachen wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think you're high value enough to have someone target you specifically by getting on your LAN or gaining access to (or coercing) an upstream ISP to serve you a browser 0-day reachable only by laying in wait for you to visit an HTTP site because there is no other way in, that's not going to be for a free books website.

This is a site asking you to commit piracy, i can totally see the some agency intercept it and replace the onion addresses with theirs so they can track everyone down.

If enough people find it okay to take such extreme measures for mundane, nearly victimless crimes, I hate to think what the future will be like. In the past, hoarding exploits was considered something for the military, for national security, and even there it was a hot debate and controversial and many parties/countries wanted restrictions like time limits until it's reported to the vendor. Entering homes was a thing of warrants because we wanted to limit government overreach. Now it's okay to employ both of these for reading books without permission? If there's one of you then there's probably more. The future is bright.

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#339

Post by visarga »

khimaros wrote: post #179
visarga wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting difference here between how YC reacts to Codex vs this library. Both are reusing copyrighted materials to help society.

maybe it has something to do with the commercial nature of one of those two things.

In order to run Codex you need 4-8 large GPUs connected in the same box or cabinet. Such computers cost about $100k to buy. Then they use about 5..10kwh to run, that adds up to 50MW/year. The Codex model needs to be very low latency, means more expensive. This is just for one single replica of the model, you need many to serve all the requests.

Not to mention the cost of development - for that they needed thousands of GPUs or TPUs and a large team of top AI talent which is very very expensive to hire.

Regarding the open source copyrights - wasn't that code released to be "open"? This is actually a radical way to open the code, make it more useful for everyone. Open source devs can also use it to create projects.

I think $10 per month for this whole process is justified. It's not like you could run it at home.

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#340

Post by AnotherDwellr »

moritonal wrote: post #228
stavros wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPFS doesn't really work well for this because you'd never know if the peer hosting the last subset of some books went offline (and you'd lose those until someone who had them came online again). I want a slightly different system, which I've posted about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31972252

This is my point about the shame it isn't. It seems obvious that ipfs would have both privacy and a self balancing way to pin a partial set of data. But no, which makes it unsuitable.

What makes you think IPFS has privacy? It has the complete opposite, it is not designed for privacy at all.

When you pin files, you announce to the whole world which files you're hosting. When you download files, you announce to the whole world what you're looking to download.

Post reply on HN