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“The books will stop working.”

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Re: “The books will stop working.”

#351
post #7

This is why DRM isn't just anti-consumer, it's also morally evil using the same logic that says libraries are a good thing. This is also why I buy games on gog.com instead of steam if they both have them.

Morally evil? They’re giving full refunds on the books. This type of hyperbole makes it hard to take anti-DRM arguments seriously. “It’s a less desirable technology choice” feels more like the right level of angst IMO.

GP wrote DRM is morally evil, not Microsoft. That MS is giving refunds is nice of them, but doesn't invalidate the problems with DRM in general.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#352
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because our collective western culture is still the direct product of Greek philosophy no matter how many mario kart games are released. The books in the western canon are important because they are good and went on to influence everything you consume today, even the narrative in super mario. Take some time to read a good chunk of these books and you will be wiser than most people you know on all sorts of topics.

My view is quite different. They're just stories that anyone could have told and don't contain any unobtainable wisdom. The people that told those stories simply existed before us. In many ways the stories are inferior to their modern counterparts.

The argument here is not about quality. It is about relevance. Specifically, these old works have largely determined our current culture. If you want to understand the current culture, it pays to have some knowledge of what it was based on.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we merely had the same copyright we had when the country first formed, this entire "your books turn off thing" would possibly be completely acceptable: a subset of works would be onerous and somewhat annoying for 28 years, after which you could literally do whatever you want with them. Key here is that this means that within your lifetime this would quite possibly be the case. This also means that a very large var…

> If we merely had the same copyright we had when the country first formed, this entire "your books turn off thing" would possibly be completely acceptable: a subset of works would be onerous and somewhat annoying for 28 years, after which you could literally do whatever you want with them Also, the US didn't respect any other country's copyrights or patents so anything published outside the US would be free immediat…

Yes, I believe Charles Dickens was the first to near simultaneously publish in both the UK and US.

Cant imagine the US letting other countries get away with that now.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#354

My grandmother is in her late 90s, has dementia, and is in a care home. My mother sent me this update last week: > Went to see Granny yesterday, was quite cheerful, read though the poems in "When we were very young"[0], her original copy[1], given to her in 1928, how about that. She knows them off by heart and joins in when you read them to her Q: When we're in our late 90s, how many of us will be able to consume 90-…

I've been hoping this nostalgia trend will end. It's time to move forward. Instead of teaching kids about Shakespeare, we should be teaching about Super Mario for cultural history. Why should anyone care about poems or poetry? It was the entertainment of the early-print society, it has comparably little value today.

Unfortunately schools often fail to teach the message behind the works we view as classics.

Shakespeare wrote not just to entertain, but to inform and comment on what was happening at the time. Unfortunately many teachers don't do a good job, or don't have the time, to explain the background of the works. Students often don't know or understand that his works were often directed at specific royalty or other influential people. And so when we first read his works, we don't get the insults, slights, and compliments that would have been obvious to people back then.

Other classics speak about what it is to be human, and evoke imagery that most works never manage. What we consider to be the classics are only a small percentage of novels, poetry, and essays created in their time. There are works being written today that will become classics, but they have to be shown to be meaningful to future generations, just like the current classics have.

There are some games telling wonderful stories, and maybe they'll come to be regarded as classics in their own right. But the Super Marios, Warcrafts, and even Assassin's Creeds are not going to be among them. They're pioneers in their own right, but they don't actually have anything to teach us about the human condition, politics of their day, or have a timelessness that help towards enlightenment.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#355
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we merely had the same copyright we had when the country first formed, this entire "your books turn off thing" would possibly be completely acceptable: a subset of works would be onerous and somewhat annoying for 28 years, after which you could literally do whatever you want with them. Key here is that this means that within your lifetime this would quite possibly be the case. This also means that a very large var…

>>>a subset of works would be onerous and somewhat annoying for 28 years, after which you could literally do whatever you want with them. Unfortunately, what would probably happen is more like what is happening to video games now; they are no longer profitable to publish, don't exist in an easy-to-backup, easy-to-share format (like an epub file with no DRM, for example), and so are essentially lost to time. If an ebo…

Surely then you want them in the public domain sooner to prevent that. Sourcing a 28 year old pc to read some 'ancient' format is workable. Finding a 100+ year old pc to do the same seems less workable.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if you know this, but DRM is a core part of Netflix. No studio would ever have signed up with them if they couldn't control distribution. >See far too many articles from Konrath, who at one point uploaded all his books on a torrent site AND advertised that on his blog... to no effect on his sales I am not familiar with that example. Any link to the data?

- The DRM of Netflix is irrelevant. The people who want to download the movies will do it anyway, but their number got way lower once Netflix (and probably Hulu and others like them) got a large enough catalog. People like convenience and are willing to pay for it. - I couldn't immediately find the article where he announced that HE uploaded his books (as an experiment), but here is one of the many articles where he…

The number of people willing to download movies and TV shows is going to only get higher now that the movie streaming space is getting balkanized, and Netflix in particular is shedding its catalogue faster than my cat sheds its fur.

I pay for Netflix. I'm probably going to reduce my plan in the next month or two, to buy a subscription to HBO. Sure. But there's no way in hell I'm going to pay for Netflix and HBO and Hulu and Disney and CBS and whatever other fly-by-night streaming service that happened to inherit rights to the particular show I wanted to watch. Not even because it's too much money (though frankly, it is), but because it's a hassle. Hassle with managing accounts and subscriptions. Hassle with dealing with everyone's bullshit web UI that's different from everyone else's bullshit web UI. Hassle with dealing with VPN and getting a US CC somehow, because I'm willing to bet region restrictions are only going to get worse.

Compared to all that, BitTorrent just works. And between PopcornTime and Radarrr/Sonarrr, I hear it even works better than the streaming services now. I might need to look into it.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#357
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got it from a private tracker but it looks like you can find it on libgen fiction too [0]. The 1.7Mb epub one is the one I got. [0] http://gen.lib.rus.ec/fiction/?q=A+Fire+Upon+the+Deep

>O site a que pretende aceder encontra-se bloqueado na sequência do cumprimento de ordem judicial ou administrativa. (The website you want to reach is blocked due to the execution of a judicial or administrative order). Ah the World Wide Web, less world-wide every day. I guess now if you don't use a VPN you're a second class netizen in many places.

Don't worry. You're a second class netizen with a VPN too. You'll just spend half your time solving Google's ReCaptcha instead of being blocked outright.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#358
post #7

This is why DRM isn't just anti-consumer, it's also morally evil using the same logic that says libraries are a good thing. This is also why I buy games on gog.com instead of steam if they both have them.

We desperately need a way to pay most/all authors directly

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love reading. I resisted ebooks until we had a baby at which point my reading time shrank to situations (bed w/the lights out, on the bus) where my Kindle is more convenient than a paper book. I buy/acquire ebooks that are the sort of thing I'd probably purchase, read, and then sell. For books I think (or know) I want to keep, I buy a paper copy, even if I've gotten an e-copy. I want my kids to have lots of book ar…

I much prefer real books but after having a baby it's just impossible to have two hands for reading during what now counts as reading time. Now it's mostly 0 hands where I just balance the reader on something.

My wife an I don't seem to have any problem reading paper books with the baby. Accidentally dropping them isn't much of a problem either.

Re: “The books will stop working.”

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of empathy in the responses is staggering to me. It's as if the idea that a content creator should be financially rewarded for his or her hard work is some sort of moral crime. Yes, DRM sucks, but what other way can content providers ensure that they get rewarded for the hard work and good content that they provide?

It is rather bizarre to see some people feel entitled to content which isn't distributed as per their own personal wishes. A principled person would chose to take his/her business elsewhere and purchase a book on a platform whose ethics they agree with. Not saying I'm some Mother Teresa type.. but I'm against online ads, and I don't run an ad-blocker. I simply don't visit sites which feature blaring in-your-face ads.…

> It is rather bizarre to see some people feel entitled to content which isn't distributed as per their own personal wishes. A principled person would chose to take his/her business elsewhere and purchase a book on a platform whose ethics they agree with.

Couple counter-points:

1) It's reasonable that I'm expected to compensate the creator for the content. It's not reasonable for the publisher to dictate how I get to consume that content, especially not by forcing me to use particular format, software or hardware. DRM is enforcing the latter, not the former.

2) Having personal wishes wrt. content distribution is part of the market game. There is huge demand for bullshit-free content distribution, which is evidenced by the success of Steam and Netflix (especially relative to Torrents!), who cut out most of the crap and left the "you're now renting the content, not buying it".

3) Most content is non-substitutable. You can't just "take your business elsewhere", because there's nowhere else to take the business to! If Disney decides that the newest Star Wars is DRMed, there's shit all I can do - it's going to be DRMed everywhere, I can only choose from providers that enforce that DRM, and I can't exactly go and watch some cat videos on PeerTube instead - I wanted Star Wars, not smelly cats. This applies to books, movies, TV shows, video games, and to a large extent, to music.

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