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ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

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Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#391

Post by jrm4 »

notch656a wrote: post #79
hodgesrm wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the previous commenter has already said, the author has been paid already in the first case. That's a material difference.

It blows my mind that in a hypercapitalist society like the US, that copyrights still exist. Copyrights are a massive violation of property rights, criminalizing merely observing something and independently reproducing it with your own private materials for your own non-commercial use. IMO it shakes to the core free market, capitalist, and founding principles of our nation.

Weirdly, I'm OP, and I disagree. Fundamentally, without them, you get more situations like what's going on with Stable Diffusion and Copilot (and perhaps Spotify and Google before them) -- the people who own the machinery end up owning and controlling EVERYTHING, and the creator gets nothing.

There's no actual "free market" in the way you're thinking of. Thumbs will always be on scales.

Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#392

Post by Normille »

lxgr wrote: post #346
Normille wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I regularly lend e-books from my city's public library... No. You 'borrow'. The library 'lends'

Ah, that one always gets me – my native language doesn't have the distinction. Thanks!

You're not alone. A lot of native English speakers get it wrong too. And the other way round as well...

"Will you borrow me ten quid?"

"No. But I'll lend you it"

Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#393

Post by jrm4 »

dragonwriter wrote: post #85
notch656a wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It blows my mind that in a hypercapitalist society like the US, that copyrights still exist. Copyrights are a massive violation of property rights, criminalizing merely observing something and independently reproducing it with your own private materials for your own non-commercial use. IMO it shakes to the core free market, capitalist, and founding principles of our nation.

> It blows my mind that in a hypercapitalist society like the US, that copyrights still exist. Copyrights are a massive violation of property rights, Ah, you’ve mistaken capitalism (which had been developing for centuries earlier) with 18th century liberal economic theory, which is not its foundation but instead a rough ex-post-facto rationalization for large parts of the way it had developed. What capitalism is, tho…

Even further, all too many conflate much of the above with mere "commerce," a word I've been trying to inject into this.

LITERALLY NO ONE DOES, or SHOULD, HAVE A PROBLEM WITH COMMERCE. People are always going to buy and sell things. All the other stuff is details on exactly what the rules about doing this should be.

Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#394

Post by kertoip_1 »

idontwantthis wrote: post #7

Purchased ebooks are like ebooks except you can only read them in Adobe's shitty app, you can't share them with your kids, and you are guaranteed to lose access to them in 10 years or tomorrow. I want to purchase ebooks, but I want to own what I purchase!

I buy a lot in polish online book stores. I've never seen any DRM-protected books yet, they always give me mobi and epub files which I can give to whoever I want. Maybe it's time to change where you buy them? :)

Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#396

Post by mjreacher »

I'm reading on the zlibrary subreddit that supposedly there were some popular (>300k views) TikToks going around showing that you could use z-lib to get free books. https://torrentfreak.com/tiktok-blocks-z-library-hashtag-pen...

I wonder if this is related.

Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#397

Post by survirtual »

jl6 wrote: post #385
survirtual wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just use this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage 5d is a bit dramatic but it is a femtosecond laser writing of quartz crystal that should, in theory, be stable for billions of years and can hold hundreds of terabytes. Seems to be just what is needed.

Sadly it appears to be early-stage R&D vaporware.

That’s a shame. I saw it earlier on Reddit and read the wikipedia article, seemed promising.

Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#398

Post by pdimitar »

OmarAssadi wrote: post #150
braingenious wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well damn, I guess I’ve gotta figure out how to get 30+TB of storage. Does anybody have any suggestions for doing that as cheaply as possible?

It'll depend on where you live and what your goals are. If you have free-time to tinker and enjoy that kind of thing, you can build something very fast and reliable and prevent e-waste by building your own storage server with used parts on the cheap. If you're in the United States, electricity is cheap enough that you can pick up much older SAS drives for really low $/TB cost and have it be worthwhile. For example, I…

> And the 3.84TB U.2 drives are mirrored and act as a "special" device (lol, literally what they are called) [4] to automatically store small blocks and ZFS metadata.

Man, even enterprise servers, sold directly to data centers, max out these devices at 64 gigabytes. Many are offered with a pair of 32GB SLC old-school SSDs (for the extra durability).

Using 3.84TB for this is an enormous waste unless you host half the GitHub yourself and have specified "all files under this or that size go to the special devices".

Better make a torrent or book or comics mirror or something on this pair of huge SSDs. I use a pair of 32GB extra-durable (SLC) USB pen drives for special/metadata on a fairly decent ZFS dataset (~9TB) and they have something like 4MB of taken space...

Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#399

Post by sgc »

plandis wrote: post #214
sgc wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's obviously not exactly the same as stealing, since you are only denying the person one very specific use of their "property" (which only recently has been artificially made property, through copyright laws). That specific use you are denying them is not the right of sale even, but the right of a monopoly on distribution. Of course, if it starts materially affecting the person's capacity to live a reasonable lifes…

> since you are only denying the person one very specific use of their "property" You’re denying the author income in exchange for their labor of writing the book in the first place. > Of course, if it starts materially affecting the person's capacity to live a reasonable lifestyle Well at least according to this: https://authorsguild.org/news/six-takeaways-from-the-authors... > Inability to earn adequate living: ind…

Like I said, make an educated decision. However, the largest reason that authors make so little is that the publishing houses overwhelmingly give them next to nothing. So no, downloads are not the problem. Anecdotally, I have never had an author not send me a digital copy of a book I requested from them (generally because they were hard to get). At the same time, it is pretty obvious which authors are smaller and would thus fall into the category of "people to look out for" I indicated in my first post. And again, I am not here advocating for downloading, simply pointing out that it is quite different than strict theft (which is pretty obvious), and those who claim otherwise, by using a simplistic argument, lose a large part of their audience immediately.

Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#400

Post by Shared404 »

hacknewslogin wrote: post #371
areoform wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you so much for your efforts! I have steadily become convinced that we should make a multi-billion year backup of all of humanity's knowledge. All of it. Something that, - is resilient (can survive a nuclear explosion) - requires no power - doesn't require software to read/reboot from - (theoretically) lasts for at least 1 billion years Copying from the Long Now Foundation's projects, I think we can achieve the…

Instead of metal plates with a clear coat, maybe laser etching diamonds? a 5cm square of diamond can store 25 exabytes of data. They will weight less then metal as well. https://newatlas.com/electronics/2-inch-diamond-wafers-quant...

Wouldn't that fail this requirement though?

> The hardest part might be putting it all together in a way that can be trivially decoded by human descendants, even if they don't speak our language or share our subspecies.

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