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

Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

391–400 of 582 posts

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#391

Post by nprateem »

spankalee wrote: post #321
JoshTriplett wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1 year is 1 year too long, but reducing to 14 years would at least be an improvement over the current effectively perpetual system..

I just don't understand this take. Why should authors not be able to reap the economic benefits from their work? Someone write a novel and everyone else should be able to copy it? It just doesn't make sense to me. Why wouldn't this line of reasoning apply to physical property? Why can't I just go live in any house I want? Take any car I want?

Fanciful rubbish from people who have either never put in the effort to write a book, or are so rich they don't need money from them.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#392

Post by Dylan16807 »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #327
Dylan16807 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The basic issue is that if a library is filled with electronic books, the publishers will stand to lose a lot of profit. Profit they're only getting because they figured out a way to cheat the concept of ownership and get around the first sale doctrine. > The physical restrictions in a library - ala, only 1 person could read it at a time - is what prevents publishers from trying to charge more or prevent it. Publis…

>they figured out a way to cheat the concept of ownership and get around the first sale doctrine. How do you figure we get around this problem? The ability to reshare infinite electronic copies of a work does make this a legitimate issue compared to a physical good. I don't have any good answer.

I don't have a full plan, but I know exactly where I'd start:

A scheme where you lend each copy you own to one person at a time and don't use it yourself, with them deleting the loaned copy at the end, and with a reasonably large granularity like "1 day", needs to be legal. And probably disallow publishers from blocking such a scheme.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#393

Post by eat_veggies »

WalterBright wrote: post #385
eat_veggies wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you understand the difference between starting an engine and keeping it running? I'm referring to northern wealth btw. > Where were the industries in the South? Where were the industries in South America? They weren't there precisely because slave labor was so profitable that they did not see the need to industrialize. > Why did the South secede to protect their economy from the North? The south seceded in order t…

> Good thing we don't measure wealth by photos and paintings Do you really think that photos and paintings are all lies? > Be serious, think about why an economy based on slave labor and agriculture would not build a network of railroads even if they had the money for it. I'm sorry, I can't take that comment seriously. > slave labor was so profitable that they did not see the need to industrialize Or that one. Sorry.…

If you recall, the original contention was that "You cannot make money off of people who are starving." Clearly you can—in the short term, and enabled by violent coercion, as you've helpfully added.

My argument summed up is that slavery was a "local maximum" that A) generated an enormous amount of wealth early on, and was thus a crucial factor in developing the American economy, even if it was no longer the main driver of wealth by the time of the civil war, and B) made it unattractive for the south to risk seeking a global maximum (investing in industrialization) a strategic misstep for sure.

It's clear which strategy wins long term, I don't think that's a debate. I should have phrased my earlier comment better, sorry.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#394

Post by johnnyanmac »

hliyan wrote: post #384
johnnyanmac wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between perpetuality and "1 year is too long". A year may barely be enough time to get your IP to market. Meanwhile competitors will outproduce you, sit on it, and flood the market. >Another way to look at this: unlike physical property, what you pay for is the novelty. And that wears off. In my eyes, I pay to show demand to the creator to keep doing this thing. We can certainly argue if authors…

In my view, we don't reward labour, we reward its output. And unlike a physical object or consumable material, the utility of this type of knowledge seem to lie in its novelty (i.e. it's not already available elsewhere). Happy to be corrected.

>Maybe if we could let people do what they could become an expert in, we would all be better off.

Ideally, yes. In reality, far from it. Teaching and nursing are some of the easiest examples of how this structure is fundamentally broken.

>unlike a physical object or consumable material, the utility of this type of knowledge seem to lie in its novelty

Well we don't take the time to measure the long term output of knowledge. That's a fundamental problem that goes against your view. If novelty is the value and we remove that, knowledge is no longer valuable and thus, not rewarded based on its output. Your novel research on the next iteration of AGI is no more valuable than some AI slop that spits out a recipe for a cake. And incorrectly at that.

Does that sound like a structure that can support a non-post scarcity society?

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#395

Post by mandmandam »

WalterBright wrote: post #382
mandmandam wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this account keep managing to make every thread on HN into 'communism bad' without getting flagged? Tell me your secrets Walter.

> make every thread on HN Only in response to posts that extol the virtues of collectivism and/or how bad freedom is. It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it :-) > Tell me your secrets Walter Too bad it seems to be a secret that free markets are far more successful. My dad was a finance professor at a college in his later years. He said students would tell him from time to time that they had never heard of a case…

I'm sure your "dirty job" makes sense to you, and it's clear you even feel very righteous about it.

Be that as it may, ideological crusades such as this are explicitly disallowed on here. "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That tramples curiosity."

Dang has been very clear on that, many times - whatever he "knows about you".

You really think it's "impossible" for a corporation with Star Trek replicator tech to profit from starving people? ... And that was the right time to fight "the virtues of collectivism"? You are trampling curiousity, and have admitted as much, and now you really ought to consider giving it a rest.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#396

Post by TaylorAlexander »

WalterBright wrote: post #357
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is false. You can create conditions where their only real choice is to work for you. And since they’re starving, they’ll work for very low wages. You sell the product of their labor and collect the surplus value created by their work.

[flagged]

All you said was “You cannot make money off of people who are starving.”

Yes you can, by coercing them in various legal and illegal ways. Your original comment was just the one quoted sentence above. It is not correct.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#397

Post by SequoiaHope »

mandmandam wrote: post #366
WalterBright wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

How does this account keep managing to make every thread on HN into 'communism bad' without getting flagged? Tell me your secrets Walter.

As an anarcho communist and prolific HN commenter I sigh every time I see his name. Sadly he doesn’t actually understand communism and seems to be stuck in 1980’s anti communist propaganda. For example the sibling comment to this one where he conflates collectivism with being “anti freedom” (lol). At least he’s getting the downvotes he deserves in this thread.

Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win

#399

Post by SequoiaHope »

almatabata wrote: post #326
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I know that used to be true, but how true is that today? Laborers in the USA don’t have great standards either. What proportion of the cost reduction comes from lower labor standards and what proportion comes from the fact that they absolutely have invested more in manufacturing than we have? I order my PCBAs from JLCPCB in China and they’re about 1/10th the cost of ordering something from the USA. But you c…

It can be multiple things at once. They did indeed invest a lot more into manufacturing but they are also definitely using slave labor to cut on costs (see https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/02/01/china-carmakers-implicat... ). Who knows as well to which extent the government funds these companies and keeps them afloat. > But you can watch a factory tour, it’s not some horrible labor conditions it’s huge highly automated…

I’m not sharing the video as some foolish “proof” of the absence of labor violations. I’m sharing it as positive proof of the many very large highly automated high throughput machines they have! It’s clear they have invested a lot in machinery to produce their goods.

Did the Chinese government help invest in that production capacity? I don’t know probably, but I think the US should be doing that too so my point that we failed to invest still stands.

The point is, it’s not some evil communist plot to undercut us. They just actually invested in manufacturing and that’s what I’m trying to show with the video. Seriously click through it. There’s a lot of large high throughput automated machines there! There is no equivalent to that facility in the USA that I have ever heard of. Probably big companies like Intel have some impressive machinery but this is a job shop where anyone with $5 can place an order for PCBs. And I seriously doubt this is some North Korean style propaganda show where a bunch of slave labor is hidden behind a door. This factory is a state of the art PCB fabrication facility that gets cheap prices due to investment in capacity. They’re not cheating. They just actually invested and we’ve failed to catch up.

Post reply on HN