401–410 of 582 posts
Archive.org looks a bit like astalavista these days.
I've no idea what you're trying to say.
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Can't agree. Even as recent as about one decade ago, the best way to learn a programming language is often buying a book or checking out a book from the library, because that's the only high-quality source on the topic. Since then we have had people creating complete tutorials like the Rust book and distribute it on the Internet, for free. In the US, some professors profit from selling textbooks that get updated ever…
Arguably, professors are paid a salary to write those books.
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> If Star Trek Replicators were invented today, we're so stupid we'd outlaw them. You're so optimistic to think the law would even be this fair. More like limit access to corporations as "the only custodians responsible enough to wield them", while still allowing the developing world to starve and further increasing their profit margins simultaneously to decreasing working wages and employment levels.
You cannot make money off of people who are starving.
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>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.
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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.
Without draconian DRM to enforce, this is only going to work in a fantasy. I mean, piracy already exists today, and this could be achieved if people voluntarily follow these rules outlined.
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Lets change from "selling" to "assigning". Could you assign the copyrights to a corporation (that then doesn't die). Would that prevent them from going into the public domain? If I write some software and assign its copyright to the Apache Foundation or FSF or some other organization through a CLA, what happens to the license if I kick the bucket tomorrow? For that matter, what happens if I don't assign its copyright…
What do you think was the real reason for all the remakes of Disney movies that happened the last decade? Copyright terms were running out. Also, by your logic, every contributor of a project, contemporary or previously, must die in order for the "GPL losing its teeth".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_protection_for_ficti...
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For Linux, the "every contributor" might be true.
For a lot of other projects, they've got a CLA in place. https://www.mongodb.com/legal/contributor-agreement
(a) Assignment. By submitting a Contribution, you assign to MongoDB all right, title and interest in any copyright you have in the Contribution, and you waive any rights, including any moral rights, database rights, etc., that may affect our ownership of the copyright in the Contribution.
Consider also the "I don't know who you cookiengineer are, therefore I assert that you're dead and the copyright on your previous comment has expired and I'll just slurp this up into an LLM training model."
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/302
(c) Anonymous Works, Pseudonymous Works, and Works Made for Hire.—
In the case of an anonymous work, a pseudonymous work, or a work made for hire, the copyright endures for a term of 95 years from the year of its first publication, or a term of 120 years from the year of its creation, whichever expires first. If, before the end of such term, the identity of one or more of the authors of an anonymous or pseudonymous work is revealed in the records of a registration made for that work under subsections (a) or (d) of section 408, or in the records provided by this subsection, the copyright in the work endures for the term specified by subsection (a) or (b), based on the life of the author or authors whose identity has been revealed. ...
(e) Presumption as to Author’s Death.—
After a period of 95 years from the year of first publication of a work, or a period of 120 years from the year of its creation, whichever expires first, any person who obtains from the Copyright Office a certified report that the records provided by subsection (d) disclose nothing to indicate that the author of the work is living, or died less than 70 years before, is entitled to the benefits of a presumption that the author has been dead for at least 70 years. Reliance in good faith upon this presumption shall be a complete defense to any action for infringement under this title.
Having copyright on anonymous or psuedoanonymous or being able to assign copyright to another entity are incompatible with copyright expiring upon the death of the author.
Resetting that number back to 50 years as covered by the Berne Convention would be a good thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention#Term_of_prote...
Having it be less than 50 years implies that the United States would be leaving the Berne Convention (signed by 181 countries) and that would put the United States in very small group of countries that do not recognize any intellectual property laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_internation...
Trying to change the copyright to a very short period implies that the United States would be leaving the Berne Convention and TRIPS and the WTO and would go about trying to renegotiate those treaties with about 200 countries all over again (and getting those treaties signed by congress)
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Indeed the arrangement is violent and enforced with terrible violence, and in no way is this incompatible with profits.
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History shows us that you can build Pyramids and the Chinese wall with slave labor, probably not affordable with "free labor". But maybe we should also look at "modern slavery" that is "free labor" but without any chance to get another job or get reported to the police.
>it's about forcible slave labor, forced with guns and whips.
Worked incredible well for Belgium, and works incredible well for every warlord in west-Africa...and for us (>bloodyI know what you want to say with it, forcing specialized people with whips isn't going to give you good results in the long run, however if you just need their joules it's shockingly effective.
There is no greater folly of contemporary human society than the purposeful restriction of such vast and easily shareable repositories of knowledge. Perhaps these schemes made sense in the past but with the advent of the internet and independent groups willing to fund all hosting fees, we should move to models of publishing that do not require this restriction of information. Library genesis exists but necessarily mu…
If you want to build something you’ll need to strike out on your own and take only those who follow you into the wilderness.
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If I build a house and you build a house and we exchange houses, both of us end up with exactly one house each. If I have an idea and you have an idea and we exchange ideas, both of us end up with two ideas each. There may be labour in both but there's a fundamental difference between physical property and intellectual property.
If we exchange ownership of ideas, we end up with one idea each. That's different from providing usage rights to our ideas to each other.
How would that work? Given that one exposed to an idea, a person cannot exactly erase it from their mind...
I mean if I have an idea and I give it to you the idea itself is still in my mind. And in order to give it to you I have to communicate it to you, so now it is in your mind too. So innately, while physical objects are physically moved, ideas are only ever copied; the former creates a sense of ownership because when a brick is in your hand it is not in mine, whereas the latter makes this notion of ownership impossible.
Let's try anyway. If I write the idea on a piece of paper, zip it into an envelope, and give the envelope to you, not only do I still have the idea in my head but can you really claim to somehow "have" the idea too? Unless you open the envelope and you don't get to actually "have" it, you have an envelope which contains a copy of the idea that's still in my mind and not in yours. You don't even know what I've given you unless I shared the idea with you beforehand, at which point we're back to square one and the piece of paper is moot (it may carry more detail but that's immaterial to the concept of ideas fundamentally being only copied).
A person has an idea and writes it on a piece of paper, puts it in an envelope, gives it to me, the person dies, I don't ever open the envelope and then I give it to you. Did I ever "own" the idea? I don't even know what it is? A copy of the idea has disappeared when the person died, the piece of paper has a copy on it, and once you read it that idea will be in both in your mind and the paper until you burn the latter.
So maybe you're thinking, but the person of origin of the idea matters. Okay, let's go along with it. Say you and I never even remotely interacted, and I come up with a "foobarbaz" idea and you come up with a "foobarbaz" idea, and we happen to meet. We exchange ideas and realise "oh we had the same idea!"; how can the idea be "the same" if it has been independently conceived and the person of origin matters? To double down on that, after the transactional exchange, we both have one "foobarbaz" idea , not two identical ones each: the operation was a complete noop.
We could drill down further about whether any idea can ever be truly original or if it's about standing in the shoulders of giants, so a huge proportion of any idea or the process having led to is is actually not original at all but instead remixes.
All this to essentially say that "ownership of ideas" and "usage rights" are really a completely artificial construct, one that aims to replicate ownership as it is born out of physical reality.
Which brings me to TFA's situation, in which half a million books are essentially disappeared purely for the sake of pretending ideas are like bricks, as in they should be "owned" because someone could make money off of it, which is not even true because even if I wanted to throw a truckload of money at these folks they would still not allow the ideas to be accessed because they can't be bothered to republish - even though they can be bothered to sue - so the paper/bits might just as well be set on fire, which is most certainly not what the authors would have desired.
PS: Obviously authors deserve tools that help them make a living and combat plagiarism, but this situation is way beyond that and highlights how these artificial constructs are completely upended to the detriment of all.
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>History shows us that slave labor cannot compete with free labor. History shows us that you can build Pyramids and the Chinese wall with slave labor, probably not affordable with "free labor". But maybe we should also look at "modern slavery" that is "free labor" but without any chance to get another job or get reported to the police. >it's about forcible slave labor, forced with guns and whips. Worked incredible we…
Does it?
Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t slaves who built the pyramids. We know this because archaeologists have located the remains of a purpose-built village for the thousands of workers who built the famous Giza pyramids, nearly 4,500 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Egypt#Great...