431–440 of 538 posts
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Donate it to a library so other people can know about it.
Giving the physical book away kinda defeats the spirit of buy + pirate.
You don't keep proof, though, and probably isn't allowed to keep a backup after you give the book away. But most countries laws don't care about any of this (and it's not a backup).
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> There was no law to restrict that, so they just made something up. That's a rather facetious interpretation. You're complaining that there was no law preventing software being distributed, and as there was a need to prevent that then lawmakers fixed that problem. That's hardly surprising, isn't it? You also seem surprised that including cryptography software in existing lists designed to prevent export of military…
The lawmakers did not have any involvement. The executive branch unilaterally abused its power to declare that encryption was a munition, to work around the fact it had no other power to restrict it without convincing the legislature to actually make a law. If you go by the common interpretation of "munitions" and by and large the contents of that list, then it clearly does was not intended to include mathematics.
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Automatic screenshots and OCR still work well enough.
A proper epub consists of multiple html and css, not to mention the correct font files (ttf or otf). OCR can't recover those. I've found other books like that, you know, where someone didn't even bother to remove the page numbers from the OCRed text, and it's just a subpar reading experience.
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> but can you point to any prosecution of someone for a _prose description_ of circumvention (as opposed to actually making code available)? I'll do you one better: 2600 Magazine was prohibited from saying which website hosted DRM-circumvention code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_City_Studios,_Inc._v... They were legally prohibited from saying, on their own website, words like "You can get DeCSS from http:/…
The USA has a lot of criminalised speech, despite the 1A. The most obvious historical example is "I am going to assassinate the president tomorrow at noon", but recently there have been a lot more things you can't say, such as "Fuck Donald Trump" which got someone arrested and deported.
Dispute that this should constitute a crime as much as you want (and please, do. Take it to court, get the laws changed, go into politics, get the US fixed, this is bullshit) but for as long as it is: being charged with a crime for "doing crime and teaching others to do the same crime" is not a first amendment violation.
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Remember when it was illegal to export strong cryptography from the US? There was no law to restrict that, so they just made something up. It basically went like this: Problem: we can't make cryptography exports (software exports) illegal -> what actually IS illegal to export? -> munitions! -> let's just declare that cryptography is "munitions" -> problem solved https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_fr…
> There was no law to restrict that, so they just made something up. That's a rather facetious interpretation. You're complaining that there was no law preventing software being distributed, and as there was a need to prevent that then lawmakers fixed that problem. That's hardly surprising, isn't it? You also seem surprised that including cryptography software in existing lists designed to prevent export of military…
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Books have got to be the least expensive form of entertainment out there. The value to cost ratio is incredible. Consider buying books to support authors and publishers. If you can't afford it, then libraries are nice too. I personally know people who pirate books, but pay hundreds of dollars a year for streaming services or battle pass type video games. It blows my mind. Books are so cheap people! I recently bought…
If at all possible, find a local independent book store and buy from there. If they don't have it in stock, often they'll order it for you. I have one that's been around since I was a kid, and I love taking the family there. Everybody picks a book, and it might cost anywhere from $80-120 (I've got a good sized family), but these days that's about what it would cost to go to a movie. And since you have a physical book…
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Afaik, format shifting for convince is legal so long as you're Anthropic. It was mostly a passing mention in the lawsuit against them where the damages are just for pirating books they didn't also buy. The fact that they bought used books and scanned them since its cheaper than ebooks was allowed by the court.
I think the key part was they scanned the books then destroyed the originals. I suppose the analog here would be to log into Amazon and delete the purchased ebooks.
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> but can you point to any prosecution of someone for a _prose description_ of circumvention (as opposed to actually making code available)? I'll do you one better: 2600 Magazine was prohibited from saying which website hosted DRM-circumvention code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_City_Studios,_Inc._v... They were legally prohibited from saying, on their own website, words like "You can get DeCSS from http:/…
This is going to date me, but I had a t-shirt with basically a code-golf version of DeCSS printed on it and it said "This shirt is illegal" on it or something like that. I never actually wore it in public.
http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/shirt/
DeCSS was also available in DNS txt records for a while circa 2000.
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I think the key part was they scanned the books then destroyed the originals. I suppose the analog here would be to log into Amazon and delete the purchased ebooks.
I think they would've been allowed to do the scanning even without destroying the originals. AFAIK destroying the originals was just done to facilitate scanning — they needed the pages to be loose sheets, not bound.