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

arstechnica.com

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

#441

Post by coliveira »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #258
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the truth is we just failed to invest in the manufacturing tech and now they’re beating us in the market, so we’re taxing them to make it hard for them to compete. I’d way rather we just invest and outcompete them. I don’t think they’re intentionally undercutting us they just have lower costs from decades of investment that we haven’t been doing ourselves.

They're undercutting us by virtue of labor standards and other corners that we don't cut.

The USA cuts corners on labor standards for more than a century, but Europeans are Ok with that. The same logic applies, Europeans get a lot of their products and services from a country that has little to no safety nets for their workers, so by buying from USA, Europeans are funding their own demise.

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

#442

Post by coliveira »

SequoiaHope wrote: post #399
almatabata wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Somehow in the West it is now an ideological crime to point out the obvious: that China has high tech industries, new technology, and scientific development. These are all things that they didn't expect could appear in a country like China, so they want the evidence to be excluded from the internet and labeled as fake news or propaganda.

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

#443

Post by snvzz »

Tomte wrote: post #273
snvzz wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likely a reference to an old search engine (altavista), which of course sucked next to google. Yet, it ironically gave better results than Google does today.

No, to Astalavista, which was also a search engine, but for pirated and other illegal stuff.

Now that you mention it. I had near completely forgot.

I knew that site at some point.

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

#444

Post by zjuventus14 »

monero-xmr wrote: post #363
zjuventus14 wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s true that copyright and patents make pursuing certain risky (from a monetary perspective) innovations that are valuable to society worthwhile. But they’re only one way of solving that problem. We choose to apply copyright almost universally, even to innovations and ideas that don’t suffer from high capital risk, and would be worthwhile to pursue without copyright or with shorter copyright. Why not instead subsid…

The government is political. When you make things political, it has requirements separated from the profit motive. I’m not an anarchist. I think the government has its place. But it’s undeniable that a lot of fundamental research is held hostage by politics: Certain ideas are in vogue and get funded, while the new ideas and those pursuing them must wait, or perhaps never get funded for whatever political reason. The…

I don’t entirely disagree - subsidies aren’t a perfect solution. But the current system is so far from perfect that I think considering alternatives is worthwhile.

I’d be curious how many actual world-changing innovations were ONLY pursued because of the existence of copyright, that don’t belong to a class of innovation (like pharmaceuticals) that could have a solution, whether copyright, subsidies, or something else applied to the industry as a whole. I don’t doubt that there are some, but I would be shocked if their benefit isn’t dwarfed by the innovation lost to the anticompetitive nature of patents and copyright.

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

#446

Post by fagrobot »

iandanforth wrote: post #120
troad wrote: post #105

Should it be legal for IA to offer this, especially for older and out of print books? Yes, almost certainly. Is it legal? No, not as the law currently stands. You can support Robin Hood, but you shouldn't be shocked when Robin Hood is caught and sent to jail. It was a mistake and a huge legal risk for IA to do this. It could easily have brought down the whole organisation, and all that they've archived to date. I wis…

Are you a lawyer? Can you point to the relevant statutes? I don't ask this flippantly as there exist many forms (private / public / academic) of library which allow for both physical and digital lending of owned assets and are not subject to lawsuits like this. It's not at all obvious that IA's interpretation of the law is in error.

[dead]

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

#447

Post by WillAdams »

throwaway14356 wrote: post #416
WillAdams wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

while it is also true that it is harder to get money for any print if there is anything else available at all. It makes it beneficial to not reprint anything or otherwise be available.

With the goal being that one would get things back in print so as to compensate the author.

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

#448

Post by WillAdams »

selestify wrote: post #77
WillAdams wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Do you have any data to back that up? Wouldn’t something being highly pirated indicate that there’s a lot of interest in a reprint?

When _Traditional Archery from Six Continents_ went out of print, the price quickly got to 4 digits (feedback loop from Amazon pricing algorithms), so I put up the money for a second print run --- before I picked up the printed copies someone put up an illicit, unauthorized PDF copy --- it took several years for me to sell out the print run and get my living room closet back.

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

#449

Post by 7thaccount »

coliveira wrote: post #97
ryandrake wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe in hundreds, maybe thousands of years, after humanity has finally evolved past our current monkey mentality, future historians will look back at this time period in awe: "They had the technology to make the sum of all human knowledge available to everyone... And they blew it! Further, they had the means to feed everyone, clothe everyone, house everyone, but they just walked away in the other direction, pure…

Europeans and Americans are now taxing green technology, which they said in the past they want, because it is built in another country...

Tariffs do decrease competition and lead to higher prices for consumers....but...there are certain industries important for national security where a country may wish to subsidize an industry like building renewables or use a tariff against a country like China that is trying to corner the market through nationalized companies. Because those companies are a wing of their government (so to speak) a free market company can't compete and eventually all you have are Chinese companies for these critical industries and they can dictate policy to us.

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

#450

Post by WillAdams »

pessimizer wrote: post #206
WillAdams wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If they're selling an ebook, I'm pretty sure that counts as in-print. You don't have to finance that. We don't need to kill trees to read, just like at one point we stopped killing goats to read. > That's why current copyright status should be the bar --- that or granted permission from the copyright holder. Copyright terms are nearly infinite at this point.

Life plus 70 is scarcely "nearly infinite", and since Disney didn't try to extend the Sonny Bono copyright extension so as to keep "Steamboat Willie" in copyright, this doesn't seem likely to change.

It's also the result of an international consensus:

http://copyright.nova.edu/copyright-duration/

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