This will backfire against publishers so hard. Now everyone has to resort to piracy.
The increased uncertainty to retain access to obscure and out of print works does seem to give one a desire to begin digital hoarding.
Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
481–490 of 582 posts
Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
The usual steelman I hear is that Ulysses S. Grant wrote his memoirs on his deathbed because he knew the royalties after he died would take care of his family. I grant that's a marginal case but I don't know that the CBA there actually works on long copyright's side.
you dont need copyright for that. by the time he died the family could have kept the memoirs and sold the exploitation rights to whoever wanted them. contracts are a thing.
Exactly where do "exploitation rights" come from if not copyright? Anyone who is going to enter a contract for these "exploitation rights" is going to want exclusive rights so others can't just share, republish, copy, etc. This is what copyright affords those who want to sell "exploitation rights"
Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
#483Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was said about IBM. It was inevitable it was going to take over the world, an unstoppable juggernaut. Yet it faded away into irrelevance. Plenty of other examples.
That's the thing, though. IBM faded into... A 62B earnings call for 2023. I sure wish that's how I could fade if I sold out. Not being in the limelight doesn't mean these old juggernaut aren't still making more money than some small countries. Very few companies that you feel are "dead" are truly in dire straits financially. They've mad their money and still make a non-negligible amount today in the background
Intel has also faded away. As did Sears, Kodak, Xerox, GE, even Walmart was eclipsed by Amazon. Disney has lost its footing. AT&T. Novell. Cisco. Kmart. RCA.
Capitalism has been in the US for what, 250 years? You'd think the theory that capitalist businesses grow to take over the world would have been repeatedly verified by now.
Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
The neato thing about free markets is in order to make more money you have to please other people so those people will freely give you their money.
>"you have to please other people " Nope. Comparatively to what it used to be some 25 years "pleasing" factor went down the tubes. In many cases modern capitalism looks more and more like an extortion business
> Nope.
Do you buy things you don't want?
Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
Should GPLv3 code be licensed to the public domain after 10 years too?
My understanding is that the whole reason GPL has its stipulations is to counter-balance the lack of commons caused by commercial exploitation and expansion of copyright. So yes.
I completely agree, that's the part that I like about the GPL. That's why I'm a bit iffy about removing copyright outright (as it would mostly affect open source projects, proprietary software rarely has an available source that would be made free by such a move). But I see the point.
Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
#487Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Should it be legal for IA to offer this, especially for older and out of print books? Yes, almost certainly No, not “almost certainly.” I think they pushed the limit of what should be legal, especially since they were digitizing print books and lending those out as ebooks.
Actually, the digitising part is what I find the most acceptable. Why shouldn't they be allowed to do this? Would you have the same problem if they bought ebooks in MOBI, converted them and then lent out EPUB versions. The lending out more copies than they bought part is what there are some good arguments against.
> Would you have the same problem if they bought ebooks in MOBI, converted them and then lent out EPUB versions.
Yes.
> Why shouldn't they be allowed to do this
They bought a paper book, not the right to lend out an ebook.
Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, the digitising part is what I find the most acceptable. Why shouldn't they be allowed to do this? Would you have the same problem if they bought ebooks in MOBI, converted them and then lent out EPUB versions. The lending out more copies than they bought part is what there are some good arguments against.
> lending out more copies than they bought Legality aside, why is this acceptable for banks but not books? Banks can create money out of nothing to enrich themselves, but libraries can't lend out more books than they have to enrich society? Contemporary copyright law is pernicious and IMO if not drastically reformed soon, will be made moot and obsolete by genAI.
> Banks can create money out of nothing to enrich themselves, but libraries can't lend out more books than they have to enrich society?
Others are enriched by the made up money the banks lend out, too. The people who buy homes, start businesses, go to college, etc.
But yeah, I think otherwise you have a decent understanding of it.
Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
#489Robert Miller, global director of books for the internet archive, stated in a documentary in 2013 that there had been an estimated 100 million books published in the world, that the archive had an initial target of 10 million, and that their book warehouse had space for 3 million. Based on those figures, 500k is a rather large number. Maybe some of those 500k are duplicate scans?
[1] https://archive.org/details/archive_documentary_internet_arc...
Re: Internet Archive forced to remove 500k books after publishers' court win
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I sell you copyright of my code, I might still have it on my computer but I lost any rights to use it. This is a standard business arrangement that anyone on this site knows and uses. I don't think it's as complicated as you make it sound.
>I might still have it on my computer but I lost any rights to use it. Just step back and think about how irrational this is. Abstract constructs like this are arbitrary.
I think the opposite is more irrational. I want to be able to sell my work, and I want to own my work for myself too, otherwise I have no chance of competing against the big corporates. GPL licenses don't make any sense if the authors don't control the copyright, so open source would die.
Yes, it's arbitrary - just like practically everything else. Having to drive my car on a road and not kill anyone is arbitrary, but leads to good outcomes.