- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
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You know, this thread really needs a list of of the publishers responsible for this travesty.
“Publishers Hachette Book Group Inc, HarperCollins Publishers LLC, John Wiley & Sons Inc and Penguin Random House LLC” - According to Reuters
Of course those Penguin fucks are involved.
Yeah, kinda funny how it’s OK when there’s a bunch of neoliberal gangsters like larry summers behind it, right?
There are a lot of books that are out of print, especially reference books. And if you look for them on Amazon or eBay, they’ve been snapped up by scalpers who are reselling them for obscene profit.
Either make the books available for sale or quit complaining about “copyright infringement.” But whatever you do, quit hoarding knowledge like a dragon sitting on a pile of gold.
Exactly. Copyright should be nullified if there’s no longer first party sales.
We should also go back to the original copyright duration: 14 years with an optional, one-time extension for an additional 14 years.
If something does not sell anymore, automatically should go public domain or open source. Games, for example.
Copyright should be nullified if there’s no longer first party sales.
Then everything created before now will compete with new copyrighted creations.
In a lobbied environment such a thing can’t exist.
Probably some elaborations about what exclusive rights can and can’t be should have been put into US constitution (because US is the main source of this particular problem, though, of course, it’ll be defended by interested parties in many other countries), but that was written a bit earlier than even electric telegraphy became a thing.
They really couldn’t imagine trying to destroy\outlaw earlier better creations so that the garbage wouldn’t have competition. Printing industry back then did, of course, have weight in making laws, but not such an unbalanced one, because the middle class of that time wouldn’t consume as easily as in ours (one could visually differentiate members of that by normal shoes and clothes), and books were physical objects.
Yup, copyright wasn’t an issue because producing books was expensive enough to discourage copycats. The original copyright act I’m referring to was passed in 1790, which was actually passed a year before the Bill of Rights was ratified (you know, freedom of speech and all that). There was a lot of contention around the Bill of Rights, with many saying they were self-evident and didn’t need explicit protection, and I’m guessing the Copyright Act was similar in distinguishing what should be a regular law and what needs an amendment.
It was probably discussed in the constitutional convention, but probably dismissed since the constitution was intended to define and restrict government, not define what citizens can and cannot do. I think that’s the appropriate scope as well, I’m just sad that we’ve let the laws get away from us.
A sad day
Great, another victory of people keeping IP in closed box away from the public at the small cost of culture disappearing.
We live in a system that actively prevents humans to get more knowledge, go figure.
We live in a system that monetizes everything, then seeks to restrict access to those things in order to profit.
Knowledge is just one casualty.
Scarcity is money and if there is no scarcity laws will be bought to to artificially create said scarcity.
No one is preventing you from visiting a library, which would be a fesible alternative.
However, not a simple solution for everyone in every country. Knowlegde should be a free and shared common good.
That depends on where you live. The Internet Archive is far more accessible than a good library, for much of the global populace.
And my library doesn’t have every book I want to read.
That depends on where you live.
Yes, I know. That’s why I said:
However, not a simple solution for everyone in every country.
It’s not even limited by country. There are far too many places in well resourced countries that don’t have access to good (or any) libraries.
No one is preventing you from visiting a library, which would be a fesible alternative.
actually blatantly wrong, public libraries are slowly dying and losing funding.
I hope they remove them like how Apple removed deleted texts.
Also the “deleted images” years back from icloud
😂
That’s good. The internet is for advertiser’s and businesses. Its not for archives of information
Welp, hope they’re backed up somewhere in an uncentralised, segmented, shareable form where people can still access them from the internet.
There’s a Minecraft server that has books and articles stored. it’s called The Uncensored Library, (visit.uncensoredlibrary.com), and they have various articles and books that are free to view. The Uncensored Library was created by Reporters Without Borders. If I were the people of the Internet Archive, I’d be talking to the folks in the RSF about porting some of their content to this virtual library.
It only contains a relatively small collection of banned reporting from various countries, not the whole Internet Archive, and only in the form of in-game books, not anything really usable IRL. It’s neat but basically a promotional project for RWB.
Maybe I’m just seeing potential where there isn’t any, but I really think if the people of the Archive could find a way to get their stuff stored in TUL, or perhaps build a Library of their own, the publishers couldn’t go after them then, because to the outside observer, all they see is a buncha dudes playing Minecraft.
It’s just not practical – no Minecraft server or map can realistically hold all the books in the Archive, or even just the 500k that were removed. Even if it could, you’d only be able to read them by literally taking your avatar to the book object and reading it in the tiny in-game interface.
The Minecraft thing is just a gimmick to promote awareness of press freedom and censorship, not a plausible way to deliver books to people. If the IA wanted to “set books free” they’d be better off using torrents or something like Libgen (and even then they’d still be criminally liable for making the files available, even if the publishers couldn’t stop the files from being shared further).
Maybe the fact you have to be there and read it while connected is the secret sauce to prove that it’s a “real” library, meaning they have a fixed number of copies (max players connected to the server at any given time) and that helps them get protected the same way a real library is?
Doubt thats the point. I mean, real libraries at this point also lend out e-books, and i dont think they have an upper limit. Probably more to do that libraries (or the cities that finance them) have deals with publishers, and IA doesnt.
YMMV, but my local library system has a limit on the number of e-books that can be checked out at a time. Some e-books they only have 1 or 2 “copies” of, other they have 20+ “copies”. Seems dumb to me that there’s a limit, but I’m sure they’re forced to do it for a reason.
Time to create some torrents? Let’s see them fight with the Netherlands on what’s seeding in Europe lol
If anyone wants my ebook library just let me know.
Hopefully they have an offline backup in storage somewhere for when the current shitshow ends
Well they have no reason to delete them as they “own” the copy they have. They just need to take them offline until they get through the appeal or lose and have to keep them on a p2p torrent aspect instead of through their site. That sucks
(Unplugs external drive)
“I deleted them.”
“You deleted all of them?”
“Yep, not on the website anymore. See.”
“Ok… Good… But I’m watching you.”
I was looking for resources for a custom LLM and noticed they had a ton of copyrighted books and wondered to myself how the heck that was legal
I guess this answers that
Just like regular libraries have copyrighted books: they lend them to one person at a time.
They definitely weren’t monitoring the one at a time rule… I downloaded the file and now have it forever
Sounds like a you problem. ;)
How does that make sense? How does putting a “Download PDF” button on their site with no restrictions make this a “me” problem?
You should obviously delete those downloaded files like a good boy.
Which IA failed to do, which is why they got sued, and why they can’t lend those publishers’ books at all anymore.
I have no sympathy.
Just want to let you know why you’re being downvoted. It’s not because you’re wrong. From a legal perspective you’re right. This court case was decided this way because you’re right.
But that last line about having no sympathy. There’s a meme for this.
“You’re not wrong. You’re just an asshole.”
It’s an asshole perspective that the IA dearly needs to listen to. Don’t poke a bear when you have so much to lose. Doesn’t matter if you’re “in the right”. The history books are littered with the corpses of righteous people.
Let the EFF handle the quixotic battles, it’s what they’re best at.
“No one should stand up for new rights. Don’t rock the boat bro.”
Your mindset is the road to a dictatorship.
What does the Mafia do? Show up, “Wow you got a lot of valuable things here Be a shame if someone broke them. Best listen to us.”
The Mafia leverages potential of damage to existing value to extract cooperation.
I see very little difference here between the Mafia and the plaintiff.
“Societies with rule of law are dictatorships. How leaders are selected and the existence of fundamental Constitutional rights is not a factor.”
How you like them strawmen?
“You’re not wrong. You’re just an asshole.”
I made my peace with that a long time ago.
You should strive to improve as a person rather than be content being a stagnant asshole
I know who I am.
you can still be an asshole, and have sympathy for the loss of accessible educational material strictly for the purposes of monetization. Unless you are one of these publishing companies, in which case you probably won’t be on the internet for very long.
Isn’t it “asshole” to consume copyrighted works for free?
As a published (if hilariously unsuccessful) author; no, no it isn’t.
I have talked to a few published authors (most unsuccessful) and listened to a few successful published authors, and they all say the same as you. Some of them (esp. successful) give away free books on their website. They just want people to read their books.
The ones complaining here aren’t the authors, but the publishers.
That depends on if you see the current copyright system as far to start with. The current system is a far cry from how it was created and was co-opted by companies like Disney to maintain monopolies on their IP for MUCH longer than the system was supposed to protect.
This. If I’m not mistaken, the system was meant to operate like a hybrid between patents and trademarks. Iirc, things weren’t originally under copyright by default and you had to regularly renew your copyright in order to keep it. Most of the media in the public domain is a result of companies failing to properly claim or renew copyright before the laws were changed. My understanding is that the reason for this was because the intent was to protect you from having your IP stolen while it was profitable to you, but then release said IP into the public domain once it was no longer profitable (aka wasn’t worth renewing copyright on).
Then corpos spent a lot of money rewriting the system and now practically everything even remotely creative is under copyright that’s effectively indefinite.
It wasn’t just “the corpos”, you can basically tie changes to the copyright system back to Disney trying to maintain a strangle hold on their fucking mouse.
Copyright is bullshit, so no.
Copyright serves a very useful purpose. It’s just been twisted into something it wasn’t meant to be.
Exactly. Copyright used to last 14 years and required an application for a one-time extension. Let’s go back to that.
The Internet Archive picked a dumb fight that it couldn’t win. I want to donate money to the Wayback Machine, but I can’t because they’ll spend it appealing this stupid thing.
