Libraries are part of a balancing act between spreading knowledge and keeping incentives for writing books high enough that people actually do it.
Libraries purchase books, increasing payment to authors
Libraries have a limited quantity of books and check them out for a limited time, making them inconvenient compared to purchasing a book. For very popular books this means there's a high incentive for people to buy rather than wait to be able to check them out.
Libraries carry a limited catalogue, particularly for highly technical books. This means that for very niche and valuable books the market allows books to be sold at the higher prices necessary to sustain incentives.
Digital libraries destroy this balance. The content of books is available to everyone, instantly, at maximum convenience.
There was quite a bit of time between when the invention of the (Western) printing press commoditized publishing, and the invention of the concept of copyright. (Specifically, ~270 years — Gutenberg was in the 1440s, and the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne was in 1710.)
Before 1710, there was a concept of government licensing of printers and publishing houses (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166...) — but this was used for censorship (i.e. blocking libel, anti-government propaganda, etc) rather than for enforcement of any conceptual property rights over published works per se.
A printing press still takes resources and times. I don't imagine many people had easy access to a printing press.
And even then, it wasn't a scanner. Printing a single book meant making templates for each page. Sure you could print a lot of copies of that particular book, but you could not make a library out of every book out of it. Worse I imagine most people who did print books likely didn't credit the author at all, just sold them as a business.
You’re thinking about books, but the content that everyone was trying to claim copyright over at the time was news, in newspapers (broadsheets.)
It was pretty easy to “pirate” someone else’s single-spread daily newspaper — rote copying of someone else’s layout and typesetting for a single spread, split between 2–4 skilled hands, being only the work of an hour or so. If you got your fonts from the same foundry, the result might even be indistinguishable from the original!
I don't know this part for a fact, but it's pretty easy to imagine that the "news stands" of the day were vertically integrated affairs, owned by the particular newspapers themselves. But like a newsstand of today, they likely wanted to cross-sell one-another's papers as well — capture the other guy's foot-traffic, and sell them a pack of gum while they're here. But probably each newspaper wouldn't allow their competitor to buy their own paper for resale. Or, if they did, it'd be at an unprofitable markup. Bootlegging your competitor's paper, to sell in your newsstands alongside your own paper, works neatly around both problems. (And, if you're really underhanded, maybe you might even cut distribution deals to be the supplier of your competitor's paper through non-newsstand sales channels — commoditizing and thus cheapening their paper, while yours retains the exclusivity of being sold only in your newsstand.)
Fun actual fact: newspaper piracy is in part why newspapers were on the forefront of commissioning their own proprietary typefaces. They wanted a “signature” style, to make it harder for their competitors to sell pirate copies of their work — especially ones with alterations slipped in! Typefaces were effectively cryptographic signing for newspapers.
Copyright wasn't the cause of the dropping price of books, copyright was a RESPONSE to the dropping price of books. I don't buy the causality you're drawing here at all.
I can appreciate copyright had some benefits but dropping the price of books is one I am hyper-sceptical about.
I'd expect it to decrease the number and quality of books since it limits the number of things authors can write about and people can't write improved versions of other's people's books either.
Imagine what kinds of books we'd end up with if every story had to compete with alternate versions of the same. Over time the 'best' versions of every popular story would emerge and become mainstream. This was essentially how storytelling worked for all of human history until we made it illegal to retell certain stories.
Yes, I'd agreed with that. The present day example is China which has only paid lip service to international copyright law and patents but which in practice has essentially ignored them. No other country is booming ahead like it is - it proves your point.
We in the West really need to wake up over the damage bad copyright and overly long (and often imbecilic and trivial) patents have caused, they've slowed progress down and made its overhead much more complicated.
I'm not against patent and copyright law per se but they ought to be both reasonable and workable. Currently, they benefit few.
When we have so-called 'legal' information raiders like Elsevier and that illegal ones like Sci Hub have to come into existence to redress the balance then it's obvious even to Blind Freddy that our IP laws are fucked (i.e.: favor few at the expense of the national interest/population at large).
They're booming because they're benefiting from our work. Copy + paste only works for some time until you start needing to create your own original things. But without copyright what's the point? Someone else will quickly take your investment of time and effort, and make profit that you can't (because you need to price what you developed higher than the competition, who is using your work, to recoup that investment).
Copyright is useful, just not in its current state where it's being abused.
"Copyright is useful, just not in its current state where it's being abused."
I'd agree—and I'm not contradicting my earlier comment by saying that. It's that what passes as breach of copyright and patent law is so finely ground that neither corporate or national interests are properly served.
So much time is wasted on protecting stuff that either isn't really a breach (so close to prior art) or on developments that are so trivial that they effectively amount to very little, that is the overall net result/outcomre is negative (even the winners only achieve a Pyrrhic victory).
The only people who truly benefit from this over-grinding of the law are those in countries whose laws allow more flexibility. The over-fine grinding of law also acts as a disincentive as it's intimidatory, people aren't going to invest in developing products if they have to spend most of the profits from them on litigation brought on by competitors whose principal aim is to just thwart competition.
As long as you stay ahead of competition or make simply better products it will work. Someone might steal your design, but they still have to manufacture it and parts like pcb, case and so on. This will take certain amount of time and in this time you should come up with new better model that offers more to customers.
That's fine if there's a level playing field. If a manufacturer can steal your design in China and get away with it and you can't do the same in the US then you're stuffed. And that's what's happened.
This is a very interesting take on the history of copyright I had not come across before. It is interesting because the historic facts don't match the pro-copyright narrative.
It also echoes what happened in China where the absence of IP enforcement helped them become the "factory of the world" and what piracy did for software a couple of decades ago.
Sure but I think we went too far. Current copyright protections are aimed squarely at keeping corporate profits, with insanely long protection periods that in most cases end up profiting the company insanely more than the author.
Similarly with patents stifling innovation, especially in industries moving way faster than patent protection and patenting trivial things just so they can "gotcha" the competition (or just patent troll).
Knowledge (and art) creation itself requires access. Which was what Aaron Swartz was hoping to achieve in compiling JSTOR's archive. He was effectively politically assassinated for this.
Cory Doctorow's explored that topic in various aspects, including the sheer naked power grab and risk-shift of publishers, e.g., the NY Times's "reasonable agreement" which resulted in Doctorow shelving a planned essay for the newspaper:
Note that the copyright angle here is that:
[T]he contract came in, and it included a clause that I never signed: I had to indemnify the publisher against all claims related to my work, including any that the publisher decided, unilaterally, to settle. This magazine, published all over the world, had exposure to legal systems I knew nothing about, as well as legal systems that I knew all too well to be grossly authoritarian and terrible.
That is, any copyright infringement risk is borne by the author rather than the publisher, which as Doctorow notes:
[S]ince I have very few assets and very little savings, I was literally financially incapable of indemnifying them. Signing that clause might ruin my life and drive me to bankruptcy, but it wouldn't actually protect them in any way.
that was resources/materials problem not content problem. To make a book back then involved paying a scribe to handwrite on a parchment which is made of sheeps skins. it usually took about 425 sheep skin to make one bible for example. Yet libraries still existed. Copyright by contrast has never been about incentivizing literary creation but the opposite. It was in fact was put in effect as a censorship mechanism where the printers where given exclusive right to copy a written works in exchange for not printing book that parliament objected to. Under the Statute of Ann, the first copyright law, an author did not have right to his work the printer did.
You are comparing two different periods with completely different environments. You would take todays world any day for virtually anything of the human condition nowadays, thats not an argument to justify copyright at all.
That's roughly true worldwide -leader would pay for books to be written. But someone still had to pay, and copies tended to be limited. And if course then there were the book burnings to eradicated knowledge dangerous to the current leader.
Yes, and long before the digital mode of distribution.
I think there's a somewhat irrational fear from publishers that anyone with a personal computer can create 1 million copies of a book almost instantly (ok, maybe a few hours, depending on disk speed), and distribute them almost as quickly.
I imagine there were similar fears of the printing press from book scribes back in the 16th century.
The reason why the fear is irrational is that the digital mode of distribution is actually constrained by the inherent ability of people to consume new information. You can read only so fast, so it makes no difference if you have 1 million different books "stolen" on your computer. Most of them would have never been read or even opened.
> The reason why the fear is irrational is that the digital mode of distribution is actually constrained by the inherent ability of people to consume new information. You can read only so fast, so it makes no difference if you have 1 million different books "stolen" on your computer. Most of them would have never been read or even opened.
It's not. They want you to pay them for the book instead of just getting it for free.
That isn't the fear. The fear is that you as an author will not be paid for your work of creating and publishing the material because whoever wants a copy of the book will go pirate it instead of paying you.
Luckily, for now, piracy doesn't seem to be making that huge a dent in author income as far as I know. Many people find it easier to buy their book with one click on Amazon or one of the other storefronts, or read through a bunch of books with a single Kindle Unlimited subscription.
I'm not sure how long that will last. Some authors are updating their business model to include subscription services like Patreon, where they sell more direct interaction, character naming rights, early access, and additionally gated materials to dedicated readers. This is probably good to secure their income stream in the long term.
> A million copies of a 10MB PDF is 10 terabytes. A gigabit internet connection could serve that in 22 hours. Pretty straightforward to do that.
Yes, just so. The parent seemed to be arguing that it was too much to claim that it would take a few hours. I'd definitely call 22 hours at least a few!
That was at 10 MB per book, but that seems pretty high. Looking at the most popular books at Project Gutenberg suggests that 0.5 to 1.5 MB is where most fall.
If you go the sponsored route and use a CDN, then at 10 TBit/second it would only take 18 hours to serve it 8 billion times (approx once for every human). But there's still bittorrent and if the file's popular, that gigabit upload won't be the limiting factor.
> Libraries and books existed long before copyright.
There was even a period (ancient greece to middle-ages) where the very notion of "author" did not make much sense as books would get copied and augmented many times over by new copyists/contributors.
Kind of a sad that we lost this practice along the way, where a book was a living, evolving thing.
A chief difference is that with a wiki there's a canonical current version which everyone is working from. With written manuscripts there's ... just a bunch of different (usually handwritten) variations and modifications of a manuscript.
(Modifications wouldn't have been made to a single print copy, usually, though there are such practices as marginalia.)
What you'd see especially are commentaries on works. E.g., Averroes's commentaries on Aristotle, or the many commentaries which accompany Sun Tzu's text (itself likely a compilation) in Art of War.
That said, good observation. I've been suggesting for some years that the wiki is itself a distinct form of literature, though itself with some precursors, such as loose-leaf bindings which enabled the notion of a loose-leaf service in which a book could be continuously updated over time, dating to the late 19th century:
A huge percentage of the population wants to write a book. For many it's an innate desire, much like making music. If people who write books for financial gain decide to quit, I'm not sure it's a big loss.
I have an innate desire to write a book. But I haven’t because the effort would be significant and I have other things to do, including work. I am glad that the many professional authors whose work I’ve enjoyed had financial reward providing them both the motive and means to write for me.
You could argue I have an innate desire to care for people inasmuch as I was a volunteer ambulance officer for a while. But I’m pretty glad we pay doctors and nurses and paramedics to dedicate their working lives to doing an excellent job of that stuff rather than just assume that pro bono efforts will see us through. I think it’s enormously naive to assume we’d lose nothing if we took away art as a profession - especially since it’s so obvious it would be a dumb idea to do away with many other professions.
Also I find it hard enough finding books and music I genuinely love even WITH the profit motive at work and giving people the ability to dedicate their lives to it!
Survey of Chemical Notation Systems - A Report of the Committee on Modern Methods of Handling Chemical Information. Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences - National Research Council, 1964.
It's an excellent snapshot of the world of chemical information on the cusp of computerization.
I'd much rather have doctors that weren't motivated by profit. There would be many more that actually give a shit about people rather than paying off med school or their Porsche loan.
Academic publishing says this too, and for them at least it turns out not to be true, because they insist that typesetting be done before they see it. The value-add from the publishing industry in general is payment advances and marketing. Same as the music industry. They're both a whole lot more and a whole lot less than somebody drafting in word.
They absolutely do and would do more often without copyright laws holding them back. Every person who finds a book they want to share with others would be free to make improvements as they saw fit, and that would certainty include edits and correcting errors.
Even today we have rouge editors who take copyrighted works, then illegally edit and distribute them along with their changes because they feel it improves the works in question. Examples include fan edits of films to improve the narrative and streamline edits of mythbusters to remove obnoxious repetitive cruft.
Other examples of free editors can be found in Wikipeida articles, fanfic projects, fan translation projects, and video game walkthroughs. Even mods/patches for video games can be a form of "free editing".
There are very few forms of media where I haven't seen people providing some form of editing services for free. (I can't say I've seen it for oil paintings yet I guess)
I think Wikipedia is a massive, living counterexample to this. It has tons of problems, but the lack of people willing to do the work for free is not one of them.
After 3 days it suddenly struck me how hilarious this is. How does one fact check if substantial amounts are gone or impossible to find?
You get the modern internet, great editing, wonderful font set, the best marketing money can buy under the sun, no references. Sort of factual, we think... uhh... trust us!
> But a very small number of people want to edit, copy edit, fact check, type set, market and fund writing for no pay.
But not all books need all of those services. The editing, copy editing, and fact checking can be left to the responsibility of a motivated producer to provide, or to a motivated consumer to demand. (Of course, a producer might decide to skip those, and serve non-discerning consumers who don't worry about factuality. But … well, that's where we are, anyway, and always have been. There was yellow journalism well before social media.) Typesetting can be handled automatically for bulks that never leave the computer, which is probably many of them. I'm quite OK if books aren't marketed to me; I think I've hardly ever intentionally consumed a book based on an ad anyway.
As to funding, the whole point of the claim to which you were responded was that there are plenty of people are willing to write for free, so that there is no need for separate funding. This means that we'll get literature that reflects the skills and interests of the people who are interested enough in writing to do it for free, and who can support themselves while they do so. Well, OK; it's not a representative sample, but neither is the literature we have now, nor has it ever been historically. (Of course, too, some writing is inherently costly: travel writing, for example, is costly even if you are willing to do the writing itself for free. But not all writing needs all of these services.)
Heh. It looks like I set out inadvertently to demonstrate the importance of copy-editing. "bulks that never leave the computer" should have been "books …"; and "to which you were responded" should have been "… responding".
I'm curious (but not complaining!) about the downvote—whether it indicates disagreement with my claim that some of these services are not needed for some books, or something else. If the latter, then I'd like to know what, to understand better the nature of the argument. If the former, I would be very interested to hear that case! (That is, the case that all books need all of the services "edit, copy edit, fact check, type set, market and fund writing".)
As an academic, where publishers are particularly parasitic, and where academics do, indeed, provide all of these services for free (and worse, since we still wind up paying, directly or indirectly, the publishers' exorbitant fees), I share the sentiment of my sibling commenter pessimizer (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32975366).
> A huge percentage of the population wants to write a book.
But only a tiny percentage of the population is any good at writing books. If those people stop doing so or greatly cut back on doing so it is a big loss even if that doesn't change the total number of books written each year by a noticeable amount.
Writing gets better the more you do it. And many writing styles people have initially complained about turned out to be wildly successful. See Karl Ove Knausgaard.
Ed wood made a lot of movies, they were not any better after he had gained a lot of experience. The assumption that there is significant improvement on what you with time only occurs if there is self reflection and feedback loops and an incentive to progress.
> If people who write books for financial gain decide to quit, I'm not sure it's a big loss.
Plenty of people write software for free. Why don't we just use all software however we like? If people who write software for financial gain decide to quit would it be such a loss?
If software copyright ceased to exist, there would still be work for professional programmers: I want software that does X. There is no free software that does X. What are my choices? Write it myself, or pay somebody to write it for me.
If I pay you to write software for me to use, then you release that software to the public, then I got the software I wanted and you got paid for it, by me. Everybody is square, everybody comes out ahead.
It is never good to explain something in terms of what it is not and it is better to travel towards some place new than to travel away from something. If you build your philosophy or movement on [say] anti-capitalism success can be glorious as always but in the long run you will need real life examples of capitalism for any of your arguments to make sense.
One might dream of all software and books being free from copyright in the same way but it works even better the other way around.
If we take the natural order of things. [say] plants replicating themselves with mammals grazing on them or birds dropping delicious eggs all over the place...
What kind of complete imbecile would attempt to control that?
The topic most worthy of debate isn't the events, it might not even be the discussion about people who desire to reap the benefits from forcing others to behave against their own interest.
The real topic is people who desire to accomplish something that is not and will never be possible.
They have been at it not since 1790 but FOREVER! People have always attempted to deny access to knowledge and stop technological progress. Even other peoples entertainment must happen on their terms.
The copyright circus is not about authors getting paid. It is marketing slang for the Spanish inquisition.
We can massage the words to make them sound more appealing but the purpose of technology is what it does. This is every bit as terrifying as it sounds.
The purpose of splitting the atom is to erase all life on this planet over primitive mammalian territory disputes.
Even the most sophisticated things we do can be traced back to supper primitive instinctive behavior that (in its defense) took 4 billion years to calibrate.
It is not that we don't know how to care for others but it is hard to balance it with reproduction.
If we make life easy and comfortable for everyone they are going to reproduce until non of that remains.
Thus we have this drive to make others miserable while completely unaware of why exactly we do this: I got a good thing going for myself - fuck everyone else!
We've build giant automatons to make ourselves miserable!
yeah, we just duplicate and share all of those books that you like to think of as your personal property. Sucks to be you doesn't it? It was not like your motivations were honorable or even reasonable.
Imagine how we created the rule of law and how all that had to step aside so that inspectors can search your home for a radio or TV because you didn't pay for a license.
Out of the way, we have illegal books to burn!... and scholars!
Piracy? Surely you mean heresy?
In conclusion I think, in an argument between barely civilized men, you choice of methods for winning the debate shouldn't sink as low as your opponents but it is fair to meet them half way. No need to torture them into a confession, burn them at the stake or the horrific censorship of their dialog. We can just mock them while copying the books and the movies and rewriting the software from scratch. After all, we are the nice people, its so nice from us that we allow these neo-inquisitors to talk their little talk in public. How they want to do just a little bit of infringement by searching your property, perhaps not burn the heretic today but at least fine little jimmy a few hundred thousand. We can just laugh behind our hand when they talk their little talk.
How dare we have bigger things to worry about: Preserving the ecosystem, infesting other worlds and we should eventually be able to fix the population issues by extending life by just a few hundred years.
haha, I just type faster than I can think. I would normally rewrite things a few times but I felt it captured my thoughts well enough. And since they are to deep or to all over the place (however you want to see it) for this forum why bother refining it? Ill remember not to write/post/share my perspective more often as to not disturb the group think.
And a lot of worst of modern day Linux & Open Source is those big tech corporations pushing their own agendas... Linux might even be better off being a hobby again.
Which is great for this conversation, because it proves that it isn't absolutely necessary for software copyright to exist in order for people to get paid to write it.
Yes, but very few people can afford to write full-time without getting paid for it. The money isn't the deciding factor between writing vs not writing. It's the deciding factor between writing 40 hours a week vs 5 hours a week after doing their day job.
Many other good writers are restricted from producing a lot more because of it too.
For all we know Steven King could have authored the best Harry Potter novel of all time, but we'll never know that because even if he wanted to, laws would have prevented him from writing one. King actually might have enough money to make that happen anyway, but billions of other humans, each of which might also write the best Harry Potter novel would never be able to afford to under current laws.
It's easy to look at the good works that get created despite our copyright system and think that it's working out pretty well without giving consideration to what we're being denied because of it.
I don't think one has to go this far. It's already a hard job being an author, and if you make it less well-paid for the median author, we'd get less art, and less knowledge shared. However I think one could easily make a case for making it less well-paid for the big winners head of the power-law curve (the Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Mickey Mouse, Star Wars, etc) which extract huge paychecks from the copyright monopoly.
I think it's fine to give authors a temporary monopoly of say ten or twenty years, to reward production. The problem is when the modern special-interest-driven capitalist system hooks into this and keeps lobbying to increase the length of copyright, benefitting estates and conglomerates, rather than the initial authors doing the creative work. And the public pays the cost.
I would be shocked if the median pay for an author was more than $2/hour. I'd actually be shocked if it was that much. Not sure what effect lowering it to $1.50/h would be.
That seems incredibly short-sighted to me. Sure, there might be a lot of people who want to _write_ a book and may do it for free or very little, but the people editing books still need to eat.
Writing a book takes a long time and will take even longer or never get finished at all if you also need to work at McDonald's to make rent and keep the electricity on.
When it comes to populations it's about statistics, not about what is possible at all. If we want many great works, we need to make it possible for more people to succeed with that not make it harder. Same fallacy as saying that discrimination or poverty don't impact success, since some people have pulled it off despite those.
Sorry but this is such an american trope, that people need to write themselves off to prove something to somebody or themselves (not sure what exactly, there are other ways to gain respect but maybe some folks struggle to find other, more effective means of deeper introspection).
Few times this has been mentioned by an american in some group of people somewhere I managed to be too, puzzled looks from all others followed (few times also from other americans). That's literally the only time I ever heard anybody mentioning wanting to write a book (well apart from doing children's book made just of illustrations from 1 german lady, but that ain't the same category, and she just went and did it by the time I met her and it was great).
That music making mentioned has much higher popularity, we all have been young and some still are in our hearts.
I don't think I am that much of an outlier, I've spent tons of time with folks from all continents, cultures and religions when backpacking, working, socializing in our tiny cosmopolitan metropole of Geneva. I don't want to state that nobody wants to write, but "huge percentage" is roughly in 1/2% if I am optimistic and take everybody that ever even fleetingly mentioned it by their word.
To me personally it just sounds like too much actual effort and self-torture for some at-best mediocre output. One can learn whole new sports, hobbies, do long adventures that will create tons of memories that will make you smile and have that distant look into past when you will be dying and remembering them... that's worth investing some time into, not 10 millionth average book
> Digital libraries destroy this balance. The content of books is available to everyone, instantly, at maximum convenience.
What you are describing is a wonderful result that happens to fail due to our economic system which requires everyone to constantly seek profitable activities to survive. If seeking profitable activity was optional, authors could write books as their passion drives them, and then share them with everyone for free on a global library. Most creators create because they want to do so, and the profit is incidental as they require some profit to survive.
But if we have an economic system that can’t handle maximum convenience of a free worldwide digital library, it’s worth considering systems that would allow for that.
Ok, go ahead and consider alternate economic systems.
But until we have that new system, would it be alright to continue to respect the wishes of authors who have created creative works under the current economic system? Consent is important. We can’t opt them into our hypothetical passion-driven economic system where is everything is free against their will.
Individual authors might opt in, and it’s fair game to pirate their work. But let’s not decide on behalf of other people.
The decision is not entirely on the author. Jurisdictions have to decide how much they are willing to spend and how far they are willing to go to enforce copyright, potentially forever.
Technological advances are going to make it very hard to enforce copyright.
> Technological advances are going to make it very hard to enforce copyright.
Alternately, technological advances are going to make it much easier to control everything a person has access to, constantly monitor everything they access, and identify/punish those who access unauthorized material.
I currently mirror many terabytes of content onto external hard drives. I have loaned copies out to many people, who have made their own copies. I will continue to loan to anyone who asks.
What technological advances do you imagine preventing me and others from doing this?
Storage will continue to decrease in cost. It will only get easier to duplicate these libraries. What happens when they fit on a phone or a thumb drive?
> What technological advances do you imagine preventing me and others from doing this?
DRM "Trusted Computing" and spying at the OS level mostly. Your friend will plug in the external hard drive. Their OS will immediately scan the contents, upload filenames/hashes to a server to compare them against anything they consider illegal or unacceptable. Any attempt to play media will require your computer to connect to the internet to verify that you have a valid license for it. Your friend's OS will be 100% cloud based (Windows360 SE) making every device basically a dumb terminal and anything they do on their computer could be watched and analyzed in real time for signs of illegal activity (and market research). Your files may not even be accessible at all for your friends since the OS could stamp each file with an ID and remote attestation could prevent any unauthorized computer/user account from viewing the files. You can't authorize all your friends computers without de-authorizing your own. Limited number of authorizations per year. Any attempts to access unauthorized content could be logged and reported to authorities.
Very soon you won't be able to buy a computer with a modern processor from either Intel or AMD that doesn't include code written by Microsoft designed to prevent your computer from booting at all unless it's got Windows installed. Currently they allow you to toggle a switch in software that will let you bypass that restriction, but no promises that it'll stay that way (https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-pluton-secure-processo...) and (https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/59931.html)
DRM is in every browser, and even in the HTML5 spec.
Every computer/monitor that supports HDMI already has DRM included in it designed to prevent you from making unauthorized copies of high quality video content. Like all DRM it's illegal to bypass that.
Starting with Windows 10 (although a windows update later added it to 7 and 8) Microsoft collects your filenames. Apple already wanted to scan their customer's personal files for illegal content.
We're much much closer to that reality than I'd like. There's already very little hope of getting away from DRM.
I believe that the default path on Windows will impede copying of some content.
I remain entirely unconvinced that I will somehow be stopped from putting together unencumbered Linux machines. I am unconvinced that anyone can prevent me from enjoying and sharing the terabytes of content I already have. I am unconvinced that HDCP strippers will stop working for existing content. I am unconvinced that people around the world will be entirely prevented from copying new content.
I really hope you're right. If they start adding more user-hostile stuff in CPUs and firmware it may not matter what we're using for an OS. Intel and AMD are basically the entire market and having just two companies with that much control over our computing freedom is a problem.
HDCP strippers will probably keep working, but committing crimes like circumventing DRM only gets riskier as our computers log and report back connected devices, what we're doing on them, and companies can buy up our purchase histories.
I do admire your optimism, but I've seen our freedom increasingly restricted over the course my own lifetime too. For example, the idea that Microsoft was overstepping their boundaries and taking inappropriate liberties with our computers has been around since Windows 95, but there was a time when I never thought we'd see a day where MS was openly snooping on user's personal files or plastering ads all over their OS yet here we are.
Don't underestimate surveillance capitalism and the desire companies and governments have to restrict what we're able to do with our own devices.
I am not just optimistic. I am actively working to ensure that I have general purpose computing available. The world is more than Intel and AMD. Tech at the level of Raspberry Pi is not going to go away. What Windows users do is irrelevant.
> But if we have an economic system that can’t handle maximum convenience of a free worldwide digital library, it’s worth considering systems that would allow for that.
I honestly cannot think of a more trivial reason to tinker with the system of incentives that undergirds the global economy.
Anyway, the free worldwide digital library already exists at library dot lol.
That we could make an authorized free library for everyone in the world is just one benefit. If we also eliminate patents and all intellectual property restrictions we’d see a much higher rate of innovation. Contrary to the fairy tales we’re told by those who benefit from holding patents, I’m convinced that intellectual property restrictions dramatically slow down the rate of innovation.
But there is a big difference between an illegal pirate library and an authorized global library. The latter would be much better for everyone.
And you might be surprised to realize that providing a basic standard of living for every person does not require dismantling the larger capitalist system. Corporations buying raw materials could still pay in currency. I’m just describing a world where food and shelter and clothing and individual transportation and medical care are provided to everyone. This doesn’t even require dismantling the broader capitalist system.
> If we also eliminate patents and all intellectual property restrictions we’d see a much higher rate of innovation. Contrary to the fairy tales we’re told by those who benefit from holding patents, I’m convinced that intellectual property restrictions dramatically slow down the rate of innovation.
This claim is contrary to common sense. If there are no IP protections, why would I write a novel? The moment I share it, every publisher on the planet can print it for free, without paying me a penny. If I invent a widget, Walmart can use their established supply chains to build my widget for cheaper and distribute it wider than I ever could. Why would I put in all the work required to invent my widget only for some soulless corporation to profit from my labor?
> The latter would be much better for everyone.
So we remake the global economic system... to remove the odium that accompanies pirating IP?
> And you might be surprised to realize that providing a basic standard of living for every person does not require dismantling the larger capitalist system.
Obviously--every single nation with a high standard of living has achieved it via free markets.
> If there are no IP protections, why would I write a novel?
Why did you write this comment? Anyone can copy it for free without paying you a penny! Even if authors had zero chance of making money on books they would continue to write them because they have something to say and writing is what they love. Fewer people might become full time authors, but books would continue to be made. There would always be artists who would continue to paint and musicians who would continue to write songs even if they could never make a single cent on their work too.
Not everyone gets fulfillment only when they are paid money. Many artists are perfectly happy just knowing people enjoy their works and want to share them with others. Some artists even encourage the free sharing of their works.
Common sense is often wrong. This is how we form new ideas. We look at existing common sense and discover the flaws, and that's part of how the world changes.
> If there are no IP protections, why would I write a novel?
Because no one else has written it and you have a story to tell. Are you a novelist? I feel like most novelists write primarily because they want to write, often despite it being unlikely to net much profit. This is like looking at open source software and saying "if someone could copy my code I would never write any code". Well, this may be true for you, but it is quite apparently not true for everyone. As someone who puts every engineering artifact of mine on github with a copyleft license, the idea that people will only do things if they can exercise IP restrictions is just comical to me.
> If I invent a widget, Walmart can use their established supply chains to build my widget for cheaper and distribute it wider than I ever could.
Walmart may or may not want to produce the thing. You may notice that there is a lot of open source hardware out there and walmart isn't producing it all, so obviously there are more criteria out there than "free designs exist". If it happens that they are well positioned to produce the item then it's probably good for everyone for them to produce it.
Think for example of the people in poorer countries who, through their government's agreement with the WTO to trade normalization laws, they are required to follow US patent laws. So if there is a piece of medical equipment like an MRI machine that is patented and costs one million dollars, those people will simply have to die of their illness because no one in their country could afford the patented machine. But if IP restrictions did not exist, then someone well suited to produce those machines could produce them for cheaper, to the medical benefit of people all over the world.
> Why would I put in all the work required to invent my widget only for some soulless corporation to profit from my labor?
Because the widget does not exist and you want it to. That's why I and so many other people contribute to open source.
> So we remake the global economic system... to remove the odium that accompanies pirating IP?
No, we remove the intellectual property restrictions generally spread across the globe over the last 30 years to end this government blockade on innovation that comes with an individual being able to claim rights over one idea. I assume you are not familiar with the story of 3D printers and how rapidly they spread only after the patents expired. 3D printers were patented in 1989, though two companies came up with the idea and were not able to resolve things until the early 1990's, when they agreed on terms and began selling the first machines for $50,000 in 1995. By 2008 the price had dropped to $25,000. In this time they sold 16,000 machines. Then the patents expired. Creators in Europe worked to make the first open source 3D printer which they got working just as the patents expired. This clearly demonstrates the folly of your assertion that engineers would not work without intellectual property restrictions, as these creative engineers did just that. There is something that animates us that is deeper than profit that does not require government manipulation of markets to facilitate. Over the next three years engineers all over the world worked on new designs, and by 2011 you could get a decent 3D printer for $2k. By 2018, there were hundreds of manufacturers all over the world, you could get a machine for $250, and a single company, Prusa, was shipping 6,000 printers a month. Their machine was all open source and their machines are still all open source to this day.
So printers went from $50k to $25k in the first 13 years under patent, and then $25,000 to $250 in the following ten years after patent. They went from shipping 16000 printers in 13 years to global volumes of 10k per month. So tell me, did more innovation occur before or after the patents expired? And given that two companies independently invented them and had to work out agreements before they could sell, I think it is fair to say that they could have taken off before 2008 if it had not been for the patents.
Remember, the sole purpose of a patent is to block would-be innovators from improving upon a patented design. This is like molasses for innovation. Patents do allow for securing large investments, but without patents we would see more frequent smaller investments to help innovators maintain first mover advantage and keep the market moving. The whole point is that free markets work fine without the massive market intervention that is government-secured monopoly on information.
Imagine if poorer nations could copy the designs for MRI machines? Then suitable machines would still be produced. You have to really study how open source 3D printers have developed to understand that the rules of innovation do not follow the old business school fairy tale that all innovation comes from big investors looking to create new IP. That just isn't the only way things work. And when you learn how all this other innovation occurs, you start to see how much of that is being squashed by IP restrictions.
> every single nation with a high standard of living has achieved it via free markets.
We could achieve a higher standard of living with freer markets not moderated by government decree that allows an individual to claim monopoly on information for 20 years or longer. It's funny that you mention free markets because the Mises Institute has multiple lectures about the way Intellectual Property harms capitalism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWShFz4d2RY
The library of Alexandria famously copied every book that that entered the port of Alexandria. Libraries 'buying not copying' is a modern mode of operation, but not intrinsic to the premise of libraries.
That first lowercase "library" formed a garden path that reminds me: How (nearly) nominatively deterministic of Elbakyan! In a way your comment makes sense there too, when considering Sci-Hub's purported use of donated credentials.
Hope the next Alexandria library is named Elbakyan library. She surely deserves. And this time I hope it doesn't catch fire. Fortunately bits are not as flammable as paper. But on the other side they are higher maintenance to last thousands of years.
> Libraries are part of a balancing act between spreading knowledge and keeping incentives for writing books high enough that people actually do it.
Not by design. Libraries are a way of keeping and organizing books for the interested to read them. Any function they provide to the publishing industry is incidental, in that readers are more likely to become writers. But no part of the mission of most libraries is to support the publishing industry. The history of libraries has been to defend themselves from the publishing industry, which historically has always fought to have them shut down.
I think the industry is ignoring ideas like micropayments, donations, short-term rentals, and similar.
The average reader wants a centralized repository of knowledge with a smart search engine. They may not always want to buy the whole book. But hundreds may want to read something relevant and even pay for it. The publishers should notice all this and collaborate with one another to provide what people want.
Instead, they lock up their books in silos, expect separate registrations and logins, demand annual subscriptions upfront, or require university accounts to access. It seems short-sighted to me. Spreading knowledge doesn't appear to be part of their balancing act at all half the time.
This is far outside the Overton window, but I think it will be what wins out in the end. All information deserves to be free.
The society that used it will grow with the value of the information. That value can then be captured through increased land rents. Those land rents can then be used to pay back the creator through either a lump sum or a residual process.
Since all information released in this process is free-to-use, new information will flourish just like the eco-system behind stable diffusion is flouring faster than OpenAI.
That's an implementation detail. Do we first agree that the system proposed would lead to a better society? Would lead to the pie growing by a lot? Would stop heaps of wasteful processes?
Since people already give away information for free - see open source software, wikipedia, all sorts of other sources, you wouldn't need to be even close to accurate to start with. Can we agree that Wikipedia provides at least $1b/year in value? Great, give them $100m/year and we'll work from there. Linux? Let's go with another $100m. Firefox? Stable Diffusion? That guy in Nebraska[0]?
I'm sure someone else can come up with a better implementation, but a way is through a very small subset of people, when trying to download a book or use other information, they get entered into an auction shared by some others who also want to use that information. Anyone who bids more than the median gets to use the information and pays the median, anyone who bids less than the median doesn't - but gets the median value in return.
> Libraries carry a limited catalogue, particularly for highly technical books
Libraries as in the Library of Congress or the British Library are offered a copy of every book that is published in those countries. And you can go there and read them.
If you’re lucky enough to have been born to the right parents and have the right passport. But if you weren’t, if you have a citizenship that does not come with the right to knowledge, then Library Genesis is there for you.
Pretty much everybody in the non-music industries saw what happened to music, and they want to avoid it. Music went from something you happily pay $10 each for semi-permanent access to 10-12 songs to a system where you pay $10/mo for nearly all music. Books also don't have the secondary income stream of live performance, so they're even more at risk of major loss. Recorded music revenues dropped by 40% between 2001 and 2014. It's coming back up, but those numbers are not inflation adjusted, and no one expects to get back to the heydays of the pre-streaming era.
> Books also don't have the secondary income stream of live performance, so they're even more at risk of major loss.
Lecture offers are secondary income streams for nonfiction authors (actually very similar to what live performances are for music).
Also, it would perfectly possible for publishing houses to find secondary income streams if they desired, but it is easier to complain about illegal copies than to find new income sources:
Just to give one possible example that could open new secondary income streams for publishing houses: why don't publishing houses sell rights for remixing or generating derived works of their published works, for example so that fanfiction becomes legal if the fanfiction author paid his fee instead of - as of today - fanfiction being in a legal grayzone?
> Just to give one possible example that could open new secondary income streams for publishing houses: why don't publishing houses sell rights for remixing or generating derived works of their published works, for example so that fanfiction becomes legal if the fanfiction author paid his fee instead of - as of today - fanfiction being in a legal grayzone?
Coz they'd prefer to control the supply and get all the profits while giving actual writers a pittance and having in their contracts that anything they write belongs to corporation that paid them. Similar deal with code really...
> Books also don't have the secondary income stream of live performance
Funny, I was just thinking of this.
In this current world of copyright, the secondary income stream for books seems to be selling rights to make movies & television shows for the larger audience.
Only works for bestsellers, but that's true of anything in book finances; only a small handful of bestsellers make money.
> Books also don't have the secondary income stream of live performance
I'd argue with some forms of writing / publishing books are the secondary income stream.
There seems to be a growing audience for online serial fiction as well as technical books that are written by the chapter, where some readers pay for early access to chapters that have yet to be released.
The outputs of these are quite long, so at some point a block of chapters gets bundled into a "book" as well as an audiobook on occasion and then sold on amazon.
Some authors then hide / remove the earlier chapters (this is not universal), or add extra bits in the book and then publish this for people who are hearing that "This story is really good, get the book to find out what happens".
Not sure what the actual economics looks like at the macro level, but it seems some authors are doing it as their full-time gig.
I spend way more on music than I used to before Spotify. Before then I might buy a few albums a year and pirate most of my collection, now I consistently give the music industry a repeatable income each month. And I hate those guys.
I’m surprised this doesn’t yet exist, to be honest.
I stopped pirating music/shows exclusively because Netflix and Spotify were more convenient. I now have mixed opinions on the ethics of piracy, but a convenient, inexpensive option for consuming books (and audiobooks) seems like a no-brainer.
O’Reilly offers this for a huge proportion of technical and business books. Amazon has a sort of offering for fiction, but it seems to offer only the back-catalogues, not current best-sellers.
Check your local library. Mine has a surprisingly robust eBook collection via Libby that's easy - and integrated with Amazon for delivery to my Kindle.
I'm actually sad to see libraries embrace DRM encumbered services that track what people are reading or use your personal information for marketing. Librarians at one time fought very hard to keep user's reading lists private, and while they lost that battle in the US and the state collects our reading lists, it seems backwards for them to hand that same data over to 3rd parties to use it for profit.
Well, Spotify and Netflix have large gaps in their catalogs, so I would expect the same to be true for a similar book service. In fact, more than half of the time I look up a book on LibGen, I come up empty.
Libgen and the current zeitgeist is making sure that no one will ever write books except those who have the privilege of writing them for fun or for free. If you have ever tried to write a book, depending on the scope it is a monumental multi year effort. It takes time, risk tolerance and money to do it.
If the society wants short term benefits (libgen) over destroying long term incentive structures that led us here with a huge wealth of knowledge, we are going to see a world devoid of high quality books (with aforementioned exceptions).
Purchase books. Please.
Stop justifying piracy. Same arguments can be made for things other than books.
I agree that funding for otherwise unknown authors is necessary for high quality books, and I agree that more sales mean more money around to fund "risky" authors.
But I'd rather see funding work a bit like science, where you ask a non-profit for funding based on a project proposal that's judged more on its merits than on its sales potential. No author would need an "X Twitter followers" pre-requisite anymore.
And then there's the counterpart, namely, reach: when I studied Japanese in South America the only textbook available in Spanish were photocopies sold (illegally, of course) by the University of the only original they had - with such a small market and highly devaluated currency, no bookstore imported the book anymore. Had it not been for piracy, none of us could have studied. And it would have been poor consolation to know that our sacrifice in not pirating a book would have led to better books somewhere else that we also wouldn't be able to afford.
Are project proposals not sales pitches? Isn't this what everyone in academia complains about? Having to "sexy" up science so they can sell it to people (get other people to pay for it)?
> Libgen and the current zeitgeist is making sure that no one will ever write books except those who have the privilege of writing them for fun or for free.
I would argue this is more or less already the case.
Modern pirates are economically disenfranchised people (usually sustinance fishermen) that have had their livelihoods stolen by international conglomerates.
Even with the the murders, etc, they are multiple steps up the ethical food chain from slaver fishing ships, which are apparently totally legit businesses (TM) in the global economy.
I really don't see the problem with the term "piracy". I guess if you are a vegan and also 100% boycott Asia you might be able to cast a stone against 21st century pirates.
> This site really isn't news for hackers, either...
I would consider this actually to be a serious point. Indeed there exist people who complain that the focus of Hacker News has shifted from what it was in the past.
I suspect someone was making that complaint by day two. Every community (online and offline) has a tendency to talk about how the community has changed, typically in a derogatory manner.
This is perfectly explainable: Very often, early adaptors of, say, communities are a very different breed of people than people who join the community in a later phase.
So, it is the behaviour to expect that sooner or later these early adaptors that lead to the initial growth of the community won't feel home anymore.
There's that, and there's also the tendency for humans to feel nostalgia for a time that never was. Memories are poor. I suspect if people were asked to guess whether a thread was from today or 2008, they'd get a lot wrong (aside from chronological details giving clues).
You're hardly the first person to moan about that, and you won't be the last. Your moaning won't make the slightest bit of difference, though. The vast majority of the world already uses the word "piracy" to describe copyright theft.
Just because some clever PR campaign launched by the copyright lobby succeeded in equating harmless act of copying files to a violent dangerous crime, it doesn't mean we should perpetrate forever this substitution of concepts.
Because the main source of ire of book authors is that they lose some part of the revenue from book sales due to copyright infringement, which many call piracy.
Now, piracy is an incorrect and am emotionally charged term to describe this phenomenon. I believe that a productive discussion on any matter requires clarity of chosen terms. Piracy is not one such term when talking about something not related to sea and ships.
Given that any book can now be preserved and reproduced indefinitely, and given that there's only so much reading one man can do in his life, shouldn't there be a point when we have enough books and don't need any new ones? We might have reached that point already.
> Digital libraries destroy this balance. The content of books is available to everyone, instantly, at maximum convenience.
They certainly don't have to operate that way. You could have nearly the same incentive structure (minus the cost of actually commuting to a library) if they purchased their goods and only offered time-limited checkouts up to the number of copies they've purchased.
most books are written with no expectation of financial reward. the book that pays the writer well is by far the exception and if books were made free by law tomorrow books would still be written. we’d lose some fiction authors sure, but even those would keep being written. in general the importance of money to the creative process is greatly exaggerated. barely anyone gets rich from art or knowledge production but it keeps happening because beauty and knowledge are ends in themselves, things we seek out for no other reason than to behold them. money is just what we need to eat and have shelter.
> keeping incentives for writing books high enough that people actually do it
Nobody that writes books worth reading becomes a writer out of financial motivation.
It's entirely possible that the above can be expanded to every pursuit (that quality typically isn't motivated by profit), but whether that's true or not, it certainly tracks for the craft of writing.
That's pretty clear. I start from "work should be financially incentivized" as evidenced by, well, the world around us. Then you argue that writing is very special (maybe a form of art, and many artists are hobbyists). To which I reply that while writing could be considered a form of art, the kind of books I read (and sometimes write) require hundreds of hours of work (that could be very satisfying, for sure). The enormous time investment means that you either get money for it in some way or you don't do as much of it as you'd want to, because you need to get a paying job to survive.
Exactly. The idea that people who have an ardent need for financial support to survive would choose an activity that is statistically unlikely to provide sufficient financial remuneration seems odd, don't you think?
The separation here is nothing to do with "art". It's to do with a person's ability to choose an occupation based on desire/interest or pure financial need. Writing is in the former category not because it's "art", but simply because one needs to be comfortable to have the luxury of taking such risk.
To put it another way: people choose the vocation of writing despite financial motivation to pursue alternative more lucrative undertakings.
> if people don't wanna write books anymore unless they already have financial stability
This is less about want and more about means (people wanting to write books but not having the freedom to invest their time in it if they don't have pre-existing financial stability).
But... this is currently the case. 50% of books published by the "big 5" publishing houses sell less than 12 copies (source: recent Penguin Random House antitrust case). The chances of any writer making any money on a book they write is close to zero even if they get a publishing deal with a major publisher.
The current system of copyright doesn't protect writers (nor motivate them to write); it only protects monopoly.
I think a big part of the argument for Universal Basic Income etc is that you can make a meager living doing just that. You could make an argument that UBI and free information would go well hand in hand.
>"Libraries are [a] part of a balancing act between spreading knowledge and keeping incentives for writing books high enough that people actually do it."
Libraries purchase books, increasing payment to authors
Libraries have a limited quantity of books and check them out for a limited time, making them inconvenient compared to purchasing a book. For very popular books this means there's a high incentive for people to buy rather than wait to be able to check them out.
Libraries carry a limited catalogue, particularly for highly technical books. This means that for very niche and valuable books the market allows books to be sold at the higher prices necessary to sustain incentives.
Digital libraries destroy this balance. The content of books is available to everyone, instantly, at maximum convenience.