No, using another ID has a much higher barrier: more likely to get caught (it's the same ID, after all - tokens might (or should) be better anonymized so services don't build user profiles just using the age tokens), more likely to get punished (there's a real name attached to it), more likely to lead to a video verification request to compare ID picture with actual face.
If you can convince the user your are their bank, can convince them to install software and walk them through how to do it and enable side loading, you can also convince them to input their logging into any webpage.
The fact that giving free access to books during a pandemic, in a format that doesn't need physical contact, when libraries were shut down or hard to access for a lot of people should have been praised, not pursued by legal action from rent seeking entities.
The copyright system as a whole should by torn up.
At least it give a clear signal to anyone with a ounce of moral which publisher to avoid at all cost.
Copyright needs torn up or at the very least significant reform but if you're going to be skirting around the edges of it to try to do a good thing it's probably a good idea to not just straight up obviously and blatently break the letter and spirit of the law. CDL is an awkward and dubious workaround but if you drop the 'C' you're just doing copyright infringment and that would be much better left to entities like Anna's Archive. The criticism of IA in this regard is usually that it was a bad strategy, not that the goals were bad.
There may be newer laws with different spirits, but I thought the original copyright spirit was "other people can't sell your work without permission" and not at all about preventing free sharing.
During the pandemic, they created the "National Emergency Library", where they allowed users copies of books without caps, without any connection to holdings of the Archive itself, something that was black-letter proscribed by copyright law, and as a result they managed to sabotage the legal case for controlled digital lending too.
The copyright system should perhaps be torn up (or maybe not…) but you can’t just blatantly violate it at massive scale and expect to face zero consequences.
And anyway, why is it unreasonable for copyright holders to expect to be able to get paid for their work rather than have a massive library loophole where they just never get paid as long as you're a nonprofit?
Here you go, you can steal beer from my store as long as you’re a nonprofit organization.
> For a decade, the Archive had loaned out individual e-books to one user at a time without triggering any lawsuits. That changed when IA decided to temporarily lift the cap on loans from its Open Library project
So stupid. They had a working system that they blew up through their own actions and now the library is dead.
IMO the only two reform the copyright system needs are DCMA takedown abuse and copyright term length. All the other concepts of copyright make perfect sense. If I create something I should be able to consent to giving or not giving it to someone.
A lot of the software engineers on this forum wouldn’t like what happens to their profession without copyright.
More and more authors of nonfiction today make money from a number of channels other than actual book sales. The book only serves as a promotional tool for their personal brand, and is only a collection of previously published blog posts or magazine pieces. This already started due to changing consumer behaviors and declining interest in books, so by the time piracy has come on the scene, the shift had already largely occurred.
Cory Doctorow's works that were released under more permissive licensing still reserved some rights for the author. I believe he used some flavor of a Creative Commons non-commercial license, if memory serves. Point being that the method of licensing his works was still fundamentally based on copyright.
(I think the US copyright system is hugely broken and the social contract needs to be re-negotiated, but I comment here in the interests of facts, not in support of the broken system.)
I worry 'hacker' news is going to become more and more 'normie' steadily moving farther and farther away from Barlow's declaration of independence of cyberspace cypherpunk ethos
It's easier to make money when you comply with The Man
you realize that HN has always been deeply business oriented, with it's root in the startup scene through the connection with YC? the hackers I believe is reference to pgs essay Hackers and Painters: https://paulgraham.com/hp.html
I'm old enough to recall the term in active use, and to have received the appellation from one who'd had it likewise handed down. I regard both as epiphenomena of the Internet's frontier or "Wild West" days, of which California has proven as terminal as it was for the nominate example after the US Civil War - not wholly for dissimilar reasons, if we take Vietnam, for the Internet, as the war whose loss would spur the migration.
That's good background, but I'm not sure where I'm meant to understand it to disagree with the idea that the "hacker" in "Hacker News" is the same one discussed in TNHD.
> Can someone tell me another effective way to combat book piracy that is not Amazon's way?
There simply no effective way to lock a book from copy while being able to read it. It will simply slow the process to free the book, at worst it will result in error or information loss (some links and fancy layout)
> There are authors to these books on Kindle, and they don't want their books free on the internet, it's Amazon's jobs to combat this. They have no choice but to DRM
We, as a civilisation, don't have to respect their wish. Free (as in beer) books are a necessity for a lot of people, and free (as in speak) book should be the norm, DRM introduce plenty of problem fir thé reader, with not a single added value for the customer.
> We, as a civilisation, don't have to respect their wish. Free (as in beer) books are a necessity for a lot of people, and free (as in speak) book should be the norm, DRM introduce plenty of problem fir thé reader, with not a single added value for the customer.
Obviously you don't respect their wish, but Amazon needs to respect their wish.
You don't really have to replace the microswitch, at least on my Logitech (M570) I can pull them open, bend the metal strip a little, close the switch back and I'm good for another year or two.
It's still tedious, as the metal strip is really small and is hard top manipulate, but far easier and less risky for the pcb than desoldering.
> Sure, there’s a lot of crap. But you don’t have to watch that.
But even non-crappy content will be steered toward some direction by the advertisement, most videos are made just long enough to fit whatever is the new optimum time for revenue per view. And some subject will be censored to not displease advertisers.
Some people are not doing that, but it's simply because they don't rely on YouTube revenues.
The people who aren’t doing that still produce way more than 24 hours of quality content per day. And for those who do, I’ll judge them based on what they make, not how I imagine they decide what to make.
By way of analogy, large portions of Reddit have turned into every other social media hellscape.
Reddit is still awesome if you curate your subscriptions and avoid the big subs.
Is it cherry picking to say Reddit is awesome because I’ve carefully made it that way?
> Sure if you ignore everything wrong, you can say the system is alright.
This framing doesn’t make sense. It’s an ecosystem, and it’s not so much about “ignoring” things as much as it is about making active choices. If you go to a shopping district, there is nothing forcing you to shop at every store. If the district still has the stores you care about, shop at them.
> This framing doesn’t make sense. It’s an ecosystem, and it’s not so much about “ignoring” things as much as it is about making active choices. If you go to a shopping district, there is nothing forcing you to shop at every store. If the district still has the stores you care about, shop at them.
There ton of people that won't go to some shopping districts because the rest of the area is an intolerable mess.
In the same spirit, look a Twitter/X, sure, there still plenty of people making good content there, but you can't deny that the website policies are steering it in a peculiar direction, and lot of users choose to leave Twitter entirely to not be complicit.
> There ton of people that won't go to some shopping districts because the rest of the area is an intolerable mess.
But there is still a major difference between “this shopping area is mostly stores I don’t care about but has a few that I care about significantly” and “this shopping center is a complete nightmare and not worth wading through the nightmare for the the few stores I care about.”
I can easily think of a few real places in my city that fit into each category.
A better analogy would be the internet. This place has enormous mountains of crap. And yet there's more than enough good stuff for it to be worth it to me to pay a decent amount of money for access.
I'm not paying for YouTube, really. I'm paying for access to the output of various creators. The service also includes access to a bunch of other creators I'm not interested in. And that's fine, I don't access them, just like I pay Verizon and T-Mobile but don't use their service to access instagram.com.
I mean, yeah! Cherry-picking is the entire point of an on-demand video service. Are you just watching whatever it gives you in order? I seriously cannot comprehend what would possess someone to write this.
Because if the service you pay for start to do what you expressively pay them not to do, your whole subscription since the beginning will feel like a waste.
Worst, your money was partially used against your interest, by financing people unilaterally altering a contract they made with you.
> your whole subscription since the beginning will feel like a waste.
This is such a bizarre way of looking at something. I've canceled many subscriptions because of changes made by the company and I never felt like the time I already paid for was a waste. I got the thing I was paying for, then it changed in a way I felt like it was no longer worth paying for so I stopped. It doesn't change the time I was using it at all.
If a company taking your money and using it to make the service works is your line in the sand I've got bad news for you about how almost every single companies uses the money you pay them.
And there have been a ton of things I just lost interest in over time and wasn't getting value from any longer, so I (usually, eventually) canceled. Doesn't typically mean my earlier subscription was a waste. When I got rid of my cable TV, doesn't mean I wished I never had it.
If your favorite restaurant changes their menu, does that make your past meals feel like a waste? It seems like a textbook economic transaction to buy when the deal is good and stop when it isn’t.
Restaurant aren't subscription based, you pay for a one-time meal.
The whole point of a subscription is to support an ongoing service _to you_, if your money is used to enshitify the service and make it work _against you_, there no point of paying it altogether, you will be better serve by piracy (as you don't provide them with money to enshitify it, nor to lobby against your interests).
“Your” money isn’t being used to work against you, you are voluntarily paying for what is currently on offer. They’ve announced major changes in advance so you have plenty of time to decide to cancel after the current month if the future service is not to your liking.
It’s rather entitled to think that your monthly payment gives you some kind of veto authority over their product plan. If you don’t like how they run their business, that doesn’t magically create the right to use their work on your terms.
