10 ms·

The coming IP war over facts derived from books

211 points by awinter-py 7y ago

Nasrudith 7y ago
That complaint about books and stealing personally strikes me as deeply silly even by permission culture standards. The whole point of books is to learn from them. Proper summarization already separates plagerism from original content (even if it is preferrable to provide citations). It doesn't matter how it is derived - either the end product is fair use or it is effectively unauthorized publishing from including too much source content. We should be rejoicing at the ability to have an assistant that digests the world's libraries not worrying that someone might make a profit off of it without permission.
- miker64 7y ago
  But we won't have an assistant that digested the world's libraries. We'll have an advertising company gatekeeping the digitally digested world's libraries. I think that's worth worry about. As well, if Google in their drive to monetize content that they don't own, causes the various publishers and IP owners to go on the legal attack, any other option/startup will be quickly dissuaded from building a similar, or better, assistant.
  - philipkglass 7y ago
    The HathiTrust is a partnership of the academic libraries involved in Google Books and other digitization efforts. They offer the Google-originated scans free to the public for works that are already in the public domain, and allow university members and research partners to access scans of books that are still under copyright. https://www.hathitrust.org/partnership https://www.hathitrust.org/partnership They're not going to compete with Google in software development, but Google isn't the sole gatekeeper of the book scans.
- jacinabox 7y ago
  Deliberately creating uncertainty around the copyright in ML-created works (through legislation), would be a low-key and indirect way of impeding the automation of creative work. Not that I'm advocating it.
heartbeats 7y ago
> This will do to non-fiction books what youtube did to music: drive down the price in ways that makes distribution only economical for low-margin platforms. It could give G a monopoly on the market and create a disincentive for production of new knowledge. This is just tiresome. Wasn't piracy supposed to doom us all? It's regrettable to see Google gaining more power, but the copyright cartel doesn't have a solid moral standing from which to complain.
- robtherobber 7y ago
  My thought exactly. The alleged damage that piracy should bring about never actually happened, on the contrary, if we are to consider a number of studies. Then you have you simplistic and ridiculous statements like > When you free something that belongs to someone it’s called stealing. As if anything that was ever invented, written, done or created by a human being was done so in complete isolation and not based on what others have done before.
- tgv 7y ago
  > Wasn't piracy supposed to doom us all? Piracy is what drove YouTube's monetization scheme, and there is a race to the bottom among musicians (which is certainly not only caused by piracy). So it may not be doom, but it's at least a PITA.
ImaCake 7y ago
I particularly like the author's heirachy of information value. It applies to what individuals should be reading too. But I would probably seperate blogs/articles into "clickbait" and "serious" and put the latter category equal with books. It's important to be very selective with your internet resources, most of the internet reguritates information in a continous and boring cycle, while select corners push novel content and engaging ideas. What does the author mean by "CRS"? Coordinate Reference Systems?
- wmf 7y ago
  Congressional Research Service? https://crsreports.congress.gov/ https://crsreports.congress.gov/
- milesvp 7y ago
  I'd tend to agree with this categorizing certain free blogs/web content above paywalled newspaper content. I can't really remember the last time information available from a news organization actually allowed me to change my behavior such that it helped me achieve any of my long term goals, or even modified my long term goals for that matter. Impacts of things like extreme weather and economic trends, and recently disease trends are about the only thing news is ok for, and even then, I find good comment threads give me a better general sense for the actual severity of things to come.
  - ImaCake 7y ago
    For weather tracking you could try windy.com or your local weather service forecast. Both are more engaging and beneficial than other ways of getting weather news!
beeschlenker 7y ago
Part II: Impeachment Is A Diversion And Delay - Blocking of the "impeachment" witnesses was collusion planned before the new year. Listen to an FBI agent's disclosure from Jan 1, 2O2O here. President Trump was to resign late summer securing election for Biden. See latest updates. ;Here is the zip file, which was also made available in the 3Jan2O2O update. The file within is VID_20200101_201948.mp3. Turn up the volume and put on headphones. BB10Mp3Footage31Dec1Jan.zip 122.4mb https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IXOOhQhHybwky8Z5pGdr9ZXhWpIUazmi/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IXOOhQhHybwky8Z5pGdr9ZXhWpI... The dialogue about the impeachment starts near the beginning. Having Biden in the White House is as good as Trump or anyone else in their organization. Obviously Schiff and Nadler pledged their allegiance to the organization by raping boys on the record, with their task being to drag out an impeachment designed to obstruct and delay any real efforts to remove the President, thus keeping Trump in power. The witness blocking was to cause an apparent uproar delaying things with legal actions until late Summer. Soon after, the President would resign, leaving any other candidate with not enough time or support to compete with an opportunistic Biden, who is as good as Trump or any other Illuminati friendly politician in the Presidency. 162 page PDF [last updated: February|4|2O2O]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S7T_kDv48E40eHzus6CTXHxcm0W2qxVc/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S7T_kDv48E40eHzus6CTXHxcm0W... Previously reported: \Wag The Dog: first was feigned impeachment hearings meant to obstruct, now an attack on Iranians in Iraq. Here is what they are trying to distract from & cover up to retain power. $100+ billion in bribes to the highest offices in this country. 815+ deaths from child rapes to prove loyalty! See the latest PDF updates: FBI Director Wray, AG Barr, SoD Shanahan, & SoS Pompeo each raped boys and were paid billions in bribes for a Soros & Koch funded child rape org. So did Trump & his "impeachment" team Nadler,Schiff,Mueller.So did media moguls Redstone,Murdoch,Moonves. What are they trying to set up? Who can arrest them since they are all bribed and in on it ? Their strategy to stay in every office and obstruct until forced to leave no matter what. Feigning impeachment: see page 13O. Kolpempomfr, kdnroiece ce cercew mor,fr, lpo. \\if;Download the video/audio file, put on headphones and turn up the volume. You will hear these people committing these crimes. Audio was broadcast into my apartment by outdated surveillance equipment illegally embedded within my walls. This very same technology was being used to broadcast me to the internet for five years without my consent. I own this footage. Please use this to prosecute all found within. Note:: I am obliviously speaking throughout the video, and it can be quite loud at times relative to the desired content. The are dozens more links, including these, that can be found in this PDF last updated 4 FEB 2O2O: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S7T_kDv48E40eHzus6CTXHxcm0W2qxVc/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S7T_kDv48E40eHzus6CTXHxcm0W... All members of the "Illuminati"; "....an underground organization of homosexuals and child rapists..." (from pg 26: Barack Obama with Jack Dorsey). President Donald Trump: Demands a $4 billion dollar bribe here at 10:18am 4thJan2019: 3JanCh3_900-1100.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Grdr8xF2psKNsuYlEnl9dIRV-77YG0Vr/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Grdr8xF2psKNsuYlEnl9dIRV-77... 3JanCh2_900-1100-avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LUmVygl_q0XVs8h2cWr8jZl-24fY0vBB/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LUmVygl_q0XVs8h2cWr8jZl-24f... 3JanCh4_1000-1100.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZpP1pJbJakBgg-y-MWNozTxp3wJojHge/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZpP1pJbJakBgg-y-MWNozTxp3wJ... President Trump rapes and kills 12boys, including five boys in a "who can rape five boys to death the fastest" game: 14JanCh3_600.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ufPmglde9Mep0m6xYMJ9c4TWTjj258zB/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ufPmglde9Mep0m6xYMJ9c4TWTjj... 14JanCh2_600-700.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/136qLJdEn8eCs9tI4QtIxl4opW_Lw_gCF/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/136qLJdEn8eCs9tI4QtIxl4opW_L... Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: Accepting a $3 billion dollar bribe at 1033 am on the 17 Jan 2019 to ensure Asian boys can get through the border at "Monterrey" undocumented to be raped: 17JanCh3_949-1100.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eodHu4o5Cm3xEWhDqipSuTj-M1CZUvmE/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eodHu4o5Cm3xEWhDqipSuTj-M1C... 17JanCh4_1017-1100.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y-nWEQbempkVZSz230j9wTyduZNjDmnk/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y-nWEQbempkVZSz230j9wTyduZN... Speaker Nancy Pelosi also "preps" boys with First Lady Melania Trump, defined as in she performs oral sex on the boys’ penis and anus, as a child rapist like Henry Porter would, while trying to remove fecal matter from the boy prior to handing them over to be raped and then subsequently murdered, for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who apparently decides he would rather just have ten billion dollars instead. US Attorney for Western New York James Kennedy rapes these boys instead: 12JanCh3_1533-1638.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AgFkDsbPbI4b5Xd3Wbz2EVNNx25kW2Oz/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AgFkDsbPbI4b5Xd3Wbz2EVNNx25... Attorney General William Barr with FBI Deputy Director Christopher Wray raped and killed boys for billions in bribes in Buffalo, NY on the 17Jan2019 at 7:50am: 18JanCh4_700mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UIdZkS5ZVksZdHYsnHk2t5losi0N0Bp7/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UIdZkS5ZVksZdHYsnHk2t5losi0... 18JanCh2_700.mp3 gorepqkberqaoper,bqpo,rfbv. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DFK8IAxm5pQVqZv9L518nfgP7_odB2Um/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DFK8IAxm5pQVqZv9L518nfgP7_o... 18JanCh3_725-.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DG5ej59Ic8RT9UhbyMdwT0BDcKIifGGm/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DG5ej59Ic8RT9UhbyMdwT0BDcKI... Secretary of State Michael Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan each raped and killed boys on 5thJan'19 at 17:39 for billions in bribes: tionqewncwq. ewqoinmcewcw cwq ece. 5JanCh3_1600 1800.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ghgmNrQvJ8WfJ2TsDVx1ruDU36hrhx6S/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ghgmNrQvJ8WfJ2TsDVx1ruDU36h... 5JanCh2_1721-1818.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eSlD4otX4KZqWXboQM92Mu-6J02Mjwrg/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eSlD4otX4KZqWXboQM92Mu-6J02... Leaders of the "impeachment" effort Jerrold Nadler, Robert Mueller, and Adam Schiff all rape and kill boys between 11:20pm and 1:10am: 14JanCh4_2300-0000.mp3 Nadler starts at about 20mins in- https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Kuvv2Zmbw5Jw7onbRI2hCZ0M8FU66GuU/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Kuvv2Zmbw5Jw7onbRI2hCZ0M8FU... 14JanCh2_2304-2359.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nofp5xF-aXXcCSgQVwj30KlzE9WLr1x1/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nofp5xF-aXXcCSgQVwj30KlzE9W... Mueller at 12:25am, next is Schiff who starts 12:55-ish: 15JanCh2_000-100.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EsmHfguwBuo2PbavJ1WYyhiML62tgCkj/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EsmHfguwBuo2PbavJ1WYyhiML62... 15JanCh2_100-200.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NZnWRnBryalNQu2yJmfJUdS2pA_rGSFH/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NZnWRnBryalNQu2yJmfJUdS2pA_... 15JanCh4_000-100.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZEDJR6jb6ARpcNnWJTokBUKb2J2OQnwZ/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZEDJR6jb6ARpcNnWJTokBUKb2J2... 15JanCh4_100-200.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/173aYWvWHH4VGht1h_2nM0IMdw746LeCL/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/173aYWvWHH4VGht1h_2nM0IMdw74... Complete Media Protection: Lester Holt, of NBC NightlyNews, apparently a member of the Illuminati since the 1980's, along with ABC Nightly News lead anchor David Muir, stop over to the Porter studio in Buffalo, New York on 14Jan2019 at 5:00 am. They both rape and kill about two dozen boys by 6:00 am. Muir starts around 5.15am, then Holt about 5:38 am. Multi-billionaire Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corp and also Fox Corporation, takes his turn after Holt. Video links below: 14JanCh3_500-601.avi zijnoijrpotmebr https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i7NKepeyG_FfdQRrM7KsnFOZOOX3o7UL/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i7NKepeyG_FfdQRrM7KsnFOZOOX... 14JanCh2_530-600.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NZzgN5ilI7ToroU5cfqMaL4o2u1RwidV/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NZzgN5ilI7ToroU5cfqMaL4o2u1... Adding to the media protection and reason this is not picked up by the media, CBS and Viacom owner Sumner Redstone and Leslie Moonves rape and kill boys following the President. 14JanCh3_700.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/10XDw6x3ldnnQiq7oIjpdYVENyXaB4aI0/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/10XDw6x3ldnnQiq7oIjpdYVENyXa... 14JanCh2_700-800.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NS_e6AzEZ05wnfljkGMETGU5CWYKfRDp/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NS_e6AzEZ05wnfljkGMETGU5CWY... 161p PDF [last updated: Feb|4|2O2O]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S7T_kDv48E40eHzus6CTXHxcm0W2qxVc/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S7T_kDv48E40eHzus6CTXHxcm0W... \\. Please repost in USA! Post gets censored in US Recently more relevant: From page 49, Senator Mitch McConnell: At 1632 Senator Mitch McConnell checks into the Porter camera system inquiring if he can be part of the "eviction" for $10 million dollars. He is informed by group members that there are enough people for the event already and his participation is not necessary. At 1634 McConnell states "I fucked 15 kids, how am I not getting paid by you?" He is dismissed by Donald Reeves with "I think that will be all Mr. McConnell." 13JanCh3_1600-1700.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L7bqOpvaEWmLiJpMhJNQDrfsQAHtsX8-/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L7bqOpvaEWmLiJpMhJNQDrfsQAH...
PeterisP 7y ago
There's no IP war coming over facts derived from books because copyright doesn't cover facts derived from books and the other forms of IP (trademarks, patents) are even less relevant. I've done some work with corpus linguistics and quantitative linguistics, and large parts of these disciplines essentially are about facts derived from books in some manner. Modern approaches tend to involve machine learning, deep neural networks and other things fashionable on hackernews, but in general that's an old, traditional area that was working on facts derived from books for decades before the "ML era". To work on facts derived from books, we're sourcing all kinds of books and other written language, such as newspapers. Some publishers and authors are cooperative and helpful for such research, some are uncooperative and prefer to intentionally make working on their sources difficult - but in any case, even in the case of disagreement and conflict there's no "IP war", the conflict in our case tends to be about practical convenience of access, not about IP, because they don't really have a leg to stand on in claiming a copyright violation. They hold the copyright on the original text, which gives them certain exclusive rights, there's a bunch of intermediary data that we can't make available to public without their permission, but these rights don't extend to facts derived from that text, and we legally don't need their permission to work on, analyze, transform, publish and use stuff based on facts in the text or facts about the text, we can do that openly even if they've explicitly made it clear that they don't want us to do that. That's nothing new, that's established law that probably predates modern computers.
- Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
  > copyright doesn't cover facts derived from books EU database right can and does.
  - mehh 7y ago
    Are there any instances of that actually happening, in regards to a book being treated as a database? It kinda makes sense, Guinness Book of Records, being an example.
    - kragen 7y ago
      Westlaw page numbers and Lexis citations. Carl Malamud has been involved in a number of struggles in the US. Mostly since Feist things have gone in the direction of intellectual freedom in the US and intellectual privatization in the EU.
tristanho 7y ago
The system described by the author of this post actually already exists, and was indeed created by google: https://books.google.com/talktobooks/ https://books.google.com/talktobooks/ It's just really not that good (yet)...
fergie 7y ago
This article makes no sense. Quality non-fiction books have always cited other quality non-fiction books and this is a Very Good Thing.
- topspin 7y ago
  I wish I shared your certainty but ours is the age of the rent seeker. They don't care about 'Good.' They want to get paid and if there is any remotely feasible way to impose themselves they will, tradition be damned.
- michaelt 7y ago
  Maps are collections of facts about road locations, and if I write directions based on a map, doing so doesn't infringe on the map producer's copyright. But if I'm starting a map company, and I scan in and trace the roads in my competitors' maps? I'd say that's less clear cut - and may well be copyright infringement, even though I'm extracting facts from their publication and creating a new publication containing the same facts. If I use an entire copyrighted book to train an AI, is it more like the first example, or more like the second?
  - kragen 7y ago
    Maps and charts have been statutorily subject to copyright in the US since the Constitution was ratified. Facts, on the contrary, have been protected from copyright.
bambax 7y ago
Where do "facts derived from books" come from? Archives and original research. Wouldn't it make more sense, and be economically (and legally) more defensible to index those primary sources, than books?
jbj 7y ago
The author makes a side note about getting access to gmail. aren't there at least a handful of third party services that require access to content of gmail?
changoplatanero 7y ago
Pretty sure that ML is adding billions of dollars of value in ad ranking
ggm 7y ago
I always liked that many of the ancients words are only known because somebody writes "plato tells us that socrates said..." which is in context, pretty much what monetising the actual semantic intent of those scanned books would be.
aaron695 7y ago
No There's lots wrong with this article > Google has only one valuable proprietary dataset They own none of the map/street view data? Google already answers questions using books. And if you too want the world's book repository you can just download it, just illegally. There are big megapacks of it. Way better data than Google books, The only thing Google books might beat you on is original documents for history. But books are almost dead, maybe a decade? ML with human assisted help will be able to pop out quality books quite easily. It'll still take a human, just it'll do in a month what took years.
- andrey_utkin 7y ago
  > But books are almost dead, maybe a decade? Paper book format maybe is. "Long form content" is what "book" means now and it is not going away.
egypturnash 7y ago
The opening bits about how “monetization of machine learning has been five years away for several years” reminds me of how fusion has been twenty years away since at least the mid-fifties (so about 65 years). And now I am wondering if anyone has ever looked at the track records on people saying “technology X will be usable in Y years” versus the actual amount of time things took to become usable, if ever.
- Multicomp 7y ago
  Reminds me of the Popular Mechanics magazines promising new battery technologies any day now. Similarly, battery technologies that show great promise in the labs of 2015/16/17/18/19 are still 'soon on the market, any minute now'.
  - K0SM0S 7y ago
    That's entertainment though; ever since I was a kid (child of the 1980's) I've never heard a single physicist confirm that 'new' battery tech, operating through different first principles, was anywhere in sight for commercial use. All we do is refine the materials and building and designs based on the same core principles (this optimization has yielded decent but not paradigm-changing results, unlike what a "new S-curve" would entail). The perceived increase in "lasting power" of our portable devices compared to 40 years ago was largely due to Moore's Law, optimization on the consumption side of the energy equation, not the source.
    - philipkglass 7y ago
      The first commercial lithium ion battery dates to 1991: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Commercialization_and_later_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Commercial... The lithium ion battery has incrementally improved energy density every year since its commercialization (see Figure 4): https://www.intechopen.com/books/ict-energy-concepts-towards-zero-power-information-and-communication-technology/energy-storage-battery-materials-and-architectures-at-the-nanoscale https://www.intechopen.com/books/ict-energy-concepts-towards... Most breakthroughs or projected-breakthroughs that get Popular Science articles written about them are overstated or never materialize at all. But battery technology is improving over time. It's not improving at the pace of microelectronics, but hardly anything improves that quickly.
huac 7y ago
I can absolutely assure you that FB and G's ad targeting algorithms are more complex and significantly more performant than "cluster and sort by click rate per keyword." For one, you rank ads on an eCPM basis, which includes bid, but leaving that aside, trust me, just because you don't know how ads systems work, that doesn't mean they're not working. Here's a clear example of ML improving search: voice search. You might not use it, but it's extremely popular in India and other developing markets. "G search has gotten worse as they’ve focused on recency in the index, gotten more tolerant of synonyms, and gotten less strict about quoted phrases." None of these are "machine learning" - these are product decisions. If you wanted to say "Google is not an ML company," you'd point to the outsized human influence on search rankings (see, e.g. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...). Google Maps is extremely valuable as a proprietary dataset, and we're all making it better whenever we do a captcha, doing object recognition from streetview. So are YouTube, News, Translate, and so many others. There are so many papers detailing practical metric improvements from ML: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.09591 https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.09591, is one ("Replacing the manual scoring functionwith a gradient boosted decision tree (GBDT) model gave one of the largest step improvements in homes bookings in Airbnb’s history, with many successful iterations to follow" and deeper neural nets offered significant improvements after that).
- awinter-py 7y ago
  this airbnb paper is great, thanks for posting this
looper_dude 7y ago
If the cost of books went down I'd happily start buying them again. Until then, I can't justify paying $150 for non-fiction that will be outdated in 2 years.
anonsivalley652 7y ago
IANAL, but this seems like a good video response topic for a copyright attorney such as Leonard French.
mdale 7y ago
It's odd that the post mentions Wikipedia as it is a counter argument to the central premise. I.e contesting book fact aggregation would already had to have sued an won against Wikipedia and Britannica before it.
sanxiyn 7y ago
People already mentioned map, but isn't search history Google's most valuable proprietary dataset?
michaelmrose 7y ago
This is broken thinking. > If I’d published a non-fiction book in the last 100 years I’d put $10 right now into a class action to prevent this product from hitting the market. Authors are a 1 100th of a percent of the population. If we do create new ways for people whose entire life and minds are derivative of millennia of civilization to own facts observed in the world around them the primary funding for and beneficiary of such a change would be an even smaller class of people who collect much more of the sweat of the authors brow than the author even will. The proper response to this is voting any bums who vote for this out of office. If this doesn't work the next step is the guillotine. > Google will force us to create a new format for information by removing the profitability from the existing one. The fact that actual scarcity is giving way to plenty in no way suggests that we ought to fight to impose artificial scarcity for the dubious privilege of ensuring that leaches can keep profiting in order to keep a minority of the money filtering down to the people who do the actual work. Perhaps we ought to discover a way for everyone to profitably enjoy the greater bounty instead of glorifying working for a living. > It’s not like they didn’t tell us they were doing this. Their mission statement was to ‘free the world’s information’. Small wonder they don’t understand privacy. In this case we’re talking about information that’s protected by IP rights. When you free something that belongs to someone it’s called stealing. Our inherent emotional reaction to real scarcity based on the rivalrous nature of physical goods is a poor foundation to build a case for inventing new rights designed to divvy up the world for the benefit of the rich. I'm sick unto death of hearing proponents of new and inventive varieties of imaginary property describing circumvention of their imaginary rights "stealing". There are no words in keeping with the dignity of this site that I could use to aptly describe my feelings for the authors words. People like him are emphatically the enemies of the people.
- nnq 7y ago
  EXACTLY! The article is infected with a really vile and evil way of thinking that is almost the equivalent of the "but think of the children" argument for justifying privacy invasion and censorship, but in the field of IP...
buboard 7y ago
i mean, it's not impossible for a competitor to re-do the archiving of all books. Doesn't amazon own all the books!
imvetri 7y ago
Good job!
jtbayly 7y ago
The author is confused. The thing he's talking about is actually Wikipedia. Facts, mostly derived from books, is exactly how he describes Wikipedia. And indeed, it was transformative for education, and it did cause us to question parts of education.

211 points by awinter-py 7y ago

That complaint about books and stealing personally strikes me as deeply silly even by permission culture standards. The whole point of books is to learn from them. Proper summarization already separates plagerism from original content (even if it is preferrable to provide citations). It doesn't matter how it is derived - either the end product is fair use or it is effectively unauthorized publishing from including too much source content. We should be rejoicing at the ability to have an assistant that digests the world's libraries not worrying that someone might make a profit off of it without permission.

miker64 7y ago
But we won't have an assistant that digested the world's libraries. We'll have an advertising company gatekeeping the digitally digested world's libraries. I think that's worth worry about. As well, if Google in their drive to monetize content that they don't own, causes the various publishers and IP owners to go on the legal attack, any other option/startup will be quickly dissuaded from building a similar, or better, assistant.
- philipkglass 7y ago
  The HathiTrust is a partnership of the academic libraries involved in Google Books and other digitization efforts. They offer the Google-originated scans free to the public for works that are already in the public domain, and allow university members and research partners to access scans of books that are still under copyright. https://www.hathitrust.org/partnership https://www.hathitrust.org/partnership They're not going to compete with Google in software development, but Google isn't the sole gatekeeper of the book scans.
jacinabox 7y ago
Deliberately creating uncertainty around the copyright in ML-created works (through legislation), would be a low-key and indirect way of impeding the automation of creative work. Not that I'm advocating it.

heartbeats 7y ago

> This will do to non-fiction books what youtube did to music: drive down the price in ways that makes distribution only economical for low-margin platforms. It could give G a monopoly on the market and create a disincentive for production of new knowledge. This is just tiresome. Wasn't piracy supposed to doom us all? It's regrettable to see Google gaining more power, but the copyright cartel doesn't have a solid moral standing from which to complain.

robtherobber 7y ago
My thought exactly. The alleged damage that piracy should bring about never actually happened, on the contrary, if we are to consider a number of studies. Then you have you simplistic and ridiculous statements like > When you free something that belongs to someone it’s called stealing. As if anything that was ever invented, written, done or created by a human being was done so in complete isolation and not based on what others have done before.
tgv 7y ago
> Wasn't piracy supposed to doom us all? Piracy is what drove YouTube's monetization scheme, and there is a race to the bottom among musicians (which is certainly not only caused by piracy). So it may not be doom, but it's at least a PITA.

ImaCake 7y ago

I particularly like the author's heirachy of information value. It applies to what individuals should be reading too. But I would probably seperate blogs/articles into "clickbait" and "serious" and put the latter category equal with books. It's important to be very selective with your internet resources, most of the internet reguritates information in a continous and boring cycle, while select corners push novel content and engaging ideas. What does the author mean by "CRS"? Coordinate Reference Systems?

wmf 7y ago
Congressional Research Service? https://crsreports.congress.gov/ https://crsreports.congress.gov/
milesvp 7y ago
I'd tend to agree with this categorizing certain free blogs/web content above paywalled newspaper content. I can't really remember the last time information available from a news organization actually allowed me to change my behavior such that it helped me achieve any of my long term goals, or even modified my long term goals for that matter. Impacts of things like extreme weather and economic trends, and recently disease trends are about the only thing news is ok for, and even then, I find good comment threads give me a better general sense for the actual severity of things to come.
- ImaCake 7y ago
  For weather tracking you could try windy.com or your local weather service forecast. Both are more engaging and beneficial than other ways of getting weather news!

beeschlenker 7y ago

Part II: Impeachment Is A Diversion And Delay - Blocking of the "impeachment" witnesses was collusion planned before the new year. Listen to an FBI agent's disclosure from Jan 1, 2O2O here. President Trump was to resign late summer securing election for Biden. See latest updates. ;Here is the zip file, which was also made available in the 3Jan2O2O update. The file within is VID_20200101_201948.mp3. Turn up the volume and put on headphones. BB10Mp3Footage31Dec1Jan.zip 122.4mb https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IXOOhQhHybwky8Z5pGdr9ZXhWpIUazmi/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IXOOhQhHybwky8Z5pGdr9ZXhWpI... The dialogue about the impeachment starts near the beginning. Having Biden in the White House is as good as Trump or anyone else in their organization. Obviously Schiff and Nadler pledged their allegiance to the organization by raping boys on the record, with their task being to drag out an impeachment designed to obstruct and delay any real efforts to remove the President, thus keeping Trump in power. The witness blocking was to cause an apparent uproar delaying things with legal actions until late Summer. Soon after, the President would resign, leaving any other candidate with not enough time or support to compete with an opportunistic Biden, who is as good as Trump or any other Illuminati friendly politician in the Presidency. 162 page PDF [last updated: February|4|2O2O]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S7T_kDv48E40eHzus6CTXHxcm0W2qxVc/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S7T_kDv48E40eHzus6CTXHxcm0W... Previously reported: \Wag The Dog: first was feigned impeachment hearings meant to obstruct, now an attack on Iranians in Iraq. Here is what they are trying to distract from & cover up to retain power. $100+ billion in bribes to the highest offices in this country. 815+ deaths from child rapes to prove loyalty! See the latest PDF updates: FBI Director Wray, AG Barr, SoD Shanahan, & SoS Pompeo each raped boys and were paid billions in bribes for a Soros & Koch funded child rape org. So did Trump & his "impeachment" team Nadler,Schiff,Mueller.So did media moguls Redstone,Murdoch,Moonves. What are they trying to set up? Who can arrest them since they are all bribed and in on it ? Their strategy to stay in every office and obstruct until forced to leave no matter what. Feigning impeachment: see page 13O. Kolpempomfr, kdnroiece ce cercew mor,fr, lpo. \\if;Download the video/audio file, put on headphones and turn up the volume. You will hear these people committing these crimes. Audio was broadcast into my apartment by outdated surveillance equipment illegally embedded within my walls. This very same technology was being used to broadcast me to the internet for five years without my consent. I own this footage. Please use this to prosecute all found within. Note:: I am obliviously speaking throughout the video, and it can be quite loud at times relative to the desired content. The are dozens more links, including these, that can be found in this PDF last updated 4 FEB 2O2O: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S7T_kDv48E40eHzus6CTXHxcm0W2qxVc/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S7T_kDv48E40eHzus6CTXHxcm0W... All members of the "Illuminati"; "....an underground organization of homosexuals and child rapists..." (from pg 26: Barack Obama with Jack Dorsey). President Donald Trump: Demands a $4 billion dollar bribe here at 10:18am 4thJan2019: 3JanCh3_900-1100.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Grdr8xF2psKNsuYlEnl9dIRV-77YG0Vr/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Grdr8xF2psKNsuYlEnl9dIRV-77... 3JanCh2_900-1100-avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LUmVygl_q0XVs8h2cWr8jZl-24fY0vBB/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LUmVygl_q0XVs8h2cWr8jZl-24f... 3JanCh4_1000-1100.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZpP1pJbJakBgg-y-MWNozTxp3wJojHge/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZpP1pJbJakBgg-y-MWNozTxp3wJ... President Trump rapes and kills 12boys, including five boys in a "who can rape five boys to death the fastest" game: 14JanCh3_600.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ufPmglde9Mep0m6xYMJ9c4TWTjj258zB/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ufPmglde9Mep0m6xYMJ9c4TWTjj... 14JanCh2_600-700.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/136qLJdEn8eCs9tI4QtIxl4opW_Lw_gCF/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/136qLJdEn8eCs9tI4QtIxl4opW_L... Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi: Accepting a $3 billion dollar bribe at 1033 am on the 17 Jan 2019 to ensure Asian boys can get through the border at "Monterrey" undocumented to be raped: 17JanCh3_949-1100.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eodHu4o5Cm3xEWhDqipSuTj-M1CZUvmE/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eodHu4o5Cm3xEWhDqipSuTj-M1C... 17JanCh4_1017-1100.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y-nWEQbempkVZSz230j9wTyduZNjDmnk/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1y-nWEQbempkVZSz230j9wTyduZN... Speaker Nancy Pelosi also "preps" boys with First Lady Melania Trump, defined as in she performs oral sex on the boys’ penis and anus, as a child rapist like Henry Porter would, while trying to remove fecal matter from the boy prior to handing them over to be raped and then subsequently murdered, for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, who apparently decides he would rather just have ten billion dollars instead. US Attorney for Western New York James Kennedy rapes these boys instead: 12JanCh3_1533-1638.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AgFkDsbPbI4b5Xd3Wbz2EVNNx25kW2Oz/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AgFkDsbPbI4b5Xd3Wbz2EVNNx25... Attorney General William Barr with FBI Deputy Director Christopher Wray raped and killed boys for billions in bribes in Buffalo, NY on the 17Jan2019 at 7:50am: 18JanCh4_700mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UIdZkS5ZVksZdHYsnHk2t5losi0N0Bp7/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UIdZkS5ZVksZdHYsnHk2t5losi0... 18JanCh2_700.mp3 gorepqkberqaoper,bqpo,rfbv. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DFK8IAxm5pQVqZv9L518nfgP7_odB2Um/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DFK8IAxm5pQVqZv9L518nfgP7_o... 18JanCh3_725-.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DG5ej59Ic8RT9UhbyMdwT0BDcKIifGGm/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DG5ej59Ic8RT9UhbyMdwT0BDcKI... Secretary of State Michael Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan each raped and killed boys on 5thJan'19 at 17:39 for billions in bribes: tionqewncwq. ewqoinmcewcw cwq ece. 5JanCh3_1600 1800.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ghgmNrQvJ8WfJ2TsDVx1ruDU36hrhx6S/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ghgmNrQvJ8WfJ2TsDVx1ruDU36h... 5JanCh2_1721-1818.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eSlD4otX4KZqWXboQM92Mu-6J02Mjwrg/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eSlD4otX4KZqWXboQM92Mu-6J02... Leaders of the "impeachment" effort Jerrold Nadler, Robert Mueller, and Adam Schiff all rape and kill boys between 11:20pm and 1:10am: 14JanCh4_2300-0000.mp3 Nadler starts at about 20mins in- https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Kuvv2Zmbw5Jw7onbRI2hCZ0M8FU66GuU/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Kuvv2Zmbw5Jw7onbRI2hCZ0M8FU... 14JanCh2_2304-2359.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nofp5xF-aXXcCSgQVwj30KlzE9WLr1x1/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nofp5xF-aXXcCSgQVwj30KlzE9W... Mueller at 12:25am, next is Schiff who starts 12:55-ish: 15JanCh2_000-100.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EsmHfguwBuo2PbavJ1WYyhiML62tgCkj/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EsmHfguwBuo2PbavJ1WYyhiML62... 15JanCh2_100-200.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NZnWRnBryalNQu2yJmfJUdS2pA_rGSFH/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NZnWRnBryalNQu2yJmfJUdS2pA_... 15JanCh4_000-100.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZEDJR6jb6ARpcNnWJTokBUKb2J2OQnwZ/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZEDJR6jb6ARpcNnWJTokBUKb2J2... 15JanCh4_100-200.mp3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/173aYWvWHH4VGht1h_2nM0IMdw746LeCL/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/173aYWvWHH4VGht1h_2nM0IMdw74... Complete Media Protection: Lester Holt, of NBC NightlyNews, apparently a member of the Illuminati since the 1980's, along with ABC Nightly News lead anchor David Muir, stop over to the Porter studio in Buffalo, New York on 14Jan2019 at 5:00 am. They both rape and kill about two dozen boys by 6:00 am. Muir starts around 5.15am, then Holt about 5:38 am. Multi-billionaire Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corp and also Fox Corporation, takes his turn after Holt. Video links below: 14JanCh3_500-601.avi zijnoijrpotmebr https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i7NKepeyG_FfdQRrM7KsnFOZOOX3o7UL/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i7NKepeyG_FfdQRrM7KsnFOZOOX... 14JanCh2_530-600.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NZzgN5ilI7ToroU5cfqMaL4o2u1RwidV/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NZzgN5ilI7ToroU5cfqMaL4o2u1... Adding to the media protection and reason this is not picked up by the media, CBS and Viacom owner Sumner Redstone and Leslie Moonves rape and kill boys following the President. 14JanCh3_700.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/10XDw6x3ldnnQiq7oIjpdYVENyXaB4aI0/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/10XDw6x3ldnnQiq7oIjpdYVENyXa... 14JanCh2_700-800.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NS_e6AzEZ05wnfljkGMETGU5CWYKfRDp/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NS_e6AzEZ05wnfljkGMETGU5CWY... 161p PDF [last updated: Feb|4|2O2O]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S7T_kDv48E40eHzus6CTXHxcm0W2qxVc/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S7T_kDv48E40eHzus6CTXHxcm0W... \\. Please repost in USA! Post gets censored in US Recently more relevant: From page 49, Senator Mitch McConnell: At 1632 Senator Mitch McConnell checks into the Porter camera system inquiring if he can be part of the "eviction" for $10 million dollars. He is informed by group members that there are enough people for the event already and his participation is not necessary. At 1634 McConnell states "I fucked 15 kids, how am I not getting paid by you?" He is dismissed by Donald Reeves with "I think that will be all Mr. McConnell." 13JanCh3_1600-1700.avi https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L7bqOpvaEWmLiJpMhJNQDrfsQAHtsX8-/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1L7bqOpvaEWmLiJpMhJNQDrfsQAH...

PeterisP 7y ago

There's no IP war coming over facts derived from books because copyright doesn't cover facts derived from books and the other forms of IP (trademarks, patents) are even less relevant. I've done some work with corpus linguistics and quantitative linguistics, and large parts of these disciplines essentially are about facts derived from books in some manner. Modern approaches tend to involve machine learning, deep neural networks and other things fashionable on hackernews, but in general that's an old, traditional area that was working on facts derived from books for decades before the "ML era". To work on facts derived from books, we're sourcing all kinds of books and other written language, such as newspapers. Some publishers and authors are cooperative and helpful for such research, some are uncooperative and prefer to intentionally make working on their sources difficult - but in any case, even in the case of disagreement and conflict there's no "IP war", the conflict in our case tends to be about practical convenience of access, not about IP, because they don't really have a leg to stand on in claiming a copyright violation. They hold the copyright on the original text, which gives them certain exclusive rights, there's a bunch of intermediary data that we can't make available to public without their permission, but these rights don't extend to facts derived from that text, and we legally don't need their permission to work on, analyze, transform, publish and use stuff based on facts in the text or facts about the text, we can do that openly even if they've explicitly made it clear that they don't want us to do that. That's nothing new, that's established law that probably predates modern computers.

Doctor_Fegg 7y ago
> copyright doesn't cover facts derived from books EU database right can and does.
- mehh 7y ago
  Are there any instances of that actually happening, in regards to a book being treated as a database? It kinda makes sense, Guinness Book of Records, being an example.
  - kragen 7y ago
    Westlaw page numbers and Lexis citations. Carl Malamud has been involved in a number of struggles in the US. Mostly since Feist things have gone in the direction of intellectual freedom in the US and intellectual privatization in the EU.

tristanho 7y ago

The system described by the author of this post actually already exists, and was indeed created by google: https://books.google.com/talktobooks/ https://books.google.com/talktobooks/ It's just really not that good (yet)...

fergie 7y ago

This article makes no sense. Quality non-fiction books have always cited other quality non-fiction books and this is a Very Good Thing.

topspin 7y ago
I wish I shared your certainty but ours is the age of the rent seeker. They don't care about 'Good.' They want to get paid and if there is any remotely feasible way to impose themselves they will, tradition be damned.
michaelt 7y ago
Maps are collections of facts about road locations, and if I write directions based on a map, doing so doesn't infringe on the map producer's copyright. But if I'm starting a map company, and I scan in and trace the roads in my competitors' maps? I'd say that's less clear cut - and may well be copyright infringement, even though I'm extracting facts from their publication and creating a new publication containing the same facts. If I use an entire copyrighted book to train an AI, is it more like the first example, or more like the second?
- kragen 7y ago
  Maps and charts have been statutorily subject to copyright in the US since the Constitution was ratified. Facts, on the contrary, have been protected from copyright.

bambax 7y ago

Where do "facts derived from books" come from? Archives and original research. Wouldn't it make more sense, and be economically (and legally) more defensible to index those primary sources, than books?

jbj 7y ago

The author makes a side note about getting access to gmail. aren't there at least a handful of third party services that require access to content of gmail?

changoplatanero 7y ago

Pretty sure that ML is adding billions of dollars of value in ad ranking

ggm 7y ago

I always liked that many of the ancients words are only known because somebody writes "plato tells us that socrates said..." which is in context, pretty much what monetising the actual semantic intent of those scanned books would be.

aaron695 7y ago

No There's lots wrong with this article > Google has only one valuable proprietary dataset They own none of the map/street view data? Google already answers questions using books. And if you too want the world's book repository you can just download it, just illegally. There are big megapacks of it. Way better data than Google books, The only thing Google books might beat you on is original documents for history. But books are almost dead, maybe a decade? ML with human assisted help will be able to pop out quality books quite easily. It'll still take a human, just it'll do in a month what took years.

andrey_utkin 7y ago
> But books are almost dead, maybe a decade? Paper book format maybe is. "Long form content" is what "book" means now and it is not going away.

egypturnash 7y ago

The opening bits about how “monetization of machine learning has been five years away for several years” reminds me of how fusion has been twenty years away since at least the mid-fifties (so about 65 years). And now I am wondering if anyone has ever looked at the track records on people saying “technology X will be usable in Y years” versus the actual amount of time things took to become usable, if ever.

Multicomp 7y ago
Reminds me of the Popular Mechanics magazines promising new battery technologies any day now. Similarly, battery technologies that show great promise in the labs of 2015/16/17/18/19 are still 'soon on the market, any minute now'.
- K0SM0S 7y ago
  That's entertainment though; ever since I was a kid (child of the 1980's) I've never heard a single physicist confirm that 'new' battery tech, operating through different first principles, was anywhere in sight for commercial use. All we do is refine the materials and building and designs based on the same core principles (this optimization has yielded decent but not paradigm-changing results, unlike what a "new S-curve" would entail). The perceived increase in "lasting power" of our portable devices compared to 40 years ago was largely due to Moore's Law, optimization on the consumption side of the energy equation, not the source.
  - philipkglass 7y ago
    The first commercial lithium ion battery dates to 1991: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Commercialization_and_later_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium-ion_battery#Commercial... The lithium ion battery has incrementally improved energy density every year since its commercialization (see Figure 4): https://www.intechopen.com/books/ict-energy-concepts-towards-zero-power-information-and-communication-technology/energy-storage-battery-materials-and-architectures-at-the-nanoscale https://www.intechopen.com/books/ict-energy-concepts-towards... Most breakthroughs or projected-breakthroughs that get Popular Science articles written about them are overstated or never materialize at all. But battery technology is improving over time. It's not improving at the pace of microelectronics, but hardly anything improves that quickly.

huac 7y ago

I can absolutely assure you that FB and G's ad targeting algorithms are more complex and significantly more performant than "cluster and sort by click rate per keyword." For one, you rank ads on an eCPM basis, which includes bid, but leaving that aside, trust me, just because you don't know how ads systems work, that doesn't mean they're not working. Here's a clear example of ML improving search: voice search. You might not use it, but it's extremely popular in India and other developing markets. "G search has gotten worse as they’ve focused on recency in the index, gotten more tolerant of synonyms, and gotten less strict about quoted phrases." None of these are "machine learning" - these are product decisions. If you wanted to say "Google is not an ML company," you'd point to the outsized human influence on search rankings (see, e.g. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterhub.com/en//searchqualityevaluatorguidelines.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/guidelines.raterh...). Google Maps is extremely valuable as a proprietary dataset, and we're all making it better whenever we do a captcha, doing object recognition from streetview. So are YouTube, News, Translate, and so many others. There are so many papers detailing practical metric improvements from ML: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.09591 https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.09591, is one ("Replacing the manual scoring functionwith a gradient boosted decision tree (GBDT) model gave one of the largest step improvements in homes bookings in Airbnb’s history, with many successful iterations to follow" and deeper neural nets offered significant improvements after that).

awinter-py 7y ago
this airbnb paper is great, thanks for posting this

looper_dude 7y ago

If the cost of books went down I'd happily start buying them again. Until then, I can't justify paying $150 for non-fiction that will be outdated in 2 years.

anonsivalley652 7y ago

IANAL, but this seems like a good video response topic for a copyright attorney such as Leonard French.

mdale 7y ago

It's odd that the post mentions Wikipedia as it is a counter argument to the central premise. I.e contesting book fact aggregation would already had to have sued an won against Wikipedia and Britannica before it.

sanxiyn 7y ago

People already mentioned map, but isn't search history Google's most valuable proprietary dataset?

michaelmrose 7y ago

This is broken thinking. > If I’d published a non-fiction book in the last 100 years I’d put $10 right now into a class action to prevent this product from hitting the market. Authors are a 1 100th of a percent of the population. If we do create new ways for people whose entire life and minds are derivative of millennia of civilization to own facts observed in the world around them the primary funding for and beneficiary of such a change would be an even smaller class of people who collect much more of the sweat of the authors brow than the author even will. The proper response to this is voting any bums who vote for this out of office. If this doesn't work the next step is the guillotine. > Google will force us to create a new format for information by removing the profitability from the existing one. The fact that actual scarcity is giving way to plenty in no way suggests that we ought to fight to impose artificial scarcity for the dubious privilege of ensuring that leaches can keep profiting in order to keep a minority of the money filtering down to the people who do the actual work. Perhaps we ought to discover a way for everyone to profitably enjoy the greater bounty instead of glorifying working for a living. > It’s not like they didn’t tell us they were doing this. Their mission statement was to ‘free the world’s information’. Small wonder they don’t understand privacy. In this case we’re talking about information that’s protected by IP rights. When you free something that belongs to someone it’s called stealing. Our inherent emotional reaction to real scarcity based on the rivalrous nature of physical goods is a poor foundation to build a case for inventing new rights designed to divvy up the world for the benefit of the rich. I'm sick unto death of hearing proponents of new and inventive varieties of imaginary property describing circumvention of their imaginary rights "stealing". There are no words in keeping with the dignity of this site that I could use to aptly describe my feelings for the authors words. People like him are emphatically the enemies of the people.

nnq 7y ago
EXACTLY! The article is infected with a really vile and evil way of thinking that is almost the equivalent of the "but think of the children" argument for justifying privacy invasion and censorship, but in the field of IP...

buboard 7y ago

i mean, it's not impossible for a competitor to re-do the archiving of all books. Doesn't amazon own all the books!

imvetri 7y ago

Good job!

jtbayly 7y ago

The author is confused. The thing he's talking about is actually Wikipedia. Facts, mostly derived from books, is exactly how he describes Wikipedia. And indeed, it was transformative for education, and it did cause us to question parts of education.