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> IA did something nice for the people of the world locked down by Corona Virus. But fuck them, right? Gotta get that money, as there is literally nothing else

> IA did something nice for the people of the world locked down by Corona Virus. But fuck them, right? Gotta get that money, as there is literally nothing else worth anything in the human experience. Doing the right thing for humanity is completely bad for businesses, all of whom will be sending, what, 10 cents back to the authors per book. Gotta save those publishers! Just a crazy thought: they weren't just depriving publishers of revenue, they were directly depriving authors. People already not widely renowned as rolling in the dollars, and also hurt during a time of decreased discretionary spending. But they don't count as people, right?

kick 6y ago
This is blatantly ridiculous. IA allows authors to opt out, despite how incredibly unethical it is for authors to opt out, and copying isn't stealing in the first place.
- xhkkffbf 6y ago
  It doesn't matter. If the authors can't eat, they can't produce. You're still taking food from the author's mouth when you read an unauthorized copy. This hairsplitting baloney about whether the word "theft" applies is a distraction.
  - kick 6y ago
    Blaming the children in impoverished towns in places like Louisiana for "stealing" information over blaming the politicians who refuse after all this time to make authoring works sustainable or the system that enforces the same is ridiculous. I'm totally sure that twelve year old "stealing" bytes from LibGen over the wire in their rural town without a library worth its salt is just ripping that sandwich away from the author. Piracy doesn't harm sales, and actually improves them in certain cases: https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-found-piracy-do-1818629537 https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-... Tell me, though, how someone who can't afford books would be able to buy them in the first place? How are they taking food from the author's mouth? Complete and utter hogwash.
    - xhkkffbf 6y ago
      Go ahead. Focus on the extreme outliers. 98% of America can afford to buy a book. I would guess that 90% of America spend more at Starbucks than they do at a bookstore. Yeah, that's their choice, but it proves they can afford it. Heck. Most of the panhandlers make enough in change in an hour to afford a Kindle Single. Please. Don't pretend to care for the small fraction of America that is in bad financial shape. You're just using them to justify your theft.
  - VonGuard 6y ago
    What part of "opt-out" Do you not understand? Contact them, ask them to remove it, they will, on an author by author basis, rather than as a blanket publisher request that everything be removed.
    - xhkkffbf 6y ago
      Tell ya what, I'm going to take your car. You can fill out some form on my web site to opt out. But if you don't, I'm going to feel free to just take your car. You and everyone else in the world have been warned. Fill out the form now or I'm going to feel completely legit when I take your car.
      - kick 6y ago
        Copying isn't stealing. If I made a perfect double of your car based on a picture of it, and you didn't lose your car, there is literally no way you can make that out to be bad. Your analogy falls flat on its face and chokes to death before it accomplishes anything.
        xhkkffbf 6y ago
        No. As I said above, it doesn't matter whether the word is "stealing" or "blajeidmjdels". The authors can't eat if they aren't paid. Now fill out the form and opt out or I'm going to feel completely good about taking your car.
        kick 6y ago
        Tell me, though, if the person doesn't take your car, doesn't take literally any asset from you, and just copies your car, how's that taking your car? Though I have to point out you seemingly ignored my other question, so I'm not sure how much good this one'll do.
        xhkkffbf 6y ago
        No. You're ignoring the reality that digital assets aren't like cars. Close to 100% of the cost of creating a book, movie or song lies in the creation not the duplication. If all of the audience copies it for free instead of buying it, the creator makes nothing. It has ZERO to do with whether the book store is deprived of the use of the copy. It has everything to do with whether the creation costs are split evenly amoungst the users. Here's an assignment for you: imagine writing a book or creating a movie. Now imagine that everyone pirates a digital version instead of paying you. Do you feel okay because no one deprived you of your original copy? Or are you depressed because everyone is using your work but not paying you what you asked?
- chance_state 6y ago
  >despite how incredibly unethical it is for authors to opt out Authors sometimes spend years of their lives and plenty of their own money to write a book. They often have no idea if it will even sell, so it can be a huge risk. Why do you feel entitled to the product of that work for free?
  - kick 6y ago
    I'll take the last line first, because my response flows better if I tackle it reverse-chronologically. Why do you feel entitled to the product of that work for free? I buy physical copies of all of my books; I used to be in a vastly different situation. When I was growing up, my town's library didn't have a non-fiction section worth its salt, and had a fiction section that rarely had every book in a series, and that was including ILL programs. My household couldn't always afford food, let alone non-essentials like books. Copying bits isn't stealing, and it'd have to be snowing in Hell if some of the people in this thread are right: if impoverished kids are stealing from the mouth of authors every single time they copy a book on the Internet, and it's somehow unethical for them to do so, who has a chance in the world of being moral? But now, let me tackle the first line: Authors sometimes spend years of their lives and plenty of their own money to write a book. They often have no idea if it will even sell, so it can be a huge risk. So there are two ways to approach this. First, we can go the capitalist route, which you're advocating for: "Risk. Keyword risk. You are not guaranteed a return on your investment for anything. Someone steals your physical copies of your book, sure, that's stealing. Someone copies your book, you lose literally nothing. Free market. Economics. Woo!" "That line is completely and utterly ridiculous if you substitute 'Authors' and 'book' with any other occupation." Alternatively, here's a more realistic, less hyper-capitalistic, less dystopian view: Instead of getting mad at the people participating in the system, get mad at the system and the people orchestrating it. Try as much as you like, blaming people trying to better their lives in a way that's objectively not harmful, which is always what you're doing if you're reading a book and didn't rip the copy from someone's hands, and you'll always come off as the villain. You'll lose in the long run, and you'll be looked at as the villain in all of the history books when you do. Drew DeVault (a person who both publishes software under free licenses & who has written a book and licensed it under the CC) has written a bunch of great stuff on this.
- arkades 6y ago
  You can assert copying isn't stealing, but the part where "I have something I didn't have a minute ago, and would normally have to pay money to acquire it, but didn't" is pretty clear-cut. The author is being deprived of the revenue in exchange for their service (creating the entertainment), same as if someone snuck into a show. And it's not like you don't know that. This juvenile nonsense where "copying isn't theft" is the laziest form of post-hoc rationalization imaginable. Not a single one of you would start from first principles with, "it's okay to deprive people of payment for their services as long as the final product of their services is an artifact that they, too, retain a copy of."
  - zucker42 6y ago
    > the part where "I have something I didn't have a minute ago, and would normally have to pay money to acquire it, but didn't" is pretty clear-cut Say after a hurricane or other national disaster there's a company selling water bottles for $1. Then, a charity shows up and starts providing water bottles for free. I decide to get the free water bottle instead of paying for one. Clearly no theft is involved, but your description would include this action. Even if you think copyright infringement is wrong, it's clearly different from stealing physical objects. Calling it "theft" is an attempt to create a false equivalency between copyright infringement and shoplifting, burglary, robbery, etc. and ignores much of underlying ethics behind why we prohibit theft in the first place. It's no wonder why opponents of copyright strongly object to the label of "stealing"; it's using a dirty word to dismiss your opponents objections. "Theft" implies copyright infringement is wrong, so by arguing unlicensed copying is theft you are begging the question instead of making an argument defending the current copyright system on its own merits. It's similar to why proponents of abortion access object to the use of the term "murder" to describe abortion. Or why people who eat meat object to calling killing animals "murder".
  - CryptoBanker 6y ago
    Unearned revenue is not a loss or theft...
- arkades 6y ago
  You people realize authors, by and large, aren't millionaires, right? They write in exchange for, when things are going reasonably well, money for food and healthcare and whatever bullshit writing app you're currently working on (but won't be pirated, because Apple will protect your cherished revenue stream, while you go on about how incredibly unethical it all is). Calling people "trying to preserve their livelihood" "incredibly unethical" is the most entitled, self-serving, upper-class-bubbled nonsense I've ever seen in my life. Pretending that gutting people's ability to be writers is a net social good - because it gives people access to the very stuff you're gutting their ability to create - is such flagrant champagne socialist nonsense that it's amazing anyone can put that forward with a straight face. You wanna talk about copyright law being broken? Hell yeah, it's broken. Disrupting the chain of royalties that allows authors to survive is probably not the most effective way of dealing with it, insofar as your argument boils down to "things authors create are too darn valuable." And I'm bowing out. When I start replying twice to the same comment, I'm clearly too engaged to reply tactfully.
  - kick 6y ago
    You people realize authors, by and large, aren't millionaires, right? Many of my friends have written books, including my closest one, and many acquaintances have. I cited one such person in this thread. They write in exchange for, when things are going reasonably well, money for food and healthcare "Here's an obvious statement that I know everyone knows and I've got enough hubris to believe that you haven't considered it!" whatever bullshit writing app you're currently working on I'm not even in the tech industry: jerk yourself off somewhere else. because Apple will protect your cherished revenue stream I'm a big fan of free software, and I dislike Apple. You can see this with my post history, it's no secret. Just the other day I got hounded on for calling proprietary software morally wrong. My code's floating around with free licenses all over the Internet. And I love it! while you go on about how incredibly unethical it all is Apple's unethical, Google's unethical, but you can release ethical applications on Apple devices (jailbroken app stores) and on Android devices (F-Droid). Calling people "trying to preserve their livelihood" "incredibly unethical" is the most entitled, self-serving, upper-class-bubbled nonsense I've ever seen in my life. I grew up in poverty, which is directly where my view is rooted. Pretending that gutting people's ability to be writers is a net social good Pretending that gutting access to books for people who can't afford them is a "net social good" is self-serving, entitled, upper-class nonsense. is such flagrant champagne socialist nonsense Not a socialist over here (not so fond of capitalism, either), but nice try. If you actually believe in the capitalist nonsense you're circlejerking so hard you wouldn't be against the market providing an alternative. Disrupting the chain of royalties that allows authors to survive is probably not the most effective way of dealing with it, insofar as your argument boils down to "things authors create are too darn valuable." The National Emergency Library doesn't include anything published in the last five years, has DRM, so on. It does minimal harm to the profits of authors, and I've already linked a post about the study the European Union funded that showed that actual piracy improves book sales, so... You want actual change, push for systemic change. Don't act like it's somehow moral to deny a buoy to someone who's drowning, or deny water to someone who's dying of thirst.
mimi89999 6y ago
How many people who read a certain book on IA would actually be able to buy it during the crisis? I think that that number is really low, so the loss is really low as well, but sometimes authors prefer not to sell or give away even when there is no perspective or benefit. Some time ago, I needed an old book that wasn't popular, but nobody wanted to sell a new copy of it at even a remotely decent price...
- mimi89999 6y ago
  It's like a car dealer said "you fool came to buy a car in that hard time. I see that you really need it, so I will charge 10x the price" "But look! You have an entire parking lot of cars that nobody wants to buy. Maybe you could give me a discount?" "You are right. I will charge 40x the price!"

kick 6y ago

This is blatantly ridiculous. IA allows authors to opt out, despite how incredibly unethical it is for authors to opt out, and copying isn't stealing in the first place.

xhkkffbf 6y ago
It doesn't matter. If the authors can't eat, they can't produce. You're still taking food from the author's mouth when you read an unauthorized copy. This hairsplitting baloney about whether the word "theft" applies is a distraction.
- kick 6y ago
  Blaming the children in impoverished towns in places like Louisiana for "stealing" information over blaming the politicians who refuse after all this time to make authoring works sustainable or the system that enforces the same is ridiculous. I'm totally sure that twelve year old "stealing" bytes from LibGen over the wire in their rural town without a library worth its salt is just ripping that sandwich away from the author. Piracy doesn't harm sales, and actually improves them in certain cases: https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-found-piracy-do-1818629537 https://gizmodo.com/the-eu-suppressed-a-300-page-study-that-... Tell me, though, how someone who can't afford books would be able to buy them in the first place? How are they taking food from the author's mouth? Complete and utter hogwash.
  - xhkkffbf 6y ago
    Go ahead. Focus on the extreme outliers. 98% of America can afford to buy a book. I would guess that 90% of America spend more at Starbucks than they do at a bookstore. Yeah, that's their choice, but it proves they can afford it. Heck. Most of the panhandlers make enough in change in an hour to afford a Kindle Single. Please. Don't pretend to care for the small fraction of America that is in bad financial shape. You're just using them to justify your theft.
- VonGuard 6y ago
  What part of "opt-out" Do you not understand? Contact them, ask them to remove it, they will, on an author by author basis, rather than as a blanket publisher request that everything be removed.
  - xhkkffbf 6y ago
    Tell ya what, I'm going to take your car. You can fill out some form on my web site to opt out. But if you don't, I'm going to feel free to just take your car. You and everyone else in the world have been warned. Fill out the form now or I'm going to feel completely legit when I take your car.
    - kick 6y ago
      Copying isn't stealing. If I made a perfect double of your car based on a picture of it, and you didn't lose your car, there is literally no way you can make that out to be bad. Your analogy falls flat on its face and chokes to death before it accomplishes anything.
      - xhkkffbf 6y ago
        No. As I said above, it doesn't matter whether the word is "stealing" or "blajeidmjdels". The authors can't eat if they aren't paid. Now fill out the form and opt out or I'm going to feel completely good about taking your car.
        kick 6y ago
        Tell me, though, if the person doesn't take your car, doesn't take literally any asset from you, and just copies your car, how's that taking your car? Though I have to point out you seemingly ignored my other question, so I'm not sure how much good this one'll do.
        xhkkffbf 6y ago
        No. You're ignoring the reality that digital assets aren't like cars. Close to 100% of the cost of creating a book, movie or song lies in the creation not the duplication. If all of the audience copies it for free instead of buying it, the creator makes nothing. It has ZERO to do with whether the book store is deprived of the use of the copy. It has everything to do with whether the creation costs are split evenly amoungst the users. Here's an assignment for you: imagine writing a book or creating a movie. Now imagine that everyone pirates a digital version instead of paying you. Do you feel okay because no one deprived you of your original copy? Or are you depressed because everyone is using your work but not paying you what you asked?
chance_state 6y ago
>despite how incredibly unethical it is for authors to opt out Authors sometimes spend years of their lives and plenty of their own money to write a book. They often have no idea if it will even sell, so it can be a huge risk. Why do you feel entitled to the product of that work for free?
- kick 6y ago
  I'll take the last line first, because my response flows better if I tackle it reverse-chronologically. Why do you feel entitled to the product of that work for free? I buy physical copies of all of my books; I used to be in a vastly different situation. When I was growing up, my town's library didn't have a non-fiction section worth its salt, and had a fiction section that rarely had every book in a series, and that was including ILL programs. My household couldn't always afford food, let alone non-essentials like books. Copying bits isn't stealing, and it'd have to be snowing in Hell if some of the people in this thread are right: if impoverished kids are stealing from the mouth of authors every single time they copy a book on the Internet, and it's somehow unethical for them to do so, who has a chance in the world of being moral? But now, let me tackle the first line: Authors sometimes spend years of their lives and plenty of their own money to write a book. They often have no idea if it will even sell, so it can be a huge risk. So there are two ways to approach this. First, we can go the capitalist route, which you're advocating for: "Risk. Keyword risk. You are not guaranteed a return on your investment for anything. Someone steals your physical copies of your book, sure, that's stealing. Someone copies your book, you lose literally nothing. Free market. Economics. Woo!" "That line is completely and utterly ridiculous if you substitute 'Authors' and 'book' with any other occupation." Alternatively, here's a more realistic, less hyper-capitalistic, less dystopian view: Instead of getting mad at the people participating in the system, get mad at the system and the people orchestrating it. Try as much as you like, blaming people trying to better their lives in a way that's objectively not harmful, which is always what you're doing if you're reading a book and didn't rip the copy from someone's hands, and you'll always come off as the villain. You'll lose in the long run, and you'll be looked at as the villain in all of the history books when you do. Drew DeVault (a person who both publishes software under free licenses & who has written a book and licensed it under the CC) has written a bunch of great stuff on this.
arkades 6y ago
You can assert copying isn't stealing, but the part where "I have something I didn't have a minute ago, and would normally have to pay money to acquire it, but didn't" is pretty clear-cut. The author is being deprived of the revenue in exchange for their service (creating the entertainment), same as if someone snuck into a show. And it's not like you don't know that. This juvenile nonsense where "copying isn't theft" is the laziest form of post-hoc rationalization imaginable. Not a single one of you would start from first principles with, "it's okay to deprive people of payment for their services as long as the final product of their services is an artifact that they, too, retain a copy of."
- zucker42 6y ago
  > the part where "I have something I didn't have a minute ago, and would normally have to pay money to acquire it, but didn't" is pretty clear-cut Say after a hurricane or other national disaster there's a company selling water bottles for $1. Then, a charity shows up and starts providing water bottles for free. I decide to get the free water bottle instead of paying for one. Clearly no theft is involved, but your description would include this action. Even if you think copyright infringement is wrong, it's clearly different from stealing physical objects. Calling it "theft" is an attempt to create a false equivalency between copyright infringement and shoplifting, burglary, robbery, etc. and ignores much of underlying ethics behind why we prohibit theft in the first place. It's no wonder why opponents of copyright strongly object to the label of "stealing"; it's using a dirty word to dismiss your opponents objections. "Theft" implies copyright infringement is wrong, so by arguing unlicensed copying is theft you are begging the question instead of making an argument defending the current copyright system on its own merits. It's similar to why proponents of abortion access object to the use of the term "murder" to describe abortion. Or why people who eat meat object to calling killing animals "murder".
- CryptoBanker 6y ago
  Unearned revenue is not a loss or theft...
arkades 6y ago
You people realize authors, by and large, aren't millionaires, right? They write in exchange for, when things are going reasonably well, money for food and healthcare and whatever bullshit writing app you're currently working on (but won't be pirated, because Apple will protect your cherished revenue stream, while you go on about how incredibly unethical it all is). Calling people "trying to preserve their livelihood" "incredibly unethical" is the most entitled, self-serving, upper-class-bubbled nonsense I've ever seen in my life. Pretending that gutting people's ability to be writers is a net social good - because it gives people access to the very stuff you're gutting their ability to create - is such flagrant champagne socialist nonsense that it's amazing anyone can put that forward with a straight face. You wanna talk about copyright law being broken? Hell yeah, it's broken. Disrupting the chain of royalties that allows authors to survive is probably not the most effective way of dealing with it, insofar as your argument boils down to "things authors create are too darn valuable." And I'm bowing out. When I start replying twice to the same comment, I'm clearly too engaged to reply tactfully.
- kick 6y ago
  You people realize authors, by and large, aren't millionaires, right? Many of my friends have written books, including my closest one, and many acquaintances have. I cited one such person in this thread. They write in exchange for, when things are going reasonably well, money for food and healthcare "Here's an obvious statement that I know everyone knows and I've got enough hubris to believe that you haven't considered it!" whatever bullshit writing app you're currently working on I'm not even in the tech industry: jerk yourself off somewhere else. because Apple will protect your cherished revenue stream I'm a big fan of free software, and I dislike Apple. You can see this with my post history, it's no secret. Just the other day I got hounded on for calling proprietary software morally wrong. My code's floating around with free licenses all over the Internet. And I love it! while you go on about how incredibly unethical it all is Apple's unethical, Google's unethical, but you can release ethical applications on Apple devices (jailbroken app stores) and on Android devices (F-Droid). Calling people "trying to preserve their livelihood" "incredibly unethical" is the most entitled, self-serving, upper-class-bubbled nonsense I've ever seen in my life. I grew up in poverty, which is directly where my view is rooted. Pretending that gutting people's ability to be writers is a net social good Pretending that gutting access to books for people who can't afford them is a "net social good" is self-serving, entitled, upper-class nonsense. is such flagrant champagne socialist nonsense Not a socialist over here (not so fond of capitalism, either), but nice try. If you actually believe in the capitalist nonsense you're circlejerking so hard you wouldn't be against the market providing an alternative. Disrupting the chain of royalties that allows authors to survive is probably not the most effective way of dealing with it, insofar as your argument boils down to "things authors create are too darn valuable." The National Emergency Library doesn't include anything published in the last five years, has DRM, so on. It does minimal harm to the profits of authors, and I've already linked a post about the study the European Union funded that showed that actual piracy improves book sales, so... You want actual change, push for systemic change. Don't act like it's somehow moral to deny a buoy to someone who's drowning, or deny water to someone who's dying of thirst.

mimi89999 6y ago

How many people who read a certain book on IA would actually be able to buy it during the crisis? I think that that number is really low, so the loss is really low as well, but sometimes authors prefer not to sell or give away even when there is no perspective or benefit. Some time ago, I needed an old book that wasn't popular, but nobody wanted to sell a new copy of it at even a remotely decent price...

mimi89999 6y ago
It's like a car dealer said "you fool came to buy a car in that hard time. I see that you really need it, so I will charge 10x the price" "But look! You have an entire parking lot of cars that nobody wants to buy. Maybe you could give me a discount?" "You are right. I will charge 40x the price!"