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This reward ratio concept that you invented to frame this only accounts for one side of the transaction. For starters, to give something away for free, you have

This reward ratio concept that you invented to frame this only accounts for one side of the transaction. For starters, to give something away for free, you have to own it first. There no moral high ground in deciding to give away other people’s things. But if you want to only focus on the potential for public good, then where would you put the “reward ratio” for the authors who’s work was given away by the internet archive? They struggle enough as it is to make money without a global financial crisis, and without large organisations taking it upon themselves to give their content away. What’s the “reward ratio” for all the book retails going out of business at the moment, and all the staff they’re laying off? Even if you hate publishers, and for some reason think they’re not entitled to property rights, what’s the “reward ratio” for their employees, or the people who’s retirements are invested in their publicly traded companies? It’s easy to sympathise with the motivation behind the decision, but really their decision was to summarily strip people of their rights, and the payoff for their hard work. It wasn’t a noble decision, because they didn’t own what they were giving away, and an attempt to rationalize the deprivation it contributed to is really just sad. It was truly a monumentally stupid decision on their part, and they’ve jeopardized their entire mission because of it.

matheusmoreira 6y ago
> There no moral high ground in deciding to give away other people’s things. Copyright does not have the moral high ground either. The fact is most books should already have entered the public domain. However, the public was cheated out of its rights due to ever increasing copyright durations. Why should authors and publishers retain monopoly rights to works for over a hundred years? It should be a few years at most and that's being exceptionally generous. There's absolutely nothing moral about copyright. When properly constrained to a reasonable duration, it could be considered a necessary evil at best. In its current form, it is equivalent to rent seeking and should be straight up abolished.
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  Copyright is neither moral nor immoral. It simply gives people who create content the ability to exercise certain property rights over that content for a certain period of time. There would be nothing immoral about abolishing copyright, but if you did then you could be sure that a lot less people would be willing to spend years writing the books you enjoy reading, or millions of dollars creating the TV shows and movies you enjoy watching. Whether or not you think the existing copyright laws have exceeded their purpose is a completely different discussion, and one that is not at all related to this particular topic at all. Because the Internet Archive did not only violate copyright for content benefiting from whatever your opinion of excessive copyright is, they violated it for all the content they had.
  - som33 6y ago
    >Copyright is neither moral nor immoral. Except you're wrong, idea's are not rivalrous goods. Imagine if someone copyrighted the alphabet and we had to pay $5 a word. Rent seeking puts a damper on global productivity by allowing people to take information hostage. It can also be used as a tool for censorship. Right now copyright is censoring culture and I'm watching videogame history being destroyed on the PC due to bs copyright and software licensing laws. We should have gotten full property rights transfer for software. It's allowed mass invasion of privacy and theft of software on a mass scale by PC game companies. You haven't been paying attention to how monopoly rights have been used or abused. http://www.free-culture.cc/ http://www.free-culture.cc/ https://www.lessig.org/books/ https://www.lessig.org/books/
    - AmericanChopper 6y ago
      As I said: > Whether or not you think the existing copyright laws have exceeded their purpose is a completely different discussion Bringing up another completely seperate category of abuse is again another completely different discussion, and completely not relevant to this one.
      - som33 6y ago
        You're clueless, it is directly relevant, you said "copyright laws are neither moral or immorral" which is a bs statement because every rule (which it is) has political consequences, you need a giant state to declare "some ideas are not sharable". AKA copyright is a cultural construct that evolved in one particular society at a particular point in history, not a natural law. So no, you don't get the idea of owning ideas is directly itself an attack on freedom itself, aka if you can claim you own ideas you can use violence against others because you believe in that idea. The problem you're not seeing is that it's impossible to enforce property rights for ideas while not infringing on basic human freedoms. Copyright is backdoor to get rid of property rights for the public by associating it with software/technology. The idea that we just need "good regulation" to stop the abuses, is bs, since the last 200 years of copyright has always seen its power and abuse expanded and not reduced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#/media/File:Tom_Bell's_graph_showing_extension_of_U.S._copyright_term_over_time.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#/... So you're the one making disingenuous arguments. Since our culture is literally being irrevocably destroyed and there's no way much culture during this period will be saved because of the lawlessness of the USA and general idiocy of its citizenry.
- dwheeler 6y ago
  Copyright has the force of law internationally. Which means that courts, police, and armies back it up. I would agree that copyright has many problems. But "rule of law" also matters. Perhaps more importantly, the Internet Archive has chosen to take actions that are likely illegal, and do that in ways that threaten its very existence. Any court in the world might rule against the IA with a financial punishment that would permanently shut it down AND hand all its resources to its enemies. And those rules will be enforced by trained policemen with guns, tear gas, and bulletproof vests. The IA is very important, and in general I really like the IA. The Wayback machine is a critical resource today. The IA's decision to risk the existence of itself and all its archives, by taking this step, was extremely unwise. I'm disappointed in the IA, I expected smarter decisions. I hope they get some excellent lawyers that might salvage them so they can at least exist in some form. Right now, the IA and all it archived is at risk of being destroyed, with nothing good to come from it. If they stay in existence, I hope that they get some good lawyers to keep them away from such horrendously bad legal decisions in the future.
RobertoG 6y ago
This idea, implied in your comment, that information should have the same legal treatment that a physical object it's not so obvious to me.
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  As I stated in a different response, I don’t think there would be anything immoral about abolishing copyright in general (for newly created work at least). But if you did that then you would most certainly see much less people investing their time and money into creating it, I also imagine it would create a resurgence in draconian practices such as chained libraries. How does cinema-only releases sound to you? For both TV and movies, of course. However, whatever you think of such an idea, the people who created the content in question did so under conditions where the state had offered them copyright protection. To remove that protection from people who have already invested their time and money into creating content under those conditions, is simply to defraud them of that time and money, which for a lot of people could amount to their lives work.
  - matheusmoreira 6y ago
    > To remove that protection from people who have already invested their time and money into creating content under those conditions, is simply to defraud them of that time and money, which for a lot of people could amount to their lives work. No. Laws can change unilaterally and society does not owe them anything. If they created something today and the law changed tomorrow thereby destroying the economic value of their investment, too bad. That's life. Copyright and its practically infinite duration defrauds the public out of works that by any reasonable estimate should already be in the public domain. Did Disney worry about that before spending its intellectual property profits on lobbyists in order to get the government to extend the duration of copyright? No. These creators and companies have already made an obscene amount of money, many times over their initial investment. Are we supposed to feel guilty about "defrauding" this industry by changing the laws that enable it?
    - AmericanChopper 6y ago
kick 6y ago
Views like the ones you've expressed here, which frame this as a property issue, will lead more and more to begin to think that intellectual property isn't "property" at all.
- arpa 6y ago
  Hey hey, property is property of corporations and business entities. We can only have temporary access rights to that property.

matheusmoreira 6y ago

> There no moral high ground in deciding to give away other people’s things. Copyright does not have the moral high ground either. The fact is most books should already have entered the public domain. However, the public was cheated out of its rights due to ever increasing copyright durations. Why should authors and publishers retain monopoly rights to works for over a hundred years? It should be a few years at most and that's being exceptionally generous. There's absolutely nothing moral about copyright. When properly constrained to a reasonable duration, it could be considered a necessary evil at best. In its current form, it is equivalent to rent seeking and should be straight up abolished.

AmericanChopper 6y ago
Copyright is neither moral nor immoral. It simply gives people who create content the ability to exercise certain property rights over that content for a certain period of time. There would be nothing immoral about abolishing copyright, but if you did then you could be sure that a lot less people would be willing to spend years writing the books you enjoy reading, or millions of dollars creating the TV shows and movies you enjoy watching. Whether or not you think the existing copyright laws have exceeded their purpose is a completely different discussion, and one that is not at all related to this particular topic at all. Because the Internet Archive did not only violate copyright for content benefiting from whatever your opinion of excessive copyright is, they violated it for all the content they had.
- som33 6y ago
  >Copyright is neither moral nor immoral. Except you're wrong, idea's are not rivalrous goods. Imagine if someone copyrighted the alphabet and we had to pay $5 a word. Rent seeking puts a damper on global productivity by allowing people to take information hostage. It can also be used as a tool for censorship. Right now copyright is censoring culture and I'm watching videogame history being destroyed on the PC due to bs copyright and software licensing laws. We should have gotten full property rights transfer for software. It's allowed mass invasion of privacy and theft of software on a mass scale by PC game companies. You haven't been paying attention to how monopoly rights have been used or abused. http://www.free-culture.cc/ http://www.free-culture.cc/ https://www.lessig.org/books/ https://www.lessig.org/books/
  - AmericanChopper 6y ago
    As I said: > Whether or not you think the existing copyright laws have exceeded their purpose is a completely different discussion Bringing up another completely seperate category of abuse is again another completely different discussion, and completely not relevant to this one.
    - som33 6y ago
      You're clueless, it is directly relevant, you said "copyright laws are neither moral or immorral" which is a bs statement because every rule (which it is) has political consequences, you need a giant state to declare "some ideas are not sharable". AKA copyright is a cultural construct that evolved in one particular society at a particular point in history, not a natural law. So no, you don't get the idea of owning ideas is directly itself an attack on freedom itself, aka if you can claim you own ideas you can use violence against others because you believe in that idea. The problem you're not seeing is that it's impossible to enforce property rights for ideas while not infringing on basic human freedoms. Copyright is backdoor to get rid of property rights for the public by associating it with software/technology. The idea that we just need "good regulation" to stop the abuses, is bs, since the last 200 years of copyright has always seen its power and abuse expanded and not reduced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#/media/File:Tom_Bell's_graph_showing_extension_of_U.S._copyright_term_over_time.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#/... So you're the one making disingenuous arguments. Since our culture is literally being irrevocably destroyed and there's no way much culture during this period will be saved because of the lawlessness of the USA and general idiocy of its citizenry.
dwheeler 6y ago
Copyright has the force of law internationally. Which means that courts, police, and armies back it up. I would agree that copyright has many problems. But "rule of law" also matters. Perhaps more importantly, the Internet Archive has chosen to take actions that are likely illegal, and do that in ways that threaten its very existence. Any court in the world might rule against the IA with a financial punishment that would permanently shut it down AND hand all its resources to its enemies. And those rules will be enforced by trained policemen with guns, tear gas, and bulletproof vests. The IA is very important, and in general I really like the IA. The Wayback machine is a critical resource today. The IA's decision to risk the existence of itself and all its archives, by taking this step, was extremely unwise. I'm disappointed in the IA, I expected smarter decisions. I hope they get some excellent lawyers that might salvage them so they can at least exist in some form. Right now, the IA and all it archived is at risk of being destroyed, with nothing good to come from it. If they stay in existence, I hope that they get some good lawyers to keep them away from such horrendously bad legal decisions in the future.

RobertoG 6y ago

This idea, implied in your comment, that information should have the same legal treatment that a physical object it's not so obvious to me.

AmericanChopper 6y ago
As I stated in a different response, I don’t think there would be anything immoral about abolishing copyright in general (for newly created work at least). But if you did that then you would most certainly see much less people investing their time and money into creating it, I also imagine it would create a resurgence in draconian practices such as chained libraries. How does cinema-only releases sound to you? For both TV and movies, of course. However, whatever you think of such an idea, the people who created the content in question did so under conditions where the state had offered them copyright protection. To remove that protection from people who have already invested their time and money into creating content under those conditions, is simply to defraud them of that time and money, which for a lot of people could amount to their lives work.
- matheusmoreira 6y ago
  > To remove that protection from people who have already invested their time and money into creating content under those conditions, is simply to defraud them of that time and money, which for a lot of people could amount to their lives work. No. Laws can change unilaterally and society does not owe them anything. If they created something today and the law changed tomorrow thereby destroying the economic value of their investment, too bad. That's life. Copyright and its practically infinite duration defrauds the public out of works that by any reasonable estimate should already be in the public domain. Did Disney worry about that before spending its intellectual property profits on lobbyists in order to get the government to extend the duration of copyright? No. These creators and companies have already made an obscene amount of money, many times over their initial investment. Are we supposed to feel guilty about "defrauding" this industry by changing the laws that enable it?
  - AmericanChopper 6y ago

kick 6y ago

Views like the ones you've expressed here, which frame this as a property issue, will lead more and more to begin to think that intellectual property isn't "property" at all.

arpa 6y ago
Hey hey, property is property of corporations and business entities. We can only have temporary access rights to that property.