11 ms·

So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost?

So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost? It's intellectual property, and duplicating it is piracy. Do I judge pirates? No, they're taking risks, and that's their own prerogative. I am all for available and affordable resources, but expecting a book someone else wrote for free is a bit ridiculous.

daveguy 4y ago
"changes hands" Meaning, if you give or sell the ebook to someone else. Yes, anyone should be able to give someone a book for free.
HideousKojima 4y ago
>So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost? Unironically yes. Copyright is a moral evil, and "intellectual property" is a legal fiction. No one owns ideas. That being said, I'm pragmatic and realize that copyright (and patents/trademarks/etc.) can be a necessary evil as well, which is why I'd fully support lowering copyright down to 10 or 20 years or so. No reason Disney should have exclusive rights to their latest Marvel CGI-fest for longer than someone who discovers a cure for cancer would have exclusive rights to profit from their discovery.
- baseballdork 4y ago
  > I'd fully support lowering copyright down to 10 or 20 years or so. I agree. It should be no longer than a patent duration. Death of the author + 70 years is just an insane duration and means that works created in your lifetime will practically never enter public domain before you die.
  - owlbite 4y ago
    I could go for some scheme where the first 10 years are free, and then you have to register for $x where x is a value that doubles every year. That allows the big IPs to get roughly what they want for commercially viable stuff, but also means that 99% of stuff will drop out of copyright quickly.
  - beej71 4y ago
    The original term in the US was 14 years with one optional 14-year renewal. That sounds good to me. The most popular thing I've written was 27 years ago, so the initial versions would just about be in the public domain now. But the newer versions would still be copyrighted.
  - jimhefferon 4y ago
    > Death of the author + 70 years is just an insane duration Also, I have had trouble finding when some authors died.
- DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
  > Copyright is a moral evil Please elaborate.
  - nordsieck 4y ago
    >> Copyright is a moral evil > Please elaborate. I think your parent was expressing the inherent tradeoff in Copyright. On the one hand, the country has a vested interested in allowing citizens to participate in culture. That doesn't just mean consuming, but also modifying and creating using inspiration from other parts of culture. On the other hand, the country recognizes that the generation of cultural artifacts is greatly increased if creators have limited monopoly rights over their creations so they can more easily make a living creating them. I'm not sure if I would call it a "moral evil", but I can understand how one could.
  - gostsamo 4y ago
    Not the GP, but the argument could be summarized as: Intellectual work takes time and effort only once when it is created. Copying information is so cheap, it is close to zero. Yet, copyright holders accumulate copyrightable material and try to earn money from it in perpetuity. This is the classic case of rent seeking where the concept of ownership is used to take value from the labor of others. I don't fully agree with this interpretation, but I won't say that I totally disagree either.
- rmbyrro 4y ago
  > "Intellectual property" is a legal fiction. No one owns ideas. Just to clarify: intellectual property does not protect ideas, but the way they are expressed. You can rewrite an entire book and republish it with your own words. What you cannot is copy the exact same words.
  - NineStarPoint 4y ago
    I tend to think more along the lines of sequel rights. The copyrighted idea is not the exact same words, but the idea of the universe of Star Wars. I think we would live in a world of superior creativity if making money off derivative works made without permission was legal. (Probably those works should be required to say “unofficial” on them or something along those lines)
    - kmeisthax 4y ago
      I have a... partial counter-argument to this. Publishers would absolutely jump at the chance to screw over individual authors with "unofficial" derivative works. In fact, we know this to be the case because its how publishing used to work pre-Berne Convention. Imagine the mid-90s anime fansubbing scene, except everyone is a for-profit business who is able to obtain copyright over their translations of other people's work. It was incredibly scummy and hostile to artists in ways that would make Jeff Bezos[0] blush. There's also a related problem of dividing "official" and "unofficial" works in such a way as to be legally airtight. "Noncommercial use" is actually really narrow, because the work itself is a commercial product and its production costs money. Think about how many fan artists have Patreon campaigns these days: sure, you don't have to pay to view their work, but they are still running the same kind of business that the original/official release is using. It's the sort of thing more appropriate for the original creators to just have a blanket "I don't care about people who do X, Y, or Z" policy/license rather than peeling back the legal protections on certain creative jobs in a way that, say, the scumbags at large media conglomerates might figure out how to monetize. Or, in other words, that fanartist with a Patreon is arguably protected from corporate competition by the fact that their work is illegal but practically unprosecuted in a way you can't put into law. None of this would matter, of course, if copyright terms were limited to a short time period. All of the more onerous copyright rules I mentioned above were far more tolerable in a world where copyright on works people cared about regularly expired. If lawmakers had known that copyright terms would get blown out to life plus a tail period that is basically another life term, they probably would not have allowed derivative works to be controlled in this fashion. [0] Owner of Amazon, the company that put your local bookstore out of business and then made it incredibly easy to resell other people's books on their platform
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > Unironically yes. Copyright is a moral evil, and "intellectual property" is a legal fiction. No one owns ideas. These are extreme views. That's fine! But it's why we get crap like Pearson putting NFTs on textbooks. Because reasonable objections get drowned out by fringe opposition. (Side note: all property is a legal fiction.)
- xhkkffbf 4y ago
  Copyright is the only way that digital workers can be paid. To put a lefty spin on it, copyright is just a form of union that allows digital workers to keep control of their work. Regular property laws protect artisans and craftspeople who work with physical things from having their work stolen so they can earn a living. Don't you feel that the writers, coders, and digital artists deserve to have some control over their work too?
  - TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
    Not for life + 70 years, no. Once you share an idea you should have a chance to be compensated for your work, but it enters the collective unconscious and it becomes part of society. It's like having a child, you can raise it however you like until a certain point, but then it goes out into the world.
    - xhkkffbf 4y ago
      Sure it is for life-- and longer. If a carpenter builds a house, that house is the carpenter's forever. He/she can pass it on to their heirs and those can pass it onto their heirs. The same goes for all physical goods. And, others have pointed this out, but copyright has nothing to do with ideas. If you want to write your own book with the ideas, go to it.
      - chownie 4y ago
        The carpenter does not get a cut when their children sell the house, crucially.
  - adamc 4y ago
    1) Not for work-for-hire, no. 2) 70 years is too long.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- antonymy 4y ago
  I'd like it that if a work has been out of print for more than 10 years then its copyright should expire, regardless of the remaining copyright duration. Let them have their 100+ year copyright, but its forfeit if they don't bother to keep it in print. Let somebody else print it if you can't be bothered.
FredPret 4y ago
As a freshman, I had to buy a calculus textbook. Now, this was introductory calculus, pretty much the stuff Newton/Leibniz invented and nothing else. It's been the same for centuries. But the textbook was on version 9. Nine! Why? Because every year, a new version was sold, with the only difference being the problems are numbered differently - so when the professor handed out homework, you needed the new version to keep up. I'm an uber-capitalist, but making money should come from adding value, not whatever these idiots are doing.
- HeckFeck 4y ago
  Yeah, predatory practices like these remove all sense of remorse I have when borrowing a PDF from someone else's hard drive. No one should respect companies and institutions that are just out to shaft everyone.
- jcranmer 4y ago
  To be fair, textbooks have improved tremendously in pedagogy over the decades. I wouldn't want to use even a 50-year-old textbook to teach calculus today. I can almost tolerate the exorbitant costs of textbooks on the basis of the existence of a vibrant used textbook market. But what keeps me from doing so is the lengths to which the publishers go to stamp out that used market, without any concomitant reductions in price. You want to play the rapidly-coming-out-with-new-editions game, the one-time-use online code game? Fine, I ain't forking out more for your textbook than any other book (that would be $20), and if you're not offering it at that price point, well, the $0 you're getting instead should be sufficient comfort.
  - sitkack 4y ago
    > I wouldn't want to use even a 50-year-old textbook to teach calculus today. Of course there are some excellent recent calculus books, but that doesn't mean all books over 50 aren't good. There are some great old calculus books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_Made_Easy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_Made_Easy https://archive.org/details/elementaryillust00demouoft/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/elementaryillust00demouoft/mode/... https://archive.org/details/j.e.thompsoncalculusforthepracticalman https://archive.org/details/j.e.thompsoncalculusforthepracti... New isn't better, old isn't worse.
grishka 4y ago
> It's intellectual property, and duplicating it is piracy. And piracy is a good thing. I encourage it and I wish there was more of it to keep these companies in check.
monkeywork 4y ago
Making additional copies / replicas to pass around? No that shouldn't be free. Taking something I've paid for and giving or selling my copy to someone else? Yes should be free
horsawlarway 4y ago
> So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost? What exactly is your problem with this model? Seriously - lets have this conversation for real. What is ethically wrong with a model that states "I will create this thing for you if you pay me X up front - then it is a public good"? Many indie creators are already using this model. It seems like an absolutely fair trade. --- Further, continuing the conversation how in the fucking fuckitty fuck do you think that model is less ethical than the complete repeal of the right of first sale that these publishers seem to be working towards? How can you possibly attempt to justify their actions as ANYTHING other than literal rent seeking, at great societal expense?
- Joker_vD 4y ago
  Because greed is good!.. well, the business people's greed only, not the consumers' greed. Obviously.
- eldaisfish 4y ago
  at the root of this is the question of ownership. Digital goods have a questionable concept of ownership vs access through rental fees. If i buy a book, it is mine and i can do with it what i please. That concept is much easier to implement with a physical object as opposed to a digital one.
  - mctaylor 4y ago
    The concept only makes sense for physical objects. The problem are the definitions of "piracy", "robbery", "theft", etc. There's two ways you could reasonably define them: by the loss, or by the gain. From a simple ethical/logical viewpoint it stands to reason that if a gain can occur without a loss, that's good for everyone - so we should define theft to have occurred only when a loss is incurred (and hence intellectual property theft wouldn't be theft, and the very concept of IP makes no sense). Unfortunately just because it's good for everyone doesn't mean it'll obviously work out that way. Defining theft by the unauthorised gain of something (regardless of whether there was a loss) lets those with the authority to grant rights to those gains profit. That profit can then be used to create incentives for others with authority (through lobbying, for instance), creating a situation where despite the fact that it's in the common interest to define theft solely on the basis of loss, it's in the interest of those with authority to define it as any gain which is not approved by an anointed member of the authority structure (either economically or politically). Intellectual property is stupid, counter-productive, hurts culture, hurts innovation, and generally doesn't do an ounce of good to the vast majority of people on the planet Earth.
pessimizer 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine
_fat_santa 4y ago
> So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost? This isn't piracy that we are talking about. This is the publisher wanting to be in on every sale after the initial one. It's a bit like if you wanted to sell your John Deere lawnmower at a yard sale, but John Deere sent out a representative to make sure the company collected 20% of whatever you sold that lawnmower for.
jcranmer 4y ago
> So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost? I do not believe that publishers deserve to get paid for anything after the sale. We already have an existing mechanism to prevent the second half of that question from happening: it's called copyright. It is illegal for me to make a copy and distribute that copy, at least for any book published in the last 95 years (and honestly, that period is itself way too long). That there is a vibrant secondhand market for textbooks in particular is a testament to the failures of publishers to make their retention desirable. I hold no sympathy for them, and I bristle at the notion that they deserve to be recompensed for their mistakes.
- misterbishop 4y ago
  and copyright is already holding back our culture insanely without blockchain DRM do away with copyright and guarantee everyone a decent standard of living.
- xhkkffbf 4y ago
  The side-effect of this kind of attitude is that the purchaser must capitalize the whole price of a book or work. Right now, if a student buys a textbook, the student pays full price and then recoups some later by reselling it. The goal of this current scheme is to lower the initial cost by spreading out the fees among everyone who uses a copy. In an ideal version of this model, a textbook that normally costs $100 could be sold for $10 and then used for ten years. The publisher still gets $100 but the students only need to pay $10 each.
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    That's great, except that's never happened. For example, digital games also do not have the ability to resell them, but they aren't inherently cheaper to compensate for this. This is because creative works are not priced cost-plus, they are priced by perceived value. Insamuch as digital textbooks will be cheaper than physical, it will be purely a psychological pricing thing rather than a function of the publisher's expected profit. If that $100 textbook was $90 used, the digital copy will be $85, even though the publisher would still get the same total revenue selling them for $10. They will bank on students not accounting for the used market at the end of the semester lowering their total costs (or students not having extra cashflow to lock up in textbooks).
RajT88 4y ago
> So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost? This was how copyright worked in Europe until quite recently. A composer was only entitled to the royalties of the first public performance of their work, and after that it was public domain. You wonder why the likes of Bach, Vivaldi, etc. were such prolific composers: The system was designed that way.
kmeisthax 4y ago
No, they just think publishers only deserve to get paid for copies, not licenses. In the Old Days we had a legal doctrine of copyright exhaustion, whereby once a copyright holder had made a copy and sold it, they had to point to some further act of copying in order to claim infringement. This meant that copyright owners got paid and the public, generally, didn't have to worry about copyright any further. Then the computers and Internet came. Devices whose only interaction with information is to copy it. Publishers realized that they could defraud the public of their First Sale rights in two steps: 1. Get the courts to believe that every interaction between a computer and a copyrighted work is infringement[0] 2. Stick "licensed-and-not-sold" language on everything they possibly could There is a direct through-line between the time when copyright was an obscure regulation on publishing houses to today's "you will own nothing and be happy" rhetoric. NFTs are just another manifestation of that: they purport to emulate physical property by letting us sell and resell dangling pointers to a work, as some kind of exercise in mixing the harms of DRM[1] and financialization into one particularly toxic soup. That's why the games industry jumped on them so damned quickly, and why the textbook publishers want in on that next. [0] See MAI Systems Corp v. Peak Computer, a 9th Circuit ruling so nutty that it argues that dynamic RAM is a fixed medium and any software that isn't execute-in-place cannot be run without a licensing agreement [1] Yes I know NFTs do not have DRM in and of themselves, "right click, save as" is a meme. Getting DRM into the system is phase two.
adamsmith143 4y ago
> So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost? You mean like all other objects ever made? Cars e.g. are routinely resold and automakers never receive a dime after the first purchase from a dealer. This is the norm.
LocalH 4y ago
"Intellectual property". What a joke of a term. Why should a rightsholder should retain control of a work throughout its existence? That's what this discussion is really about - Pearson abusing the blockchain to insert themselves into private transactions between third parties. One of the biggest failings of the digital age was not baking "first sale" rights into the system from the beginning. Just like with everything else, adding "on/with/by a computer" to anything seems to be free rent-seeking territory.

daveguy 4y ago

"changes hands" Meaning, if you give or sell the ebook to someone else. Yes, anyone should be able to give someone a book for free.

HideousKojima 4y ago

>So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost? Unironically yes. Copyright is a moral evil, and "intellectual property" is a legal fiction. No one owns ideas. That being said, I'm pragmatic and realize that copyright (and patents/trademarks/etc.) can be a necessary evil as well, which is why I'd fully support lowering copyright down to 10 or 20 years or so. No reason Disney should have exclusive rights to their latest Marvel CGI-fest for longer than someone who discovers a cure for cancer would have exclusive rights to profit from their discovery.

baseballdork 4y ago
> I'd fully support lowering copyright down to 10 or 20 years or so. I agree. It should be no longer than a patent duration. Death of the author + 70 years is just an insane duration and means that works created in your lifetime will practically never enter public domain before you die.
- owlbite 4y ago
  I could go for some scheme where the first 10 years are free, and then you have to register for $x where x is a value that doubles every year. That allows the big IPs to get roughly what they want for commercially viable stuff, but also means that 99% of stuff will drop out of copyright quickly.
- beej71 4y ago
  The original term in the US was 14 years with one optional 14-year renewal. That sounds good to me. The most popular thing I've written was 27 years ago, so the initial versions would just about be in the public domain now. But the newer versions would still be copyrighted.
- jimhefferon 4y ago
  > Death of the author + 70 years is just an insane duration Also, I have had trouble finding when some authors died.
DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
> Copyright is a moral evil Please elaborate.
- nordsieck 4y ago
  >> Copyright is a moral evil > Please elaborate. I think your parent was expressing the inherent tradeoff in Copyright. On the one hand, the country has a vested interested in allowing citizens to participate in culture. That doesn't just mean consuming, but also modifying and creating using inspiration from other parts of culture. On the other hand, the country recognizes that the generation of cultural artifacts is greatly increased if creators have limited monopoly rights over their creations so they can more easily make a living creating them. I'm not sure if I would call it a "moral evil", but I can understand how one could.
- gostsamo 4y ago
  Not the GP, but the argument could be summarized as: Intellectual work takes time and effort only once when it is created. Copying information is so cheap, it is close to zero. Yet, copyright holders accumulate copyrightable material and try to earn money from it in perpetuity. This is the classic case of rent seeking where the concept of ownership is used to take value from the labor of others. I don't fully agree with this interpretation, but I won't say that I totally disagree either.
rmbyrro 4y ago
> "Intellectual property" is a legal fiction. No one owns ideas. Just to clarify: intellectual property does not protect ideas, but the way they are expressed. You can rewrite an entire book and republish it with your own words. What you cannot is copy the exact same words.
- NineStarPoint 4y ago
  I tend to think more along the lines of sequel rights. The copyrighted idea is not the exact same words, but the idea of the universe of Star Wars. I think we would live in a world of superior creativity if making money off derivative works made without permission was legal. (Probably those works should be required to say “unofficial” on them or something along those lines)
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    I have a... partial counter-argument to this. Publishers would absolutely jump at the chance to screw over individual authors with "unofficial" derivative works. In fact, we know this to be the case because its how publishing used to work pre-Berne Convention. Imagine the mid-90s anime fansubbing scene, except everyone is a for-profit business who is able to obtain copyright over their translations of other people's work. It was incredibly scummy and hostile to artists in ways that would make Jeff Bezos[0] blush. There's also a related problem of dividing "official" and "unofficial" works in such a way as to be legally airtight. "Noncommercial use" is actually really narrow, because the work itself is a commercial product and its production costs money. Think about how many fan artists have Patreon campaigns these days: sure, you don't have to pay to view their work, but they are still running the same kind of business that the original/official release is using. It's the sort of thing more appropriate for the original creators to just have a blanket "I don't care about people who do X, Y, or Z" policy/license rather than peeling back the legal protections on certain creative jobs in a way that, say, the scumbags at large media conglomerates might figure out how to monetize. Or, in other words, that fanartist with a Patreon is arguably protected from corporate competition by the fact that their work is illegal but practically unprosecuted in a way you can't put into law. None of this would matter, of course, if copyright terms were limited to a short time period. All of the more onerous copyright rules I mentioned above were far more tolerable in a world where copyright on works people cared about regularly expired. If lawmakers had known that copyright terms would get blown out to life plus a tail period that is basically another life term, they probably would not have allowed derivative works to be controlled in this fashion. [0] Owner of Amazon, the company that put your local bookstore out of business and then made it incredibly easy to resell other people's books on their platform
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> Unironically yes. Copyright is a moral evil, and "intellectual property" is a legal fiction. No one owns ideas. These are extreme views. That's fine! But it's why we get crap like Pearson putting NFTs on textbooks. Because reasonable objections get drowned out by fringe opposition. (Side note: all property is a legal fiction.)
xhkkffbf 4y ago
Copyright is the only way that digital workers can be paid. To put a lefty spin on it, copyright is just a form of union that allows digital workers to keep control of their work. Regular property laws protect artisans and craftspeople who work with physical things from having their work stolen so they can earn a living. Don't you feel that the writers, coders, and digital artists deserve to have some control over their work too?
- TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
  Not for life + 70 years, no. Once you share an idea you should have a chance to be compensated for your work, but it enters the collective unconscious and it becomes part of society. It's like having a child, you can raise it however you like until a certain point, but then it goes out into the world.
  - xhkkffbf 4y ago
    Sure it is for life-- and longer. If a carpenter builds a house, that house is the carpenter's forever. He/she can pass it on to their heirs and those can pass it onto their heirs. The same goes for all physical goods. And, others have pointed this out, but copyright has nothing to do with ideas. If you want to write your own book with the ideas, go to it.
    - chownie 4y ago
      The carpenter does not get a cut when their children sell the house, crucially.
- adamc 4y ago
  1) Not for work-for-hire, no. 2) 70 years is too long.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
antonymy 4y ago
I'd like it that if a work has been out of print for more than 10 years then its copyright should expire, regardless of the remaining copyright duration. Let them have their 100+ year copyright, but its forfeit if they don't bother to keep it in print. Let somebody else print it if you can't be bothered.

FredPret 4y ago

As a freshman, I had to buy a calculus textbook. Now, this was introductory calculus, pretty much the stuff Newton/Leibniz invented and nothing else. It's been the same for centuries. But the textbook was on version 9. Nine! Why? Because every year, a new version was sold, with the only difference being the problems are numbered differently - so when the professor handed out homework, you needed the new version to keep up. I'm an uber-capitalist, but making money should come from adding value, not whatever these idiots are doing.

HeckFeck 4y ago
Yeah, predatory practices like these remove all sense of remorse I have when borrowing a PDF from someone else's hard drive. No one should respect companies and institutions that are just out to shaft everyone.
jcranmer 4y ago
To be fair, textbooks have improved tremendously in pedagogy over the decades. I wouldn't want to use even a 50-year-old textbook to teach calculus today. I can almost tolerate the exorbitant costs of textbooks on the basis of the existence of a vibrant used textbook market. But what keeps me from doing so is the lengths to which the publishers go to stamp out that used market, without any concomitant reductions in price. You want to play the rapidly-coming-out-with-new-editions game, the one-time-use online code game? Fine, I ain't forking out more for your textbook than any other book (that would be $20), and if you're not offering it at that price point, well, the $0 you're getting instead should be sufficient comfort.
- sitkack 4y ago
  > I wouldn't want to use even a 50-year-old textbook to teach calculus today. Of course there are some excellent recent calculus books, but that doesn't mean all books over 50 aren't good. There are some great old calculus books. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_Made_Easy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_Made_Easy https://archive.org/details/elementaryillust00demouoft/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/elementaryillust00demouoft/mode/... https://archive.org/details/j.e.thompsoncalculusforthepracticalman https://archive.org/details/j.e.thompsoncalculusforthepracti... New isn't better, old isn't worse.

grishka 4y ago

> It's intellectual property, and duplicating it is piracy. And piracy is a good thing. I encourage it and I wish there was more of it to keep these companies in check.

monkeywork 4y ago

Making additional copies / replicas to pass around? No that shouldn't be free. Taking something I've paid for and giving or selling my copy to someone else? Yes should be free

horsawlarway 4y ago

> So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost? What exactly is your problem with this model? Seriously - lets have this conversation for real. What is ethically wrong with a model that states "I will create this thing for you if you pay me X up front - then it is a public good"? Many indie creators are already using this model. It seems like an absolutely fair trade. --- Further, continuing the conversation how in the fucking fuckitty fuck do you think that model is less ethical than the complete repeal of the right of first sale that these publishers seem to be working towards? How can you possibly attempt to justify their actions as ANYTHING other than literal rent seeking, at great societal expense?

Joker_vD 4y ago
Because greed is good!.. well, the business people's greed only, not the consumers' greed. Obviously.
eldaisfish 4y ago
at the root of this is the question of ownership. Digital goods have a questionable concept of ownership vs access through rental fees. If i buy a book, it is mine and i can do with it what i please. That concept is much easier to implement with a physical object as opposed to a digital one.
- mctaylor 4y ago
  The concept only makes sense for physical objects. The problem are the definitions of "piracy", "robbery", "theft", etc. There's two ways you could reasonably define them: by the loss, or by the gain. From a simple ethical/logical viewpoint it stands to reason that if a gain can occur without a loss, that's good for everyone - so we should define theft to have occurred only when a loss is incurred (and hence intellectual property theft wouldn't be theft, and the very concept of IP makes no sense). Unfortunately just because it's good for everyone doesn't mean it'll obviously work out that way. Defining theft by the unauthorised gain of something (regardless of whether there was a loss) lets those with the authority to grant rights to those gains profit. That profit can then be used to create incentives for others with authority (through lobbying, for instance), creating a situation where despite the fact that it's in the common interest to define theft solely on the basis of loss, it's in the interest of those with authority to define it as any gain which is not approved by an anointed member of the authority structure (either economically or politically). Intellectual property is stupid, counter-productive, hurts culture, hurts innovation, and generally doesn't do an ounce of good to the vast majority of people on the planet Earth.

pessimizer 4y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

_fat_santa 4y ago

> So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost? This isn't piracy that we are talking about. This is the publisher wanting to be in on every sale after the initial one. It's a bit like if you wanted to sell your John Deere lawnmower at a yard sale, but John Deere sent out a representative to make sure the company collected 20% of whatever you sold that lawnmower for.

jcranmer 4y ago

> So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost? I do not believe that publishers deserve to get paid for anything after the sale. We already have an existing mechanism to prevent the second half of that question from happening: it's called copyright. It is illegal for me to make a copy and distribute that copy, at least for any book published in the last 95 years (and honestly, that period is itself way too long). That there is a vibrant secondhand market for textbooks in particular is a testament to the failures of publishers to make their retention desirable. I hold no sympathy for them, and I bristle at the notion that they deserve to be recompensed for their mistakes.

misterbishop 4y ago
and copyright is already holding back our culture insanely without blockchain DRM do away with copyright and guarantee everyone a decent standard of living.
xhkkffbf 4y ago
The side-effect of this kind of attitude is that the purchaser must capitalize the whole price of a book or work. Right now, if a student buys a textbook, the student pays full price and then recoups some later by reselling it. The goal of this current scheme is to lower the initial cost by spreading out the fees among everyone who uses a copy. In an ideal version of this model, a textbook that normally costs $100 could be sold for $10 and then used for ten years. The publisher still gets $100 but the students only need to pay $10 each.
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  That's great, except that's never happened. For example, digital games also do not have the ability to resell them, but they aren't inherently cheaper to compensate for this. This is because creative works are not priced cost-plus, they are priced by perceived value. Insamuch as digital textbooks will be cheaper than physical, it will be purely a psychological pricing thing rather than a function of the publisher's expected profit. If that $100 textbook was $90 used, the digital copy will be $85, even though the publisher would still get the same total revenue selling them for $10. They will bank on students not accounting for the used market at the end of the semester lowering their total costs (or students not having extra cashflow to lock up in textbooks).

RajT88 4y ago

> So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost? This was how copyright worked in Europe until quite recently. A composer was only entitled to the royalties of the first public performance of their work, and after that it was public domain. You wonder why the likes of Bach, Vivaldi, etc. were such prolific composers: The system was designed that way.

kmeisthax 4y ago

No, they just think publishers only deserve to get paid for copies, not licenses. In the Old Days we had a legal doctrine of copyright exhaustion, whereby once a copyright holder had made a copy and sold it, they had to point to some further act of copying in order to claim infringement. This meant that copyright owners got paid and the public, generally, didn't have to worry about copyright any further. Then the computers and Internet came. Devices whose only interaction with information is to copy it. Publishers realized that they could defraud the public of their First Sale rights in two steps: 1. Get the courts to believe that every interaction between a computer and a copyrighted work is infringement[0] 2. Stick "licensed-and-not-sold" language on everything they possibly could There is a direct through-line between the time when copyright was an obscure regulation on publishing houses to today's "you will own nothing and be happy" rhetoric. NFTs are just another manifestation of that: they purport to emulate physical property by letting us sell and resell dangling pointers to a work, as some kind of exercise in mixing the harms of DRM[1] and financialization into one particularly toxic soup. That's why the games industry jumped on them so damned quickly, and why the textbook publishers want in on that next. [0] See MAI Systems Corp v. Peak Computer, a 9th Circuit ruling so nutty that it argues that dynamic RAM is a fixed medium and any software that isn't execute-in-place cannot be run without a licensing agreement [1] Yes I know NFTs do not have DRM in and of themselves, "right click, save as" is a meme. Getting DRM into the system is phase two.

adamsmith143 4y ago

> So you think publishers only deserve to get paid for the first copy, and then all of humanity should be free to replicate and distribute their work for no cost? You mean like all other objects ever made? Cars e.g. are routinely resold and automakers never receive a dime after the first purchase from a dealer. This is the norm.

LocalH 4y ago

"Intellectual property". What a joke of a term. Why should a rightsholder should retain control of a work throughout its existence? That's what this discussion is really about - Pearson abusing the blockchain to insert themselves into private transactions between third parties. One of the biggest failings of the digital age was not baking "first sale" rights into the system from the beginning. Just like with everything else, adding "on/with/by a computer" to anything seems to be free rent-seeking territory.