6 ms·

Z-Library Responds to U.S. Crackdown, Asks Authors for Forgiveness

31 points by picture 4y ago

dredmorbius 4y ago
What Z-Library and similar systems offer is a relief from the tremendous deadweight losses of a legacy and increasingly inexcusable private copyright regime, one which has been tremendously expanded over the lifetime of many of the works presently alleged to be infringing. As Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has written, knowledge is a global public good.[1] And public goods inevitably result in market failure. Information and markets simply don't work. The classic way to pay for public goods is through a tax, or tax-like, general assessment, preferably indexed by income or household wealth. As I've noted several times here recently,[2] the $9 billion in annual bookstore sales[3] could be met with a $5.25 per month fee for a typical U.S. household, or an 0.1% income tax basis (say, rolled into your broadband access charge). This would provide compensation equal to all current book sales, and avoid both the deadweight losses of information access denial of the present system as well as the Federal Crime of Letting People Read by which the so-called US Justice system assassinated Aaron Swartz.[4] As jl2618 recently noted,[5] Criminalisation of digital distribution was only legislated in 2008 as 17 USC 506 (again in the U.S.), under Public Law 110--403: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/506 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/506 https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-110publ403/pdf/PLAW-110publ403.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-110publ403/pdf/PLAW... A small, progressive, integrated fee would address the grossly specious complaint that "authors must be paid". Yes, pay them, and decriminalise knowledge access. I've noted much of this before, including: "A Modest Proposal: Universal Online Media Payment Syndication" (2014) <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...> (I've since suggested that broadband service providers act as the gateway for revenue collection.) "What the academic publishing industry calls 'theft' the world calls ;research': Why Sci-Hub is so popular" (2016) <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_the_academic_publishing_industry_calls_theft/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_th...> ________________________________ Notes: 1. Joseph Stiglitz, "Knowledge as a Global Public Good," in Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, Marc A. Stern (eds.), United Nations Development Programme, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 308-325. <https://archive.org/details/globalpublicgood0000unse/page/308/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/globalpublicgood0000unse/page/30...> 2. E.g., <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33647625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33647625> 3. "Book store sales in the United States from 1992 to 2021" <https://www.statista.com/statistics/197710/annual-book-store-sales-in-the-us-since-1992/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/197710/annual-book-store...> 4. The Archive Org Open Library link above in footnote 1 is presented by way of one of the many information innovations Swartz pioneered: the Open Library itself. 5. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33643398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33643398>
- amadeuspagel 4y ago
  > As I've noted several times here recently,[2] the $9 billion in annual bookstore sales[3] could be met with a $5.25 per month fee for a typical U.S. household, or an 0.1% income tax basis (say, rolled into your broadband access charge). > This would provide compensation equal to all current book sales How would this money be distributed?
  - freeplay 4y ago
    And herein lies the problem with socialism...
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      The method would strongly resemble how present broadcast and mechanical royalties operate in music radio, broadcast television, and even print publication circulation audits. The idea being that content is aggregated and total consumption is reasonably estimated, rather than precisely extracted via hugely inefficient direct-sales mechanisms. There's no such thing as a free lunch-monetisation system.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    See for example: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Fox_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Fox_Agency> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_of_Composers,_Authors_and_Publishers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_of_Composers,...> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical-Copyright_Protection_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical-Copyright_Protectio...> Mechanical royalties based on exposures and prevalence are already well-established. I'd suggest a combination of a basic income plus some level of extraordinary royalties, given that writing's reward is exceedingly uneven, both in distribution amongst authors and over time. Present "tentpole" revenues in publishing (and television, film, and music) reflect this within a market context, where blockbusters support far smaller, often much higher-quality (from a literary, cinemographic, or musical sense) works. A replacement scheme should offer a similar mechanism. Alternatively, a bidding system in which tranches of works are offered differing levels of compensation, based on various quality-criteria assessments, genres, and classes of works, might be used. Meme-generation and investigative journalism, for example, should arguably not be compensated equivalently. RMS's "Internet Sharing" proposal (2012) suggests a popularity-based mechanism: I propose instead to pay each artist according to the cube root of his or her popularity. More precisely, the system could ascertain the popularity of each work, divide that among the work's artists to get a figure for each artist, then compute the cube root of that figure, and set the artist's share in proportion to that cube root. The effect of the cube root stage would be to increase the shares of moderately popular artists by reducing the shares of superstars. Each individual superstar would still get more than an individual non-superstar, even several times as much, but not hundreds or thousands of times as much. Shifting the funds towards moderately popular artists means that a given total sum will adequately support a larger number of artists. Furthermore, the money will do more good for the arts because it will go to the artists who really need it. <https://stallman.org/articles/internet-sharing-license.en.html https://stallman.org/articles/internet-sharing-license.en.ht...>
emkemp 4y ago
Obligatory "this has nothing to do with zlib".

31 points by picture 4y ago

What Z-Library and similar systems offer is a relief from the tremendous deadweight losses of a legacy and increasingly inexcusable private copyright regime, one which has been tremendously expanded over the lifetime of many of the works presently alleged to be infringing. As Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has written, knowledge is a global public good.[1] And public goods inevitably result in market failure. Information and markets simply don't work. The classic way to pay for public goods is through a tax, or tax-like, general assessment, preferably indexed by income or household wealth. As I've noted several times here recently,[2] the $9 billion in annual bookstore sales[3] could be met with a $5.25 per month fee for a typical U.S. household, or an 0.1% income tax basis (say, rolled into your broadband access charge). This would provide compensation equal to all current book sales, and avoid both the deadweight losses of information access denial of the present system as well as the Federal Crime of Letting People Read by which the so-called US Justice system assassinated Aaron Swartz.[4] As jl2618 recently noted,[5] Criminalisation of digital distribution was only legislated in 2008 as 17 USC 506 (again in the U.S.), under Public Law 110--403: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/506 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/506 https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-110publ403/pdf/PLAW-110publ403.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-110publ403/pdf/PLAW... A small, progressive, integrated fee would address the grossly specious complaint that "authors must be paid". Yes, pay them, and decriminalise knowledge access. I've noted much of this before, including: "A Modest Proposal: Universal Online Media Payment Syndication" (2014) <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modest_proposal_universal_online_media_payment/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...> (I've since suggested that broadband service providers act as the gateway for revenue collection.) "What the academic publishing industry calls 'theft' the world calls ;research': Why Sci-Hub is so popular" (2016) <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_the_academic_publishing_industry_calls_theft/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_th...> ________________________________ Notes: 1. Joseph Stiglitz, "Knowledge as a Global Public Good," in Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st Century, Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, Marc A. Stern (eds.), United Nations Development Programme, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 308-325. <https://archive.org/details/globalpublicgood0000unse/page/308/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/globalpublicgood0000unse/page/30...> 2. E.g., <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33647625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33647625> 3. "Book store sales in the United States from 1992 to 2021" <https://www.statista.com/statistics/197710/annual-book-store-sales-in-the-us-since-1992/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/197710/annual-book-store...> 4. The Archive Org Open Library link above in footnote 1 is presented by way of one of the many information innovations Swartz pioneered: the Open Library itself. 5. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33643398 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33643398>

amadeuspagel 4y ago
> As I've noted several times here recently,[2] the $9 billion in annual bookstore sales[3] could be met with a $5.25 per month fee for a typical U.S. household, or an 0.1% income tax basis (say, rolled into your broadband access charge). > This would provide compensation equal to all current book sales How would this money be distributed?
- freeplay 4y ago
  And herein lies the problem with socialism...
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    The method would strongly resemble how present broadcast and mechanical royalties operate in music radio, broadcast television, and even print publication circulation audits. The idea being that content is aggregated and total consumption is reasonably estimated, rather than precisely extracted via hugely inefficient direct-sales mechanisms. There's no such thing as a free lunch-monetisation system.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  See for example: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Fox_Agency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Fox_Agency> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_of_Composers,_Authors_and_Publishers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_of_Composers,...> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical-Copyright_Protection_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical-Copyright_Protectio...> Mechanical royalties based on exposures and prevalence are already well-established. I'd suggest a combination of a basic income plus some level of extraordinary royalties, given that writing's reward is exceedingly uneven, both in distribution amongst authors and over time. Present "tentpole" revenues in publishing (and television, film, and music) reflect this within a market context, where blockbusters support far smaller, often much higher-quality (from a literary, cinemographic, or musical sense) works. A replacement scheme should offer a similar mechanism. Alternatively, a bidding system in which tranches of works are offered differing levels of compensation, based on various quality-criteria assessments, genres, and classes of works, might be used. Meme-generation and investigative journalism, for example, should arguably not be compensated equivalently. RMS's "Internet Sharing" proposal (2012) suggests a popularity-based mechanism: I propose instead to pay each artist according to the cube root of his or her popularity. More precisely, the system could ascertain the popularity of each work, divide that among the work's artists to get a figure for each artist, then compute the cube root of that figure, and set the artist's share in proportion to that cube root. The effect of the cube root stage would be to increase the shares of moderately popular artists by reducing the shares of superstars. Each individual superstar would still get more than an individual non-superstar, even several times as much, but not hundreds or thousands of times as much. Shifting the funds towards moderately popular artists means that a given total sum will adequately support a larger number of artists. Furthermore, the money will do more good for the arts because it will go to the artists who really need it. <https://stallman.org/articles/internet-sharing-license.en.html https://stallman.org/articles/internet-sharing-license.en.ht...>

emkemp 4y ago

Obligatory "this has nothing to do with zlib".