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I'm so sick of modern businesses and their vampire approach on creativity and intelligent property. I see a lot of comments in this thread with what about-isms

I'm so sick of modern businesses and their vampire approach on creativity and intelligent property. I see a lot of comments in this thread with what about-isms or "I don't care, we wouldn't miss anything", but these people are short-sighted. And to be honest the hacker news community is frequently the community I loathe to engage in these topics with. Because they are always looking forward with very little respect for the past as well as very little respect for domains outside of technology. The internet archive is a huge boon in intangible value for communities and the world. It represents a huge cultural fountain that is accessible for anyone so long as they have the ability to access a computer. A great example of this is that the Internet Archive was the ONLY place where I could enjoy a completely random piece of lost media from a children's television show called Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. There was a lost episode where OJ Simpson was in it and it never aired because of obvious issues. BUT there was a book published from the production called "White Rabbits Can't Jump" https://archive.org/details/whiterabbitscant00varl https://archive.org/details/whiterabbitscant00varl I can't imagine being able to go to any publisher or paid streaming service or god forbid Amazon to find this book, and I sure as shit don't believe in this community to help create ecosystems to support finding things like this. I am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play counter to productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve anything. The fact that I have to wait until people die until copyright is up is god awful. And the fact that I have to read people in this community who sound like boot-lickers for corporate oligarchs and their shitty value adds to the world drives me so fucking insane. I'm only commenting here because I feel it's important to articulate that there are people out there who care, and that the vocal a-holes on this site really miss the point and the intangible value of what the internet archive provides.

disqard 3y ago
Thank you so much for speaking up! You're not alone in thinking this way. And kudos for investing the Time to write this up -- the sophists are all-too-often over-represented here, and I'm never really sure that they're always arguing in Good Faith, or if they are, they're often being so short-sighted that it's simultaneously funny and sad.
int_19h 3y ago
I really wish we ditched the name "copyright" altogether because of its unfortunate implications. It's not actually a right - it's a privilege. The system is entirely artificial and wouldn't exist without active social and legal enforcement. And if the privilege is abused in ways that don't benefit society, then it can and should be curtailed or even revoked.
- tablespoon 3y ago
  > It's not actually a right - it's a privilege. The system is entirely artificial and wouldn't exist without active social and legal enforcement. And if the privilege is abused in ways that don't benefit society, then it can and should be curtailed or even revoked. In other words, it's a right.
- eecc 3y ago
  How about calling it Copyrent? Isn't iut more descriptive of what it actually is, while "right" makes it more sympathetic to the liberties and freedoms they're actually reigning in.
- astraloverflow 3y ago
  Personally I find the term "intellectual property" to be more messed up. It isn't property, it's a government granted monopoly on reproduction and distribution. Calling it property allows for this bizarre concept of a form of "theft" that still leaves you with the thing "stolen" from you.
  - tablespoon 3y ago
    > Personally I find the term "intellectual property" to be more messed up. It isn't property, it's a government granted monopoly... So, in other words, it's property. There's nothing that guarantees a particular lump of atoms are "yours" besides a government-granted monopoly to control that lump. The atoms don't care.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
rhtgrg 3y ago
> very little respect for domains outside of technology. The HN community can also be out of touch with technology. If you are an AI researcher this becomes plainly obvious the moment you visit any of the AI threads (if it isn't obvious already from the 6 to 12 month delay on the posting of cutting edge developments here). Sometimes it's hard to argue with zwj.org's assessment [0]. [0] https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2016/hn.png https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2016/hn.png
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  Not just misinformed and outdated, but people here seem to have think _very_ highly of their own intelligence - often being dismissive of frankly incredible ideas because “why didn’t they just…” I’ve never been less impressed with the supposed elite class of Ivy League “hackers” than when I’m on this site. Get over yourself. You didn’t just solve AI with your “recursive LLM”. No one with ADHD is going to benefit from your pomodoro app that is…slightly more visible than the other thousands of pomodoro apps? Also - half of you don’t have ADHD. Believe it or not - coding is an attention drain and taking stimulants to gain an advantage so that you can ship in 3 months instead of 12 is toxic as fuck. Don’t get me started on LessWrong. FWIW, while I agree with the sentiment - not everyone is prepared to see an unsolicited photoshop of a testicle in a wine glass. Might want to edit a warning in if you still can.
  - jurynulifcation 3y ago
    I'm entirely out of the loop with the LessWrong crowd. Could you explain what you mean by your comment? I saw the interview between Friedman and Yudlowski and was less than impressed.
    - ShamelessC 3y ago
      Uh, well I will admit to some ignorance there as well. Mostly it just seems like alignment researchers in general read a bunch of Asimov books and thought - “I know! I’ll invent the laws of robotics and be firmly established in the history books, ignored by the mainstream scientists of the times who were too shortsighted to understand my 12-dimensional thought experiments”. That’s not to undermine the role of the thought experiment, more to suggest that they are more concerned about “peak rationality” than they are about having a useful discourse with other researchers in the field. I’ve seen others suggest it mildly resembles a cult. It is also apparently strongly associated with the “effective altruism” movement and so clearly caters to the ultra wealthy.
Gerard0 3y ago
Great post! Beautifully said!
jlpom 3y ago
> Internet Archive was the ONLY place where I could enjoy a completely random piece of lost media from a children's television show called Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Same for me with Le roi et l'oiseau and Peter and the Wolf by Disney.
- cassepipe 3y ago
  If you are looking for rare things in french or with frech subs like le Roi et l'oiseau, I also recommend checking the private torrent tracker called ygg (https://mamot.fr/@YggTorrent https://mamot.fr/@YggTorrent - you may have to change your DNS, check this page regularly as they move around a lot) The idea behind private tracker is that you are supposed to store as much content as you take from the network and you are actually incentivized to keep old rare stuff you like for people like you out there.
ChancyChance 3y ago
I would argue that the aspects of culture that shape the culture are inherently recorded by the culture. The loss of one specific work known by very few can hardly be reason to panic, because there are petabytes of this content which I'm pretty sure no one will remember ever existed in the future, except the AIs that are trained on them. Now if the work that was lost was something of value, like a mathematical paper that wasn't realized for its benefit, that would be a counter argument, but those are stored in other vaults of provenance. I'm in the camp that the internet archive is for nostalgia and curiosity enthusiasts.
RajT88 3y ago
IA, to your point, is better than it has ever been. Long lost episodes of local shows (super local) are being uploaded by their actors and creators.
modriano 3y ago
> I am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play counter to productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve anything. The fact that I have to wait until people die until copyright is up is god awful. So what's the right way to balance the need to preserve artistic/creative works and the rights of the creator to monitize or permit usage of their works? It seems rather gross to just say that the creator has no right to sell their work or object to some source copying their work and distributing it in a way that deprives the creator of profit.
- amadvance 3y ago
  A good compromise to me looks like twenty years from the first publication.
- dantheman 3y ago
  The entire concept of copyright is problematic - it limits what you can do with property that you own. It's a government granted monopoly. Ideally copyright would be eliminated and people who choose to create will choose to create. There is development in lots of areas that aren't copyrightable. If you want to keep copyright, then it should be reduced to the bear minimum to incentivize creative works - that could be on the order of 20 - 30 years.
  - modriano 3y ago
    > The entire concept of copyright is problematic - it limits what you can do with property that you own. People can own guns. Is it problematic for the government to limit what people can do with their own guns? I would argue that it's not problematic at all, and I bet you would, too. I'm open to other systems than copyright to make it possible for creators to afford to create and sell their creations. I think Patreon is fantastic, but I don't think it would work well for things like code (or situations where people don't really care about the creator and just want the product). Everything will have second,third,fourth order effects.
    - chelical 3y ago
nrbernard 3y ago
> https://archive.org/details/whiterabbitscant00varl https://archive.org/details/whiterabbitscant00varl A truly cursed book cover!
Pokepokalypse 3y ago
Frankly, at least in the context of US Copyright Law, we need to go back to Article I of the Constitution that defines copyright. The very first sentence is "To promote the useful arts and sciences..." If congress passes a copyright law, and that law can't demonstrate that it actually MEASURABLY does promote the useful arts and sciences, (but rather hinders them, as is often the case), then that law should be overturned, desecrated, and posted on a wall-of-shame as an example to others of what doesn't work. I think that would solve 90% of our problems with copyright law. But that's just me. I'm not typically a "Constitutional Originalist" but I think this kind of thinking here could help.
- kitsunesoba 3y ago
  Fully agree. Copyright was originally conceived as a scalpel, but has been turned into a bludgeon. Its current scope and power is far too great.
  - dclowd9901 3y ago
    You can blame brain-dead case law and precedent for that, no doubt bought and paid for by corporations who can afford great lawyers to keep stretching the definition until it's completely unrecognizable.
    - randmeerkat 3y ago
      > You can blame brain-dead case law and precedent for that, no doubt bought and paid for by corporations who can afford great lawyers to keep stretching the definition until it's completely unrecognizable. How important is precedent..? Roe v Wade was overturned despite decades of precedent. Law right now seems to be as dynamic as tech.
      - xbar 3y ago
        Make me a judge and I will fix it.
- yieldcrv 3y ago
Sakos 3y ago
> I see a lot of comments in this thread with what about-isms or "I don't care, we wouldn't miss anything", but these people are short-sighted. And to be honest the hacker news community is frequently the community I loathe to engage in these topics with. Because they are always looking forward with very little respect for the past as well as very little respect for domains outside of technology. There is a severe lack of appreciation for culture or even an understanding of what constitutes our culture, especially here on HN (which is why I hate discussing these topics here). It's not just a handful books that happen to turn into literature in 100 years. Our culture consists of every medium we interact with today. Allowing corporations to monopolize nearly all of it in perpetuity is quite simply immoral and severely damaging to our continued cultural development.
- getwiththeprog 3y ago
  I find this a very diverse space with many points of view, many which I do not agree with, and also a place I find people who are rational, cultured and thoughtful. It's not a full discussion without disagreements.
dclowd9901 3y ago
If it makes you feel better, just skimming the top reply threads on here, the most upvoted replies seem to be ones in support of your argument. And FWIW, I'm right there with you. But I also don't have all the energy I need to be pissed off all the time. Right now, a lot of that anger is directed at the gun lobby since I have a young child in school.
nuodag 3y ago
> I am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play counter to productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve anything. If you think about how cruel it is to make illegal the way human culture has worked for millenia, to listen to the storys you hear, retell them, remix them and make them your own in a new context. That is against the law now.
- luckylion 3y ago
  No it's not. Go ahead, tell your friends the book you recently read. As a matter of fact, go ahead, read that book to your friends. Perfectly legal. Oh, you want to "retell" it and make money off of it? Yeah, that's something else.
  - kroltan 3y ago
    Is the Internet Archive making money off of it? I agree with your statement in isolation, but this is in the context of preserving stories (and heck, history) so they can be retold at all. --- Unrelated tangent, I really miss the distinction of "story" ("estória") and "history" ("história") in the Portuguese language, it makes speaking about topics involving but not exclusively fiction very hard.
    - luckylion 3y ago
      The IA isn't, but the argument was that copyright is dumb, not that a nonprofit like the IA should have exception. Archiving and making publicly available are different things though, so I don't think an exception for archiving should extend to distribution. The archiving also clashes with individual privacy rights and the "right to be forgotten" (which I'm not a big fan of in its depth, but totally agree with in principle). Perhaps not having distinct terms isn't the worst thing: it reminds us that history is largely fictional, both on the personal and the society level, and its truthiness and usefulness is derived from our shared belief in it.
  - 627467 3y ago
    Its a vacuous argument: it's very obvious that any domain hosting such content for free incurs in costs of hosting and handling legal threats for doing so. So any income received would be another excuse for legal threats. On the other hand: why are these public goods services still hosted in infra/protocols exposed to western/us legal arm?
zouhair 3y ago
There is way more pros than cons for just scratching Copyright as it is. Patents are another insanity. Money should be a mean not the goal. We are literally living in a dystopia and most of us are so mired in it we can't see it.
pdntspa 3y ago
"bUt cReAtOrS NeEd tO bE pAiD!!" whined the masses
- account42 3y ago
  So let's pay them. "bUt tHaTs SoCiAlIsM" whined the masses For some reason it's ok with extra steps that fuck over everyone else and mainly lead profit towards few middle men though.
sfifs 3y ago
Part of the problem is that there is a natural tendency for people taking extreme positions to begin dominating non-profit, academic etc types of organizations. This results in unnecessary risk taking or alienating different groups in the society that risks the organisation's core deliverable. In this case, management adventurism in an area they were widely advised as legally risky has led to existential risk. On this specific issue, there was very much a fully compliant way to dramatic increase the number of copies in circulation - which was to reach out to all the libraries which were closed, get their catalogues all of which is electronic anyway and administer lending with a much expanded collection. It is just extra work - which likely would have gotten funded. Instead the management irresponsibily tried to score political points. We need to have the right governance & KPIs in the charters of these critical organizations to prevent extreme people from grabbing their agenda
lkbm 3y ago
I don't know what you're talking about. White Rabbits Can't Jump is available for purchase right now on Abe Books for the low, low price of $222.22 ($4.25 shipping, US only, only one copy available)[0]. The emergency library lending seemed questionable, but the current system they're doing—they have a physical copy of the book and lend out a single scanned copy to one patron at a time—sounds legal, and certainly should be legal. Doubly so when it's out of print. [0] https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=31457338626&searchurl=sortby%3D17%26tn%3DWhite%2BRabbits%2Bcan%2527t%2Bjump&cm_sp=snippet-_-srp1-_-title1 https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=3145733862...
Latty 3y ago
> I am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play counter to productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve anything. Very much this. Copyright was a hack that was meant to encourage creation. I feel like it often does the reverse, and is robbing us of our public domain and making it harder for people to create. Yes, while we have a capitalist society we need to enable creating things that can be copied somehow, but I think currently copyright law hurts that as much as it helps. Creating silos of IP owned by giant companies that rent seek over things made ages ago, encouraged to sit on them and extract value by remaking them, rereleasing old works in new forms to get people to pay again, and stopping anyone else from exploring the ideas without pointlessly recreating the scenarios to avoid copyright violation. We need to be able to preserve works, to share, to build off others' work, and to explore ideas further after the original creators put them out there. It feels like copyright works for giant companies that can hoarde IP, and the lucky few who make huge amounts from something that blows up, but it sucks for actually encouraging most creators, making living off creation viable for normal people, and most of all: it is terrible for building on other's work. I think copyright length needs to be way shorter, ideally with some provision requiring source for code being submitted to a copyright office to be released after the duration runs out, as patents require explanation. (In an ideal world also stems for music and stuff, but that becomes really hard to prove and enforce). I don't think there are easy answers, but I worry we are locked into a system that makes us worse off as a whole.
Bluecobra 3y ago
Internet Archive not only has lost episodes, but whole lost seasons of shows. For example, Little Britain has been “cancelled” on streaming/digital purchases. The DVDs are out of print so third party sellers jack up the price. Internet Archive provides a way of enjoying these out of print works.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
OK, let's stop licking Oligarch Gates' boot. Let's remove copyright from software and watch MSFT go into free fall.
- Zuiii 3y ago
  Pushing the idea that software is copyrightable is going to be Bill Gate's lasting legacy and history will eventually look back at it as one of humanities worse policies.

disqard 3y ago

Thank you so much for speaking up! You're not alone in thinking this way. And kudos for investing the Time to write this up -- the sophists are all-too-often over-represented here, and I'm never really sure that they're always arguing in Good Faith, or if they are, they're often being so short-sighted that it's simultaneously funny and sad.

int_19h 3y ago

I really wish we ditched the name "copyright" altogether because of its unfortunate implications. It's not actually a right - it's a privilege. The system is entirely artificial and wouldn't exist without active social and legal enforcement. And if the privilege is abused in ways that don't benefit society, then it can and should be curtailed or even revoked.

tablespoon 3y ago
> It's not actually a right - it's a privilege. The system is entirely artificial and wouldn't exist without active social and legal enforcement. And if the privilege is abused in ways that don't benefit society, then it can and should be curtailed or even revoked. In other words, it's a right.
eecc 3y ago
How about calling it Copyrent? Isn't iut more descriptive of what it actually is, while "right" makes it more sympathetic to the liberties and freedoms they're actually reigning in.
astraloverflow 3y ago
Personally I find the term "intellectual property" to be more messed up. It isn't property, it's a government granted monopoly on reproduction and distribution. Calling it property allows for this bizarre concept of a form of "theft" that still leaves you with the thing "stolen" from you.
- tablespoon 3y ago
  > Personally I find the term "intellectual property" to be more messed up. It isn't property, it's a government granted monopoly... So, in other words, it's property. There's nothing that guarantees a particular lump of atoms are "yours" besides a government-granted monopoly to control that lump. The atoms don't care.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

rhtgrg 3y ago

> very little respect for domains outside of technology. The HN community can also be out of touch with technology. If you are an AI researcher this becomes plainly obvious the moment you visit any of the AI threads (if it isn't obvious already from the 6 to 12 month delay on the posting of cutting edge developments here). Sometimes it's hard to argue with zwj.org's assessment [0]. [0] https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2016/hn.png https://cdn.jwz.org/images/2016/hn.png

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ShamelessC 3y ago
Not just misinformed and outdated, but people here seem to have think _very_ highly of their own intelligence - often being dismissive of frankly incredible ideas because “why didn’t they just…” I’ve never been less impressed with the supposed elite class of Ivy League “hackers” than when I’m on this site. Get over yourself. You didn’t just solve AI with your “recursive LLM”. No one with ADHD is going to benefit from your pomodoro app that is…slightly more visible than the other thousands of pomodoro apps? Also - half of you don’t have ADHD. Believe it or not - coding is an attention drain and taking stimulants to gain an advantage so that you can ship in 3 months instead of 12 is toxic as fuck. Don’t get me started on LessWrong. FWIW, while I agree with the sentiment - not everyone is prepared to see an unsolicited photoshop of a testicle in a wine glass. Might want to edit a warning in if you still can.
- jurynulifcation 3y ago
  I'm entirely out of the loop with the LessWrong crowd. Could you explain what you mean by your comment? I saw the interview between Friedman and Yudlowski and was less than impressed.
  - ShamelessC 3y ago
    Uh, well I will admit to some ignorance there as well. Mostly it just seems like alignment researchers in general read a bunch of Asimov books and thought - “I know! I’ll invent the laws of robotics and be firmly established in the history books, ignored by the mainstream scientists of the times who were too shortsighted to understand my 12-dimensional thought experiments”. That’s not to undermine the role of the thought experiment, more to suggest that they are more concerned about “peak rationality” than they are about having a useful discourse with other researchers in the field. I’ve seen others suggest it mildly resembles a cult. It is also apparently strongly associated with the “effective altruism” movement and so clearly caters to the ultra wealthy.

Gerard0 3y ago

Great post! Beautifully said!

jlpom 3y ago

> Internet Archive was the ONLY place where I could enjoy a completely random piece of lost media from a children's television show called Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Same for me with Le roi et l'oiseau and Peter and the Wolf by Disney.

cassepipe 3y ago
If you are looking for rare things in french or with frech subs like le Roi et l'oiseau, I also recommend checking the private torrent tracker called ygg (https://mamot.fr/@YggTorrent https://mamot.fr/@YggTorrent - you may have to change your DNS, check this page regularly as they move around a lot) The idea behind private tracker is that you are supposed to store as much content as you take from the network and you are actually incentivized to keep old rare stuff you like for people like you out there.

ChancyChance 3y ago

I would argue that the aspects of culture that shape the culture are inherently recorded by the culture. The loss of one specific work known by very few can hardly be reason to panic, because there are petabytes of this content which I'm pretty sure no one will remember ever existed in the future, except the AIs that are trained on them. Now if the work that was lost was something of value, like a mathematical paper that wasn't realized for its benefit, that would be a counter argument, but those are stored in other vaults of provenance. I'm in the camp that the internet archive is for nostalgia and curiosity enthusiasts.

RajT88 3y ago

IA, to your point, is better than it has ever been. Long lost episodes of local shows (super local) are being uploaded by their actors and creators.

modriano 3y ago

> I am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play counter to productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve anything. The fact that I have to wait until people die until copyright is up is god awful. So what's the right way to balance the need to preserve artistic/creative works and the rights of the creator to monitize or permit usage of their works? It seems rather gross to just say that the creator has no right to sell their work or object to some source copying their work and distributing it in a way that deprives the creator of profit.

amadvance 3y ago
A good compromise to me looks like twenty years from the first publication.
dantheman 3y ago
The entire concept of copyright is problematic - it limits what you can do with property that you own. It's a government granted monopoly. Ideally copyright would be eliminated and people who choose to create will choose to create. There is development in lots of areas that aren't copyrightable. If you want to keep copyright, then it should be reduced to the bear minimum to incentivize creative works - that could be on the order of 20 - 30 years.
- modriano 3y ago
  > The entire concept of copyright is problematic - it limits what you can do with property that you own. People can own guns. Is it problematic for the government to limit what people can do with their own guns? I would argue that it's not problematic at all, and I bet you would, too. I'm open to other systems than copyright to make it possible for creators to afford to create and sell their creations. I think Patreon is fantastic, but I don't think it would work well for things like code (or situations where people don't really care about the creator and just want the product). Everything will have second,third,fourth order effects.
  - chelical 3y ago

nrbernard 3y ago

> https://archive.org/details/whiterabbitscant00varl https://archive.org/details/whiterabbitscant00varl A truly cursed book cover!

Pokepokalypse 3y ago

Frankly, at least in the context of US Copyright Law, we need to go back to Article I of the Constitution that defines copyright. The very first sentence is "To promote the useful arts and sciences..." If congress passes a copyright law, and that law can't demonstrate that it actually MEASURABLY does promote the useful arts and sciences, (but rather hinders them, as is often the case), then that law should be overturned, desecrated, and posted on a wall-of-shame as an example to others of what doesn't work. I think that would solve 90% of our problems with copyright law. But that's just me. I'm not typically a "Constitutional Originalist" but I think this kind of thinking here could help.

kitsunesoba 3y ago
Fully agree. Copyright was originally conceived as a scalpel, but has been turned into a bludgeon. Its current scope and power is far too great.
- dclowd9901 3y ago
  You can blame brain-dead case law and precedent for that, no doubt bought and paid for by corporations who can afford great lawyers to keep stretching the definition until it's completely unrecognizable.
  - randmeerkat 3y ago
    > You can blame brain-dead case law and precedent for that, no doubt bought and paid for by corporations who can afford great lawyers to keep stretching the definition until it's completely unrecognizable. How important is precedent..? Roe v Wade was overturned despite decades of precedent. Law right now seems to be as dynamic as tech.
    - xbar 3y ago
      Make me a judge and I will fix it.
yieldcrv 3y ago

Sakos 3y ago

> I see a lot of comments in this thread with what about-isms or "I don't care, we wouldn't miss anything", but these people are short-sighted. And to be honest the hacker news community is frequently the community I loathe to engage in these topics with. Because they are always looking forward with very little respect for the past as well as very little respect for domains outside of technology. There is a severe lack of appreciation for culture or even an understanding of what constitutes our culture, especially here on HN (which is why I hate discussing these topics here). It's not just a handful books that happen to turn into literature in 100 years. Our culture consists of every medium we interact with today. Allowing corporations to monopolize nearly all of it in perpetuity is quite simply immoral and severely damaging to our continued cultural development.

getwiththeprog 3y ago
I find this a very diverse space with many points of view, many which I do not agree with, and also a place I find people who are rational, cultured and thoughtful. It's not a full discussion without disagreements.

dclowd9901 3y ago

If it makes you feel better, just skimming the top reply threads on here, the most upvoted replies seem to be ones in support of your argument. And FWIW, I'm right there with you. But I also don't have all the energy I need to be pissed off all the time. Right now, a lot of that anger is directed at the gun lobby since I have a young child in school.

nuodag 3y ago

> I am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play counter to productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve anything. If you think about how cruel it is to make illegal the way human culture has worked for millenia, to listen to the storys you hear, retell them, remix them and make them your own in a new context. That is against the law now.

luckylion 3y ago
No it's not. Go ahead, tell your friends the book you recently read. As a matter of fact, go ahead, read that book to your friends. Perfectly legal. Oh, you want to "retell" it and make money off of it? Yeah, that's something else.
- kroltan 3y ago
  Is the Internet Archive making money off of it? I agree with your statement in isolation, but this is in the context of preserving stories (and heck, history) so they can be retold at all. --- Unrelated tangent, I really miss the distinction of "story" ("estória") and "history" ("história") in the Portuguese language, it makes speaking about topics involving but not exclusively fiction very hard.
  - luckylion 3y ago
    The IA isn't, but the argument was that copyright is dumb, not that a nonprofit like the IA should have exception. Archiving and making publicly available are different things though, so I don't think an exception for archiving should extend to distribution. The archiving also clashes with individual privacy rights and the "right to be forgotten" (which I'm not a big fan of in its depth, but totally agree with in principle). Perhaps not having distinct terms isn't the worst thing: it reminds us that history is largely fictional, both on the personal and the society level, and its truthiness and usefulness is derived from our shared belief in it.
- 627467 3y ago
  Its a vacuous argument: it's very obvious that any domain hosting such content for free incurs in costs of hosting and handling legal threats for doing so. So any income received would be another excuse for legal threats. On the other hand: why are these public goods services still hosted in infra/protocols exposed to western/us legal arm?

zouhair 3y ago

There is way more pros than cons for just scratching Copyright as it is. Patents are another insanity. Money should be a mean not the goal. We are literally living in a dystopia and most of us are so mired in it we can't see it.

pdntspa 3y ago

"bUt cReAtOrS NeEd tO bE pAiD!!" whined the masses

account42 3y ago
So let's pay them. "bUt tHaTs SoCiAlIsM" whined the masses For some reason it's ok with extra steps that fuck over everyone else and mainly lead profit towards few middle men though.

sfifs 3y ago

Part of the problem is that there is a natural tendency for people taking extreme positions to begin dominating non-profit, academic etc types of organizations. This results in unnecessary risk taking or alienating different groups in the society that risks the organisation's core deliverable. In this case, management adventurism in an area they were widely advised as legally risky has led to existential risk. On this specific issue, there was very much a fully compliant way to dramatic increase the number of copies in circulation - which was to reach out to all the libraries which were closed, get their catalogues all of which is electronic anyway and administer lending with a much expanded collection. It is just extra work - which likely would have gotten funded. Instead the management irresponsibily tried to score political points. We need to have the right governance & KPIs in the charters of these critical organizations to prevent extreme people from grabbing their agenda

lkbm 3y ago

I don't know what you're talking about. White Rabbits Can't Jump is available for purchase right now on Abe Books for the low, low price of $222.22 ($4.25 shipping, US only, only one copy available)[0]. The emergency library lending seemed questionable, but the current system they're doing—they have a physical copy of the book and lend out a single scanned copy to one patron at a time—sounds legal, and certainly should be legal. Doubly so when it's out of print. [0] https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=31457338626&searchurl=sortby%3D17%26tn%3DWhite%2BRabbits%2Bcan%2527t%2Bjump&cm_sp=snippet-_-srp1-_-title1 https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=3145733862...

Latty 3y ago

> I am so sick and tired of the copyright laws that play counter to productive creation and stymying efforts to preserve anything. Very much this. Copyright was a hack that was meant to encourage creation. I feel like it often does the reverse, and is robbing us of our public domain and making it harder for people to create. Yes, while we have a capitalist society we need to enable creating things that can be copied somehow, but I think currently copyright law hurts that as much as it helps. Creating silos of IP owned by giant companies that rent seek over things made ages ago, encouraged to sit on them and extract value by remaking them, rereleasing old works in new forms to get people to pay again, and stopping anyone else from exploring the ideas without pointlessly recreating the scenarios to avoid copyright violation. We need to be able to preserve works, to share, to build off others' work, and to explore ideas further after the original creators put them out there. It feels like copyright works for giant companies that can hoarde IP, and the lucky few who make huge amounts from something that blows up, but it sucks for actually encouraging most creators, making living off creation viable for normal people, and most of all: it is terrible for building on other's work. I think copyright length needs to be way shorter, ideally with some provision requiring source for code being submitted to a copyright office to be released after the duration runs out, as patents require explanation. (In an ideal world also stems for music and stuff, but that becomes really hard to prove and enforce). I don't think there are easy answers, but I worry we are locked into a system that makes us worse off as a whole.

Bluecobra 3y ago

Internet Archive not only has lost episodes, but whole lost seasons of shows. For example, Little Britain has been “cancelled” on streaming/digital purchases. The DVDs are out of print so third party sellers jack up the price. Internet Archive provides a way of enjoying these out of print works.

1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago

OK, let's stop licking Oligarch Gates' boot. Let's remove copyright from software and watch MSFT go into free fall.

Zuiii 3y ago
Pushing the idea that software is copyrightable is going to be Bill Gate's lasting legacy and history will eventually look back at it as one of humanities worse policies.