4 ms·

We should be more discerning with where we allow copyright to be enforced. In my view, copyright's only legitimate purpose is to prevent someone else from selli

We should be more discerning with where we allow copyright to be enforced. In my view, copyright's only legitimate purpose is to prevent someone else from selling your work as their own in order to make money. If the person or entity distributing your work is doing so with no direct recompense and only has the aim of making the work widely accessible mostly for education, scholarship and to the impoverished who would not otherwise purchase your work, then there should be no case to be tried. You wouldn't make any money off of these uses anyways. The people with enough disposable income to buy your book or software along with dozens of other copyright protected works they may purchase in a year aren't (generally) the same people who spend hours scouring IA or torrent sites for a freebie, their time is worth too much for that when they can just click Buy Now on Amazon and be done with it. Those are the people, whales in gaming industry parlance, that are paying your bills. Fighting legal battles against librarians and pirates won't win you any customers, it'll just reduce your publicity and sour what's left of it.

modriano 4y ago
> The people with enough disposable income to buy your book or software along with dozens of other copyright protected works they may purchase in a year aren't (generally) the same people who spend hours scouring IA or torrent sites for a freebie, their time is worth too much for that when they can just click Buy Now on Amazon and be done with it. I fully concede that wouldn't go to IA to read any full work (it's too slow and the interface isn't nearly as nice as O'Reilly Online or a physical book), I think copyright made it possible for the current highly-convenient distribution models (of spotify, Amazon, and to a diminishing extent paid video streamers) to develop. In the early 2000s, people who had the money were still extensively using Napster/Kazaa/Limewire/etc to get content because buying an entire CD when you wanted one song sucked (although paying $0.99 for a song on itunes also sucked). I think there should be a carveout for IA as IA is a uniquely valuable resource, I'm just not sure how to make that into a general rule.
- throwaway4aday 4y ago
  Pretty much everyone I knew who used to torrent music owned very few actual CDs, the few who did own a lot of CDs seemed to only download rare or hard to find tracks and would go on endlessly about the shitty audio quality of downloaded music.

modriano 4y ago

> The people with enough disposable income to buy your book or software along with dozens of other copyright protected works they may purchase in a year aren't (generally) the same people who spend hours scouring IA or torrent sites for a freebie, their time is worth too much for that when they can just click Buy Now on Amazon and be done with it. I fully concede that wouldn't go to IA to read any full work (it's too slow and the interface isn't nearly as nice as O'Reilly Online or a physical book), I think copyright made it possible for the current highly-convenient distribution models (of spotify, Amazon, and to a diminishing extent paid video streamers) to develop. In the early 2000s, people who had the money were still extensively using Napster/Kazaa/Limewire/etc to get content because buying an entire CD when you wanted one song sucked (although paying $0.99 for a song on itunes also sucked). I think there should be a carveout for IA as IA is a uniquely valuable resource, I'm just not sure how to make that into a general rule.

throwaway4aday 4y ago
Pretty much everyone I knew who used to torrent music owned very few actual CDs, the few who did own a lot of CDs seemed to only download rare or hard to find tracks and would go on endlessly about the shitty audio quality of downloaded music.