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Let's take a second to remember that copyright is the reason ~every child doesn't have access to ~every book ever written. While it might be too disruptive to
by holmesworcester 3y ago
Let's take a second to remember that copyright is the reason ~every child doesn't have access to ~every book ever written.
While it might be too disruptive to eliminate copyright overnight, we should remember that our world will be much better and improve much faster to the extent we can reduce copyright's impact.
And we should cheer it on when it happens. A majority of the world's population in 2023 has a smartphone. Imagine a world where a majority of the world had access to every book ever digitized, and could raise their children on these books!
- lotsoweiners 3y agoI’m imagining a world that looks just about the same as this one does. A larger book library doesn’t automatically make that medium more appealing to kids than what Mr Beast, Unspeakable, and the other crap kids love are doing.
- CactusOnFire 3y ago...for the global middle class? Maybe. For the world as a whole? Definite differences. It just seems like a super jaded "kids these days" thing to hate on them for consuming easily accessed, free content- and acting like the global literacy and intellectual capital would remain unaffected.
- aaomidi 3y agoAlso, piracy exists and is perfectly reasonable for an individual, especially when they are not able to afford the book, to use to get access to a book.
- WillAdams 3y agoHow many of these kids have read what percentage of the books which are legitimately freely available? I've never encountered a kid (other than my own) who has read: https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.html https://mathcs.clarku.edu/~djoyce/java/elements/elements.htm... but have encountered many others who struggle with geometry.
- lotsoweiners 3y ago> For the world as a whole? Definite differences. Tell me these differences. Shitty internet videos exist and are what kids want all over the world. At some point you are going to have to face it that reading lost the battle for people’s eyes to video. I was an avid reader for most of my childhood and young adult life but now in my 40s I have accepted that I’d just rather watch from the deluge of visual media available vs reading. Piracy also exists for books so copyright doesn’t seem to be that big a deal. In fact if I look at the top pirated books currently I’m going to run across more junk books like “Make Money Faster” and “Give her orgasms in under 30 seconds” than anything you might find intellectually stimulating.
- dlivingston 3y agoIt would look largely identical to ours, I think. It's pretty trivial to get access to many, if not most, e-books. Any public-domain work is available on Project Gutenberg [0]. Copyrighted works can be accessed for free using tools of various legality: Libby [1] is likely sponsored by your local library and gives free access to e-books and audiobooks. Library Genesis [2] has a questionable legal status but has a huge quantity of e-books, journal articles, and more. [0]: https://www.gutenberg.org https://www.gutenberg.org [1]: https://www.overdrive.com/apps/libby https://www.overdrive.com/apps/libby [2]: https://libgen.rs/fiction/ https://libgen.rs/fiction/
- DennisP 3y agoPublic domain would be fine, if we had the original copyright term instead of "life of the author plus seventy years." Libby is an interesting option, though I'm curious how many kids in disadvantaged countries would actually have access to it. Regarding Libgen, I'm not convinced it makes the case for modern copyright to say it's fine, because people can just violate copyright.
- zugi 3y agoExactly. The original copyright term was 14 years. Now Disney and the Intellectual Monopoly cartel have extended it 120 years, and convinced an unthinking population that anything less is "stealing."
- thrixton 3y agoIt’s important to note that only some copyrighted works can be accessed for free using the legal options, I’m a member of probably a dozen overdrive supporting libraries and still frequently find titles unavailable for loan of any kind. I’d love to see an analysis of what % of books are available via libraries around the globe. Also, the whole DRM thing is a massive pain, audiobooks especially are terrible at allowing side-loading onto a consumer friendly device (such as an MP3 player).
- trogdor 3y ago
- aaomidi 3y agoUsing charged language of bringing children into the equation is not a good way in having a discussion.
- salawat 3y ago...On the other hand, seems to work gangbusters for getting policy passed.
- throw10920 3y agoIt's straight-up manipulative. I downvote and flag whenever I see it, because it actively contributes to the decline of HN, and is absolutely not appropriate content for here.
- erehweb 3y agoSecond-order effects are real - removing copyright would hurt authors. (See cstross comments in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35761641 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35761641 e.g.)
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Second-order effects are real - removing copyright would hurt authors. Aiding authors is an instrumental, not fundamental, purpose of copyright in the US; the fundamental purpose to which any instrumental purposes are subordinate is “to promote the progress of science and useful arts”. That is, while copyrights are a form of property, they are not something that is seen as natural property, but instead property explicitly granted as a means of achieving a public policy goal, and therefore limitations (or even elimination) harming the owners of that property is not the kind of dispositive argument against a policy that would be with the kinds of property seen as natural property.
- erehweb 3y agoTo make this more explicit, the argument is that removing copyright hurts authors, meaning that fewer people become authors in the future, meaning that the progress of the useful arts is hurt.
- 698969 3y agoThen most people stop writing books because they can't get paid for their time/effort and ~every child will be stuck with outdated knowledge within a decade.
- DennisP 3y agoOr maybe we could figure out a new economic model, instead of blindly sticking with one based on the limitations of the pre-digital age.
- listenallyall 3y agoHow about you go figure out this new economic model, and come back when it's ready. Until then, the existing model will persist, thank you
- leereeves 3y agoFirst change the incentives, then everyone will work on finding a new economic model.
- listenallyall 3y agoThis makes even less sense than the previous guy. When you've figured out how the world will work without people incentivized by money and power, get back to the rest of us
- leereeves 3y agoSuing people for reading a book is one of the ways the poor are kept poor. The world will work just fine without ceding control to people who seek money and power, because most people aren't like that. The question is how to prevent the few who are from oppressing the rest of us. That is quite a challenge, but haven't you ever created something just for the fun of it?
- 3y ago
- WillAdams 3y agoThere are already many more public domain books than people are inclined to read: https://www.gutenberg.org/ https://www.gutenberg.org/ https://librivox.org/ https://librivox.org/ many of which form the basis for an education: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34630153 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34630153 And most of which, when in copyright, paid their authors quite handsomely in terms of royalties. If you believe that books should exist without copyright, then one has to ask --- how many books have you written which you have explicitly placed in the public domain? Or, how many authors have you patronized so as to fund their writing so that they can publish their works freely? Or, if neither of these applies, how do you propose to compensate authors for the efforts and labours of writing?
- djaouen 3y ago>If you believe that books should exist without copyright, then one has to ask --- how many books have you written which you have explicitly placed in the public domain? Or, how many authors have you patronized so as to fund their writing so that they can publish their works freely? Lol Edit: I should probably clarify here. While I can’t speak for OP, I can say that, for some reason, I am sure there are people who have done both lol
- WillAdams 3y agoI've authored quite a bit of book-like content which has been made freely available: - the Shapeoko wiki (still available on archive.org) - a couple of articles for TUGboat - edited a couple of texts on wikibooks trying to make them better - currently working on https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/ https://willadams.gitbook.io/design-into-3d/ The Venn diagram of folks who don't believe in copyright and those who have actually produced something other folks want to read is quite sparse, excepting the odd manifesto.
- thrixton 3y agoI’d more ask what the cost vs benefits are of keeping the existing scheme, it’s not free to run all these DRM services, prosecute offenders etc… Not to say I support no copyright…
- listenallyall 3y ago> copyright is the reason ~every child doesn't have access to ~every book ever written. And? Is there some reason anybody, child or adult, deserves access to "every" anything? Should children have access to every video game ever made, every Matchbox car, every Lego set?
- gs17 3y agoYes? I can't see any reason "you can't have that Lego set because the giant corporation behind it stopped selling it, refuses to let anyone else make it, and resale is all horribly expensive from collectors" is something we should have to tell our kids. I really hope my children will have access to a higher tech version of something like the (discontinued?) toy where you could melt old crayons into toy car bodies. 3D printing is almost there, but ideally the end product of a Lego set could be recycled into new blocks easily and quickly.
- kristianp 3y agoAnyone want to check if the book in question is in ThePile dataset?: https://github.com/EleutherAI/the-pile/blob/master/the_pile/datasets.py https://github.com/EleutherAI/the-pile/blob/master/the_pile/...
- gorbachev 3y agoThis situation is a bit different, however. A company that believes in strong intellectual property rights protection is using resources that blatantly ignore intellectual property rights to get access to the content for free. I agree with you, however, that it's an argument in favor of abolishing strong intellectual property rights. At least for OpenAI's products.
- ssss11 3y agoSo why do we cheer on megacorps and not mom and pop pirates?
- gretch 3y agoWho is cheering for 1 and not the other? Megacorps should buy 1 of every book (if they want to train on it)
- edanm 3y ago> Let's take a second to remember that copyright is the reason ~every child doesn't have access to ~every book ever written. No, copyright is the reason that authors all over the world are working very hard to make new books for my kids and everyone else's kids, despite never having met me. Copyright is the reason so many brilliant things are actually created that otherwise would never be. Of course I'd prefer to live in a world in which I get all the media I want, for free. But I have no idea how to make such a world happen, and neither does anyone else, and humanity has been discussing this for a few centuries.
- account42 3y agoI'm all for abolishing copyright, but how is this relevant to megacorporations ignoring copyright when it suits them while still expecting us to follow it when that suits them?
- Eddy_Viscosity2 3y agoI think the point here is that while children can be denied access to copyrighted works without paying the owners, but openAI and Meta can do as they please. I don't disagree that the current copyright system needs improvement, but what I really really don't like are seeing rich and powerful people breaking laws with impunity over and over and over again.
- 2muchcoffeeman 3y agoThis assumes that the law is applied equally to both rich and poor.
- jklinger410 3y agoWe can totally take a second to remember that without it being in the context of allowing large corporations to hoover up private works with impunity.
- ignoramous 3y agoSecond-order effects matter, though: If everyone is allowed to steal books, what's the incentive for experts to write new ones, and for the publishers to reward them for it? Btw, not a fan of "but what about the kids" rhetoric: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
- greenie_beans 3y agobooks hardly make money, so book sales is not the top incentive for most writers. i would be willing to bet that most books pay less than minimum wage, when considering the labor hours it takes to write the book and how much a writer is ultimately paid out. if not less than minimum wage, then certainly less than the expert's typical hourly rate.
- adamc 3y agoI think that would wholly destroy the ability of writers to actually make a living writing novels. The fact that the living isn't great now does not justify this.
- avidiax 3y agoPeople wrote great works before copywrite. People write for reasons other than money from the sales of the book. This accounts for most authors, who aren't famous enough to negotiate a great deal with a publisher. And we don't need to abolish copyright outright. Just require that it is continually published at a steady or decreasing price, or it becomes public domain. And put works in the public domain a little sooner.
- adamc 3y agoPeople did write before copyright. Copyright was established to make it more likely. Yes, people write for other reasons (e.g., self-promotion). But that does not account for "most authors" I would actually want to read. I'm not against copyright being different, especially for things that are written as work-for-hire. But that's a fight with Disney. Good luck.
- toss1 3y ago>>copyright is the reason ~every child doesn't have access to ~every book ever written Copyright is ALSO the reason that many books can be written in the first place. Obviously, Copyright is abused and the continual extensions of copyright into near-perpetuity by corporations is basically absurd. And they are abused by music publishers etc. to rip-off artists. But to claim that it should not exist, when it is utterly trivially simple for anyone to copy stuff to the web is to argue that no one should create or release any creative works, or to argue for drastic DRM measures. Perhaps you DGAF about your written or artistic works because you do not or can not make a living off them, but I guarantee that for those creatives and artists who can and/or do make a living off of it, they do care, and rightly so.
- onetokeoverthe 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- stcroixx 3y agoIn this world, the only authors would be people independently wealthy who don't need an income.
- glonq 3y agoCopyright [and the textbook cartels] is the reason why my kids' highschool is using social studies textbooks that are 20-30 years old. "Japan's incredibly strong economy is responsible for the manufacture of Datsun cars, boombox stereos, and touch-tone phones..."
- throw10920 3y ago> Let's take a second to remember This is emotionally manipulative speech that provides no value to HN and only serves the purpose of bypassing peoples' logical reasoning circuits. > ~every child doesn't have access to ~every book ever written More manipulation - "think of the children!" Copyright exists because people who produce content with low distribution costs (e.g. books) need some protection for their work being taken without compensation. Fundamentally, you are never entitled to someone else's work. There's already tens (hundreds?) of thousands of books in the public domain, and tens of thousands more under Creative Commons licenses (where the author explicitly released their work for free distribution). There's lectures on YouTube and MIT OpenCourseWare. There's full K-12 textbooks on OpenStax and Wikibooks. There's Wikipedia, Stack Exchange, the Internet Archive, and millions of small blogs and websites hosting content that is completely free. There is no need for "a majority of the world had access to every book ever digitized" - and it's deeply morally wrong (theft-adjacent) to take someone else's work without compensating them on their terms.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoIt's worth challenging the length of copyright. 20 years seems good enough for high tech R&D, probably good for books as well.
- throw10920 3y agoSure! Yes! I agree! 100 years is way too long. 20 years is much more reasonable. But the comment that I was responding to (and many others in this thread) are advocating for the complete removal of copyright, and that's what I'm responding to.
- onlypositive 3y agoMost book sales are done within 5 years. It's drips after that. On top of that, knowledge moves too fast these days for a 20 year right to be useful for society.
- societyis 3y ago
- ChatGTP 3y agoWhy don't children have access to all the latest LLMs, including ChatGPT-4, for free? Why does money exist?
- charles_f 3y agoThat's not parent's point. Their point seems to be that large companies don't suffer the same consequences from a crime as any layman.
- JustLurking2022 3y agoWhat an absolute pile of nonsense. People who author creative works deserve to have control of them and make some money - otherwise you'll soon find we have far fewer great authors, artists, etc. This is essentially the same as saying builders charging for houses is the problem with the housing market, so we're going to phase out paying builders.
- onlypositive 3y ago> otherwise you'll soon find we have far fewer great authors, artists, etc. It's been long understood that this idea isn't based on any real evidence. Creators create because they like to create things. Adding money to the mix tends to ruin most creative endeavours. Look up beautification or note how Googles only good search results involve the keyword Reddit.
- kingofheroes 3y agoTheres "creators create because they like to create things" and "creators create things because they want to make a living off of what they create". If artists/authors/musicians/etc aren't going to be paid for what they create, they can't make a living doing it. If they can't make a living doing it, that severely limits their opportunity and time available for creating things since they could only do it as a hobby (unless we bring back royal patronage or something). Many of the best artistic works we have came from people who were able to commit 100% to the creative process. That's gonna be real hard to do if you can't pay for food and housing.
- onlypositive 3y agoCopyright laws are red flag laws for publishers. It has nothing to do with creators. People are regularly paying creators directly to create through patreon, super chats, advertising, early access, subscriptions, etc. The idea that you need copyright to protect you is just not based in reality. Get rid of copyright, creators will find a way to monetize it if they want to make a living doing it. It's not society's job to protect your ability to get paid for your hobby. There are no original ideas, just people that write them down. You don't own them, you extracted these ideas from society, the least you can do is give them back.
- shreyshnaccount 3y agoGP makes no remark on the morality/practicality of copyright. Also, having people sue big companies for copyright might lead to more of what you're arguing for, in a show them the taste of their own medicine way
- all_factz 3y agoI would be much more sympathetic to this stance if you weren’t implicitly endorsing the rights of companies like Meta/Alphabet/OpenAI to profit from the disruption of copyright law. If we’re talking ordinary people being able to breach copyright, then yeah seems potentially interesting. But let’s remember that these companies aren’t acting altruistically. They’re not giving away Silverman’s work - they’re repackaging it for their own profit. That’s not fair to the artist and in fact does not help the children.
- tr_user 3y agoTry adding censorship to that list.
- mywittyname 3y agoI'm a fan of copyrights. While I think that the USA's implementation of copyrights has a few glaring flaws (namely, the duration of copyright is far too long). I firmly believe that the elimination, or effective elimination of copyrights is massively detrimental to our culture. A fair middle ground would be for copyrights to last for 20 or so years. That's plenty of time to profit from a work while allowing people to preserve and distribute older works.
- renewedrebecca 3y agoBut it's not children downloading the books is it? It's a company backed by billionaires, so why cheer?
- manzanarama 3y agoHow many books would not exist if copyright had the suggested reduced impact?