3 ms·

This is your friendly reminder that, if libraries didn't predate copyright, they never would have existed because copyright owners would have argued it's a flag

This is your friendly reminder that, if libraries didn't predate copyright, they never would have existed because copyright owners would have argued it's a flagrant violation of copyright. Even given that libraries are clearly legal, copyright owners still try their utmost to make them illegal, because they're seen as lost purchases. If I were only allowed to change one thing about copyright, what I would change is not the length of copyright terms, but the treatment of digital works. Kill this stupid pretend game that you don't buy anything digital, you merely lease it, and therefore the creator gets to jerk you around to their heart's content because contract law supersedes all. No, make a digital sale a sale, and then we get to have the First Sale Doctrine kick in. And hopefully we get to sit back and enjoy the schadenfreude as they repeatedly go to SCOTUS as the printer manufacturers do with some new harebrained attempt to work around First Sale Doctrine and SCOTUS goes "lol, nope, doesn't work." But truly, fuck the ebook lending practices. It's downright predatory and it just makes me never want to actually buy an ebook (unless it's from one of the few publishers that goes all-in on DRM-free ebooks).

jazzyjackson 3y ago
what's your timeline on libraries? i guess you're counting ancient, private collections. public libraries happened well after copyright was established and just had to go to court and make their case. first sale doctrine indeed saved the day. the more interesting case for me is that xerox was allowed to exist, and libraries fought successfully to allow their patrons to use xerox machines within the library (1973 Williams & Wilkins Co. v United States). this freedom may not have been established had it been any other circumstance than a medical journal suing the medical doctors xerox'ing the papers for their own research. the public attitude was "bro, lives are on the line here, let the doctors make copies" and we got the four factors of fair use outlined in the 1976 Copyright Act
- brnt 3y ago
  If you do not consider the ancient, famous libraries to be public, Wikipedia puts ~1600 as a first date of modern public libraries. While copyright has a first occurance date in the 1700s, in some locales much later. Either way it seems public libraries were around at least a century before copyright, but by other measure, in some places, much longer.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Copyright in the UK predates the existence of the United States by quite a bit.
  - fao_ 3y ago
    And has no concept of fair use :P
    - amszmidt 3y ago
      There is the concept of "Fair Dealing" (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright#fair-dealing https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright#fair-dea...) which is similar to "fair use".
      - fao_ 3y ago
        As someone living in the UK, that's not comparable whatsoever.
samatman 3y ago
> if libraries didn't predate copyright, they never would have existed because copyright owners would have argued it's a flagrant violation of copyright. Before the advent of digital media, the meaning of copyright could be cleanly derived from the words it is compounded from. Any publisher arguing that to lend a purchased item to another person infringes on their exclusive right to produce copies, would have been laughed right out of the courtroom.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
[flagged]
- joshspankit 3y ago
  You lost me at numbers, but had me at Copyright monopolists.
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    Copyright is ownership of information, data. All information is bits. All bits are numbers in base 2. Therefore copyright is ownership of numbers. You can even figure out how big the number is. digits = ceil(bits * log10(2)) For example, a 20 kiB picture is just a number with 49,321 decimal digits. All numbers already exist. All intellectual work is just number discovery. Drawing? Music production? Editing source code? Fancy ways to enter numbers into computers. This comment is a number.
    - joshspankit 3y ago
      Ok, I’m following you now. But there are two limits you’ve put on yourself: 1. This is limited to digital representations of information (which let’s be up front about: is the overwhelming majority of information in 2024, but the point is it’s not all) 2. What is actually stored is not a number. Below the KB are bytes and below the bytes are bits, but below the bits are (typically) on/off states. 1 and 0 are just convenient ways to reason about bits. They are not the underlying truth.
      - matheusmoreira 3y ago
        > This is limited to digital representations of information All information is bits and all bits are numbers. How the numbers are represented is just an implementation detail. One could print a book containing all 50 thousand digits of the numeric representation of the 20 KiB picture I mentioned. That number is the picture! It's just represented in a very inconvenient form. It may be hard to believe but there exists software which does exactly this. Paperkey, for example, is designed to create printouts of OpenPGP secret keys so that they can be kept offline. It quite literally dumps out the bytes as rows of numbers and you print them out. Imagine reading hexadecimal characters from a paper and entering all 4096 bits into the computer one by one by hand via text editor. I've actually done it. Yes, it's as nightmarish as it sounds like. Yet it works. The point of this argument is to show how utterly absurd copyright is. It logically reduces to numeric ownership and illegal numbers. It's quite literally illegal for you to write down a certain number on a paper and give the paper to someone else. I think that's just delusional. It just can't be refuted. If the copyright monopolists try to argue that the number isn't the picture, they only hurt their own interests in the process. Such an argument automatically creates a channel where infringement of their copyrights may occur. It's illegal to copy the image directly but it's okay if I transform it into a number first and then copy it? That makes no sense whatsoever. They would never make such a self-defeating argument. Therefore they do believe that the image equals the number and that they have monopoly rights to the number. > They are not the underlying truth. I believe they are. All of information theory is bits. On/off states is just a digital mechanism humans created to store the information. If you group the bits, it becomes possible to encode larger and larger amounts of data. And any group of bits forms a number pretty much by definition.

jazzyjackson 3y ago

what's your timeline on libraries? i guess you're counting ancient, private collections. public libraries happened well after copyright was established and just had to go to court and make their case. first sale doctrine indeed saved the day. the more interesting case for me is that xerox was allowed to exist, and libraries fought successfully to allow their patrons to use xerox machines within the library (1973 Williams & Wilkins Co. v United States). this freedom may not have been established had it been any other circumstance than a medical journal suing the medical doctors xerox'ing the papers for their own research. the public attitude was "bro, lives are on the line here, let the doctors make copies" and we got the four factors of fair use outlined in the 1976 Copyright Act

brnt 3y ago
If you do not consider the ancient, famous libraries to be public, Wikipedia puts ~1600 as a first date of modern public libraries. While copyright has a first occurance date in the 1700s, in some locales much later. Either way it seems public libraries were around at least a century before copyright, but by other measure, in some places, much longer.
ghaff 3y ago
Copyright in the UK predates the existence of the United States by quite a bit.
- fao_ 3y ago
  And has no concept of fair use :P
  - amszmidt 3y ago
    There is the concept of "Fair Dealing" (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright#fair-dealing https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright#fair-dea...) which is similar to "fair use".
    - fao_ 3y ago
      As someone living in the UK, that's not comparable whatsoever.

samatman 3y ago

> if libraries didn't predate copyright, they never would have existed because copyright owners would have argued it's a flagrant violation of copyright. Before the advent of digital media, the meaning of copyright could be cleanly derived from the words it is compounded from. Any publisher arguing that to lend a purchased item to another person infringes on their exclusive right to produce copies, would have been laughed right out of the courtroom.

matheusmoreira 3y ago

[flagged]

joshspankit 3y ago
You lost me at numbers, but had me at Copyright monopolists.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  Copyright is ownership of information, data. All information is bits. All bits are numbers in base 2. Therefore copyright is ownership of numbers. You can even figure out how big the number is. digits = ceil(bits * log10(2)) For example, a 20 kiB picture is just a number with 49,321 decimal digits. All numbers already exist. All intellectual work is just number discovery. Drawing? Music production? Editing source code? Fancy ways to enter numbers into computers. This comment is a number.
  - joshspankit 3y ago
    Ok, I’m following you now. But there are two limits you’ve put on yourself: 1. This is limited to digital representations of information (which let’s be up front about: is the overwhelming majority of information in 2024, but the point is it’s not all) 2. What is actually stored is not a number. Below the KB are bytes and below the bytes are bits, but below the bits are (typically) on/off states. 1 and 0 are just convenient ways to reason about bits. They are not the underlying truth.
    - matheusmoreira 3y ago
      > This is limited to digital representations of information All information is bits and all bits are numbers. How the numbers are represented is just an implementation detail. One could print a book containing all 50 thousand digits of the numeric representation of the 20 KiB picture I mentioned. That number is the picture! It's just represented in a very inconvenient form. It may be hard to believe but there exists software which does exactly this. Paperkey, for example, is designed to create printouts of OpenPGP secret keys so that they can be kept offline. It quite literally dumps out the bytes as rows of numbers and you print them out. Imagine reading hexadecimal characters from a paper and entering all 4096 bits into the computer one by one by hand via text editor. I've actually done it. Yes, it's as nightmarish as it sounds like. Yet it works. The point of this argument is to show how utterly absurd copyright is. It logically reduces to numeric ownership and illegal numbers. It's quite literally illegal for you to write down a certain number on a paper and give the paper to someone else. I think that's just delusional. It just can't be refuted. If the copyright monopolists try to argue that the number isn't the picture, they only hurt their own interests in the process. Such an argument automatically creates a channel where infringement of their copyrights may occur. It's illegal to copy the image directly but it's okay if I transform it into a number first and then copy it? That makes no sense whatsoever. They would never make such a self-defeating argument. Therefore they do believe that the image equals the number and that they have monopoly rights to the number. > They are not the underlying truth. I believe they are. All of information theory is bits. On/off states is just a digital mechanism humans created to store the information. If you group the bits, it becomes possible to encode larger and larger amounts of data. And any group of bits forms a number pretty much by definition.