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There is no greater folly of contemporary human society than the purposeful restriction of such vast and easily shareable repositories of knowledge. Perhaps the

There is no greater folly of contemporary human society than the purposeful restriction of such vast and easily shareable repositories of knowledge. Perhaps these schemes made sense in the past but with the advent of the internet and independent groups willing to fund all hosting fees, we should move to models of publishing that do not require this restriction of information. Library genesis exists but necessarily must hide and create some friction in the discovery process. A legally unencumbered free library of all books for all people would be the greatest achievement in all of human history. We prevent this achievement due to our attachment to a specific economic system that serves as the current means of financially supporting authors. We must build alternatives to for-profit publishing, and the only resilient and widely acceptable system I can imagine is one where every community owns and controls the means of production upon which they depend for their survival. In such an economic system, the need for automation would be obvious and once implemented, all people would receive the benefits of automation. This would include such a wide allowance for leisure and free time that authors would no longer need to restrict access to their books to extract profits from their value their shared knowledge creates. All people would be free to do what they will. It would take great effort to build such a system, but open source and digital repositories of machine designs would ensure that efforts are not duplicated. The effort would still be substantial, but what hangs in the balance is the opportunity to assure the freedom of all people and the creation of the most significant repository of knowledge humanity has ever conceived of. If we succeed it will be our greatest achievement as a species.

MattGaiser 2y ago
[flagged]
- r0s 2y ago
  Many many authors publish work freely, now more than ever. Without monetary reward. Here's a tiny tip of the massive iceberg https://independentbookreview.com/2020/07/30/10-free-literary-magazines/ https://independentbookreview.com/2020/07/30/10-free-literar...
  - bilbo0s 2y ago
    I think the point the commenter was making is, why not just archive those books in that case? Just ignore the books with authors that have released the works for monetary gain. I don't know whether or not such an archive is at all attractive to anyone? But maybe over time it might start to move the needle?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - MattGaiser 2y ago
    Evidently not enough for libraries to abandon books from publishers. If they had the selection and quality people were seeking, people wouldn’t be arguing to kill copyright but rather just pointing people to free equivalents. The Internet Archive would just distribute those alternatives. When a free equivalent does exist, that is what happens. Nobody is demanding legislation to force Oracle to lower database licence prices. We just use Postgres.
  - slothtrop 2y ago
    Many is not a number.
    - r0s 2y ago
      Is any word a number?
      - slothtrop 2y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeral_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeral_(linguistics) I'm not sure what your point was, but mine is that it doesn't necessarily represent a significant amount.
        r0s 2y ago
        Oh, I thought you were making a non-sequitur semantic context shift, my mistake.
- TaylorAlexander 2y ago
  “Every community owns and controls the means of production upon which they depend for their survival.” Such a system does not exist. Your obvious point, that individual authors can publish their work freely, does little to change the system that requires government enforced punishment for people who would copy and share information available to them. But it would be unethical to pull the rug out from under authors who depend on that system today, so as I see it the best course of action is to make that system unnecessary through community support of all people, and the only ethical way I see to create that is by community ownership of the means of production. > If you don’t reward great effort, virtually nobody provides it. I strongly believe this is false and nonsense. This is propaganda from people who benefit from the system that rewards owners of capital who fear community ownership of the means of production.
  - Ray20 2y ago
    >This is propaganda from people who benefit from the system that rewards owners of capital who fear community ownership of the means of production. The Capitalist System does not imply restrictions on community ownership of the means of production. And I believe you are here not trying to appeal to a system that is completely ok with community ownership, you are trying to appeal to a system that restricts or completely bans private property on the means of production. The problems with such systems are that they always end up with Famine and Gulags - because community ownership work and managed way worse, but the government gets all the power ower the whole economy and use it to remain in the power no matter the results
- conception 2y ago
  Amazing how the open source community was a total failure as predicted!
- nequo 2y ago
  > This is book communism and fails for the same reasons as regular communism. It is in nobody’s interest to do any hard work. If you don’t reward great effort, virtually nobody provides it. Counterpoint that is decidedly not motivated by communism: https://dev.realworldocaml.org/ https://dev.realworldocaml.org/ There are many books like it, comprehensive, written with great effort, and free for anyone to read.
  - bradly 2y ago
    That isn't a counterpoint, it is exactly what OP is saying–there is already a way to give away a book for free if they author/copyright holder wants to without the IA deciding what should be free.
    - nequo 2y ago
      Parent is also saying that virtually nobody does it. This is not true. What I linked is one example, given away for free by an engineer at a prop trading firm and a CS professor. Similar to the linked example, we have excellent books on many technical subjects, available for free. And not because the authors are communists but because they want to share the knowledge or because it helps their broader business.
      - bradly 2y ago
        > Parent is also saying that virtually nobody does it. This is not true. Comparing number of books released for sale vs for free, is isn't unreasonable to use the phrase "virtually nobody". I would guess less than 1% of books are released free. > What I linked is one example, given away for free by an engineer at a prop trading firm and a CS professor. Similar to the linked example, we have excellent books on many technical subjects, available for free. That's right. There are lots of free books and still almost all books are not free. That's okay, though. People can write a book and choose what to do with it. What IA tried to do removed that option.
    - TaylorAlexander 2y ago
      I think it’s pretty clear I am not saying “there outta be a way to give books away” which would be a very stupid thing for me to say. I’m saying we should legalize the giving away of all books, but must rearrange society to ensure authors and all people still have the support the previously got from the existing system. Engaging only with the stupid point I didn’t make is a waste of time honestly and is seriously missing the point.
- Spivak 2y ago
  Of all the things to juxtapose as a contrast to communism and the failures of an overbearing government mucking too much in natural market forces you pick copyright?!
  - labster 2y ago
    Yeah, copyright is a government enforced monopoly. Basically the definition of socialist government intervention in the free market. IA can produce copies for much cheaper, but the government doesn’t allow them to compete, because they want publishers to operate a welfare program for writers.
- Hikikomori 2y ago
  Open source?
- rty32 2y ago
  Can't agree. Even as recent as about one decade ago, the best way to learn a programming language is often buying a book or checking out a book from the library, because that's the only high-quality source on the topic. Since then we have had people creating complete tutorials like the Rust book and distribute it on the Internet, for free. In the US, some professors profit from selling textbooks that get updated every few years, forcing students around the around to pay hundreds of dollars to get the latest edition. (That's still the norm.) Yet we are seeing less of that in the computer science field, especially with books like Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces ( https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ ) -- the professors are literally practicing communism and giving away the book for free.
  - gwright 2y ago
    > the professors are literally practicing communism and giving away the book for free. Ah, no. That isn't communism.
  - lupire 2y ago
    Arguably, professors are paid a salary to write those books.
    - rty32 2y ago
      The point is that they could have gone the proprietary path and earn $$$ from textbook money. Instead they are getting nothing from the material.
  - bandrami 2y ago
    > the professors are literally practicing communism and giving away the book for free No, that's more like potlatch. "Book communism" would be if authors owned the printing presses. (Or maybe if printing press technicians owned the printing presses.)
    - kjkjadksj 2y ago
      Well, if its an ebook and you own the server, you own the printing press and the bookshop.
- wesselbindt 2y ago
  I don't think you know what communism is.
  - lanfeust6 2y ago
    It's a tiresome rhetorical device these days to pretend Communism only has one narrow meaning.
    - arcimpulse 2y ago
      It's equally tiresome to pretend everything one doesn't like is communism, when communism has been operationally dead for decades.
    - wesselbindt 2y ago
      > It's a tiresome rhetorical device when people call me out on not knowing something
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  No such system exists. You only talked about removing money from an individual or from one activity without addressing the entire rest of the system that still decides everything with money. Why would you propose a stupid scenario that the commenter never described? They never said nor even implied communism either. If they had an idea what the details would be, and those details mapped to something we already have a word for, they'd has used it.
- 627467 2y ago
  Ahhh we forgot about the music dark ages when piracy meant artists couldn't make a living from their art and music died completely
  - slothtrop 2y ago
    Most musicians don't make a living from their art, they work day jobs. That doesn't mean piracy is the only factor or a strong one, but it's part of the equation.
    - willcipriano 2y ago
      Most musicians make music that nobody wants to hear.
      - slothtrop 2y ago
        Oh they're just not trying to "sell out" enough, why didn't they think of that! Be serious.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      Ironically, piracy can make a musician popular, and when they're popular they can make bank doing live performances.
- atomicnumber3 2y ago
  "Such a system exists. You can publish a book and give it away freely. But few do. This is book communism and fails for the same reasons as regular communism. It is in nobody’s interest to do any hard work. If you don’t reward great effort, virtually nobody provides it." Why does open source / free software exist then? "Nobody puts in hard word if it's not rewarded" hasnt the cURL guy been maintaining cURL/libcurl for decades and gets paid nothing?
  - MattGaiser 2y ago
    Open source covers a very tiny set of use cases for software. How many paid products have an open source competitor at all? How many have a credible competitor (GIMP isn’t a credible alternative to PhotoShop for the people who pay for it for example). It is far from rendering paid software obsolete. And not nobody. Virtually nobody. Yes open source exists. Out of the hundreds of devs I have worked with, I know one who meaningfully participates. Say 1 in 100 devs does open source. The other 99 not writing code would lead to a massive fall off in software written.
    - timschmidt 2y ago
      > GIMP isn’t a credible alternative to PhotoShop for the people who pay for it for example Weird take. GIMP's been good enough for professional work for more than a decade, and lots of professionals use it. I paid for Paint Shop Pro ages ago, because it was better than Photoshop for my use cases. GIMP progressed and became better than PSP for the same. I've used it ever since. It's even been used for major motion pictures. In the same way that software is eating the world, Free and Open Source software is eating software. Every year it does more and better. If GIMP doesn't work for your use case today, it likely will tomorrow, or the day after. Some open source tools, like Blender, like Linux, exist at the top of their respective foodchains. Proprietary tools are working to try to compete with them.
      - ethagnawl 2y ago
        > Some open source tools, like Blender, like Linux, exist at the top of their respective foodchains. Proprietary tools are working to try to compete with them. OBS is on this list, too.
- gcr 2y ago
  "One solution to this complicated problem is to require simultaneous, complete cooperation from everyone in a way that costs everybody money! This wild solution I came up with isn't workable, therefore there is no possible solution to this problem!"
- Kim_Bruning 2y ago
  You could also loan the book to people. At which point -of course- what you're doing is called a library. Libraries have historically not been considered communistic per se (rightly or wrongly). But they have not commonly been considered a failure.
- rwasco 2y ago
  We are communicating on a tech stack that TBL gave away freely. Copyright is communism, it is the exact opposite of property rights. Don't take my word for it: do the math yourself. Or just repeat false slogans.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > You can publish a book and give it away freely. > But few do. Are you kidding? It's true that few people do this in the same sense that it's true that few people publish books at all, whether they give them away freely or not. But far more people publish books and give them away freely than publish books and offer them for money. Remember Livejournal?
  - account42 2y ago
    See also: the entirety of human history before copyright.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  The irony is very, very few book authors make much of any money off of their books. It's much like the athlete and musician business.
gerdesj 2y ago
Who wrote that (sorry - EDIT) errr am I holding it upright .... bollocks? 8) "Library genesis exists but necessarily must hide and create some friction in the discovery process." Really! Personally speaking, I'm fucking incensed that ... <fill in usual argument here>
deleted 2y ago
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adolph 2y ago
> purposeful restriction of such vast and easily shareable repositories of knowledge You don’t get more golden eggs by killing the goose who lays them. Also the IA book UI was terrible.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
  Is the goose here the publisher? Or the author? If it’s the latter, then would killing the publisher necessarily dictate that the author also must die?
  - TaylorAlexander 2y ago
    Yeah I genuinely cannot understand that comment.
  - adolph 2y ago
    The goose is the entire book publishing system. Do editors, typesetters, cover artists, indexers, fact checkers, proofreaders, etc not add value to be recompensed? Is copyright (the exclusive right to make copies) not the sole fulcrum upon which rests the author and many others integral to books as we know them? Unlike music, it’s uncommon for authors to go on tour selling tickets and merch.
ryandrake 2y ago
I believe in hundreds, maybe thousands of years, after humanity has finally evolved past our current monkey mentality, future historians will look back at this time period in awe: "They had the technology to make the sum of all human knowledge available to everyone... And they blew it! Further, they had the means to feed everyone, clothe everyone, house everyone, but they just walked away in the other direction, purely to maintain existing economic power structures." The future historians are going to wonder how strong our ideology was that we sacrificed all of what we could have at the altar of our scarcity-based religion. If Star Trek Replicators were invented today, we're so stupid we'd outlaw them.
- coliveira 2y ago
  Europeans and Americans are now taxing green technology, which they said in the past they want, because it is built in another country...
  - spywaregorilla 2y ago
    Because they don't want to be dependent on another country for energy infrastructure.
    - xattt 2y ago
      Especially when another country is undercutting domestic production of others in order to impose an Orwellian ideology.
      - TaylorAlexander 2y ago
        I think the truth is we just failed to invest in the manufacturing tech and now they’re beating us in the market, so we’re taxing them to make it hard for them to compete. I’d way rather we just invest and outcompete them. I don’t think they’re intentionally undercutting us they just have lower costs from decades of investment that we haven’t been doing ourselves.
spankalee 2y ago
Why should an author be forced to give away their work for free? They can already choose to give it away for free if they wish. We already have the Creative Commons licenses, and there are many open textbook projects.
- PostOnce 2y ago
  Dead authors can't choose to give away their works, they're dead. Yet someone still owns the rights 60 years later.
  - spankalee 2y ago
    That says nothing about the living authors.
  - throwAGIway 2y ago
    If an author sells the rights and does, should the buyer automatically lose what they bought? Sounds like that would severely decrease what authors can earn, especially older ones.
    - kibwen 2y ago
      There's no reason that "selling copyrights" needs to a be a thing. If the author themself wants to profit from their work, sure, but once they die, that's it, and there's no excuse for it to not be in the public domain at that point.
      - encomiast 2y ago
        So the wife that supported the author can't profit off their assets? The author can't pass on this to children? Should we do the same thing for other property like land and money?
        anigbrowl 2y ago
        This kind of hectoring discourse is aggressive and rude. You can do better. Authors that get paid can certainly leave the assets they received to their families. They could also transfer ownership of unpublished intangible assets. More than that sucks the general public into a quasi-contractual relationship with a posthumous person; I disclaim fiscal obligations of strangers toward ghosts.
FpUser 2y ago
Most financially successful humans only care how to increase their already huge amount of money. they do not give a flying fuck about advancing humanity as a whole.
- encomiast 2y ago
  [citation needed]
  - FpUser 2y ago
    Look around and see what big corporations are doing. You woll be flooded.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Do we really need a citation on how corporations are run, and what they do to constrain innovation?
    - encomiast 2y ago
      I'm sorry, I didn't read "most financially successful humans" to mean corporations.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  The neato thing about free markets is in order to make more money you have to please other people so those people will freely give you their money.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    That works until you capture the market. That's the entire phenomenon aroind the poorly named "enshittification". Companies have in fact figured you can be too big to fail and wait until they get their to no longer "please other people" and squeeze them. Or at least, get away with otherwise company killing moves for years longer than they should.
deleted 2y ago
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Aurornis 2y ago
> we should move to models of publishing that do not require this restriction of information. It’s interesting how this comment veers into a completely hypothetical overhaul of society in which money doesn’t matter, for reasons which of course are hand-waved away. On one hand: Sure! Sounds great! If someone can reinvent all of society in a way that everyone is free to do whatever they want and not worry about getting paid, then by all means let’s go for it. On the other hand: These proposals are so fanciful and far-fetched (at least in our lifetimes) that these comments read more like a tacit admission that the current system is indeed necessary.
- vineyardmike 2y ago
  Spotify has a free tier where you can listen to any song for free. YouTube lets you watch almost anything for free. Both of these also pay the creators. There are many more services peddling free content and even covering hosting costs. Libraries are free. We have plenty of completely non-hypothetical non-society-overhauling ways to access information for free. Lots of information is free, lots of it is accessible. > the current system is indeed necessary. Not all of the current system is equally necessary. Maybe not necessary at all, it just so happens to be the system we have now. There have been plenty of radically different models of society over the years. Yea, they're gone now, but this current one isn't particularly old either. Just to be more concrete - if you stop using and protecting your trademark, you can lose it. If you just hoard and don't use a copyright, you won't lose it. We already have systems in place that can provide similar info exchange for free.
  - ysavir 2y ago
    You're comparing to the free tiers of Spotify and Youtube, which in effect is saying that we should put ads into our books.
    - chii 2y ago
      Libraries tend not to put ads into books to fund them. The physical restrictions in a library - ala, only 1 person could read it at a time - is what prevents publishers from trying to charge more or prevent it. The basic issue is that if a library is filled with electronic books, the publishers will stand to lose a lot of profit. Now I'm not arguing that they deserve this profit, but there's no good model so far that both preserves the profit motive, but also make available the copyrighted material digitally and unrestrictedly. Perhaps there could be a form of library "fee" that is funded by tax payers, in a similar way to how public radio gets funded. The state pays some amount to each published author who make their book available in the library, from a pot of money collected from taxation.
dylan604 2y ago
> There is no greater folly of contemporary human society than the purposeful restriction of such vast and easily shareable repositories of knowledge. This is exactly how people stayed in power. Knowledge is power, so keep the masses uneducated so they are subservient. I once asked an Englishman why if the British Empire was so great did all of its colonies revolt against it. His response was not what I expected when he said they taught them how to read. So watching how the school systems keep getting dumber really does get those conspiracy theory synapses firing. Make great again by taking power away from people really goes towards that.
- deleted 2y ago
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- WalterBright 2y ago
  > Knowledge is power Actually, knowledge is freedom. > so keep the masses uneducated so they are subservient Terror makes them subservient. See the Soviet Union's gulags, full of educated people.
vt85 2y ago
[dead]
afh1 2y ago
Feel free to start, just don't force anyone into it, and take a honest look at past examples and their outcomes.
throw10920 2y ago
> There is no greater folly of contemporary human society than the purposeful restriction of such vast and easily shareable repositories of knowledge This is objectively false. There zero actual harm being done here. There is very little, if any, evidence that the vast majority of the 500k removed books contain information that actually provides value to people, as opposed to being fiction and political advocacy non-fiction (for instance, the vast majority of the list of 1300 "banned and challenged books" (that contains many duplicates and is shorter than IA claims)[1] that the IA is clutching their pearls over are almost exclusively non-informational) that result in zero harm when taken away from people. You also pointedly ignored the fact that the greatest repository of knowledge in human history, by orders of magnitude, is the Internet - even if you restrict yourself to the parts that people have voluntarily made free, you still have the ability to learn everything you need to live a comfortable life, and learn more than you have time for in a thousand lifetimes. Demanding that the entertainment works that authors wrote with the express intention of making money (and who did not consent to their work being put on IA) be made freely available, regardless of the massive amount of information already voluntarily made free on the Internet that serves almost every need you have (learning to sew, fixing a leak, doing your taxes, getting the equivalent of a PhD in math), is the absolute peak of entitlement. The only vaguely reasonable vector adjacent to your argument is that academic publishers make their papers freely available, because that's actual human knowledge (and because the funding for the research doesn't come from the publishers). > We prevent this achievement due to our attachment to a specific economic system that serves as the current means of financially supporting authors. Now you're just advocating communism, which is one of the actual greatest human follies of all time, and has resulted in tens of millions of deaths and the suffering of hundreds of millions more. This comment is utterly inappropriate for HN. It is naked political advocacy that is emotionally manipulative, factually incorrect, and contains zero content that aligns with HN's goals of "stimulating intellectual curiosity". [1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/e/2PACX-1vR_xj-6SeGMCA7Mg2s-N4xbGKIQrG3XI9l0NuZz-AxQ-9TyjkKz28JP6UpsxKX_YSOreDtOG7mWMUD2/pubhtml?gid=0&single=true&pli=1 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/e/2PACX-1vR_xj-6S...
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  There was a Wiley translation of an 80s Russian textbook I needed for my research that was nowhere on libgen and which I could only get via ILL. The library yelled at me for making physical copies but IA had it.
Ekaros 2y ago
Maybe we should do software first. I see no reason why I should not get copies of all binaries and all source code for any and every service I use upon request. And even copies of databases backing them when requested. Then I could simply replicated it in my own environment or roll up competing service. And as for data, what is privacy anyway. If you want the data be private don't generate it... /s
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Sadly I feel like Poes law hits here. I do see a few borderline argue such a case. They must have no products of their own nor care how the people behind the knowledge they consume make a living.
WalterBright 2y ago
> I can imagine is one where every community owns and controls the means of production upon which they depend for their survival. In such an economic system, the need for automation would be obvious and once implemented, all people would receive the benefits of automation. This would include such a wide allowance for leisure and free time that authors would no longer need to restrict access to their books to extract profits from their value their shared knowledge creates. All people would be free to do what they will. This has been imagined many times. It's called Marxism. It's been tried, too, innumerable times. But the anticipated utopia never happened, and the people were far worse off than for-profit free markets. However, the idea of "intellectual property" is a pure invention. There's zero evidence that IP laws actually promote the creation and distribution of creative works. But there is evidence that the free flow of ideas enhances prosperity. I assert this as a person who made his living creating IP.
monero-xmr 2y ago
It might take decades and billions of dollars to prove a molecule can cure disease XYZ. Once you know the molecule, copying it is cheap. Only intellectual property rights can provide the incentive to find said molecule, safe in the knowledge that once it is found, all of the costs can be recouped plus profit. That is the clear-cut case for intellectual property, but it’s the same principle for books. I’m not going to write a book that takes tons of effort and exposes my hard-won knowledge if I can’t profit from it, despite how easy it is to copy text. Food for thought
- zjuventus14 2y ago
  It’s true that copyright and patents make pursuing certain risky (from a monetary perspective) innovations that are valuable to society worthwhile. But they’re only one way of solving that problem. We choose to apply copyright almost universally, even to innovations and ideas that don’t suffer from high capital risk, and would be worthwhile to pursue without copyright or with shorter copyright. Why not instead subsidize R&D for successful drugs (a lot of drug research in the U.S. is already publicly funded). It seems to me that it’s an exceptional case that there’s some idea that’s would benefit society but is only economically viable under the current copyright regime. But our laws apply protections that are only needed in this rare instance to all ideas. I highly recommend “Against Intellectual Monopoly” by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine. It changed how I view IP a great deal, and the final chapters are dedicated to how we could practically transition away from our current system.
  - monero-xmr 2y ago
    The government is political. When you make things political, it has requirements separated from the profit motive. I’m not an anarchist. I think the government has its place. But it’s undeniable that a lot of fundamental research is held hostage by politics: Certain ideas are in vogue and get funded, while the new ideas and those pursuing them must wait, or perhaps never get funded for whatever political reason. The profit motive enables risk takers to get funded with high risk, high reward ideas. If there was no way to capture that profit, we would be subject to political whims for the most important innovations for society.
vwkd 2y ago
> In such an economic system, the need for automation would be obvious and once implemented, all people would receive the benefits of automation. This would include such a wide allowance for leisure and free time that authors would no longer need to restrict access to their books to extract profits from their value their shared knowledge creates. All people would be free to do what they will. Oh, hello there, dear communism. Same dream, same problems. No, this time around you don’t work either.
- joquarky 2y ago
  This subjective labelling contributed nothing to the conversation. Back up your statement.
throwthrowuknow 2y ago
Your obvious conclusion that automation is the answer would be anathema to others who wish to maximize the number of people under their control and the amount of “work” they are doing. It’s a relatable mistake, many people including myself assume everyone thinks like they do before they are sorely disillusioned by rough contact with reality. Don’t make the mistake of thinking your side is in the majority either and that removing opposition or changing minds would be an achievable task. If you want to build something you’ll need to strike out on your own and take only those who follow you into the wilderness.
deleted 2y ago
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MattGaiser 2y ago

[flagged]

r0s 2y ago
Many many authors publish work freely, now more than ever. Without monetary reward. Here's a tiny tip of the massive iceberg https://independentbookreview.com/2020/07/30/10-free-literary-magazines/ https://independentbookreview.com/2020/07/30/10-free-literar...
- bilbo0s 2y ago
  I think the point the commenter was making is, why not just archive those books in that case? Just ignore the books with authors that have released the works for monetary gain. I don't know whether or not such an archive is at all attractive to anyone? But maybe over time it might start to move the needle?
- deleted 2y ago
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- MattGaiser 2y ago
  Evidently not enough for libraries to abandon books from publishers. If they had the selection and quality people were seeking, people wouldn’t be arguing to kill copyright but rather just pointing people to free equivalents. The Internet Archive would just distribute those alternatives. When a free equivalent does exist, that is what happens. Nobody is demanding legislation to force Oracle to lower database licence prices. We just use Postgres.
- slothtrop 2y ago
  Many is not a number.
  - r0s 2y ago
    Is any word a number?
    - slothtrop 2y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeral_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeral_(linguistics) I'm not sure what your point was, but mine is that it doesn't necessarily represent a significant amount.
      - r0s 2y ago
        Oh, I thought you were making a non-sequitur semantic context shift, my mistake.
TaylorAlexander 2y ago
“Every community owns and controls the means of production upon which they depend for their survival.” Such a system does not exist. Your obvious point, that individual authors can publish their work freely, does little to change the system that requires government enforced punishment for people who would copy and share information available to them. But it would be unethical to pull the rug out from under authors who depend on that system today, so as I see it the best course of action is to make that system unnecessary through community support of all people, and the only ethical way I see to create that is by community ownership of the means of production. > If you don’t reward great effort, virtually nobody provides it. I strongly believe this is false and nonsense. This is propaganda from people who benefit from the system that rewards owners of capital who fear community ownership of the means of production.
- Ray20 2y ago
  >This is propaganda from people who benefit from the system that rewards owners of capital who fear community ownership of the means of production. The Capitalist System does not imply restrictions on community ownership of the means of production. And I believe you are here not trying to appeal to a system that is completely ok with community ownership, you are trying to appeal to a system that restricts or completely bans private property on the means of production. The problems with such systems are that they always end up with Famine and Gulags - because community ownership work and managed way worse, but the government gets all the power ower the whole economy and use it to remain in the power no matter the results
conception 2y ago
Amazing how the open source community was a total failure as predicted!
nequo 2y ago
> This is book communism and fails for the same reasons as regular communism. It is in nobody’s interest to do any hard work. If you don’t reward great effort, virtually nobody provides it. Counterpoint that is decidedly not motivated by communism: https://dev.realworldocaml.org/ https://dev.realworldocaml.org/ There are many books like it, comprehensive, written with great effort, and free for anyone to read.
- bradly 2y ago
  That isn't a counterpoint, it is exactly what OP is saying–there is already a way to give away a book for free if they author/copyright holder wants to without the IA deciding what should be free.
  - nequo 2y ago
    Parent is also saying that virtually nobody does it. This is not true. What I linked is one example, given away for free by an engineer at a prop trading firm and a CS professor. Similar to the linked example, we have excellent books on many technical subjects, available for free. And not because the authors are communists but because they want to share the knowledge or because it helps their broader business.
    - bradly 2y ago
      > Parent is also saying that virtually nobody does it. This is not true. Comparing number of books released for sale vs for free, is isn't unreasonable to use the phrase "virtually nobody". I would guess less than 1% of books are released free. > What I linked is one example, given away for free by an engineer at a prop trading firm and a CS professor. Similar to the linked example, we have excellent books on many technical subjects, available for free. That's right. There are lots of free books and still almost all books are not free. That's okay, though. People can write a book and choose what to do with it. What IA tried to do removed that option.
  - TaylorAlexander 2y ago
    I think it’s pretty clear I am not saying “there outta be a way to give books away” which would be a very stupid thing for me to say. I’m saying we should legalize the giving away of all books, but must rearrange society to ensure authors and all people still have the support the previously got from the existing system. Engaging only with the stupid point I didn’t make is a waste of time honestly and is seriously missing the point.
Spivak 2y ago
Of all the things to juxtapose as a contrast to communism and the failures of an overbearing government mucking too much in natural market forces you pick copyright?!
- labster 2y ago
  Yeah, copyright is a government enforced monopoly. Basically the definition of socialist government intervention in the free market. IA can produce copies for much cheaper, but the government doesn’t allow them to compete, because they want publishers to operate a welfare program for writers.
Hikikomori 2y ago
Open source?
rty32 2y ago
Can't agree. Even as recent as about one decade ago, the best way to learn a programming language is often buying a book or checking out a book from the library, because that's the only high-quality source on the topic. Since then we have had people creating complete tutorials like the Rust book and distribute it on the Internet, for free. In the US, some professors profit from selling textbooks that get updated every few years, forcing students around the around to pay hundreds of dollars to get the latest edition. (That's still the norm.) Yet we are seeing less of that in the computer science field, especially with books like Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces ( https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ ) -- the professors are literally practicing communism and giving away the book for free.
- gwright 2y ago
  > the professors are literally practicing communism and giving away the book for free. Ah, no. That isn't communism.
- lupire 2y ago
  Arguably, professors are paid a salary to write those books.
  - rty32 2y ago
    The point is that they could have gone the proprietary path and earn $$$ from textbook money. Instead they are getting nothing from the material.
- bandrami 2y ago
  > the professors are literally practicing communism and giving away the book for free No, that's more like potlatch. "Book communism" would be if authors owned the printing presses. (Or maybe if printing press technicians owned the printing presses.)
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    Well, if its an ebook and you own the server, you own the printing press and the bookshop.
wesselbindt 2y ago
I don't think you know what communism is.
- lanfeust6 2y ago
  It's a tiresome rhetorical device these days to pretend Communism only has one narrow meaning.
  - arcimpulse 2y ago
    It's equally tiresome to pretend everything one doesn't like is communism, when communism has been operationally dead for decades.
  - wesselbindt 2y ago
    > It's a tiresome rhetorical device when people call me out on not knowing something
Brian_K_White 2y ago
No such system exists. You only talked about removing money from an individual or from one activity without addressing the entire rest of the system that still decides everything with money. Why would you propose a stupid scenario that the commenter never described? They never said nor even implied communism either. If they had an idea what the details would be, and those details mapped to something we already have a word for, they'd has used it.
627467 2y ago
Ahhh we forgot about the music dark ages when piracy meant artists couldn't make a living from their art and music died completely
- slothtrop 2y ago
  Most musicians don't make a living from their art, they work day jobs. That doesn't mean piracy is the only factor or a strong one, but it's part of the equation.
  - willcipriano 2y ago
    Most musicians make music that nobody wants to hear.
    - slothtrop 2y ago
      Oh they're just not trying to "sell out" enough, why didn't they think of that! Be serious.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    Ironically, piracy can make a musician popular, and when they're popular they can make bank doing live performances.
atomicnumber3 2y ago
"Such a system exists. You can publish a book and give it away freely. But few do. This is book communism and fails for the same reasons as regular communism. It is in nobody’s interest to do any hard work. If you don’t reward great effort, virtually nobody provides it." Why does open source / free software exist then? "Nobody puts in hard word if it's not rewarded" hasnt the cURL guy been maintaining cURL/libcurl for decades and gets paid nothing?
- MattGaiser 2y ago
  Open source covers a very tiny set of use cases for software. How many paid products have an open source competitor at all? How many have a credible competitor (GIMP isn’t a credible alternative to PhotoShop for the people who pay for it for example). It is far from rendering paid software obsolete. And not nobody. Virtually nobody. Yes open source exists. Out of the hundreds of devs I have worked with, I know one who meaningfully participates. Say 1 in 100 devs does open source. The other 99 not writing code would lead to a massive fall off in software written.
  - timschmidt 2y ago
    > GIMP isn’t a credible alternative to PhotoShop for the people who pay for it for example Weird take. GIMP's been good enough for professional work for more than a decade, and lots of professionals use it. I paid for Paint Shop Pro ages ago, because it was better than Photoshop for my use cases. GIMP progressed and became better than PSP for the same. I've used it ever since. It's even been used for major motion pictures. In the same way that software is eating the world, Free and Open Source software is eating software. Every year it does more and better. If GIMP doesn't work for your use case today, it likely will tomorrow, or the day after. Some open source tools, like Blender, like Linux, exist at the top of their respective foodchains. Proprietary tools are working to try to compete with them.
    - ethagnawl 2y ago
      > Some open source tools, like Blender, like Linux, exist at the top of their respective foodchains. Proprietary tools are working to try to compete with them. OBS is on this list, too.
gcr 2y ago
"One solution to this complicated problem is to require simultaneous, complete cooperation from everyone in a way that costs everybody money! This wild solution I came up with isn't workable, therefore there is no possible solution to this problem!"
Kim_Bruning 2y ago
You could also loan the book to people. At which point -of course- what you're doing is called a library. Libraries have historically not been considered communistic per se (rightly or wrongly). But they have not commonly been considered a failure.
rwasco 2y ago
We are communicating on a tech stack that TBL gave away freely. Copyright is communism, it is the exact opposite of property rights. Don't take my word for it: do the math yourself. Or just repeat false slogans.
thaumasiotes 2y ago
> You can publish a book and give it away freely. > But few do. Are you kidding? It's true that few people do this in the same sense that it's true that few people publish books at all, whether they give them away freely or not. But far more people publish books and give them away freely than publish books and offer them for money. Remember Livejournal?
- account42 2y ago
  See also: the entirety of human history before copyright.
WalterBright 2y ago
The irony is very, very few book authors make much of any money off of their books. It's much like the athlete and musician business.

gerdesj 2y ago

Who wrote that (sorry - EDIT) errr am I holding it upright .... bollocks? 8) "Library genesis exists but necessarily must hide and create some friction in the discovery process." Really! Personally speaking, I'm fucking incensed that ... <fill in usual argument here>

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adolph 2y ago

> purposeful restriction of such vast and easily shareable repositories of knowledge You don’t get more golden eggs by killing the goose who lays them. Also the IA book UI was terrible.

SOLAR_FIELDS 2y ago
Is the goose here the publisher? Or the author? If it’s the latter, then would killing the publisher necessarily dictate that the author also must die?
- TaylorAlexander 2y ago
  Yeah I genuinely cannot understand that comment.
- adolph 2y ago
  The goose is the entire book publishing system. Do editors, typesetters, cover artists, indexers, fact checkers, proofreaders, etc not add value to be recompensed? Is copyright (the exclusive right to make copies) not the sole fulcrum upon which rests the author and many others integral to books as we know them? Unlike music, it’s uncommon for authors to go on tour selling tickets and merch.

ryandrake 2y ago

I believe in hundreds, maybe thousands of years, after humanity has finally evolved past our current monkey mentality, future historians will look back at this time period in awe: "They had the technology to make the sum of all human knowledge available to everyone... And they blew it! Further, they had the means to feed everyone, clothe everyone, house everyone, but they just walked away in the other direction, purely to maintain existing economic power structures." The future historians are going to wonder how strong our ideology was that we sacrificed all of what we could have at the altar of our scarcity-based religion. If Star Trek Replicators were invented today, we're so stupid we'd outlaw them.

coliveira 2y ago
Europeans and Americans are now taxing green technology, which they said in the past they want, because it is built in another country...
- spywaregorilla 2y ago
  Because they don't want to be dependent on another country for energy infrastructure.
  - xattt 2y ago
    Especially when another country is undercutting domestic production of others in order to impose an Orwellian ideology.
    - TaylorAlexander 2y ago
      I think the truth is we just failed to invest in the manufacturing tech and now they’re beating us in the market, so we’re taxing them to make it hard for them to compete. I’d way rather we just invest and outcompete them. I don’t think they’re intentionally undercutting us they just have lower costs from decades of investment that we haven’t been doing ourselves.

spankalee 2y ago

Why should an author be forced to give away their work for free? They can already choose to give it away for free if they wish. We already have the Creative Commons licenses, and there are many open textbook projects.

PostOnce 2y ago
Dead authors can't choose to give away their works, they're dead. Yet someone still owns the rights 60 years later.
- spankalee 2y ago
  That says nothing about the living authors.
- throwAGIway 2y ago
  If an author sells the rights and does, should the buyer automatically lose what they bought? Sounds like that would severely decrease what authors can earn, especially older ones.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    There's no reason that "selling copyrights" needs to a be a thing. If the author themself wants to profit from their work, sure, but once they die, that's it, and there's no excuse for it to not be in the public domain at that point.
    - encomiast 2y ago
      So the wife that supported the author can't profit off their assets? The author can't pass on this to children? Should we do the same thing for other property like land and money?
      - anigbrowl 2y ago
        This kind of hectoring discourse is aggressive and rude. You can do better. Authors that get paid can certainly leave the assets they received to their families. They could also transfer ownership of unpublished intangible assets. More than that sucks the general public into a quasi-contractual relationship with a posthumous person; I disclaim fiscal obligations of strangers toward ghosts.

FpUser 2y ago

Most financially successful humans only care how to increase their already huge amount of money. they do not give a flying fuck about advancing humanity as a whole.

encomiast 2y ago
[citation needed]
- FpUser 2y ago
  Look around and see what big corporations are doing. You woll be flooded.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Do we really need a citation on how corporations are run, and what they do to constrain innovation?
  - encomiast 2y ago
    I'm sorry, I didn't read "most financially successful humans" to mean corporations.
WalterBright 2y ago
The neato thing about free markets is in order to make more money you have to please other people so those people will freely give you their money.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  That works until you capture the market. That's the entire phenomenon aroind the poorly named "enshittification". Companies have in fact figured you can be too big to fail and wait until they get their to no longer "please other people" and squeeze them. Or at least, get away with otherwise company killing moves for years longer than they should.

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Aurornis 2y ago

> we should move to models of publishing that do not require this restriction of information. It’s interesting how this comment veers into a completely hypothetical overhaul of society in which money doesn’t matter, for reasons which of course are hand-waved away. On one hand: Sure! Sounds great! If someone can reinvent all of society in a way that everyone is free to do whatever they want and not worry about getting paid, then by all means let’s go for it. On the other hand: These proposals are so fanciful and far-fetched (at least in our lifetimes) that these comments read more like a tacit admission that the current system is indeed necessary.

vineyardmike 2y ago
Spotify has a free tier where you can listen to any song for free. YouTube lets you watch almost anything for free. Both of these also pay the creators. There are many more services peddling free content and even covering hosting costs. Libraries are free. We have plenty of completely non-hypothetical non-society-overhauling ways to access information for free. Lots of information is free, lots of it is accessible. > the current system is indeed necessary. Not all of the current system is equally necessary. Maybe not necessary at all, it just so happens to be the system we have now. There have been plenty of radically different models of society over the years. Yea, they're gone now, but this current one isn't particularly old either. Just to be more concrete - if you stop using and protecting your trademark, you can lose it. If you just hoard and don't use a copyright, you won't lose it. We already have systems in place that can provide similar info exchange for free.
- ysavir 2y ago
  You're comparing to the free tiers of Spotify and Youtube, which in effect is saying that we should put ads into our books.
  - chii 2y ago
    Libraries tend not to put ads into books to fund them. The physical restrictions in a library - ala, only 1 person could read it at a time - is what prevents publishers from trying to charge more or prevent it. The basic issue is that if a library is filled with electronic books, the publishers will stand to lose a lot of profit. Now I'm not arguing that they deserve this profit, but there's no good model so far that both preserves the profit motive, but also make available the copyrighted material digitally and unrestrictedly. Perhaps there could be a form of library "fee" that is funded by tax payers, in a similar way to how public radio gets funded. The state pays some amount to each published author who make their book available in the library, from a pot of money collected from taxation.

dylan604 2y ago

> There is no greater folly of contemporary human society than the purposeful restriction of such vast and easily shareable repositories of knowledge. This is exactly how people stayed in power. Knowledge is power, so keep the masses uneducated so they are subservient. I once asked an Englishman why if the British Empire was so great did all of its colonies revolt against it. His response was not what I expected when he said they taught them how to read. So watching how the school systems keep getting dumber really does get those conspiracy theory synapses firing. Make great again by taking power away from people really goes towards that.

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WalterBright 2y ago
> Knowledge is power Actually, knowledge is freedom. > so keep the masses uneducated so they are subservient Terror makes them subservient. See the Soviet Union's gulags, full of educated people.

vt85 2y ago

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afh1 2y ago

Feel free to start, just don't force anyone into it, and take a honest look at past examples and their outcomes.

throw10920 2y ago

> There is no greater folly of contemporary human society than the purposeful restriction of such vast and easily shareable repositories of knowledge This is objectively false. There zero actual harm being done here. There is very little, if any, evidence that the vast majority of the 500k removed books contain information that actually provides value to people, as opposed to being fiction and political advocacy non-fiction (for instance, the vast majority of the list of 1300 "banned and challenged books" (that contains many duplicates and is shorter than IA claims)[1] that the IA is clutching their pearls over are almost exclusively non-informational) that result in zero harm when taken away from people. You also pointedly ignored the fact that the greatest repository of knowledge in human history, by orders of magnitude, is the Internet - even if you restrict yourself to the parts that people have voluntarily made free, you still have the ability to learn everything you need to live a comfortable life, and learn more than you have time for in a thousand lifetimes. Demanding that the entertainment works that authors wrote with the express intention of making money (and who did not consent to their work being put on IA) be made freely available, regardless of the massive amount of information already voluntarily made free on the Internet that serves almost every need you have (learning to sew, fixing a leak, doing your taxes, getting the equivalent of a PhD in math), is the absolute peak of entitlement. The only vaguely reasonable vector adjacent to your argument is that academic publishers make their papers freely available, because that's actual human knowledge (and because the funding for the research doesn't come from the publishers). > We prevent this achievement due to our attachment to a specific economic system that serves as the current means of financially supporting authors. Now you're just advocating communism, which is one of the actual greatest human follies of all time, and has resulted in tens of millions of deaths and the suffering of hundreds of millions more. This comment is utterly inappropriate for HN. It is naked political advocacy that is emotionally manipulative, factually incorrect, and contains zero content that aligns with HN's goals of "stimulating intellectual curiosity". [1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/e/2PACX-1vR_xj-6SeGMCA7Mg2s-N4xbGKIQrG3XI9l0NuZz-AxQ-9TyjkKz28JP6UpsxKX_YSOreDtOG7mWMUD2/pubhtml?gid=0&single=true&pli=1 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/e/2PACX-1vR_xj-6S...

selimthegrim 2y ago
There was a Wiley translation of an 80s Russian textbook I needed for my research that was nowhere on libgen and which I could only get via ILL. The library yelled at me for making physical copies but IA had it.

Ekaros 2y ago

Maybe we should do software first. I see no reason why I should not get copies of all binaries and all source code for any and every service I use upon request. And even copies of databases backing them when requested. Then I could simply replicated it in my own environment or roll up competing service. And as for data, what is privacy anyway. If you want the data be private don't generate it... /s

johnnyanmac 2y ago
Sadly I feel like Poes law hits here. I do see a few borderline argue such a case. They must have no products of their own nor care how the people behind the knowledge they consume make a living.

WalterBright 2y ago

> I can imagine is one where every community owns and controls the means of production upon which they depend for their survival. In such an economic system, the need for automation would be obvious and once implemented, all people would receive the benefits of automation. This would include such a wide allowance for leisure and free time that authors would no longer need to restrict access to their books to extract profits from their value their shared knowledge creates. All people would be free to do what they will. This has been imagined many times. It's called Marxism. It's been tried, too, innumerable times. But the anticipated utopia never happened, and the people were far worse off than for-profit free markets. However, the idea of "intellectual property" is a pure invention. There's zero evidence that IP laws actually promote the creation and distribution of creative works. But there is evidence that the free flow of ideas enhances prosperity. I assert this as a person who made his living creating IP.

monero-xmr 2y ago

It might take decades and billions of dollars to prove a molecule can cure disease XYZ. Once you know the molecule, copying it is cheap. Only intellectual property rights can provide the incentive to find said molecule, safe in the knowledge that once it is found, all of the costs can be recouped plus profit. That is the clear-cut case for intellectual property, but it’s the same principle for books. I’m not going to write a book that takes tons of effort and exposes my hard-won knowledge if I can’t profit from it, despite how easy it is to copy text. Food for thought

zjuventus14 2y ago
It’s true that copyright and patents make pursuing certain risky (from a monetary perspective) innovations that are valuable to society worthwhile. But they’re only one way of solving that problem. We choose to apply copyright almost universally, even to innovations and ideas that don’t suffer from high capital risk, and would be worthwhile to pursue without copyright or with shorter copyright. Why not instead subsidize R&D for successful drugs (a lot of drug research in the U.S. is already publicly funded). It seems to me that it’s an exceptional case that there’s some idea that’s would benefit society but is only economically viable under the current copyright regime. But our laws apply protections that are only needed in this rare instance to all ideas. I highly recommend “Against Intellectual Monopoly” by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine. It changed how I view IP a great deal, and the final chapters are dedicated to how we could practically transition away from our current system.
- monero-xmr 2y ago
  The government is political. When you make things political, it has requirements separated from the profit motive. I’m not an anarchist. I think the government has its place. But it’s undeniable that a lot of fundamental research is held hostage by politics: Certain ideas are in vogue and get funded, while the new ideas and those pursuing them must wait, or perhaps never get funded for whatever political reason. The profit motive enables risk takers to get funded with high risk, high reward ideas. If there was no way to capture that profit, we would be subject to political whims for the most important innovations for society.

vwkd 2y ago

> In such an economic system, the need for automation would be obvious and once implemented, all people would receive the benefits of automation. This would include such a wide allowance for leisure and free time that authors would no longer need to restrict access to their books to extract profits from their value their shared knowledge creates. All people would be free to do what they will. Oh, hello there, dear communism. Same dream, same problems. No, this time around you don’t work either.

joquarky 2y ago
This subjective labelling contributed nothing to the conversation. Back up your statement.

throwthrowuknow 2y ago

Your obvious conclusion that automation is the answer would be anathema to others who wish to maximize the number of people under their control and the amount of “work” they are doing. It’s a relatable mistake, many people including myself assume everyone thinks like they do before they are sorely disillusioned by rough contact with reality. Don’t make the mistake of thinking your side is in the majority either and that removing opposition or changing minds would be an achievable task. If you want to build something you’ll need to strike out on your own and take only those who follow you into the wilderness.

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