4 ms·

That's easy: Russia is leaning pretty hard anti-west right now, and if any of it's citizens are doing anything to annoy anything from the west, they will cheer

That's easy: Russia is leaning pretty hard anti-west right now, and if any of it's citizens are doing anything to annoy anything from the west, they will cheerfully let it continue so long as it doesn't cause them problems at home.

sampa 2y ago
[flagged]
- daedrdev 2y ago
  As opposed to your alternate view that is...? I feel like its objective fact that Russia is doing whatever is can to undermine the west, considering that they are currently committing industrial sabotage in Europe on a large scale.
  - sampa 2y ago
    as if industrial sabotage was invented in Russia
    - lesuorac 2y ago
      Very unclear how this is related to the previous comments about why Russia would be preserving Western culture.
      - jasonvorhe 2y ago
        Because it's also part of their culture.
    - exe34 2y ago
      we should send them agile.
  - HenryBemis 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - waffleiron 2y ago
      Thats a CIA playbook you are referring to: https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/SimpleSabotage.pdf https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - TrapLord_Rhodo 2y ago
    They were doing this from argentina, not russia. I think the OP's comment is meant that the view everyone aligns to a "Nationstate" is simplistic. The fact that the press release specifically mentions their russian is some kind of political doublespeak. The true lesson here is that hackers can come from every nationality and that individuals who are trying to enlighten and enrich society will be persecuted by the powers that be. It's a story as old as history itself.
    - kevinh 2y ago
      They were vacationing in Argentina, not living there.
      - TrapLord_Rhodo 2y ago
        Heavy quotes when a hacker says that i'm sure. Proper opsec in that line of work requires alot of "Vacationing". Also, your comment still completly ignores the main point; Regardless of the local, the merits of extradition here are wild. How can you charge someone for copyright law when the infridgment was never conducted in the united states?
        themoonisachees 2y ago
        US doctrine says that the perpetrator can be anywhere, they're getting sued near the victim. Most courts in the world have similar doctrine, as that allows suing any foreign national you can extradite to you instead of having to e.g. sue in a Chinese court.
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    Book piracy is an old Russian movement to evade censorship, called samizdat, and these shadow libraries have their roots in that movement. It is an anti-soviet tradition, and probably has nothing to with wanting to cause economic harm to publishers.
    - pyuser583 2y ago
      JRR Tolkein's publisher hired a lawyer to defend his copyright in the USSR. The case failed.. But what exactly did they want? The KGB to send Tolkein fans to the Gulag?
      - ogurechny 2y ago
        Post-revolutionary Soviet state declared that private property was a sin, but life demanded immediate amendments that protected some rights for 5-25 years, depending on the content. That was inside the country, as international relations were broken. As USSR turned into a “normal” corporate state with a twist, and began having economic relations with other “normal” Capitalist thugs, it started having minimal bilateral agreements that allowed things to move. Post-war reforms in local laws extended copyright terms inside the Soviet Bloc, and made them more similar to the Western agreements (even though licensing deals though the Iron Curtain were exceptions). Finally, in 1973 USSR joined Universal Copyright Convention of 1952, at the latest possible moment its old terms were still in effect. As a result, everything published before 1973 could be used on old terms, — in particular, translations did not need explicit authorization. Of course, that hurt the Soviet writers in the same manner, but not a lot of people wanted to read Socialist Realist stories about imaginary workers of imaginary factories. As for everything published after 1973, All-Union Agency of Author's Rights handled and controlled all trans-border copyright transfers both ways, and dealt with the money — until the last years of Soviet Union, when free press, and private contracts with publishers made them irrelevant. A translation of “Hobbit” was published in 1976, a print run of 100 000. An abridged version of “The Fellowship of the Ring” was published in 1982 and 1983, both runs of 100 000. https://fantlab.ru/autor19/alleditions https://fantlab.ru/autor19/alleditions Even with the arbitrary government-defined ruble exchange rate, they probably wanted to collect at least some money. Afterwards, post-Soviet countries joined the worldwide copyright agreements. One of the negative outcomes of those Soviet and post-Soviet copyright extensions made to align local and global law was that previously public domain content (like photos, which newspapers and archives often didn't even bother to track properly) became copyrighted once again, which usually put it into a limbo of orphan works, and prevented re-distribution of old products containing it.
- Dudelander 2y ago
  I must admit it is rather comfortable to have an accurate view of the world. It's much more profitable than being enmeshed in a bunch of conspiracy theories.
- jasonjayr 2y ago
  It's actually super uncomfortable realizing just how effective this is at destablizing things. As a network guy watching how much bad activity to my US-based servers comes from regions that are not friendly with the US right now, it's downright upsetting. We should be all working together and not against each other. But the world is not simple, and people have complex, and sometimes selfish motivations.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
throwup238 2y ago
I don't think it has much to do with that. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, bootleg tapes copied from friend to friend was the only way my parents had to share banned music. After the collapse, we were priced out of Western content by a weak economy so that black market morphed into a state-tolerated industry selling pirated tapes and eventually CDs and DVDs. Any time I'd go back to visit in the last few decades, I'd buy movies, entire discographies, and video games for a few dollars a piece from market stalls and specialized stores that sold nothing but pirated content. Ignoring foreign copyright was a survival mechanism and by this point, it's almost culturally ingrained.
- qball 2y ago
  >I don't think it has much to do with that. Sure it does; Russian police do nothing about credit card theft because (and to the point that) that money is ultimately coming out of Western pockets (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Chp12sEnWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Chp12sEnWk). Same as the North Koreans with their industrial-level counterfeiting of USD (to name one example), for the same reasons. Might as well be an unofficial letter of marque.
  - throwup238 2y ago
    The OP originally asked: > Why is it that Russian citizens are the most important preservers of Western culture now? What do credit card thieves and counterfeiters have to do with it? Are credit card thieves preservers of Western culture now?
nullindividual 2y ago
Windows 95 bootlegging was extremely prevalent. Piracy in Russia is nothing new. From the AP Archive - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR3wtulOJWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR3wtulOJWU
- kelipso 2y ago
  20 years ago you could find physical bootleg markets in almost every big Asian city. Nowadays it's probably all in torrents, Telegram, etc. I think copyright stuff is only really enforced in western countries.
generationP 2y ago
The Eastern European (not just Russian) book scanning scene seems to have started in the early 2000s, back before the anti-Western turn. Z-Lib is newer, from the 2010s(?), definitely predating the current meaning of Z.

sampa 2y ago

[flagged]

daedrdev 2y ago
As opposed to your alternate view that is...? I feel like its objective fact that Russia is doing whatever is can to undermine the west, considering that they are currently committing industrial sabotage in Europe on a large scale.
- sampa 2y ago
  as if industrial sabotage was invented in Russia
  - lesuorac 2y ago
    Very unclear how this is related to the previous comments about why Russia would be preserving Western culture.
    - jasonvorhe 2y ago
      Because it's also part of their culture.
  - exe34 2y ago
    we should send them agile.
- HenryBemis 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - waffleiron 2y ago
    Thats a CIA playbook you are referring to: https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/SimpleSabotage.pdf https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- TrapLord_Rhodo 2y ago
  They were doing this from argentina, not russia. I think the OP's comment is meant that the view everyone aligns to a "Nationstate" is simplistic. The fact that the press release specifically mentions their russian is some kind of political doublespeak. The true lesson here is that hackers can come from every nationality and that individuals who are trying to enlighten and enrich society will be persecuted by the powers that be. It's a story as old as history itself.
  - kevinh 2y ago
    They were vacationing in Argentina, not living there.
    - TrapLord_Rhodo 2y ago
      Heavy quotes when a hacker says that i'm sure. Proper opsec in that line of work requires alot of "Vacationing". Also, your comment still completly ignores the main point; Regardless of the local, the merits of extradition here are wild. How can you charge someone for copyright law when the infridgment was never conducted in the united states?
      - themoonisachees 2y ago
        US doctrine says that the perpetrator can be anywhere, they're getting sued near the victim. Most courts in the world have similar doctrine, as that allows suing any foreign national you can extradite to you instead of having to e.g. sue in a Chinese court.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  Book piracy is an old Russian movement to evade censorship, called samizdat, and these shadow libraries have their roots in that movement. It is an anti-soviet tradition, and probably has nothing to with wanting to cause economic harm to publishers.
  - pyuser583 2y ago
    JRR Tolkein's publisher hired a lawyer to defend his copyright in the USSR. The case failed.. But what exactly did they want? The KGB to send Tolkein fans to the Gulag?
    - ogurechny 2y ago
      Post-revolutionary Soviet state declared that private property was a sin, but life demanded immediate amendments that protected some rights for 5-25 years, depending on the content. That was inside the country, as international relations were broken. As USSR turned into a “normal” corporate state with a twist, and began having economic relations with other “normal” Capitalist thugs, it started having minimal bilateral agreements that allowed things to move. Post-war reforms in local laws extended copyright terms inside the Soviet Bloc, and made them more similar to the Western agreements (even though licensing deals though the Iron Curtain were exceptions). Finally, in 1973 USSR joined Universal Copyright Convention of 1952, at the latest possible moment its old terms were still in effect. As a result, everything published before 1973 could be used on old terms, — in particular, translations did not need explicit authorization. Of course, that hurt the Soviet writers in the same manner, but not a lot of people wanted to read Socialist Realist stories about imaginary workers of imaginary factories. As for everything published after 1973, All-Union Agency of Author's Rights handled and controlled all trans-border copyright transfers both ways, and dealt with the money — until the last years of Soviet Union, when free press, and private contracts with publishers made them irrelevant. A translation of “Hobbit” was published in 1976, a print run of 100 000. An abridged version of “The Fellowship of the Ring” was published in 1982 and 1983, both runs of 100 000. https://fantlab.ru/autor19/alleditions https://fantlab.ru/autor19/alleditions Even with the arbitrary government-defined ruble exchange rate, they probably wanted to collect at least some money. Afterwards, post-Soviet countries joined the worldwide copyright agreements. One of the negative outcomes of those Soviet and post-Soviet copyright extensions made to align local and global law was that previously public domain content (like photos, which newspapers and archives often didn't even bother to track properly) became copyrighted once again, which usually put it into a limbo of orphan works, and prevented re-distribution of old products containing it.
Dudelander 2y ago
I must admit it is rather comfortable to have an accurate view of the world. It's much more profitable than being enmeshed in a bunch of conspiracy theories.
jasonjayr 2y ago
It's actually super uncomfortable realizing just how effective this is at destablizing things. As a network guy watching how much bad activity to my US-based servers comes from regions that are not friendly with the US right now, it's downright upsetting. We should be all working together and not against each other. But the world is not simple, and people have complex, and sometimes selfish motivations.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

throwup238 2y ago

I don't think it has much to do with that. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, bootleg tapes copied from friend to friend was the only way my parents had to share banned music. After the collapse, we were priced out of Western content by a weak economy so that black market morphed into a state-tolerated industry selling pirated tapes and eventually CDs and DVDs. Any time I'd go back to visit in the last few decades, I'd buy movies, entire discographies, and video games for a few dollars a piece from market stalls and specialized stores that sold nothing but pirated content. Ignoring foreign copyright was a survival mechanism and by this point, it's almost culturally ingrained.

qball 2y ago
>I don't think it has much to do with that. Sure it does; Russian police do nothing about credit card theft because (and to the point that) that money is ultimately coming out of Western pockets (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Chp12sEnWk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Chp12sEnWk). Same as the North Koreans with their industrial-level counterfeiting of USD (to name one example), for the same reasons. Might as well be an unofficial letter of marque.
- throwup238 2y ago
  The OP originally asked: > Why is it that Russian citizens are the most important preservers of Western culture now? What do credit card thieves and counterfeiters have to do with it? Are credit card thieves preservers of Western culture now?

nullindividual 2y ago

Windows 95 bootlegging was extremely prevalent. Piracy in Russia is nothing new. From the AP Archive - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR3wtulOJWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xR3wtulOJWU

kelipso 2y ago
20 years ago you could find physical bootleg markets in almost every big Asian city. Nowadays it's probably all in torrents, Telegram, etc. I think copyright stuff is only really enforced in western countries.

generationP 2y ago

The Eastern European (not just Russian) book scanning scene seems to have started in the early 2000s, back before the anti-Western turn. Z-Lib is newer, from the 2010s(?), definitely predating the current meaning of Z.