5 ms·

Casually worth noting the obvious: There are also services like Libgen and Anna's archive that are completely DRM free and have pretty much anything you can get

Casually worth noting the obvious: There are also services like Libgen and Anna's archive that are completely DRM free and have pretty much anything you can get on Amazon except, well, for free, aside from also being DRM-free.

Kelvin506 2y ago
Also worth noting that such sites technically are piracy. I am not making any moral or ethical assertions about it, but people need to know that so they can make an informed decision before doing so. And no, it's not inherently obvious to everyone. Libgen, Anna's Archive, et al do however provide a valuable service in maintaining access to works out of distribution or blocked by censorship.
- southernplaces7 2y ago
  Oh gosh, I had no idea! I'm not an absolutist on piracy in either direction, but when X or Y megacorp and all its affiliates can claim to "sell" you goods and then whimsically restrict access to them in such a way that further, future whimsies let them take away your purchased products, i'd hardly blame anyone for pirating. Also, a company like Meta can pirate over 80 fucking TB of ebook content for indirectly commercial purposes, have its chief lie about being aware of this, and an average person who just wants content without so much bullshit DRM lock-in hassle should feel guilty about their choice?
  - mdp2021 2y ago
    Some people are more concerned about a world so dumb or in such bad faith that can make and tolerate confusion between "questionable possession" and "theft". Which, paradoxically, calls for the need for more and more intellectual practice, which is a key purpose in the access to culture we have valued for millennia. (Similar confusion is in that mentioned idea of Meta having done something wrong in processing texts - we can access all available texts.)
    - hofrogs 2y ago
      Either Meta did nothing wrong and therefore individuals who pirate ebooks do nothing wrong as well and the concept of piracy should not exist/not be illegal; Or piracy is actually theft (as it supposedly is when individuals do it) and Meta did millions of counts of it and therefore should pay trillions in damages, be dissolved, have Zuck go to jail, or all three.
      - mdp2021 2y ago
        What is the accusation: having had an automaton read a million books? I repeat from the previous post: we are entitled to having read all the published available books. (And more than entitled: encouraged to.) That is what libraries are for. "Piracy" in that context is coming into possession of something you are not entitled to own. And this latter point is thin and a stub, just to say that they are different things - the one above is not (it could be expanded but would not change).
      - Mindwipe 2y ago
        Is there anyone who opposes piracy who does not think that Meta should get the figurative book thrown at them? This is an odd strawman to tilt at.
        II2II 2y ago
        I think any answer to that question needs to be considered carefully, at least in a legal context, since it could end up having unintended consequences. LLMs ingests works but does not regurgitate them, so the product can be considered transformative. From my understanding of these models, they do not retain the original works. (There are probably reasons for the companies to retain the original works, but that is an entirely different matter.) So equating a trained model to copyright violations is akin to suggesting the knowledge, rather than the content, is copyrightable. Do we really want to enter that territory? The other route of attack is via how the materials were acquired. This can create problems from several perspectives. If companies had to purchase each work in order to train a model, the process would only be accessible to very well financed corporations. Libraries as well, since they are essentially in the business of purchasing works (albeit for an entirely different purpose). If you allowed borrowed works to be used while training models, the notion of lending would likely come under attack. I'm not sure we want to go there either. Then there is the question of online materials that are freely available. What would protect them? I'm not a fan of AI and I am even less of a fan of Meta. I would love to see them have the book thrown at them. I'm just uncomfortable with the potential repercussions of throwing the book at them.
  - cafeinux 2y ago
    Don't get so hung up and sarcastic. They were stating a fact that some people may not know yet need to be informed of when using these services (for various and personal reasons, not all linked to feeling guilty). As they said, they're not making any moral or ethical assertions about it. These websites are piracy, and I've used them in the past, still use them, and will probably keep using them. No fuss.
  - reidrac 2y ago
    Also consider checking your local public library services. You can request physical books (inter-library loans) and they often offer ebooks as well, although the service is likely to be cumbersome and hard to use because DRM (but if is too complicated you can still borrow the ebook legally in your phone and read a copy from "piracy" sites anywhere you want, with the benefit that the author will get royalties). It isn't perfect, as in you may not find what you want to read or when you want to read it, but if it works for me, it may work for you as well.
  - yason 2y ago
    We just need money that can be made to disappear from the seller and return to the buyer when the product that was "bought" is withdrawn and no longer exists...
  - gnomewascool 2y ago
    I think part of the point of OP is that if your main concern is DRM (being able to actually own your books) and you also care to a non-zero extent about the author getting paid for their work (yes, authors receive a much smaller share of sale price than they should, but it's still a substantial percentage), then you should try to buy from DRM-free bookshops and only if that fails sail the high seas. Regarding corporate piracy for AI, I don't think it's just Meta..
paintman252 2y ago
Promoting specific piracy sites is not a good look and ,I’ll go further, shouldn’t be allowed in this forum
- gherard5555 2y ago
  no fun allowed
  - tene80i 2y ago
    Do you like being paid for your work? Why deprive others of the fun of getting it for free?
    - gherard5555 2y ago
      You can get an income for your work by many other way than getting it behind a paywall. Like another user said i'd rather download the book and send 10$ to a creator I like than paying a monthly subscription to a "digital library" that will only give crumbles to the author and prevent me from reading my book "offline".
tene80i 2y ago
Genuinely, what is your motivation here? People often justify piracy in terms of their opposition to DRM, but here someone is showing you how to get DRM-free books, and your response is "But over here they are free." They clearly aren't meant to be free, and people put substantial amounts of work into creating them. Don't you care?
- eek2121 2y ago
  Have you read the news lately? Amazon is about to restrict the rights of kindle users. They are about to remove the ability to download and transfer books via USB. I don’t support/condone piracy, but I also don’t support the current trend of taking away user rights. Next on the list will be the removal of the ability to transfer via email. Just wait. That being said, all kindles can now be jailbroken: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43073969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43073969 So you can use other legit sources when possible.
  - tene80i 2y ago
    That appears to justify jail breaking or drm-free books, not screwing authors out of any kind of compensation for their labour.
    - jesuslop 2y ago
      The irony is that this will zero the e-book purchases of people that read only in unsupported devices.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  For myself, I would never pirate a book that was still in print. Over the past so many years though a lot of books on archive.org (for example) are borrow only (and I like cultivating an offline-life). Here's an odd, maybe edge-case example. Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus stories are clearly outside copyright. It's for sale on Amazon (the first link when I searched, becauseofcourseitis!) but I think we all know that the "copyright" on these published editions is only going to cover the Foreword or whatever the publishing company slapped on. When I look for it on archive.org I initially thought I could only borrow it [1] but then searched harder and found another copy that I can in fact download [2]. [1] https://archive.org/details/completetalesofu0000harr https://archive.org/details/completetalesofu0000harr [2] https://archive.org/details/the-complete-tales-of-uncle-remus/ https://archive.org/details/the-complete-tales-of-uncle-remu...

Kelvin506 2y ago

Also worth noting that such sites technically are piracy. I am not making any moral or ethical assertions about it, but people need to know that so they can make an informed decision before doing so. And no, it's not inherently obvious to everyone. Libgen, Anna's Archive, et al do however provide a valuable service in maintaining access to works out of distribution or blocked by censorship.

southernplaces7 2y ago
Oh gosh, I had no idea! I'm not an absolutist on piracy in either direction, but when X or Y megacorp and all its affiliates can claim to "sell" you goods and then whimsically restrict access to them in such a way that further, future whimsies let them take away your purchased products, i'd hardly blame anyone for pirating. Also, a company like Meta can pirate over 80 fucking TB of ebook content for indirectly commercial purposes, have its chief lie about being aware of this, and an average person who just wants content without so much bullshit DRM lock-in hassle should feel guilty about their choice?
- mdp2021 2y ago
  Some people are more concerned about a world so dumb or in such bad faith that can make and tolerate confusion between "questionable possession" and "theft". Which, paradoxically, calls for the need for more and more intellectual practice, which is a key purpose in the access to culture we have valued for millennia. (Similar confusion is in that mentioned idea of Meta having done something wrong in processing texts - we can access all available texts.)
  - hofrogs 2y ago
    Either Meta did nothing wrong and therefore individuals who pirate ebooks do nothing wrong as well and the concept of piracy should not exist/not be illegal; Or piracy is actually theft (as it supposedly is when individuals do it) and Meta did millions of counts of it and therefore should pay trillions in damages, be dissolved, have Zuck go to jail, or all three.
    - mdp2021 2y ago
      What is the accusation: having had an automaton read a million books? I repeat from the previous post: we are entitled to having read all the published available books. (And more than entitled: encouraged to.) That is what libraries are for. "Piracy" in that context is coming into possession of something you are not entitled to own. And this latter point is thin and a stub, just to say that they are different things - the one above is not (it could be expanded but would not change).
    - Mindwipe 2y ago
      Is there anyone who opposes piracy who does not think that Meta should get the figurative book thrown at them? This is an odd strawman to tilt at.
      - II2II 2y ago
        I think any answer to that question needs to be considered carefully, at least in a legal context, since it could end up having unintended consequences. LLMs ingests works but does not regurgitate them, so the product can be considered transformative. From my understanding of these models, they do not retain the original works. (There are probably reasons for the companies to retain the original works, but that is an entirely different matter.) So equating a trained model to copyright violations is akin to suggesting the knowledge, rather than the content, is copyrightable. Do we really want to enter that territory? The other route of attack is via how the materials were acquired. This can create problems from several perspectives. If companies had to purchase each work in order to train a model, the process would only be accessible to very well financed corporations. Libraries as well, since they are essentially in the business of purchasing works (albeit for an entirely different purpose). If you allowed borrowed works to be used while training models, the notion of lending would likely come under attack. I'm not sure we want to go there either. Then there is the question of online materials that are freely available. What would protect them? I'm not a fan of AI and I am even less of a fan of Meta. I would love to see them have the book thrown at them. I'm just uncomfortable with the potential repercussions of throwing the book at them.
- cafeinux 2y ago
  Don't get so hung up and sarcastic. They were stating a fact that some people may not know yet need to be informed of when using these services (for various and personal reasons, not all linked to feeling guilty). As they said, they're not making any moral or ethical assertions about it. These websites are piracy, and I've used them in the past, still use them, and will probably keep using them. No fuss.
- reidrac 2y ago
  Also consider checking your local public library services. You can request physical books (inter-library loans) and they often offer ebooks as well, although the service is likely to be cumbersome and hard to use because DRM (but if is too complicated you can still borrow the ebook legally in your phone and read a copy from "piracy" sites anywhere you want, with the benefit that the author will get royalties). It isn't perfect, as in you may not find what you want to read or when you want to read it, but if it works for me, it may work for you as well.
- yason 2y ago
  We just need money that can be made to disappear from the seller and return to the buyer when the product that was "bought" is withdrawn and no longer exists...
- gnomewascool 2y ago
  I think part of the point of OP is that if your main concern is DRM (being able to actually own your books) and you also care to a non-zero extent about the author getting paid for their work (yes, authors receive a much smaller share of sale price than they should, but it's still a substantial percentage), then you should try to buy from DRM-free bookshops and only if that fails sail the high seas. Regarding corporate piracy for AI, I don't think it's just Meta..

paintman252 2y ago

Promoting specific piracy sites is not a good look and ,I’ll go further, shouldn’t be allowed in this forum

gherard5555 2y ago
no fun allowed
- tene80i 2y ago
  Do you like being paid for your work? Why deprive others of the fun of getting it for free?
  - gherard5555 2y ago
    You can get an income for your work by many other way than getting it behind a paywall. Like another user said i'd rather download the book and send 10$ to a creator I like than paying a monthly subscription to a "digital library" that will only give crumbles to the author and prevent me from reading my book "offline".

tene80i 2y ago

Genuinely, what is your motivation here? People often justify piracy in terms of their opposition to DRM, but here someone is showing you how to get DRM-free books, and your response is "But over here they are free." They clearly aren't meant to be free, and people put substantial amounts of work into creating them. Don't you care?

eek2121 2y ago
Have you read the news lately? Amazon is about to restrict the rights of kindle users. They are about to remove the ability to download and transfer books via USB. I don’t support/condone piracy, but I also don’t support the current trend of taking away user rights. Next on the list will be the removal of the ability to transfer via email. Just wait. That being said, all kindles can now be jailbroken: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43073969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43073969 So you can use other legit sources when possible.
- tene80i 2y ago
  That appears to justify jail breaking or drm-free books, not screwing authors out of any kind of compensation for their labour.
  - jesuslop 2y ago
    The irony is that this will zero the e-book purchases of people that read only in unsupported devices.
JKCalhoun 2y ago
For myself, I would never pirate a book that was still in print. Over the past so many years though a lot of books on archive.org (for example) are borrow only (and I like cultivating an offline-life). Here's an odd, maybe edge-case example. Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus stories are clearly outside copyright. It's for sale on Amazon (the first link when I searched, becauseofcourseitis!) but I think we all know that the "copyright" on these published editions is only going to cover the Foreword or whatever the publishing company slapped on. When I look for it on archive.org I initially thought I could only borrow it [1] but then searched harder and found another copy that I can in fact download [2]. [1] https://archive.org/details/completetalesofu0000harr https://archive.org/details/completetalesofu0000harr [2] https://archive.org/details/the-complete-tales-of-uncle-remus/ https://archive.org/details/the-complete-tales-of-uncle-remu...