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So you’re saying your entire current life is because of the proceeds of crime?! I’m kidding. Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. It bel

• zerobees 3mo ago
  > Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. This is a common perspective on HN, but it's so jarring. Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us. Good books are incredibly challenging to write, more so than good software. It's not like you grab Harry Potter and say "I'm just gonna change character names and rephrase some of the text". Most authors recognize that not everyone can afford books and then contend that some amount of sharing is healthy, no different from borrowing books from a local library. If you ask nicely, they will probably send you a PDF for free. But the scale of online book piracy is absolutely staggering and demoralizing, and most of it has nothing to do with taking any serious moral stance. It's just "lol, why pay when you can download for free".
  • nzeid 3mo ago
    Taken out of context, you're right. But the parent comment couldn't buy these books even if they wanted to. I'd say there's a consensus that the primary motivation for piracy is hurdles to access having nothing to do with payment.
    • bigiain 3mo ago
      I think iTunes Store and Netflix both showed 15 or so years back that if you give people and easy and convenient way to pay a reasonable price for music/movies - a huge number of people will willingly choose to pay and support the artists/creators, instead of hanging out on Bittorrent trackers and paying for seedboxes and sharing with friends. And the siloing of movies by Netflix nd all the other streaming services, and the introduction of advertising into the "reasonable price" tiers, shows that people can and do remember piracy in still an option, for when corporations and copyright holding groups enshittify things. Lately amongst a lot of my friends I've seen more usb stick with movies being shared that even in the heyday of Bittorrent.
      • rbanffy 3mo ago
        BitTorrent is one form of collective archive for things that either have restricted or no commercial availability. I wish more cultural artifacts were archived this way.
  • dghlsakjg 3mo ago
    There’s also the argument that copyright has been extended to the point of absurdity. I respect copyright, but I can’t respect a lockup period that can push to 130 years or more. For example: if JK Rowling is alive in 4 years the first Harry Potter book will have a valid copyright extending from the 20th, 21st and into the 22nd century. Is it really defensible to say that your great, great (great?) grandchildren should benefit from a government mandated monopoly on your work?
    • fragmede 3mo ago
      JK Rowling is the exception. The duration is one thing, but so are her proceeds. Most authors are never going to see that much money, if any, from writing. Maybe copyright would expire once the original author has made enough money to pay for lavish living expenses for themselves for the rest of their life, inflation adjusted. So their family wouldn't automatically be taken care of, but they are. Kind of weird too think about it that way, but food for thought.
      • drnick1 3mo ago
        If most authors don't make much money, if any, then what is the point of copyright? It only really seems to benefit publishers.
        • harshreality 3mo ago
          I'm not here to defend publishers or the insane current copyright terms. However, in the traditional model of publishing, publishers subsidize production of new books from unproven authors--through book advances, copyediting services, and printing and distribution costs--via the money they make on the few successful and very few ultra-successful books. If you take away copyright, you reduce the revenue of publishers, which reduces the number of unproven authors they can take chances on. (They're not very good at picking winners from the pool of new author manuscripts, not nearly as good as "agents" like to think they are, but that doesn't matter; they still wouldn't be able to take as many chances.)
      • dghlsakjg 3mo ago
  • TFNA 3mo ago
    > Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. If you look back through the annals of Free Software, one often encounters the claim that the GPL was a way to use copyright against itself, and if there were no more copyright, there would be little need for these licenses.
    • rbanffy 3mo ago
      > there would be little need for these licenses. The GPL ones explicitly disallow the removal of user rights from work derived from GPL software. That wouldn’t be possible without copyright.
  • paxys 3mo ago
    The issue with copyright law is that it is all or nothing. Rights to a work are either tightly held by an author/publisher, and even downloading a small excerpt can get you in trouble, or it is fully public domain and open for any and all use. There needs to be a middle ground, such as: after 15 years of publication any private individual can access and read the work for free, but the rightsholder still controls commercial sales, merchandising, licensing, character rights, movie rights etc.
  • __rito__ 3mo ago
    If this is not bad faith argument, then I don't what is. When someone is violating an OSS licence, they are doing it for commercial gains and monetary profit. Nobody is angry at someone using FOSS software for himself with no money getting involved. As opposed to that, books, movies are pirated for personal consumption. Not monetary gains. If someone bought a $30 book, and then ran a BaaS with millions of VC money in his pocket, people in HN would be angry at him, too.
    • jmye 3mo ago
      [flagged]
    • NeutralCrane 3mo ago
      If knowledge is to be free, that means there should be no restrictions on how it is used. Even an open source license misses the point, because the implication is still that one person can dictate how another person can make use of knowledge. It’s still premised on the same dystopian view that a person can own an idea.
      • sam1r 3mo ago
        Wow very well put.
        • kennywinker 3mo ago
          Except it’s not. That poster is just doing an IP law version of the “paradox of tolerance”. Their argument is just: you say you want information to be free yet you believe in licenses that keep information from being made un-free.
          • NeutralCrane 3mo ago
            Has absolutely nothing to do with the paradox of intolerance. If you have a more substantive criticism, feel free to elaborate.
  • ritsource 3mo ago
    Just because something is challenging, that doesn't mean you should get paid for it. Art and business are two distinct endeavors. All the copyright and IP issues come up because of this one confusion.
  • appreciatorBus 3mo ago
    Copyright is not an unalloyed good. In small doses, and short terms, I might agree with your classification. But when copyright is 150 years It no longer has anything to do with reward for the author or encourage you creativity, it’s just a cartel.
  • gorgoiler 3mo ago
    Capitalism works great for shoes. You pay the proletariat for their labor and they labor away in your shoe factory. The shoe economy ticks over on scarcity. The knowledge economy is different. It’s hard to see how the system works in a world where everyone has the equivalent of a shoe replicator in their pocket. Ironically the “free market” only survives by having arbitrary regulations on shoe duplication enforced in the interests of shoe-rights holders.
    • otherme123 3mo ago
      The shoes would be free and not a market product, as is it currently air to breathe. Free market is just the best way we know of dealing with scarcity, every other alternative that was attempted seems to fail sooner or later. If you invent a way to get an infinite amount of something, that something goes out of the free market rationing. For the knowledge, a lot of free market more radical defenders don't believe at all in current state of "intelectual property", much less if et has to be enforced by the state. They are for "industial secrets" (if they leak, you lose them), NDAs (if they leak, you enforce the contract) and similar formulas.
  • alexwennerberg 3mo ago
    > This is a common perspective on HN, but it's so jarring. Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us. If the books were released under an open source license, there would be no problem here?
  • NooneAtAll3 3mo ago
    > Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks we grab pitchforks because you violate the licence by making knowledge NOT free? what exactly is the contradiction?
  • andai 3mo ago
    > It's just "lol, why pay when you can download for free". Well for starters because the research shows that reading on a screen literally makes you retarded. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/691462 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/691462 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05605-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05605-0
    • squibonpig 3mo ago
      More interested in a study on e-readers
  • psychoslave 3mo ago
    >This is a common perspective on HN, but it's so jarring. Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us. This is only apparent contradiction. The underlying issue is of course the social concentration power. It's not the same when an author is deprived of virtual money the copyright system entice them to extract from readers regardless of whether they have money or not, and deprive authors from a negotiation mechanism against corporate that swim in money. In both case, with current legal systems the most obvious law enforceable mechanism is copyright. It doesn't mean the underlying issues at stake are the same. What's really staggering and demoralizing is that humans have all that it takes to feed all mouths, make equal incomes, live in peace in all kind of diversities that encompasses reciprocity of accepting differences, and yet we end up with people dying from war and starvation while other accumulate a toxic level of wealth in a system that tries to uniform everyone and harshly cuts anything that don't fit the standard box.
  • phatfish 3mo ago
    It's almost as if we are in a comment section where most peoples jobs exist due to "content" either being stolen (AI most recently) or crowd sourced under EULAs that effectively steal it. Not that I think a back door to the shit Disney and other corporate content onwers pull is nessecarily a bad thing. But it is funny to see people here gaslight themselves into believing they have some moral right to just take what others have created.
    • squibonpig 3mo ago
      I don't think the majority here work for ai companies and I also see a lot of people critical of AI and copyright violations by ai companies. They're also very clearly different things, one is done on a massive scale by a company for profit and another is done by one person to use the work in the way it was intended to be used.
  • mdp2021 3mo ago
    > most of it has nothing to do with taking any serious moral stance If many people are immoral, curb the roots of immorality then, fight that one battle - do not shift it to others' sound behaviour exercised with proportion and judgement.
  • globular-toast 3mo ago
    The pitchforks aren't being raised for licence violations, they are raised because software should be free and unencumbered and now somebody is distributing it in a way which doesn't afford the same freedoms to the users. Free/copyleft licences like the GPL are just the way we've been able to effectively make software free in a world in which copyright applies to software.
  • vishnugupta 3mo ago
    And yet JK Rowling is a billionaire and movies make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits. So I guess we can have a world in which knowledge can be free without starving knowledge creators?
    • defrost 3mo ago
      Not if you account for just how many authors never reach the pinnacle of breaking even. Rowling is a rare exception and very much not the norm.
  • unsungNovelty 3mo ago
    > Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. Where do we do that? All LLMs are still doing it. I've not seen any MIT license or BSD license of all the repos LLMs have gone through. That's excluding copy-left licences. Zero pitch-forks in sight. > Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us. I agree here with you. And I'll give a better reason to not pirate for most people. In the seas of endless content, If you want to read/learn from a book - try paying for them. You won't read most books. You'll curate/research better before buying. The books you buy will be worth it in your own mind. You re-consume them more which is very important IMO. For most pirates, I think the issue is not unavailability of resources/content. But need to consume in a better way. Buying slows things down. You'll consume better. Quality over quantity. Even then I have a ton of humble bundle books that I've not touched at all.
  • squibonpig 3mo ago
    I'm not gonna buy the book as an alternative you know. If I'm pirating a book it's usually because I can't really afford to go buying the books I'm interested in. Sometimes if I love a book I'll get a physical copy so I can finish it in a more comfortable format and so I'll have it for another read. I figure most people who pirate are pretty similar, so I wouldn't expect an outsized effect on book sales. Add to that the fact that books by people who are literally dead still have copyright. That has nothing to do with it being hard to write a book, cause I don't think their fucking estate wrote the book.
• john-titor 3mo ago
  > Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. It belongs to us all Imagine you're a professional writer and it's your main source of income. How would you feel if someone said this to you? Would you still want to write books?
  • deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  • TFNA 3mo ago
    Things have changed a lot since the late twentieth century. The kind of people you imagine, who can live full-time off writing, are responsible for a vanishingly small amount of the books that appear today. Piracy has little to do with it; this is primarily due to the fierce competition from other books, the glut of content available today, but especially from mobile phones as fewer and fewer people read books. Even for those who make appreciable income off books, the books are nevertheless usually a side gig alongside other hustles.
    • jmye 3mo ago
      [flagged]
      • mathgeek 3mo ago
        GP is arguing that piracy is not the cause. That part is directly after your quote.
      • Cider9986 3mo ago
        Why would a logical actor pay for something infinitely duplicatable?
        • jmye 3mo ago
          [flagged]
          • 3mo ago
• tryagainian 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• abrookewood 3mo ago
  This is such a ridiculous statement. The people who spent their time building up this body of work deserve to be compensated. Take whatever job you do and imagine people confidently stating that you should work for free.
  • rfrey 3mo ago
    Yes, but do their publishers need to be compensated for a century after their death?
  • fragmede 3mo ago
    But do their grandchildren deserve to live off the proceeds for the rest of their lives as well? Say I'm a carpenter and I make chairs. How many chairs do I need to make before I get to retire? If I make a really really good one and get it put it in the right place, one should be enough. Just sit back and collect $1 for every time that someone sits in it. I don't have to make the chair particular good or comfortable, just get it into the right place where people will pay. And then I don't have to work for the rest of my life. Nor do my children. Or their children either. Framing the question at the extreme, that one should be expected to work for free, is just as absurd as framing it as some people should just never have to work at all, ever. No one put me in charge, but I believe people need to do work of some sort. Who gets to decide what counts as work or not isn't for me to decide though, so the system we've got is just this whole unorganized unplanned economy.
  • zanderwohl 3mo ago
    This is a disingenuous argument. Constant payment into perpetuity for the replication of digital information is just a form of rent-seeking. Except, unlike a landlord, you're not obligated to correct defects.
  • mathgeek 3mo ago
    A better argument here is that yhe work you do should earn you income for a century every time someone else benefits from it.
• andai 3mo ago
  https://xkcd.com/1228/ https://xkcd.com/1228/
• globalnode 3mo ago
  The entire llm chatbot craze is only possible because of the proceeds of crime. im reluctant to pick-on the little guy here.