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It's possible for someone to do something socially reprehensible and entirely distasteful and to be perfectly within the letter of the law while doing so. The a
by voidhorse 2mo ago
It's possible for someone to do something socially reprehensible and entirely distasteful and to be perfectly within the letter of the law while doing so. The article doesn't emphasize copyright issues or fair use, because that isn't the point. The post is trying to argue that the act is not sustainable and needlessly destructive, in pursuit of something that many people believe has limited value or unproven value, which is true.
Not the case here, but it's also important to keep in mind that laws too, can be unjust and immoral. Much of humanity's progress has involved the abolishment of immoral laws.
- noosphr 2mo agoThese are books that no one else wants and would get pulped otherwise. No one has space to save the 1754 edition of "whale blubber cookery on the open seas".
- brunburnburnbur 2mo agoYeah but I unironically would love to have a copy of that on my bookshelf. It likely has fantastic illustrations! This is the whole problem. A lot of people assuming they can speak unilaterally and with authority on what other people value or should find valuable. It's disgraceful. What happens to the old hacker ethos? I'd never thought I'd see the day when, on a site called hacker news the majority of posters are defending the right of a large corporation to destroy public goods permanently just to be able to charge people more for "intelligence as a service".
- noosphr 2mo agoThen go buy it from a rare book dealer.
- voidhorse 2mo agoThat's not really the point. You are defending the right of a massive corporation, to harvest and systematically and unilaterally make it impossible for people to purchase such books in the future without any oversight, just so they can charge you by meter to access information forever going forward. You are signing on to the potential complete destruction of the only record of their existence some human beings may have left on earth. I hope it's all worth it when you're paying amazon to generate hallucinations for you that have zero traceability back to the source of information. In the future, you'll have no idea if the LLM is telling you the truth about a particular niche fact about the history of whale blubber cookery, because there will be nowhere to cross check. Don't be dense.
- ronsor 2mo ago> Much of humanity's progress has involved the abolishment of immoral laws. So you are saying to abolish copyright?