Just want to let you know why you’re being downvoted. It’s not because you’re wrong. From a legal perspective you’re right. This court case was decided this way because you’re right.
But that last line about having no sympathy. There’s a meme for this.
That depends on if you see the current copyright system as far to start with. The current system is a far cry from how it was created and was co-opted by companies like Disney to maintain monopolies on their IP for MUCH longer than the system was supposed to protect.
This. If I’m not mistaken, the system was meant to operate like a hybrid between patents and trademarks. Iirc, things weren’t originally under copyright by default and you had to regularly renew your copyright in order to keep it. Most of the media in the public domain is a result of companies failing to properly claim or renew copyright before the laws were changed. My understanding is that the reason for this was because the intent was to protect you from having your IP stolen while it was profitable to you, but then release said IP into the public domain once it was no longer profitable (aka wasn’t worth renewing copyright on).
Then corpos spent a lot of money rewriting the system and now practically everything even remotely creative is under copyright that’s effectively indefinite.
It wasn’t just “the corpos”, you can basically tie changes to the copyright system back to Disney trying to maintain a strangle hold on their fucking mouse.
Not for over half a century, once Disney lobbied the US federal government to extend temporary monopolies to egregious lengths. The point of intellectual property rights is to build a robust public domain, so every year of every extension is a year denied to the public.
This has been forgotten or ignored by the ownership class with Sony and Nintendo prosecuting use and public archival abandonware games the way Disney goes after nursery murals.
So no, we would be better off with no IP laws all than the current laws we have, and the ownership class routinely screw artists, developers and technicians for their cut of their share of the profits in what is known as Hollywood Accounting. And the record labels will cheat any artist or performer who doesn’t have a Hammerhead Lawyer (or bigger) to ensure their contract is kosher.
So no. Come with me to Barbary; we’ll ply there up and down. 🏴☠️
It’s an asshole perspective that the IA dearly needs to listen to. Don’t poke a bear when you have so much to lose. Doesn’t matter if you’re “in the right”. The history books are littered with the corpses of righteous people.
Let the EFF handle the quixotic battles, it’s what they’re best at.
IA definitely has too much to lose to afford picking fights. They got off lucky only having to remove the books. If they had been fined for many counts of copyright infringement, we could have had another library of Alexandria burning situation.
It’s a quote of an opinion, so in general I ignore them. I’m usually more interested in distilling ideas constructed with some line of reasoning.
But I guess we can look at this one. Find it’s essence. Tho it doesn’t seem very deep…
“Societies with rule of law are dictatorships. How leaders are selected and the existence of fundamental Constitutional rights is not a factor.”
So in short.
Having laws at all is a dictatorship.
Yeah, that is one of the opinions I’d ignore. It’s easy to have that opinion inside the walls of a lawed society.
Luckily it is valid to respond to an opinion with an opinion, and mine is that I imagine everyone (except the strongest with the most resources) would abandon that perspective as soon as they lived in a world with no laws.
One paragraph discusses action, the other discusses philosophy. I only took issue with your regressive philosophy. I’m open to correcting misunderstandings, elaborate if you feel I continue to miss something.
The “regressive philosophy” you’re accusing me of holding is the opposite of what I said. There’s your misunderstanding to be corrected.
I don’t like the publishers, I think copyright has gone bananas with its various extensions over the years, I want to see them fought and defeated in court. The problem here is who is doing the fighting.
Imagine a scenario where there’s a ravenous man-eating bear in the woods. There’s two people available to fight it; a grizzled woodsman who makes it his entire business to go out and fight bears, and the village librarian who’s carrying around a backpack full of irreplaceable books. For some reason the librarian is out there poking the bear with a stick, and when the bear didn’t initially respond he started whacking it over the nose. Now the bear is chewing on the librarian’s leg and the librarian is crying out “oh no, my backback full of books is in danger!”
Well duh. You shouldn’t have been carrying that backpack into harm’s way like that. Nobody is in the least bit surprised that the bear attacked the librarian under those circumstances. I don’t have to be on the bear’s side to understand how this situation was going to go down and call the librarian an idiot for willingly getting into it.
The woodsman (the EFF) should have been the ones to take this fight. They’re better at it, it’s their job, and if they fail they don’t risk that precious backpack in the process. The librarian should have kept his books safely ensconced until the fight was over and it was safe for him to bring them out. If he really wanted those books distributed in the meantime, there are some sites who are already out there running around under the bear’s nose taking that risk for their own reasons; let them continue taking those risks for now. The IA’s job is to protect the archive.
Yes, let’s just completely misrepresent someone and pretend it’s a quote! That’s fun!
There are effective ways to challenge laws and to push for new rights. Loudly shouting “I don’t care about your rules, just try and stop me!” was not an effective way for IA to try and do this.
Furthermore, IA constantly misrepresenting the problem and why they were sued in all their blog posts and press shit also does not help the cause.
It’s a law in desperate need of abolishment, but this is not how you go about changing it.
This also was not an effective way for them to ensure these books would continue to be available digitally for the public. They could have quietly leaked batches of the content that only they had out to the ebook piracy groups in a staggered fashion to help obsfucate where it was coming from, then hosted a blog post telling people how to pirate ebooks and where, with a cover your ass disclaimer that everyone needs to abide by their local laws.
By any metric of success, the way they handled this set them up to lose from the start, and jeapordized one of the most important public resources in the current era. This would be understandable from some small operation of like 5 people trying to digitize shit, not from an organization as large and old as IA.
I’m not the person who said he had no sympathy, but that is why I have little sympathy about all this: They don’t deserve this outcome, I wish they had won, and I hope the law gets overturned or revised… but they absolutely should have know better that to try and do this the way they did. They fucked around and found out. This coild have ended so much worse for them.
you can still be an asshole, and have sympathy for the loss of accessible educational material strictly for the purposes of monetization. Unless you are one of these publishing companies, in which case you probably won’t be on the internet for very long.
Just want to let you know why you’re being downvoted. It’s not because you’re wrong. From a legal perspective you’re right. This court case was decided this way because you’re right.
But that last line about having no sympathy. There’s a meme for this.
“You’re not wrong. You’re just an asshole.”
Isn’t it “asshole” to consume copyrighted works for free?
That depends on if you see the current copyright system as far to start with. The current system is a far cry from how it was created and was co-opted by companies like Disney to maintain monopolies on their IP for MUCH longer than the system was supposed to protect.
This. If I’m not mistaken, the system was meant to operate like a hybrid between patents and trademarks. Iirc, things weren’t originally under copyright by default and you had to regularly renew your copyright in order to keep it. Most of the media in the public domain is a result of companies failing to properly claim or renew copyright before the laws were changed. My understanding is that the reason for this was because the intent was to protect you from having your IP stolen while it was profitable to you, but then release said IP into the public domain once it was no longer profitable (aka wasn’t worth renewing copyright on).
Then corpos spent a lot of money rewriting the system and now practically everything even remotely creative is under copyright that’s effectively indefinite.
It wasn’t just “the corpos”, you can basically tie changes to the copyright system back to Disney trying to maintain a strangle hold on their fucking mouse.
https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/mickey/
“With 3 simple circles, I dominate the planet!” ~ERB’s depiction of Walt Disney.
Copyright is bullshit, so no.
No. Here, let me introduce you to things like libraries, and education.
And, again, he’s not an asshole for being right. He’s an asshole for having no sympathy for the loss of what should have been an archival giant.
Not for over half a century, once Disney lobbied the US federal government to extend temporary monopolies to egregious lengths. The point of intellectual property rights is to build a robust public domain, so every year of every extension is a year denied to the public.
This has been forgotten or ignored by the ownership class with Sony and Nintendo prosecuting use and public archival abandonware games the way Disney goes after nursery murals.
So no, we would be better off with no IP laws all than the current laws we have, and the ownership class routinely screw artists, developers and technicians for their cut of their share of the profits in what is known as Hollywood Accounting. And the record labels will cheat any artist or performer who doesn’t have a Hammerhead Lawyer (or bigger) to ensure their contract is kosher.
So no. Come with me to Barbary; we’ll ply there up and down. 🏴☠️
Preach brotha, PREACH!!!
It’s an asshole perspective that the IA dearly needs to listen to. Don’t poke a bear when you have so much to lose. Doesn’t matter if you’re “in the right”. The history books are littered with the corpses of righteous people.
Let the EFF handle the quixotic battles, it’s what they’re best at.
“No one should stand up for new rights. Don’t rock the boat bro.”
Your mindset is the road to a dictatorship.
IA definitely has too much to lose to afford picking fights. They got off lucky only having to remove the books. If they had been fined for many counts of copyright infringement, we could have had another library of Alexandria burning situation.
Omg this can’t be any more unrelated. Hyperbole much?
“Societies with rule of law are dictatorships. How leaders are selected and the existence of fundamental Constitutional rights is not a factor.”
How you like them strawmen?
It’s a quote of an opinion, so in general I ignore them. I’m usually more interested in distilling ideas constructed with some line of reasoning.
But I guess we can look at this one. Find it’s essence. Tho it doesn’t seem very deep…
So in short.
Yeah, that is one of the opinions I’d ignore. It’s easy to have that opinion inside the walls of a lawed society.
Luckily it is valid to respond to an opinion with an opinion, and mine is that I imagine everyone (except the strongest with the most resources) would abandon that perspective as soon as they lived in a world with no laws.
You somehow overlooked the second paragraph in my comment. I explicitly said the opposite of that.
I had nothing to say to that. I agree with it.
One paragraph discusses action, the other discusses philosophy. I only took issue with your regressive philosophy. I’m open to correcting misunderstandings, elaborate if you feel I continue to miss something.
The “regressive philosophy” you’re accusing me of holding is the opposite of what I said. There’s your misunderstanding to be corrected.
I don’t like the publishers, I think copyright has gone bananas with its various extensions over the years, I want to see them fought and defeated in court. The problem here is who is doing the fighting.
Imagine a scenario where there’s a ravenous man-eating bear in the woods. There’s two people available to fight it; a grizzled woodsman who makes it his entire business to go out and fight bears, and the village librarian who’s carrying around a backpack full of irreplaceable books. For some reason the librarian is out there poking the bear with a stick, and when the bear didn’t initially respond he started whacking it over the nose. Now the bear is chewing on the librarian’s leg and the librarian is crying out “oh no, my backback full of books is in danger!”
Well duh. You shouldn’t have been carrying that backpack into harm’s way like that. Nobody is in the least bit surprised that the bear attacked the librarian under those circumstances. I don’t have to be on the bear’s side to understand how this situation was going to go down and call the librarian an idiot for willingly getting into it.
The woodsman (the EFF) should have been the ones to take this fight. They’re better at it, it’s their job, and if they fail they don’t risk that precious backpack in the process. The librarian should have kept his books safely ensconced until the fight was over and it was safe for him to bring them out. If he really wanted those books distributed in the meantime, there are some sites who are already out there running around under the bear’s nose taking that risk for their own reasons; let them continue taking those risks for now. The IA’s job is to protect the archive.
Yes, let’s just completely misrepresent someone and pretend it’s a quote! That’s fun!
There are effective ways to challenge laws and to push for new rights. Loudly shouting “I don’t care about your rules, just try and stop me!” was not an effective way for IA to try and do this.
Furthermore, IA constantly misrepresenting the problem and why they were sued in all their blog posts and press shit also does not help the cause.
It’s a law in desperate need of abolishment, but this is not how you go about changing it.
This also was not an effective way for them to ensure these books would continue to be available digitally for the public. They could have quietly leaked batches of the content that only they had out to the ebook piracy groups in a staggered fashion to help obsfucate where it was coming from, then hosted a blog post telling people how to pirate ebooks and where, with a cover your ass disclaimer that everyone needs to abide by their local laws.
By any metric of success, the way they handled this set them up to lose from the start, and jeapordized one of the most important public resources in the current era. This would be understandable from some small operation of like 5 people trying to digitize shit, not from an organization as large and old as IA.
I’m not the person who said he had no sympathy, but that is why I have little sympathy about all this: They don’t deserve this outcome, I wish they had won, and I hope the law gets overturned or revised… but they absolutely should have know better that to try and do this the way they did. They fucked around and found out. This coild have ended so much worse for them.
I made my peace with that a long time ago.
You should strive to improve as a person rather than be content being a stagnant asshole
I know who I am.
you can still be an asshole, and have sympathy for the loss of accessible educational material strictly for the purposes of monetization. Unless you are one of these publishing companies, in which case you probably won’t be on the internet for very long.