| ▲ | choo-t 16 hours ago |
| The fact that giving free access to books during a pandemic, in a format that doesn't need physical contact, when libraries were shut down or hard to access for a lot of people should have been praised, not pursued by legal action from rent seeking entities. The copyright system as a whole should by torn up. At least it give a clear signal to anyone with a ounce of moral which publisher to avoid at all cost. |
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| ▲ | rcxdude 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Copyright needs torn up or at the very least significant reform but if you're going to be skirting around the edges of it to try to do a good thing it's probably a good idea to not just straight up obviously and blatently break the letter and spirit of the law. CDL is an awkward and dubious workaround but if you drop the 'C' you're just doing copyright infringment and that would be much better left to entities like Anna's Archive. The criticism of IA in this regard is usually that it was a bad strategy, not that the goals were bad. |
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| ▲ | edgineer 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | There may be newer laws with different spirits, but I thought the original copyright spirit was "other people can't sell your work without permission" and not at all about preventing free sharing. |
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| ▲ | tptacek 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| During the pandemic, they created the "National Emergency Library", where they allowed users copies of books without caps, without any connection to holdings of the Archive itself, something that was black-letter proscribed by copyright law, and as a result they managed to sabotage the legal case for controlled digital lending too. |
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| ▲ | briandear 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| So how do authors make money? Going on concert tours? The copyright system needs reform (Mickey Mouse for example) — but the system protects creators. If there were no copyrights, no author would make any money. |
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| ▲ | WalterBright 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Put it another way - how many authors are making money off of books they wrote >10 years ago? And how many actually make a living off of writing books? The authors I know all have jobs. | |
| ▲ | HeinzStuckeIt 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | More and more authors of nonfiction today make money from a number of channels other than actual book sales. The book only serves as a promotional tool for their personal brand, and is only a collection of previously published blog posts or magazine pieces. This already started due to changing consumer behaviors and declining interest in books, so by the time piracy has come on the scene, the shift had already largely occurred. | |
| ▲ | eikenberry 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > If there were no copyrights, no author would make any money. Cory Doctorow showed that this isn't true. | | |
| ▲ | EvanAnderson 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Cory Doctorow's works that were released under more permissive licensing still reserved some rights for the author. I believe he used some flavor of a Creative Commons non-commercial license, if memory serves. Point being that the method of licensing his works was still fundamentally based on copyright. (I think the US copyright system is hugely broken and the social contract needs to be re-negotiated, but I comment here in the interests of facts, not in support of the broken system.) | |
| ▲ | criddell 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Are Cory Doctorow's newest books permissively licensed? I thought he stopped doing that. |
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| ▲ | alex1138 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I worry 'hacker' news is going to become more and more 'normie' steadily moving farther and farther away from Barlow's declaration of independence of cyberspace cypherpunk ethos It's easier to make money when you comply with The Man |
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| ▲ | zokier 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | you realize that HN has always been deeply business oriented, with it's root in the startup scene through the connection with YC? the hackers I believe is reference to pgs essay Hackers and Painters: https://paulgraham.com/hp.html | | |
| ▲ | throwanem 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yes, but from a much older coinage, as documented in (the not entirely uncontroversial) "The New Hacker's Dictionary" compiled by (the likewise) Eric Raymond: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3008/3008-h/3008-h.htm#hacke... I'm old enough to recall the term in active use, and to have received the appellation from one who'd had it likewise handed down. I regard both as epiphenomena of the Internet's frontier or "Wild West" days, of which California has proven as terminal as it was for the nominate example after the US Civil War - not wholly for dissimilar reasons, if we take Vietnam, for the Internet, as the war whose loss would spur the migration. | | |
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