I don't think I ever used or bumped into the z-library. Did they have a subscription/paying type of account? Did they have ads running?
If they made any kind of revenue from that size, which they used to fund the domains/servers/etc, and their living expenses, that would be a reasonable accusation.
Why is it that Russian citizens are the most important preservers of Western culture now? %-/
That's easy: Russia is leaning pretty hard anti-west right now, and if any of it's citizens are doing anything to annoy anything from the west, they will cheerfully let it continue so long as it doesn't cause them problems at home.
it must be comfortable to have such a simplistic view on the world
As opposed to your alternate view that is...?
I feel like its objective fact that Russia is doing whatever is can to undermine the west, considering that they are currently committing industrial sabotage in Europe on a large scale.
as if industrial sabotage was invented in Russia
Very unclear how this is related to the previous comments about why Russia would be preserving Western culture.
Because it's also part of their culture.
we should send them agile.
They were doing this from argentina, not russia.
I think the OP's comment is meant that the view everyone aligns to a "Nationstate" is simplistic.
The fact that the press release specifically mentions their russian is some kind of political doublespeak.
The true lesson here is that hackers can come from every nationality and that individuals who are trying to enlighten and enrich society will be persecuted by the powers that be. It's a story as old as history itself.
They were vacationing in Argentina, not living there.
Heavy quotes when a hacker says that i'm sure. Proper opsec in that line of work requires alot of "Vacationing". Also, your comment still completly ignores the main point; Regardless of the local, the merits of extradition here are wild. How can you charge someone for copyright law when the infridgment was never conducted in the united states?
US doctrine says that the perpetrator can be anywhere, they're getting sued near the victim. Most courts in the world have similar doctrine, as that allows suing any foreign national you can extradite to you instead of having to e.g. sue in a Chinese court.
Book piracy is an old Russian movement to evade censorship, called samizdat, and these shadow libraries have their roots in that movement. It is an anti-soviet tradition, and probably has nothing to with wanting to cause economic harm to publishers.
JRR Tolkein's publisher hired a lawyer to defend his copyright in the USSR. The case failed..
But what exactly did they want? The KGB to send Tolkein fans to the Gulag?
Probably they wanted some royalty money. If I remember right, Western nations were sending some royalty money to Russian authors who had published their work in Western nations because it would have been illegal for them to publish in the USSR. Ironically, the USSR government then tried to collect these royalties.
It's actually super uncomfortable realizing just how effective this is at destablizing things. As a network guy watching how much bad activity to my US-based servers comes from regions that are not friendly with the US right now, it's downright upsetting.
We should be all working together and not against each other. But the world is not simple, and people have complex, and sometimes selfish motivations.
I must admit it is rather comfortable to have an accurate view of the world. It's much more profitable than being enmeshed in a bunch of conspiracy theories.
I don't think it has much to do with that. Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, bootleg tapes copied from friend to friend was the only way my parents had to share banned music. After the collapse, we were priced out of Western content by a weak economy so that black market morphed into a state-tolerated industry selling pirated tapes and eventually CDs and DVDs. Any time I'd go back to visit in the last few decades, I'd buy movies, entire discographies, and video games for a few dollars a piece from market stalls and specialized stores that sold nothing but pirated content.
Ignoring foreign copyright was a survival mechanism and by this point, it's almost culturally ingrained.
I don't think it has much to do with that.
Sure it does; Russian police do nothing about credit card theft because (and to the point that) that money is ultimately coming out of Western pockets (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Chp12sEnWk).
Same as the North Koreans with their industrial-level counterfeiting of USD (to name one example), for the same reasons.
Might as well be an unofficial letter of marque.
The OP originally asked:
> Why is it that Russian citizens are the most important preservers of Western culture now?
What do credit card thieves and counterfeiters have to do with it? Are credit card thieves preservers of Western culture now?
Windows 95 bootlegging was extremely prevalent. Piracy in Russia is nothing new.
From the AP Archive -
20 years ago you could find physical bootleg markets in almost every big Asian city. Nowadays it's probably all in torrents, Telegram, etc. I think copyright stuff is only really enforced in western countries.
The Eastern European (not just Russian) book scanning scene seems to have started in the early 2000s, back before the anti-Western turn. Z-Lib is newer, from the 2010s(?), definitely predating the current meaning of Z.
If I am to guess:
- large academic population and high general education
- a tradition of collecting banned and bootlegged content, particularly Western (samizdat, magnitizdat)
- lack of resources to get things legally (e.g. university subscriptions)
- a culture of hacking and tinkering (the best known book scanning middleware, like ScanTailor and ScanKromsator and various djvu tools, comes from Russian hobbyist programmers).
Also applies to adjacent countries like Ukraine.
According to a 2016 OECD estimate, 54% of Russia's adults (25- to 64-year-olds) have attained tertiary education, giving Russia the second-highest attainment of tertiary education among 35 OECD member countries. [0]
Wonder why, was it a thing before the Soviets?
Wonder why, was it a thing before the Soviets?
Before Soviets, Russian population was largely uneducated; could not read or write. Soviets immediately started a country-wide educational campaign, Likbez: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likbez
Soviets did many things, some good and some very bad. But their push for free & universal education has been good.
I consider the wide-scale and fairly high-quality scientific education system to be the only genuine upside of Soviet communism. Admittedly, part of its success was the fact that it offered many people the only way to the middle or upper class (the Soviet Union was an extreme class society, with peasants forced to stay on their collective farms and non-Muscovites banned from settling in Moscow unless they took up professions that were currently desired by the system). Another caveat is that it was STEM-only, and excluded computer science (which the Soviet system was unconducive to for various reasons) until the 80s. The SU was particularly unwilling to teach anyone foreign languages, unless one chose (and was cleared) to work for intel.
The last statement is completely wrong; there were many avenues to study foreign languages, either for adults or children. Children could attend schools that specialized in foreign language instruction, and extracurricular classes were also available. Same went for adults that could study languages as full-time students, or attend after-work classes, or participate in a directed self-study. Private tutoring was easy to find in major metro centers. I have to mention though that the quality of foreign language education in regular schools was dismal. While in school, I participated in an after-school study group that studied Spanish under a guidance of a university professor (for free), and a part-time job that I took over the summer allowed me to pay for French tutoring. My school had an exchange program with schools in Manchester, with plenty of opportunities to become fluent in English.
Speaking of a middle class, it was not unusual that a factory worker's salary exceeded that of a high-school teacher with a university diploma.
Good point -- I was implicitly talking about serious instruction on advanced levels. There was no shortage of classes where you got to listen to French music and read some easy books; but nothing that would bring you to fluency.
An exchange program with Manchester, though? That must have been late in the 80s?
Understood, that's true, to do any serious study people had to apply to and enter a formal program, day, evening, or remote. The other option was private tutoring.
The exchange program ran in early 80s.
That would be in Moscow, correct? Because it would be unheard in a small industrial town I am from.
In St. Petersburg. Unfortunately, the whole thing went away by 1984-85. It only lasted for a few years.
In St. Petersburg
Makes sense.
Russia and most other post-Soviet countries maintained mandatory military draft, with education being one of the only non-health-related exemptions available. Because of the sad state of those armies in the 90's, 00's, and even 10's, very few young men in particular were willing to basically waste a year or so of their life, so instead nearly every male school graduate went into a university, which contributed to the statistics.
No, this is definitely a Soviet thing. The 1897 census found 79 million peasants out of 93 million, these people basically had no chance of getting a tertiary education. Only the remaining 15% and not that many of those either had even a chance.
Indeed, while the Stalinist rule was not a particularly popular one, the elderly certainly appreciated how their children became engineers, doctors and such. I mean, I heard my own grandmother saying this about my father often, she was a devout communist all her long life (96 years...) even after the Soviet Union fell apart.
Throughout the cold war, the Russians/USSR had to obtain/steal books and scientific articles from the US and its allies to keep up. This probably created the culture that copyright doesn't matter. Plus communism is about sharing with your community.
It's probably still very hard for Russians to get these materials, so the culture and will of stealing and sharing is still there.
Plus communism is about sharing with your community.
Adding on to this, my impression of Russian culture, observing both historically and today, is that Might Makes Right(tm) is a core tenet.
That is to say, if you can do it and get away with it you are justice. The two mentioned in the article clearly are (were) getting away with it, so as far as they are concerned they are right and everyone else is wrong.
Russians don't care about ink on paper unless it can literally pickup an AK-47 and shoot them.
Whole thread is wholesome, but this is pure "Wind is generated by wind generators" rationalization.
There is an amazing amount of nonsense posted on this thread. I cannot speak for all areas of science, but at least in math and physics the paper copies of most Western research journals were available in central public libraries. That flow of information was bidirectional as works published by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR were translated and published in the US and Europe. There was a considerable effort to translate English language books into Russian and publish them. I cannot vouch for all the publishers, but I know for a fact that at least MIR publisher paid royalties on sales of translated books, although I am sure they did extra printing press runs off the books, so to speak.
These days, at least before the war started... c'mon, you can't be serious.
Is it because the West has been heading full-tilt into a mish-mash of every dystopia we were ever warned about for decades?
Whatever reason Russians have to preserve humanities culture, it is entirely the West's fault that we are not looking after it ourselves. That wasn't Russia, or China; it was the yacht class and their hirelings in law, politics and media.
Ironic considering the Russian oligarchs have the most blinged out yacht fleet
Why do you think it's ironic for another highly unequal, exploitative, racist, colonialist empire to also have a yacht class?
Russia's entire GDP is less than that of New York. I highly doubt they own more stupid and planet-destroying assets than US oligarchs, or the dictators we prop up. Feel free to bring evidence of otherwise though.
Because Russian "offerings" are lacking in comparison, but they don't have access to a lot of it.
Yeah, especially films from that Andrei Tarkovsky guy. I mean, yawwwwwn, right?
Russian literature is considered part of the best in the world. As for scientific papers, I don't think they're behind either.
I don't have any data to back it up, but I've never seen as strong a reading culture as I did in my two years living in Russia and East Ukraine. Very strong cultural respect for books and the written word.
Also, zero enforcement of western copyright law, or at least that's what I've observed.
Maybe because it's not their culture, so they don't have the self-hatred many Westerns do?
There's lots of shouting about whether Russia is Western or European, but I think history shows it's really it's own thing. "Rome and Constantinople have fallen. Only Moscow remains."
Russia was(is?) an important contributor to western culture.
There are plenty of unrelated factoids thrown here in attempt to answer, but the real reason is that DIY, software, engineering, scientific communities in most of former USSR countries have been depending on freely downloaded (or $3 CD compilations) stuff because few people could afford as an example even a legal installation of Windows for a long time. Even if economic difference is not as wide as it used to be, cost of many books, subscriptions, and software tools looks prohibitively high there still. It just became so commonly accepted, and up until very recent times weren't really prosecuted, so a kind of culture emerged where any attempt to uproot this practice feels like an attack against natural rights.
If operating z library is their only "crime" I wish the couple luck and thank them for their service. Hard to say what the money laundering charges are about though
Apparently z-library received user donations and at some point used that donated money to make purchases intended to promote the carrying on of unlawful activities, probably buying hardware or services relating to the operation of z-library, which qualifies as money laundering. Even though it doesn't fit the normal conception of money laundering (hiding the source of illegal money) it still falls under the same law.
In or about and between January 2018 and November 2022, both dates being approximate and inclusive, within the Eastern District of New York and elsewhere, the defendants ANTON NAPOLSKY, also known as "Anton Napolskiy," and VALERJIA ERMAKOVA, together with others, did knowingly and intentionally conspire to conduct one or more financial transactions in and affecting interstate and foreign commerce, to wit: deposits, withdrawals and transfers of funds and monetary instruments, which transactions in fact involved the proceeds of specified unlawful activity, to wit: criminal copyright, as alleged in Count One, in violation of Title 17, United States Code, Section 506(a)(1)(A), and wire fraud, as alleged in Counts Three and Four, in violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1343 (collectively, the "Specified Unlawful Activities"), knowing that the property involved in the transactions represented the proceeds of some form of unlawful activity, with intent to promote the carrying on of the Specified Unlawful Activities, contrary to Title 18, United States Code, Section 1956(a)(l)(A)(i).
That's absolutely fucked. Literally just piling on crimes with the intent of ruining someone's life.
Ever watched The Wire?
Discussing federal prosecutions, specifically, they talk about something known in slang as “the head-shot” for federal investigators and prosecutors: finding that someone took a loan from an associate, then used that money to secure a bank loan (a mortgage, say) while misrepresenting the loaned money as their own, then later paid the money back (making it clear, in the paper trail, that it was in fact a loan).
It’s very easy to understand, easy to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, it’s fraud, and it’s a great entry to comb through the books looking for more crimes.
“Something every kid does with their parents to buy their first home”, one Baltimore cop observes.
You shouldn't get your worldview from a TV show. Such a scheme can only be used for pre-approval, to prove you can later make a down payment, not to secure an actual loan.
Yes? Exactly? How is this a correction? Doing this means misrepresenting the amount of debt you have, in order to get a loan you’d not otherwise manage to secure. It can happen on larger scales or for business purposes, too, home mortgages are just how (lots and lots of) normal people commit that particular crime.
The parts of the show I have some real-world understanding of are remarkably observant and accurate. I’m inclined to give it the benefit of the doubt for parts I’m less familiar with.
My point was simply that financial crimes, including some really common ones that often go un-prosecuted until suddenly it matters, are often components of federal cases. Piling on stuff like that, or using them for early charges to secure warrants for further investigation or to gain leverage, is fairly normal. I chose a high-quality pop culture reference to illustrate that because… that’s an effective way to communicate.
How does a temporary loan lead to approval (not a pre-approval, subject to final approval later)? What percent of kids do you estimate receive such fraudulent loans from their parents?
How does a temporary loan lead to approval (not a pre-approval, subject to final approval later)?
When it’s passed off as a gift.
What percent of kids do you estimate receive such fraudulent loans from their parents?
I dunno, but it’s pretty common. Maybe unknown in SES levels either too low (no money to loan) or too high (no fraud, because it’s actually a gift) but it’s common.
Moving the goal posts I see.
No? Seriously, what moved?
I’m entirely baffled at the pushback on this, incidentally. Do folks just really not want this to be true, for some reason?
More and more TV shows these days are realistic as FUCK And inspired by reality. The Wire Especially
What? You just report the money to the lender as a gift from parents, you can't pretend the money is yours even if you wanted to because the banks ask for years of bank statements in order to verify your income. When they see a giant injection of cash that wasn't reported they'll demand that you explain it.
Yes, you report it as a gift. If you later pay it back, you committed fraud.
[edit] to clarify what may be a point of confusion:
Rich parents are often in a position to comfortably gift their kid(s) tens of thousands of dollars for their first down payment.
Non-rich parents are more often in a position to somewhat-uncomfortably “gift” that money. It’s a gift on paper, but it’s actually a loan and they need the money back eventually (maybe for the next-oldest kid to borrow for the same purpose, lol). That’s when it’s fraud.
Definitely not.. they can’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt it was a loan originally.
You agree it’s illegal (it is) but don’t think it can be proven?
“Here are bank records showing the defendant received $5,000 dollars. Here are further records that show payments back to the person who sent the original $5,000. They occur over a span of eleven months. Eight transactions are for $500, one is for $450, and a later one is for $550, totaling $5,000. Only one month in this otherwise contiguous span—December—is skipped, with no payment occurring. Mr. [defendant], was this $5,000 in fact a loan?”
You’d have reasonable doubt?
It's amazing how much the Feds work to catch up some internet pirates. Maybe when they catch all of them, they will have time to investigate Epstein client list....
Z-lib is making Epstein clients lose money
They work to protect businesses... which explains these priorities
The CIA is pulling rank they don't want their control over those individuals on the list, built up over decades, to be burned
What they did to Aaron Swartz.
Never forget
Welcome to federal prosecution!
Z-library was literally pay for download site.
No, it wasn't. You had a daily quota of 10 free downloads per day.
As nobody reads more then 10 books each day, it was effectively free.
After the 10 downloads you'd have to pay, but get effectively unlimited access after.
That might've happened here:
http://loginzlib2vrak5zzpcocc3ouizykn6k5qecgj2tzlnab5wcbqhem...
Hard to say what the money laundering charges are about though
US federal prosecutors use a very expansive definition of “money laundering”. Basically, any financial transaction made with funds considered to be “proceeds of crime” can result in a money laundering charge. Contrary to the traditional definition of “money laundering”, there doesn’t need to be any attempt by the defendant to obscure the origin of the funds. All that is required is the defendant knew (at times in a rather loose sense of “know”) the connection between the funds and the underlying crime
Basically all money in circulation is prior proceeds of crime (and also will soon be going back to crime) and all reasonable lukewarm IQ people know this. It's such a chicken shit law.
He is actually wrong, that isn't what the law says. The reason its illegal in this instance is because their transactions related to carrying on a crime (they used user donations to pay for maintaining the site). Per the indictment they are charged under Title 18, United States Code, Section 1956(a)(1)(A)(i) which states:
(a)(1) Whoever, knowing that the property involved in a financial transaction represents the proceeds of some form of unlawful activity, conducts or attempts to conduct such a financial transaction which in fact involves the proceeds of specified unlawful activity—
(A)(i) with the intent to promote the carrying on of specified unlawful activity;
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1956
You can read the entire code but it criminalizes 2 main categories of conduct. Knowingly using the proceeds of a crime to promote the carrying on of a crime. And knowingly using the proceeds of a crime in a transaction that attempts to conceal the source of the proceeds. So even if you assume all money is the proceeds of a crime this law would not apply to you as long as you don't use it to commit any crimes yourself and you don't attempt to hide where you got it.
It's absolute bullshit because the crime (copyright violation) had not been proven at the time of the transaction, and without that, how does one know they're violating copyright vs. exercising fair use rights?
It's almost circular logic.
Like all elements of all crimes charged, it has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
>Like all elements of all crimes charged, it has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
What has to be proven?
That they got money and used it to fund the operation isn't in question.
You can read the entire code but it criminalizes 2 main categories of conduct. Knowingly using the proceeds of a crime to promote the carrying on of a crime. And knowingly using the proceeds of a crime in a transaction that attempts to conceal the source of the proceeds. So even if you assume all money is the proceeds of a crime this law would not apply to you as long as you don't use it to commit any crimes yourself and you don't attempt to hide where you got it.
I agree that the way I explained the law was less than completely accurate. But I was talking about money laundering charges as add-on charges. Your "as long as you don't use it to commit any crimes yourself" is unlikely to apply to a defendant who is getting a money laundering charge as an add-on rather than the sole charge.
Theoretically, you might commit a crime, and draw proceeds from that crime, and never use those proceeds in any way to further the commission of the underlying crime – but in practice that doesn't seem particularly likely. An enterprising prosecutor is going to come up with some explanation of how you used the proceeds to further the criminal enterprise which produced them – e.g. you used the money to buy a car, and then you went on a crime-related car trip; you used the money to buy a phone, and then you made a crime-related phone call; etc – and once the jury is convinced you are guilty of the underlying criminal conduct, they'll be primed to believe the prosecutor's explanation. Especially since the law doesn't require the prosecution to prove that you actually used the proceeds to further the criminal enterprise, only that you intended to.
'Defendant bought a new shirt, obviously with intent to impress his clients and expand the scope of his criminal enterprise.'
You're correct, but I think most reasonable people would find that statute wildly overbroad. By this logic you could charge a weed dealer who buys a bus ticket from home to downtown (where they habitually sell weed) with money laundering. Hell, you could charge them for missing the bus.
Probably for collecting donations and moving them through the SWIFT banking system.
Wouldn't this just force future operators of z-library and similar services to accept donations in crypto only, making it even harder to shut down?
I mean imagine if you took donations for some mundane fan art patreon website that ends up violating US copyright laws and you used the proceeds to buy yourself Subway sandwich and a new laptop to create copyrighted art, you are labelled a money launderer.
doesn't such draconian ruling end up driving these type of services deeper underground and closer to actual money laundering which only leads to more proliferation and opacity?
I don't think crypto wpuld help in this instance, they'd still have to turn it into fiat to do anything with it.
That's hard to trace if using monero however
Same here. If they should ever show up at my doorstep (very unlikely though) I would gladly hide them for as long as they need to.
This is laughable, there are killers, syndicate bosses, drug dealers and human traffickers out there on the run, maybe the prosecutors should get their priorities a bit in order...
Agreed. The world needs a global free library whether or not the law permits it. People deserve access to knowledge first and foremost.
I wish the publishing industry would create a flatrate model for books and magazines, I would gladly pay for it. With the current business model, digital versions are often more expensive than the printed one. Shadow libraries like z-lib, scihub or Annas Archive are just a symptom: we have a near unlimited demand for digital knowledge, but the supply logic still based on the idea of paper and scarcity.
Digital products are also worse than physical ones, because the content cartels have used DRM to trample on your first-sale rights like resale and lending. It's no coincidence that digital books are often more expensive than paper books, because the publishers have killed the second hand market.
digital books also run the risk of being censored or disappeared from your devices overnight. Another nice thing about physical books is that you don't have to worry about anyone spying on you and collecting data on what you read/when/where/how often/how quickly, etc.
Another nice thing about physical books is that you don't have to worry about anyone spying on you and collecting data on what you read
If you buy in a bookshop, for cash. If you think Amazon et al don't know your interests, I have a bridge to sell you.
If you think Amazon et al don't know your interests, I have a bridge to sell you.
If they know then they certainly don't seem to act on that information.
You've got to be kidding, right?
"Frequently bought together"
"Keep shopping for"
"Deals for you"
"Gift ideas inspired by your shopping history"
"Buy it again"
"Pick up where you left off"
"Related to items you've viewed"
"Top picks for you"
"Products from Small Businesses related to items you viewed"
"Inspired by your shopping trends"
"Recommended deals for you"
"Fashion items recommended for you"
"More items to consider in Outlet"
"Related to items you've saved"
"Tap to browse" (related to items I've viewed or purchased)
"More top picks for you" (this one specifically has books related to books I've purchased or shown interest in).
"Books that you may like" (ditto)
"Everyday essentials for you"
"Similar to your past purchases"
"Hassle free reordering"And that's just in retail...
That's the thing about surveillance capitalism. Nobody is going to tell you when they use the data they have against you. When my insurance premiums go up, my insurance company isn't going to tell me that it's because I've spent more time in drive-throughs over the last 6 months. The employer who doesn't hire me won't tell me that it's because of a political opinion I shared on facebook 12 years ago. When a store tells me that their return policy is returns within 3 days and I need a receipt, they aren't going to tell me that they told the last person who asked them the same question something very different based on the score they saw from a consumer reputation service.
The data being collected by companies is increasingly used to influence more and more of your life, but you aren't allowed to know when or why. Amazon's data could be being used to show you certain items while hiding others from you when you shop at amazon.com. It could determine what prices you pay vs your neighbors for the exact same items. It could be used to push certain content on prime. It could influence what ads you're shown. Amazon may sell your data to businesses they partner with (like “Starbucks, OfficeMax, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, J&R Electronics, Eddie Bauer and Northern Tool + Equipment.”) and they too will use that data in whatever ways they feel will benefit them.
Amazon isn't collecting and storing massive amounts of data on every facet of your life just to ignore it. They spend the money required to gather and keep that data because it is highly valuable to them in one way or another. That might mean taking more of your money from you, or that might just mean manipulating you and trying to sway your opinion, but you can be certain that they're using that data every chance they get to their own advantage and you can be certain that they aren't going to tell you when they do it.
True! Although ordering a book off amazon doesn't tell them that you bought it for you, or that you read it, or when, or how, etc. That doesn't stop Amazon from making assumptions about you that can be used against you, but the less ammo you give them the better.
Even bookstores don't always guarantee your privacy these days and libraries just keep getting worse on the privacy front. Librarians fought hard to keep the government from collecting lists of the books we check out, but they lost that fight, and now they're pushing users to use third party apps to download DRM filled digital ebooks.
Don't connect your device to the internet, and nobody is deleting your books. I sideload all my epubs from various stores and back 'em up. It's mine, not theirs.
I'd suggest using calibre or similar to make alternate copies of any digital books you buy and storing them as backups in files completely outside any device you use to read them with (especially a DRM'd device). This can get tricky with newer editions of media through devices like Amazon's kindle, but there are usually workarounds. You bought them, they are rightfully yours and fuck any "ownership" model that treats what you bought as something to be taken away from you on a bullshit legal whim.
Also, if some DRM'd digital book you've bought is truly impossible to remove from the device you're using to read it, an alternative is to just pirate a copy from certain obvious sites (cough, libgen, cough) as a backup edition in a format you fully control. Since you did indeed buy the book, also having a pirate copy is at least morally legit as far as compensating the author goes, even if it's legally shaky. Then again, many laws themselves are legally shaky, if not morally too. This applies especially to all the absurd legal contortions and false outrage practiced by proponents of the legal dumpster fire that is DRM.
That seems like the way to go honestly. Just be careful to back up your books too because just one mistake can be enough to screw you over. I have a friend who ran into that very problem. Enabled wifi just one time without thinking and all his books were deleted. There were a ton of posts about it https://old.reddit.com/r/kindle/comments/18csl9d/all_books_g...
No idea if they ever fixed that or not. My friend had to try to track down which books were even on the device and then re-obtain what he could.
Publishers are resisting tooth-and-nail a flatrate model. See previously:
"A 'Netflix of Books' would put publishing houses out of business"
Indeed, most movies make most of the money in the first few weeks of showing. Were it not for the physical limitation of having to go to a theater, much of that money won't be made.
Same with books: were it not for the need to buy a book before it shows up on libgen, or the need to have a physical book, book sales would plummet. Actually this is exactly what some of the anti-copyright activists proclaim as the goal: removing most of the need to buy a book, at least from the publisher.
Of course, there is the counter-example of music: people who pirate music also buy a lot of music, when the price is below the impulse buy threshold; see Bandcamp or Apple Music. The lack of copy protection does not incite them to pirate the same material, because they want to support their favorite bands. Those bands which did not sign up with major labels, of course, because the major labels earn and pay a significantly different amounts of money.
people who pirate music also buy a lot of music, when the price is below the impulse buy threshold; see Bandcamp or Apple Music
How do the existence of Bandcamp and Apple Music support your claim that people who pirate music also buy a lot of music?
I think he's given you examples of where music can be priced "below the impulse buy threshold".
Supporting the claim are several studies that pirates or piracy advocates are often familiar with.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/pirates-more...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/evkmz7/study-again-shows-pir...
https://corsearch.com/content-library/blog/does-piracy-impac...
It's important not to lump all 'publishers' in a single bucket here. The big 4-5 fight new models, but many outside of those are happy to try different models. See the many publishers who deliver DRM free files or work with libraries using flat rate models.
O'Reilly has had a subscription platform for technical books for a long time now. Used to be called "Safari Books Online", now it's "O'Reilly Online Learning". It's become a pretty standard benefit for public libraries and large workplaces.
There has to be aligned interest and feedback mechanisms for that to work. Otherwise there will be no reasons for publishers to not take 99% cuts for the subscription.
Most author's don't even make money from their books. Publishers take a massive chunk out of any profits they make, leaving them with barely anything.
So even if you buy the book, the author isn't really getting that much, they're probably still starving. The truth is it's the publishers that's not getting paid, and that's why all these lawsuits are happening. The political power one needs to even get someone extradited alone implies it's not just random authors banding together to sue, it's powerful rich publishers, someone with political connections. And prosecutors are going all out it seems, piling on BS charges of money laundering??
I hope the zadmins win. Maybe the ACLU can get in on this to drop the case, but they generally only take open-shut cases in their favor sadly.
That is not how publishing works. Publisher produces the book, sells to book stores, and pays royalties to the author out of their portion. The author gets 10-15% for every book sold. The whole point of going traditional publishing route is to put the risk of producing the book on the publisher. Self-published authors get bigger cut, but have to pay for editing and promotion.
There are advances where publishers give money to the author before the book is even completed. The royalties first pay off the advance before author gets royalty checks. Most authors never pay off the advance, but they don't have to pay it back.
I have an extremely hard time believing that editing and whatnot means that it's reasonable for the author to only get 15% of each sale. This is especially the case for ebooks where the marginal cost of each copy is practically zero.
For paper books, the publisher covers cover art, design, and layout. They cover promotion (although authors complain they have to do their own these days). Most importantly, it covers printing, making the physical book, and shipping it to the stores. 50% margins is pretty common for goods.
Authors get higher royalties for ebooks, 20-25%. The big part is that the Amazon wants a large cut for running the store.
I read the self-publishers get 30-35% royalties (Amazon offers 35% or 70%). But for that they need to pay in advance or do it themselves for production. And the editing can be bad on self-published books.
almost all authors have had to do their own promotion since always. philip greenspun wrote about his experience (in 01997) with how publishers 'cover promotion' in https://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/dead-trees/story.html (content warning: not safe for muslims, page contains nude photography)
The only computer book authors that I personally know are Nicholas Negroponte (Being Digital) and Michael Dertouzos (What Will Be). When these books were new, they were in a big stack at the front of every bookstore in the United States. The authors were interviewed on the radio, on TV, in magazines and in newspapers. Any American who might conceivably have wanted to read either book would have been forced to at least look at the cover.
So I waited by the phone. Nobody called.
I went into Wordsworth, the bookstore in Harvard Square with the biggest nerd book collection. They carry every “how to program HTML” book ever written. They carry a bunch of Web/database titles by authors who don’t know SQL. My friends would go into the store and say “I’ve heard great things about this Greenspun Database Backed Web Site book. Do you have it?” No. “Is it on order?” No. “Can you order it?” Yes, with payment in advance.
My friends at MIT Press had ordered 50 copies for their little bookstore and wanted me to come in and sign them. A signing! Just like real authors. So I went down there every day. No books. MIT Press had ordered their books a month before publication date to be sure that they had it as early as possible. Two months later: no books. The store manager had sent Macmillan a couple of FAXes and made three phone calls. Finally, Macmillan answered “Oh yes, we decided that you’re too small for us to deal with. You’ll have to get the books from a distributor.”
My worst humiliation was in New York City (whose isn’t?). Here’s how I described it to my brother:
I was walking down Columbus Avenue with my friend Bobby. His literary agent also represents Saul Bellow. Despite his credentials as a serious novelist, he loved the copy of my book that I’d given him and, as we walked by what is allegedly the largest Barnes & Noble ever (across from Lincoln Center in Manhattan), Bobby said “Philip, let’s see how B&N is presenting your book. I’m sure it is going to be huge, not like literary fiction.”
[Background: last time Bobby had a book at B&N it was on their 10 best sellers list and copies filled an entire front window.]
In the computer section, they had a table out front with a bunch of Internet books for people who couldn’t figure out what those nine buttons at the top of the Netscape browser do. They had a massive “for Dummies” section behind the table. Behind the “for Dummies” section was an even larger “how to program HTML” section.
They had a big Web site design area with Dave Siegel’s book. Right underneath was a two-shelf Web/Database design area. They had a big stack of IDG’s “Creating Cool Web Databases” (the book I kept on my coffee table as a joke), presented cover out. They had some better books. They did not have my book.
Nearby, Barnes & Noble also had a big database section. It did not contain my book.
We asked the clerk. He looked up the book in the computer. “Ah yes, we have one copy. It is in the network section.” So we walked across an aisle to a completely non-Web non-Internet non-database area of the bookstore. There, among books describing the TCP/IP protocol (something you don’t need to know about unless you are writing your own copy of Unix or Windows NT from scratch), was one copy of my book. Spined.
If a person walked into that store knowing that he wanted to build a database-backed Web site, he would have never come within 20 feet of my book. I don’t know if Barnes & Noble uses a central computer system but, if they do, I imagine that all 700 copies they ordered are in the wrong place.
My brother promptly wrote me back that he’d gone into a Barnes & Noble in Washington, D.C. and found my book in the network section there as well. I stopped going into bookstores.
When the dead trees world lets you down, you can always turn to the Web, no? So I visited the The Macmillan Computer Publishing Web Site and clicked on “what’s hot”. My book apparently wasn’t. But they did have a nice banner ad for Scientology: “with Scientology technology you could understand the purpose of life and through understanding, achieve the goals you set out.” Using the search engine, I managed to find a generic page for my book. There was no link to my Web site, no sample chapter, no scan of the cover, no blurbs from the inside cover, no author biography (just to list a few of the things that were actually in Macmillan’s possession). This was on July 4th, almost three months after my book was completed.
I’d talked to Macmillan earlier about them running some advertisements for the book. They said “typically, if a book is selling well after a few months then we think about running ads.” This plays into my theory that publishers don’t read books. It is easier to hire 10 losers to write 10 books on the same topic and pay them each $10,000. Then they dump all of these books into the bookstores and let the public sort it out. After a few months, their inventory computer shows them which of the 10 books is selling best and they get behind that one. Wouldn’t we all be better off if the publisher paid a skilled writer $50,000 to do a good Perl/CGI book and then actively pushed it?
Anyway, Macmillan apparently puts almost all of its efforts into schmoozing bookstore buyers and cooperative advertising with retailers. So the chance that an author would see an ad for his own book is minimal.
One thing that worked great in the case of my book was sending out promotional copies. We shipped out 100 three weeks after the book was printed. Almost everybody read it. Almost everybody who read it loved it. Almost everybody who loved it recommended it to several friends. Almost everybody who recommended it to friends also wrote a reader review at amazon.com (more about that below).
that was pretty much my experience with getting greenspun's book too in 01997. i went to my local bookstore, which had a really extensive and excellent computer books section. they didn't have it, but they did buy it from their distributor for me, and when it arrived, i went to the bookstore to pick it up. i don't remember if i had to pay in advance; i don't think so. so greenspun probably wasn't exaggerating at all
as for self-publishers, canonically they don't get royalties, they just get printed books from the printer. then it's up to them to sell the books
Thank you that was enlightening, and thanks for the heads up too about the images
glad you enjoyed it!
the reason authors take that deal is the advance; they can pay the bills with the advance while they're writing the book, and in effect the publisher is assuming the risk that the book flops (as almost all books do), in exchange for almost all of the profits if the book blows up. because publishers have more money than authors, they can afford to take on more risk
last time I checked, VCs also worked this way and didn't take 80% of your company
no? how much was your dilution before your first liquidity event? possibly you haven't done a startup at all and so you don't know about liquidation preferences; a down round normally means vcs take 100% of your company
Looks like many authors don't get more than 5% for paperbacks, and at times authors might have to fight to get paid what they're owed.
https://authorsguild.org/news/authors-guild-files-suit-again...
https://bookriot.com/disney-must-pay-task-force/
https://lunch.publishersmarketplace.com/2021/04/authors-accu...
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/author-loses-fight-for-unpaid-...
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/ip-law/authors-sues-two-predat...
https://www.thebookseller.com/news/cengage-faces-fresh-lawsu...
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p...
https://writerbeware.blog/2022/08/26/complaints-and-changes-...
The music industry has a similar problem where artists often have to resort to courts to see money that they're owed.
Everyone has to resort to the courts to see money they're owed, sadly. Wage theft is practically routine; so are do-nothing landlords.
Landlords assume the financial responsibility of mortgage payments, property taxes, and maintenance. These are non-trivial costs which the tenant is often not able to pay themselves. It's also far more convenient for transient people to rent a home than to buy.
It's easy to shit on a landlord for collecting rent every month. I've never enjoyed writing that check. But the fact is that many people, likely including yourself, would never be able to acquire housing if you weren't able to rent it from somebody else.
the fact is that many people, likely including yourself, would never be able to acquire housing if you weren't able to rent it from somebody else.
Mostly because they've made it illegal to build the kind of houses they're renting out.
Landlords, especially small-scale private landlords, enjoy many unearned tax breaks while often routinely flouting the law, on top of fundamentally gaining most of their wealth from laws that unfairly privilege those who were fortunate enough to be born earlier. I don't begrudge anyone an honest day's pay for an honest day's work, but landlords aren't that.
the author in theory gets royalties for every book sold (though usually not that high), but almost all books do get an advance, and as you point out, the royalties are so small that almost no books ever 'earn out' of the advance. so almost no authors actually get royalties for every book sold. they do get the copyright, though
Maybe for books, but for scientific journals, the sort of stuff on sci-hub, authors get nothing. And of course they rely on volunteers for technical review. All publishers bring to the table is branding/reputation.
Freeing literature and knowledge is no excuse for violating federal copyright laws
What if those laws hold back the society at large?
There is no evidence that the availibilty of Tor decreases sales in the works themselves. Quite the contrary, while i don't use z library specifically, i often use the open librarys to speed read through certain sections before i decide to buy the print, or through kindle just because the experience is that much better.
The powers that be offer us a contract where all our data is open and available for selling, training, marketing and general manipulation but yet when someone maintains a decentralized directory of books they get punished by the full extent of the law.
In this particular case, the United States can't even provide a list of copyrights that are being violated and the judge was removed for collusion. This is where my taxpayer dollars are going?...
There is no evidence that the availibilty of Tor decreases sales in the works themselves. Quite the contrary, while i don't use z library specifically, i often use the open librarys to speed read through certain sections before i decide to buy the print, or through kindle just because the experience is that much better.
Seriously.
If you're an author, do you know how much it costs to have your book distributed, for free, via NetGalley? The answer is anywhere from $700 to $1500.
It costs anywhere from $1500 to $6000 to have an "Open Access" scientific paper published.
As an author, I love to see my stuff available on free platforms. To me, there's no downside. I've even paid open access fees out of pocket.
It costs anywhere from $1500 to $6000 to have an "Open Access" scientific paper published.
Of course it doesn't. It costs just as much for you to publish any material as it cost you to publish this comment. If you need to pay up to $6000 in industry bribes for some career reason, that's some cost. But it isn't a cost of publishing.
If you're an academic, or want to be taken seriously by other academics (eg you're a self-educated expert) you want to be published in a journal because citations that link back to your blog will get you tagged as a crank - perhaps fairly, perhaps not. If your target audience is open-minded you can compromise by publishing on Arxiv.org or a similar site, but a lot of people will reflexively dismiss your work because it hasn't been through the peer review process.
The idea of peer review is a very sensible one. But (much like search engines) the process can be gamed by unethical actors; and where scarcity (of academic prestige) is enforced, rent-seekers invariably follow. Peer-reviewed journals charge a lot of money to submittants, but they generally don't pay the reviewers any of that. The money mostly goes into 'editing' - which is a little bit of curation and mostly proofreading - and administrative costs.
If you're an academic, or want to be taken seriously by other academics
Ie, industry bribes (or call it levies) to benefit one's career. Rent-seeking, as you put it.
We have all the tools to move on from that. Many sectors already have. Public discourse and free debate is enough of peer review for any idea of enough importance, in my opinion. Especially considering that the public today is almost everyone in the world, including very special interests.
As an author of two technical books, it cost me $0 to distribute because that was the publisher's job.
I got paid a pittance for the amount of time put into the works. I wouldn't have seen any more or less if someone pirated the books.
To add to this, I pirate books to see if it’s worth me buying the physical copy.
How is it even a violation if it's outside the US? Argentina is an independent country. US laws do not apply there.
I'm sure the random person violates a number of laws of Iran and/or other autocratic countries with one's online comments. Should these countries serve up extradition papers for them?
You seem to already know what an extradition treaty is, so why is this even a question?
What I'm saying is that there was no law of the US that was even violated within the jurisdiction of the US. This is different from incidents of hacking where US assets get attacked. As such, the I.P. charges seem entirely baseless to me.
The extradition treaty applies only if a crime is actually committed in a jurisdiction where it is a crime. I do not see this here.
Countries have treaties with each other to recognize and protect each other's copyrights.
There are many international intellectual property agreements which effectively make one country's copyright laws apply in another country. For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement
While I agree many copyright laws are broken in many ways, this sort of agreement is also what makes the GPL of source code copyright holders enforceable in other countries.
Chinese GPL violators were a big deal in 3D printing a few years ago, with many companies not releasing their 3D printer firmware source based off the Marlin GPL software.
It's been a while since I followed that but it's apparently got real legal precedent now, with a Chinese court fining a local GPL violator: https://segmentfault.com/a/1190000040661920/en
Generally if your victims are in a country, other (friendly) countries will arrest and extradite you if the crime is serious enough to justify the effort. There is no "world police" that forbid countries from prosecuting crimes committed outside their borders. A lot of it boils down to how friendly the two countries are with each other, and how serious they view the crime.
you are being downvoted because you are implying that US copyright laws is moral and just, it is not.
it extracts rent at the behest of those few that makes bulk of the profits not the actual creators who doesn't want peoples lives ruined for simply consuming their content from everyone that seeks privilege for something by on its own cannot place any sort of control on the viewer.
its only because the threat of violence and draconian enforcers who think someone sharing an episode simpsons is a national security threat that we "respect" US copyright laws.
It's nothing short of digital colonialism
ex) Megaupload was raided by tier 1 new zealand special forcese at the behest of President Biden and the MPAA lobby that put him in power in direct violation of NZ's sovereignty
My university attending friend who is financially affluent wishes to know where people are downloading z library books now?
He is a law abiding stand up dude who pays for music and wants to write a thesis paper on z library and absolutely does not wish to download these books.
( He is also asking if there is any anime/manga books as he is an Asian American History major )
Z-Library is still up, there's a reddit wiki page titled "How to access Zlibrary" they keep updated with details.
Annas Archive, since a long time.
Anton Napolsky and Valeriia Ermakova have done humanity a great service and I sincerely thank them for it. They are true heroes. I hope they remain safe and out of reach from the deranged laws and the "justice" circuses that are US courts and their jesters.
For anyone wishing to engage in a public good that upsets a well-funded US industry (like sharing books, building emulators or compatibility software, fan games, etc), please consider hosting your project on Tor from the start.
If evil can flourish on Tor without prosecution, then so should the good.
Yeah. They took all the hard work Library Genesis did. And started selling access to the files.
Interesting story, but I'm left wondering what happened to the Toyota Corolla.
Wow it must be really hard to be on the run like this. They can't have much money, I'm sure the few donations they get aren't lasting long and they had all the lawyers to pay for too. I hope they have made it to Russia.
While this service is somehow piracy it also highlights the huge gap of public libraries in the digital age, and they specialise specifically in scientific works which are often overpriced by publishers as far as i understand.
I support Zlibrary.
For those curious, here's some info about the U.S. case: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/65760207/united-states-...
This seems to be the indictment: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/65760207/14/united-stat...
This is the motion to dismiss (filed July 12th 2023): https://torrentfreak.com/images/momodismiss.pdf
And this is the prosecution's response (filed August 14th 2023): https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/65760207/17/united-stat...
Apparently the defense filed a reply to the response on September 11th 2023, but I can't find it without having to pay for it.
There doesn't seem to be any additional information, it doesn't seem like there's been a hearing on the motion.
I am so embarrassed of my fascist government that it is becoming intolerable.
Maybe OpenAI should pay for their lawyer.
Correct move, admins.
never used z-library ? but is it better than lib-gen ?
also it seems z-library requires an account for downloads ?
The U.S. fed spends more money and political capital going after open libraries than the numerous and destructive violent offenders. Federal corruption is now so common it's a base expectation of life. That's how we know cyberpunk isn't fiction.
Good admins. Now they need to get to Ecuador.
No one deserves the dehumanizing hell that is a US prison simply for making copies of information available.
God speed to the admins, and may justice prevail so they go free.
Z-library is (still) available via a Tor link which can be found via a google search or reddit.
Five ebook downloads a day and if you want to do more you need to donate via crypto which increases your download cap depending how much you donate.
No ads or subscriptions.
That doesn't really sound like a donation. That sounds like paying for a service. Unless that donation is going to some third party charity?
They describe it as a donation, but I think your description is more accurate. It doesn't go to charity.
This is a legal semantic argument so you're right; but giving books away for free is of far greater charitable value than most legal charities.
I think the eventual historical lesson we will learn 100 years in the future is that "Intellectual property" is not real.
I don't think the authors of the books would agree. Of course intellectual property is not real, but it's no less real than "property" of any kind, so if you don't object to the idea of property rights, it's not clear to me why people who create digital products are less worthy of economic protection than those who create physical ones.
Because lighting your candle from mine doesn't diminish my candle's brightness.
We grant limited monopolies on created works to incentivize the creation of the works, but that's it. There's no deeper moral grounding. Words you put out into the world don't belong to you anymore; they created impressions in the minds of other people and those impressions belong to those other people, by natural right.
You're right that it's just as sound a property right as every other, but it's one that cuts remarkably against the grain of the underlying natural rights (for a specific perceived societal benefit), and it should always be evaluated as such.
Every generation should be asking "Does the current copyright regime create more good than harm?" And every generation should correct if the answer is 'no.'
So are you saying authors don't deserve any compensation for their work unless they produce books in physical form?
They absolutely deserve compensation, just not nearly as much as they think they do.
I believe most authors do not earn out their advance of $5k - $10k. I'm not sure how long it takes to write a book, but I'd be willing to be that ends up being less than minimum wage. If you enjoy reading, but don't think they deserve even that amount, well...
I think they shouldn't be attached to that old business model in a world where self-publishing is possible.
I also think generous UBI should exist, but I guess that's another issue.
And that's the thing. One could make the case that in a world of UBI, copyright diminishes in relevance. If the intent of copyright is to allow people to use capitalism to create wealth via their words so that they can live a "life of the mind" and pursue grand ideas... If UBI gets us the same goal then that does something to the good/harm balance of the temporary monopoly on ideas.
The key point is remembering that copyright isn't some divine right stemming from the muses blessing the author with their own exclusively-owned words; it's a right societies fabricate because we believe it will incentivize people to build new knowledge that eventually benefits everyone. It's that incentivization that's the goal.
I think we probably agree with each other. Even with UBI, I do think it makes sense to have some degree of copyright. Just to allow creatives room to breath and tell stories they want to tell without their narratives by more popular forks. That argument is a different issue altogether, though, I think, and we are nowhere near being in a context where we need to figure it out.
I do think UBI should be a minimum, and people should still receive compensation for work they produce that people enjoy. Just not exclusive rights and perpetual royalties and all this nonsense.
That's a pretty good argument against copyright. Is it really worth losing the cultural intellectual commons so that the average author (nearly all authors, in fact) can make well below minimum wage? I'm unconvinced about that being a societally beneficial trade-off.
Is the amount that they deserve a function of the medium of the work?
I'm sure someone great at math could come up with a function. Although I'd think it's more to do with the popularity and amount of times a work is consumed, while accounting for people consuming it for free.
So you are saying people don’t deserve the right to build on public ideas without, ultimately, having armed men use violence to take money from them or forbidding them altogether?
Because remember when you say an author “deserves” to be paid you are saying the state should use its monopoly on violence to make that happen.
Perhaps it’s best not to use straw men and loaded terms designed to emotionally appeal to five year olds when discussing enclosure of the intellectual commons?
Yes, that's how property rights - and in fact all rights afforded through civilized society - are enforced. If you have a problem with that take it up with literally the entirety of recorded human history.
For the vast majority of recorded human history there was no copyright. We have records of Roman senators semi-complaining about how rude an acquaintance who wouldn't let them copy their book (not a book they had written, a book they had come into possession of a copy of) was.
Yes, I was referring to the OP's quote about armed men enforcing the law, not copyright.
Armed men have never enforced that everyone gets what they deserve. Not even close. They enforce those laws that we have decided they should. It's a huge leap from saying that someone deserves something to saying that society's armed men should take that something from other people and give it to them.
That is an hilariously authoritarian view and wrong to boot.
You are confusing rights that are created by the threat of violence, such as copyright, and rights that are protected by the threat of violence, such as the right to not be killed for no reason.
Needless to say there is no inherent right for an author to profit from copyright. It is a wholly constructed right. They do not "deserve" it. Perhaps a society chooses to organize itself that way and perhaps it doesn't. On the other hand, innocent people really do deserve to not get murdered.
Am I understanding correctly that your position is that the enforcement of property rights is authoritarian? Or is your position that copyright is not a form of property rights, and thus authoritarian?
Value and labor are divorced from each other in this world.
I don't much care to get into who deserves what when we're talking about a property right constructed to create general societal benefit. I will instead observe that you haven't gone after anybody at Hacker News for the money they're not paying you to write comments.
Do you think you deserve compensation for these writings? Why not?
Literally everyone from the richest of commercial interests to the kumbaya-est of libre interests will disagree.
And in the context of natural rights, they'd be wrong.
Natural rights are fairly easily thumbnail-sketched by "What are your rights if you're on a desert island?" Out of the context of any preexisting society, what rights would you have?
On a desert island, if I find some words scrawled ten feet high on a cliffside, I may do with the ideas in those words what I will: copy them, change them 'round, claim they came from me, claim they came from god. Similarly if I hear some mountain hermit shouting them from their cave. The natural rights as apply to ideas are very, very liberal. We in modern societies (and only recently) have taken up the experiment of constraining those rights with temporarily and contextual monopolies to incentivize creation of more ideas via property law. This works, but in a clunky, hackish way; it is a strange kind of "theft" that leaves us with more of something than when we started.
And like all good wild hacks, it deserves to be considered for refactoring frequently.
I agree, though with one semantic nitpick:
The digital nature of a work doesn't matter. It says right there on the tin, intellectual property; a la any work ("property") that is a product of human intellect.
Actually I agree with you, but I refer to the digital aspect because people don't seem to have any difficulties understanding why its problematic to steal physical books.
Which contains its own irony, as the trees providing the primary material the physical books are made from would probably have a thing or two to say about the notion of being stolen from.
I don't see any irony in it since trees don't have brains or opinions as far as we know, but when they decide to say something about it I'll definitely be sure to listen. Short of that though, I'm generally not opposed to the production of paper.
Sure, if ones moral definition of the universe is that only things which can speak human language are of importance or validity.
If you believe that paper is immoral then you're entitled to that opinion, but you haven't presented any reasoning to justify that belief.
It's scientifically known that plants respond to stimuli such as being injured, namely to communicate that fact to others of its species in the vicinity.
For an example I'm sure most people can relate to, you probably know that "cut grass smell" when you mow your lawn? That's the grass throwing out chemical signals telling other grass "Hey! Something cut me down! Be warned!".
While whether this can count as intelligence or sentience is worthy of further debate, to say that trees don't feel anything is a gross mistake.
All living things respond to stimuli, even some non-living things respond to stimuli (like viruses or crystals) so I don't see "response to stimuli" as sufficient evidence that plants suffer pain.
Actually, I'm not categorically opposed to the notion, but I think you need to bring a lot to the table to explain why things without nervous systems feel pain. If the default assumption is that all complex systems feel pain then I wonder if you think things like jetstreams, economies and the internet feels pain.
So is it immoral to cut grass?
Note that I didn't say they feel pain, just that they can feel what is done to them by the environment around them and respond appropriately.
The fact trees don't speak human plays a big role in us not understanding them, but they do clearly feel and express things whatever they may be.
Considering most of it is done for purely aesthetic purposes to satisfy human egos, arguably yes.
Note that whether it's moral or not is tangent to whether it can be done or not. We humans do plenty of immoral things without a care in the world.
Well, I never said "they feel nothing", but if you're saying plants have a right to life because they feel "something" I'm wondering where you draw the line. If you're something of a panpsychist I'm actually ok with these conclusions in terms of metaphysical consistency.
You mean sentience? Of course that's where moral value begins. Almost everyone holds that position.
And people who say they don't almost always are roleplaying that they don't for the sake of argument and can be immediately exposed as holding a contradiction in their values with the most basic pressure/consistency tests.
Your belongings aren't sentient and I'm sure that if they were to be wiped out almost everyone would hold the position that they couldn't be bothered to care.
That's not a comparable argument because your belongings have a material effect on at least one sentient entity.
Instead what if you were given the power to expunge everything in the universe outside of our solar system. Would that be acceptable?
That's not a comparable argument because you haven't been properly compensated as authors of the printed word are. If you received a dime for every snuffed-out star, would it then be acceptable?
Of course if you were to argue that downsizing the universe represents an intangible loss to humanity as a whole, we are have returned to ground zero in which it is ironic that exterminating trees provides a net benefit to humanity.
As an author of books, I can tell you this just prevents me and other authors from creating new books.
I dare you to take the same position about not paying workers for any other career. Who pays you? Should they be able to take your work without paying you or your company?
Everyone deserves to get paid for their work. Once.
Past that requires a bargain with the public.
The bargain was that the public would yield their rights for 14 years, for works that promoted the progress of science and the useful arts. The public could gift another 14 years to the creator.
The bargain has been altered. Prayers to not alter it further are never answered.
More and more years have been taken from public - almost entirely without the public's consent, typically as quietly as possible and always in response to piles of campaign cash from massive IP interests.
And if it were creators that were the ~sole (or even primary) beneficiaries of purchased and ever-ratcheting copyright extensions, maybe the public would be willing to forgive the immoral methods used to arrive here.
But creators didn't buy modern IP laws and most of that wealth is not flowing into creator's pockets. If we're looking for bad behavior to be angry at, there are a lot of deserving recipients.
I'd even argue that some blame should go to creators that remained silent while corrupt copyright laws were purchased in their names.
Interesting way to look at it. If you write a piece of software should you only get a single sale and then it be free for use by the entire world?
Proponents of free software would agree. In addition, from the programmer's point of view this is usually how things work (unless they own the startup, the equivalent of self-publishing). And for most products that actively gain new users, there is continuous work being put into adding new features and maintenance. So in my mind, this is not a perfect analogy.
I'll restore the context you omitted.
After I write code, my client pays me as agreed and I have received 100% of what I am entitled to. That's how labor and wages work.Someone else can write the same code and sell that labor to their clients and get the same result. This is good and holy and what is right with the world.
If I want to write code and deny every other person possible their right to develop and deploy that tool - Ok, well, there's a good chance I can't.
But say I work all that out. If I want to force the public to gift me the protection I get - by denying the public their natural right - I have to enter into a bargain with the public.As far as it relies on purchased copyright law, it will be a corrupt bargain. But the bargain does have to exist.
What does "once" mean here? Book sellers use a business model where the cost of creation is split between all of the purchasers. If "once" means that piracy can begin after the first sale, well, that first sale is going to cost a fortune or the book won't be created.
Let's go back to the goalposts.
You asked about not paying workers for any other career. They work once, they get paid once. That's the nature of labor.
If you're now asking about onerous agreements within some purposefully convoluted industry then you are remolding the question into a wholly different scope and at that point we have moved on.
Having moved on, we can consider the question about paying workers closed. It's been a pleasure.
So public libraries have prevented people from writing books for millennia? They've always offered free access to books.
Personally I use these services like a public library too. I buy most of the books I'm sure I want but I use public libraries and download sites alike to explore more. Once I actually dive into a book I buy it but many I don't.
Of course this depends on a honour system as you could easily download everything. But books are cheap for the amount of time you spend on them and it's a nice thing to buy.
Note: for technical books that equation can be very different and I could be more likely to download yes. Though i don't usually consume technical content in book form anyway. I tend to explore by doing and learning as I go.
Uh.... public libraries pay for their books. Then they share them with taxpayers who fund them. You may see this as "free", but your tax dollars are actually compensating the authors.
I am not impressed by the quality of literature I get from people who are purely fiscally motivated.
But somehow I feel like you're here to argue for the right to pay nothing for the labor of these people.
If it sucks so much, why do you care if they lock it with DRM?
If this were the beginning and end of the issue, you'd be arguing from a strong position. However, holding up theoretical harms by Z-Library (*=lost sale) while omitting the actual, massive and continual harm done against creators (against everyone really) by predatory publishers - it's cursing the puddle while ignoring the tsunami.
Predatory publishers? Please. Self publishing has never been easier. Authors can keep 100% of the revenues if they choose. The fact that they willfully sign away large percentages just reflects the reality that printing, design, editing, distribution and sales are expensive.
Or if you buy a legit version, some of the money will actually go to the people responsible for producing the work. This will allow them to eat and produce more art.
Sending money to the pirates, though, will only produce more piracy.
Actually, pirates consistently spend the most on content. Go figure.
I have seen this claim many times, but I have never seen anyone produce evidence to back it up.
Why do you believe that what you wrote is true?
Because I've seen this claim many times over more than a decade, and have seen evidence multiple times. I've also been able to search for it when I was curious and find it without issue.
Here's the first search result, a Vice article from 2018: https://www.vice.com/en/article/evkmz7/study-again-shows-pir...
Or you can identify the actual creator/s, send them all the money, and let the money grubbing middlemen wither on the vine.
Run the numbers on how much money you've given the publishing industry and the entertainment industries in your lifetime. I did this; I'm not giving them a red cent more. A surprising number of authors and artists have bitcoin, nearly all have some web presence and means of donating. Be generous pirates.
As a gatekeeping entity that barricades taxpayer-funded docs behind paywalls (from the taxpayers who funded their creation), the thing Elsevier produces is unethical rent-seeking behavior.
Until meaningfully ethical alternatives emerge, folks work with what they got.
I agree, but this is common. Look at EFF 'donations' at conferences, for example, where they are just selling a product for a set price and call it a donation.
Library Genesis has no limitations.