Evidently not enough for libraries to abandon books from publishers.
If they had the selection and quality people were seeking, people wouldn’t be arguing to kill copyright but rather just pointing people to free equivalents. The Internet Archive would just distribute those alternatives.
When a free equivalent does exist, that is what happens. Nobody is demanding legislation to force Oracle to lower database licence prices. We just use Postgres.
I think the point the commenter was making is, why not just archive those books in that case?
Just ignore the books with authors that have released the works for monetary gain. I don't know whether or not such an archive is at all attractive to anyone? But maybe over time it might start to move the needle?
Most musicians don't make a living from their art, they work day jobs. That doesn't mean piracy is the only factor or a strong one, but it's part of the equation.
Are you kidding? It's true that few people do this in the same sense that it's true that few people publish books at all, whether they give them away freely or not.
But far more people publish books and give them away freely than publish books and offer them for money. Remember Livejournal?
"Such a system exists. You can publish a book and give it away freely.
But few do. This is book communism and fails for the same reasons as regular communism. It is in nobody’s interest to do any hard work. If you don’t reward great effort, virtually nobody provides it."
Why does open source / free software exist then?
"Nobody puts in hard word if it's not rewarded" hasnt the cURL guy been maintaining cURL/libcurl for decades and gets paid nothing?
> "Nobody puts in hard word if it's not rewarded" hasnt the cURL guy been maintaining cURL/libcurl for decades and gets paid nothing?
If you replace "nobody" with "very few people" then the statement is mostly true. The vast majority of open source software is crap. Sure, a lot of it is passion projects made by enthusiasts, and there's nothing wrong with that from an artistic hobbyist standpoint, but the quality of the software is very low.
Good and successful open source software is, in terms of numbers, rare.
Furthermore, most good FLOSS has at least some companies providing financial support, if not being almost exclusively worked on by employees of a company selling non-FLOSS software to pay the salaries of those devs.
Developers putting in hard work to write quality software for free do exist, of course, and many of them are absolute gigachads, but they're dwarfed by those actually getting paid to write software.
Indeed. But you only need one magic product to capture a market. No one's neither jumping to nor contributing to GIMP in light of all the Adobe BS, even if they should be for the betterment of all.
Open source covers a very tiny set of use cases for software. How many paid products have an open source competitor at all? How many have a credible competitor (GIMP isn’t a credible alternative to PhotoShop for the people who pay for it for example).
It is far from rendering paid software obsolete.
And not nobody. Virtually nobody. Yes open source exists. Out of the hundreds of devs I have worked with, I know one who meaningfully participates. Say 1 in 100 devs does open source. The other 99 not writing code would lead to a massive fall off in software written.
> GIMP isn’t a credible alternative to PhotoShop for the people who pay for it for example
Weird take. GIMP's been good enough for professional work for more than a decade, and lots of professionals use it. I paid for Paint Shop Pro ages ago, because it was better than Photoshop for my use cases. GIMP progressed and became better than PSP for the same. I've used it ever since. It's even been used for major motion pictures.
In the same way that software is eating the world, Free and Open Source software is eating software. Every year it does more and better. If GIMP doesn't work for your use case today, it likely will tomorrow, or the day after.
Some open source tools, like Blender, like Linux, exist at the top of their respective foodchains. Proprietary tools are working to try to compete with them.
> Some open source tools, like Blender, like Linux, exist at the top of their respective foodchains. Proprietary tools are working to try to compete with them.
> How many paid products have an open source competitor at all? How many have a credible competitor (GIMP isn’t a credible alternative to PhotoShop for the people who pay for it for example).
I'm not sure how we could figure out the numbers, but this just doesn't feel right. A lot of important and key paid products have open source alternatives. Some examples:
* Windows/macOS -> Linux
* Microsoft Office -> LibreOffice
* Adobe Illustrator -> Inkscape
* AutoCAD -> FreeCAD
* SecureCRT -> PuTTY, Urxvt, etc.
* Maya -> Blender
* ESXi -> Proxmox
* VMWare Player -> VirtualBox
Whether they're "credible" depends on the user and their use case. I'm sure there are plenty of things the paid products do better than their open source counterparts, but at the same time, there are likely plenty of users who don't need those features and are perfectly fine with the free alternative.
I don't doubt there are more closed source projects than open source, or that there is closed software with zero open source alternatives - just that the claim that open source is a tiny set of all software use cases doesn't seem right.
>> It is in nobody’s interest to do any hard work. If you don’t reward great effort, virtually nobody provides it.
> And not nobody. Virtually nobody. Yes open source exists.
In 2018, GitHub reported on their blog [0]:
> Today we reached a major milestone: 100 million repositories now live on GitHub. Powering this number is an incredible community. Together, you’re 31 million developers from nearly every country and territory in the world, collaborating across 1.1 billion contributions.
I think it's safe to say there's more than virtually nobody doing hard work in the open source world and creating gratis software.
> This is book communism and fails for the same reasons as regular communism. It is in nobody’s interest to do any hard work. If you don’t reward great effort, virtually nobody provides it.
Counterpoint that is decidedly not motivated by communism:
That isn't a counterpoint, it is exactly what OP is saying–there is already a way to give away a book for free if they author/copyright holder wants to without the IA deciding what should be free.
I think it’s pretty clear I am not saying “there outta be a way to give books away” which would be a very stupid thing for me to say.
I’m saying we should legalize the giving away of all books, but must rearrange society to ensure authors and all people still have the support the previously got from the existing system.
Engaging only with the stupid point I didn’t make is a waste of time honestly and is seriously missing the point.
>I think it’s pretty clear I am not saying “there outta be a way to give books away” which would be a very stupid thing for me to say.
Ehh.. by this thread and other comments I'm not sure it is very clear. It sounds like you are saying all books should be free.
> Engaging only with the stupid point I didn’t make is a waste of time honestly and is seriously missing the point.
I think you may be getting a little heated around some friendly discussion. You see books different than other goods–which is great–but not everyone does. We can all still converse and hopefully all grow and understand each other better. <3
> I’m saying we should legalize the giving away of all books, but must rearrange society to ensure authors and all people still have the support the previously got from the existing system.
There’s no way to implement this without taking away the freedoms of the author to choose how to distribute the fruits of his labor. Just because you think the world would be a better place if they all did that does not mean it’s an acceptable proposition.
First of all I’m not saying we should do this just because it’s what I believe. I’m saying we should all actually spend time considering the value of this proposal and make up our own minds. But I’m not looking for knee-jerk responses, there’s too much at stake. We seriously need to consider the implications of the current system which requires vast stores of information that are freely available to be removed from public access.
Second, the only way authors can have this “freedom” you argue for is through vast sweeping government-mandated restrictions on and punishments for the sharing of information. Authors can only have this freedom by taking away the freedom of would-be librarians like IA, and only with massive government interventions. My proposal eliminates the need for government intervention in markets.
And this isn’t strictly some lefty idea either. I’ve really enjoyed this talk by a libertarian capitalist lawyer at the Mises Institute arguing that intellectual property as a concept hampers capitalism. It’s full of a bunch of great arguments and since you seem to be interested in this subject I’d encourage you to check it out!
In practice, almost no author gets to choose how the fruits of their labor are distributed. Their rights are gobbled up immediately by one of the big publishers, who then dispose of their captive intellectual property as they see fit.
To the publisher, if copyright was to terminate upon death, would the publisher then pay less for the works from a 70 year old author compared to a 30 year old? Or one that is fighting cancer or one that has sky diving as a hobby?
Is the value of the work of the author to be measured against their remaining lifetime?
In most cases this isn't accurate. The author (or, more commonly, their agent) submits the book to several publishers, who either accept or reject or refer for edits. Unless you're in the top percentile of published authors, there's very little room for negotiation. It's pretty rare for an author to have more than one "accept" on a work simultaneously, many publishers frown on multiple submission precisely because it can lead to a bidding war.
The author always chooses the publisher. They might not have many (or even multiple) options, but there is no coercion and the author can choose to keep looking for a different publisher, to go with a lower-tier publisher, to publish themselves, to publish via vanity press, or not to publish at all.
Maybe the person isn't libertarian then and you just misread said libertarian undertones? I'm not sure what's the point here, he can argue for some positions that might be libertarian in isolation, without being libertarian at all.
Do you agree that humans should be free to associate with other humans for example? Does that make you a libertarian? What about cannabis prohibition?
Agreed. In a sibling comment I just shared this lecture by a libertarian capitalist at the Mises institute arguing that intellectual property restrictions hamper capitalism.
Parent is also saying that virtually nobody does it. This is not true. What I linked is one example, given away for free by an engineer at a prop trading firm and a CS professor. Similar to the linked example, we have excellent books on many technical subjects, available for free. And not because the authors are communists but because they want to share the knowledge or because it helps their broader business.
> Parent is also saying that virtually nobody does it. This is not true.
Comparing number of books released for sale vs for free, is isn't unreasonable to use the phrase "virtually nobody". I would guess less than 1% of books are released free.
> What I linked is one example, given away for free by an engineer at a prop trading firm and a CS professor. Similar to the linked example, we have excellent books on many technical subjects, available for free.
That's right. There are lots of free books and still almost all books are not free. That's okay, though. People can write a book and choose what to do with it. What IA tried to do removed that option.
Even as recent as about one decade ago, the best way to learn a programming language is often buying a book or checking out a book from the library, because that's the only high-quality source on the topic. Since then we have had people creating complete tutorials like the Rust book and distribute it on the Internet, for free.
In the US, some professors profit from selling textbooks that get updated every few years, forcing students around the around to pay hundreds of dollars to get the latest edition. (That's still the norm.) Yet we are seeing less of that in the computer science field, especially with books like Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces ( https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/OSTEP/ ) -- the professors are literally practicing communism and giving away the book for free.
> the professors are literally practicing communism and giving away the book for free
No, that's more like potlatch. "Book communism" would be if authors owned the printing presses. (Or maybe if printing press technicians owned the printing presses.)
Of all the things to juxtapose as a contrast to communism and the failures of an overbearing government mucking too
much in natural market forces you pick copyright?!
Yeah, copyright is a government enforced monopoly. Basically the definition of socialist government intervention in the free market. IA can produce copies for much cheaper, but the government doesn’t allow them to compete, because they want publishers to operate a welfare program for writers.
"One solution to this complicated problem is to require simultaneous, complete cooperation from everyone in a way that costs everybody money! This wild solution I came up with isn't workable, therefore there is no possible solution to this problem!"
You only talked about removing money from an individual or from one activity without addressing the entire rest of the system that still decides everything with money.
Why would you propose a stupid scenario that the commenter never described?
They never said nor even implied communism either. If they had an idea what the details would be, and those details mapped to something we already have a word for, they'd has used it.
“Every community owns and controls the means of production upon which they depend for their survival.”
Such a system does not exist.
Your obvious point, that individual authors can publish their work freely, does little to change the system that requires government enforced punishment for people who would copy and share information available to them. But it would be unethical to pull the rug out from under authors who depend on that system today, so as I see it the best course of action is to make that system unnecessary through community support of all people, and the only ethical way I see to create that is by community ownership of the means of production.
> If you don’t reward great effort, virtually nobody provides it.
I strongly believe this is false and nonsense. This is propaganda from people who benefit from the system that rewards owners of capital who fear community ownership of the means of production.
>This is propaganda from people who benefit from the system that rewards owners of capital who fear community ownership of the means of production.
The Capitalist System does not imply restrictions on community ownership of the means of production. And I believe you are here not trying to appeal to a system that is completely ok with community ownership, you are trying to appeal to a system that restricts or completely bans private property on the means of production.
The problems with such systems are that they always end up with Famine and Gulags - because community ownership work and managed way worse, but the government gets all the power ower the whole economy and use it to remain in the power no matter the results
