Comment on Internet Archive forced to remove 500,000 books after publishers’ court win

• stembolts@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  “Because what is legal is always right.
  And what is right is always legal.”

  No?

  In a fascist state, your mindset is welcome, “Well they broke the rule, they must pay,” but do you never abstract one more level? Is the rule itself breaking something?

  Those who downvote you say yes. Nuance is important. The rule has two main affects that I see.

  1. Direct effect (the goal) :Publishers maintain a monopoly on bookselling low value books, the structure of their business preventing any competition.

  Okay lets think about #1. Is that good or bad?

  2. Indirect effect : the members of that society now have a restricted access to knowledge.

  Okay lets think about #2. Is that good or bad?

  Being critical in thought enough to recognize the flaws of the first quote is key.

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  • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This isn’t about right or wrong though. It’s explicitly about whether or not they broke the law.

    They did. They did so loudly and proudly. This is why we are here, where they lost the legal battle.

    If someone is pointing a gun at you with their finger on the trigger, and you say “Just try to shoot me! I dare you! You know you won’t you little chickenshit.” then you should have a pretty good expectation to get shot.

    Everything else is valid, but significantly less important. IA has to operate in the rules that currently exist, not what the rules should be. There are better ways to get bad laws changed than to dare someone to find you guilty of them.

    Maybe this case will be the first building block towards overturning the asinine digital lending laws. I would love if it was, but I’m not holding my breath.

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    • stembolts@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It would be more accurate if you said, “This is not about right and wrong (for me).”

      If you say it’s not about right and wrong, dead stop, then you are pledging full faith to the institutions, the very ones we are critiquing.

      Basically, you are dismissing my opinion as misguided, dismissing me as missing the point and I am telling you it was expressed exactly as intended.

      In short, you are arguing on the wrong conceptual meta-level for me to respond without dismissing my own claim. If I take as True that “this isn’t about right and wrong” (it is), then I am setting aside the power I have in a democratic society to say, “Fuck this I’m changing it.” Maybe we’ve just been stuck in gridlock politics, with a ruling class that strips and monetizes every aspect of humanity that the society today doesn’t realize the power citizens wield.

      Not sure. Been fun to think and share thoughts with you though. Thanks for your time and have a nice night.

      An impasse is a perfectly acceptable outcome on a sane platform like Lemmy.

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