"You're not wrong. You're just an asshole."
I made my peace with that a long time ago.
Comment on Internet Archive forced to remove 500,000 books after publishers’ court win
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 1 week agoJust want to let you know why you’re being downvoted. It’s not because you’re wrong. From a legal perspective you’re right. This court case was decided this way because you’re right.
But that last line about having no sympathy. There’s a meme for this.
“You’re not wrong. You’re just an asshole.”
Nougat@fedia.io 1 week ago
Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
You should strive to improve as as person rather than be a stagnant asshole
Nougat@fedia.io 1 week ago
I know who I am.
otp@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
But you should know who you could grow to be.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
you can still be an asshole, and have sympathy for the loss of accessible educational material strictly for the purposes of monetization. Unless you are one of these publishing companies, in which case you probably won’t be on the internet for very long.
fin@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Isn’t it “asshole” to consume copyrighted works for free?
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
Not for over half a century, once Disney lobbied the US federal government to extend temporary monopolies to egregious lengths. The point of intellectual property rights is to build a robust public domain, so every year of every extension is a year denied to the public.
This has been forgotten or ignored by the ownership class with Sony and Nintendo prosecuting use and public archival abandonware games the way Disney goes after nursery murals.
So no, we would be better off with no IP laws all than the current laws we have, and the ownership class routinely screw artists, developers and technicians for their cut of their share of the profits in what is known as Hollywood Accounting. And the record labels will cheat any artist or performer who doesn’t have a Hammerhead Lawyer (or bigger) to ensure their contract is kosher.
So no. Come with me to Barbary; we’ll ply there up and down. 🏴☠️
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Preach brotha, PREACH!!!
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 1 week ago
No. Here, let me introduce you to things like libraries, and education.
And, again, he’s not an asshole for being right. He’s an asshole for having no sympathy for the loss of what should have been an archival giant.
halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 1 week ago
That depends on if you see the current copyright system as far to start with. The current system is a far cry from how it was created and was co-opted by companies like Disney to maintain monopolies on their IP for MUCH longer than the system was supposed to protect.
MossyFeathers@pawb.social 1 week ago
This. If I’m not mistaken, the system was meant to operate like a hybrid between patents and trademarks. Iirc, things weren’t originally under copyright by default and you had to regularly renew your copyright in order to keep it. Most of the media in the public domain is a result of companies failing to properly claim or renew copyright before the laws were changed. My understanding is that the reason for this was because the intent was to protect you from having your IP stolen while it was profitable to you, but then release said IP into the public domain once it was no longer profitable (aka wasn’t worth renewing copyright on).
Then corpos spent a lot of money rewriting the system and now practically everything even remotely creative is under copyright that’s effectively indefinite.
halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 1 week ago
It wasn’t just “the corpos”, you can basically tie changes to the copyright system back to Disney trying to maintain a strangle hold on their fucking mouse.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 1 week ago
“With 3 simple circles, I dominate the planet!” ~ERB’s depiction of Walt Disney.
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
As a published (if hilariously unsuccessful) author; no, no it isn’t.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
I have talked to a few published authors (most unsuccessful) and listened to a few successful published authors, and they all say the same as you. Some of them (esp. successful) give away free books on their website. They just want people to read their books.
The ones complaining here aren’t the authors, but the publishers.
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Yeah, even the big names tend to not care much as long as nobody else is profiting off of their work. Agents and publishers, they tend to get right snippy about piracy lol.
Mind you, there is a segment of working authors that do suffer in their ability to go from a part time, almost hobbyist situation into a proper career of it. They tend to see the lack of sales as more of a problem, but they tend to be younger and didn’t ever see how impossible breaking in to traditional publishing was. It’s easy to look at your self published income and think “oh, if people had to buy these, I’d be making a living at this instead of it being barely enough to cover expenses for writing”. But, most of the time, back before self publishing was actually a valid and useful route, they wouldn’t have been selling anything, they’d be hoping for an agent to get their first sale for them.
And I’ll never tell anyone that they can’t profit from their own ideas and labor, and expect anyone consuming it to pay up. Authors that object, that’s fine by me (and I actually don’t pirate their stuff). But like you said, most writers would rather someone read and enjoy for free rather than not read at all.
TheTetrapod@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Unequivocally no.
Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Copyright is bullshit, so no.
ripcord@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Copyright serves a very useful purpose. It’s just been twisted into something it wasn’t meant to be.
Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
You misunderstand me. When I say, “copyright is bullshit” I don’t mean that I don’t like it, or that it doesn’t work. I mean it’s bullshit in the same way that the crystal healing or mushroom cancer therapy is bullshit.
You cannot steal an idea, it’s impossible. So creating laws that punish people for doing things like copying a digital file doesn’t make sense. Copyright supposedly was created to create an incentive for artists and inventors to make cool and enriching stuff.
But what it actually does is protects business savvy people and allows them to game the system, get first mover advantage over all others, and then punish any potential competitors in that space.
As if nobody was creating artwork or inventing useful devices before copyright law came into being.
Just because something is useful doesn’t make it good, atomic bombs are useful, factory farming is useful.
I think the only thing people should be protected from as a creator is fraud. You can copy a person’s works and modify or distribute them in any manner you see fit, as long as it’s clear that you are not the original creator. You cannot claim to be them or to be affiliated with them unless you actually are.
That is what the principle of copyleft is all about. If copyright worked in principle, then you should see millions of individual creators enriched and protected by it.
But you don’t see that, instead, a few giant mega corps and super wealthy tycoons own and control enormous swaths of “intellectual property” and small time creators struggle to make ends meet and are sued into oblivion by the same powerful groups.
Sure it’s great for boosting wealth and GDP, but that boost does not apply to most of the population, it applies to the tiny elite that has now captures enormous segments of the market and fight tooth and nail to keep it that way.
Copyright is structurally flawed, it doesn’t work because it cannot work. It’s fundamentally based on a the nonsensical concept of “intellectual property” which as I said at the beginning, is bullshit.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Exactly. Copyright used to last 14 years and required an application for a one-time extension. Let’s go back to that.
cm0002@lemmy.world 1 week ago
No.
KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
no?
Redistributing them, especially for money, maybe.
FaceDeer@fedia.io 1 week ago
It's an asshole perspective that the IA dearly needs to listen to. Don't poke a bear when you have so much to lose. Doesn't matter if you're "in the right". The history books are littered with the corpses of righteous people.
Let the EFF handle the quixotic battles, it's what they're best at.
stembolts@programming.dev 1 week ago
“No one should stand up for new rights. Don’t rock the boat bro.”
Your mindset is the road to a dictatorship.
bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
IA definitely has too much to lose to afford picking fights. They got off lucky only having to remove the books. If they had been fined for many counts of copyright infringement, we could have had another library of Alexandria burning situation.
wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Yes, let’s just completely misrepresent someone and pretend it’s a quote! That’s fun!
There are effective ways to challenge laws and to push for new rights. Loudly shouting “I don’t care about your rules, just try and stop me!” was not an effective way for IA to try and do this.
Furthermore, IA constantly misrepresenting the problem and why they were sued in all their blog posts and press shit also does not help the cause.
It’s a law in desperate need of abolishment, but this is not how you go about changing it.
This also was not an effective way for them to ensure these books would continue to be available digitally for the public. They could have quietly leaked batches of the content that only they had out to the ebook piracy groups in a staggered fashion to help obsfucate where it was coming from, then hosted a blog post telling people how to pirate ebooks and where, with a cover your ass disclaimer that everyone needs to abide by their local laws.
By any metric of success, the way they handled this set them up to lose from the start, and jeapordized one of the most important public resources in the current era. This would be understandable from some small operation of like 5 people trying to digitize shit, not from an organization as large and old as IA.
I’m not the person who said he had no sympathy, but that is why I have little sympathy about all this: They don’t deserve this outcome, I wish they had won, and I hope the law gets overturned or revised… but they absolutely should have know better that to try and do this the way they did. They fucked around and found out. This coild have ended so much worse for them.
FaceDeer@fedia.io 1 week ago
You somehow overlooked the second paragraph in my comment. I explicitly said the opposite of that.
stembolts@programming.dev 1 week ago
I had nothing to say to that. I agree with it.
doodledup@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Omg this can’t be any more unrelated. Hyperbole much?
AmidFuror@fedia.io 1 week ago
"Societies with rule of law are dictatorships. How leaders are selected and the existence of fundamental Constitutional rights is not a factor."
How you like them strawmen?
stembolts@programming.dev 1 week ago
It’s a quote of an opinion, so in general I ignore them. I’m usually more interested in distilling ideas.
But I guess we can look at this one. Find it’s essence. Tho it doesn’t seem very deep…
So in short.
Yeah, that is one of the opinions I’d ignore. It’s easy to have that opinion inside the walls of a lawed society.
Luckily it is valid to respond to an opinion with an opinion, and mine is that I imagine everyone (except the strongest with the most resources) would abandon that perspective as soon as they lived in a world with no laws.