Years of this whack-a-mole, yet no clear use case found for banning shadow libraries. Books are highly information dense, making them an ideal target for archival. Shadow libraries are unique in their ability to search over all knowledge known to man, something that publishers refuse. They democratize access, resist censorship (some of which is happening in the land of the free), and provide better chance at preservation. There’s not even much evidence that shadow libraries detract from authors, who are already robbed by publishers (and most of the publisher’s funding comes from institutions, not individuals)
To hell with it. Viva la revolución. Let knowledge be free.
The critical thing here is that regular people can help. The archive is already split into many O(GB)-sized chunks. We need to ensure each chunk has many, many copies.
Torrents are a widely-understood, robust way to mirror large files. But there's no "meta-coordination" built in to the protocol. It's not possible, using just torrents, to have the swarm cooperatively assign who stores which chunks. The optimization function here is maximal chunk availability, subject to individual storage limits and reliability (ie: how often they're online).
It should be easy to just press a button to join a shadow library, allocated 100GB, and be part of the mission.
The best effort I've seen in this space is some guy running a script that crawls the number of seeders for a list of SciHub torrents. Users manually pick the ones with the lowest seeds. All very cumbersome, and prone to staleness.
Of course, this is all a technical problem, separate from infringing copyright or whatever. In the same way as torrents being a technical solution for sharing files, in a general way.
> It's not possible, using just torrents, to have the swarm cooperatively assign who stores which chunks.
I don't know if it's strictly desirable to have the swarm cooperatively assign who stores which chunks, because that provides an avenue for bad actors to attack that assignment (e.g. by e.g. claiming to have a block to drive peers away, but never actually serving it).
It would be possible to have the swarm behave cooperatively based on heuristics, though. Your client gets a copy of what peers have what chunks, so it has enough information to make its own decision on what chunks need to be mirrored the most. A sufficiently clever algorithm would get pretty close to a centralized cooperation server.
Iirc, some extant torrent clients have similar features where they download the "hot" chunks first (the chunks with the most leechers, for private tracker ratios). I suspect the only reason an "archive/sparse" variant of that where it only downloads poorly mirroed chunks doesn't exist is because it's useless for the normal "download a file" use case. Sparse chunks of a file are basically useless outside of archival.
IPFS is a network that solves your coordination problem, compared to torrents it allows you to decide which chunks you want to store and it will even de-duplicate automatically across different "torrents" that happen to include the exact same byte-identical file.
Well, it might take literally months for a file to become available/resolvable everywhere. Also if a host can resolve a file now doesn't matter it would be in ten minutes (the publisher is always running of course).
Can we? I have tens of terabytes of unused storage space that I would be happy to contribute to library archival, but my understanding is that if I seed these torrents I'm going to get spammed with DMCA letters from publishers until my ISP gives up and cuts my service. If we need to seed exclusively through tor or VPNs in copyright-notice-ignoring countries, then that's not all that accessible to "regular people" anymore.
I wonder just how much of this "shadow library" content is stuff that's actually in the public domain and could be mirrored with no legal jeopardy whatsoever. Unfortunately, the low quality of catalog-like metadata that's available from so-called "shadow libraries" (including the one that's linked in the top comment) makes this a very hard question to answer. Even if that makes up only a handful of TB's or so, it would be worth mirroring the stuff - among other things, a reliable repository of copyright-free content would also be a valuable resource for "ethical" AI training and other such uses.
(I know that the linked blogpost mentions that they just don't bother mirroring "widely available collections" of public domain books. The interesting question is whether there's some "long tail" of PD content that might not have made it to the more well-known collections as of yet.)
FWIW, I've been getting (automated) DMCA notices for years (since 2015 or so) with no warnings or anything like that from my ISP. They just forward the notices because they have to.
Not to say there's no risks here, but this really depends on your jurisdiction, I think.
This does seem like it would be the way to handle such libraries, considering the immense size of them. I'd be curious to hear about any efforts in this area, of anyone knows of any.
Is remember back in the day 2008 you could download individual files from torrents (Amiga disk images). Is there a torrent toll that can compare individual files in a torrent and if the hashes are correct, download from a bunch and rebuild the torrent.
Some torrents add another ASCII advert like Amiga BBS's used to add back in the old day which used to result in dupes?.
Amazing that book piracy is a thing, I guess it's pretty big on this board as the majority of users on this board would be considered 'bookish' and know that a lot of the (technical) books that would like are not available at the local library.
You can still download specific files from torrents of many files, yes. You can pick a subset of files to download.
In theory, you could extend torrent clients to support archiving some subset of the files. You just tell it to keep around 100 GB of files in a 10 TB torrent. Since the client knows the status of each chunk in the swarm, it can make smart decisions about which chunks to download and seed. Clients already let to set preferences to seed the "least-seeded" chunks. So this isn't so far fetched.
The big problem with this is that it lets you work only with a fixed archive. Torrent files can't be mutated after they are created. So you'd be able to get people to archive a fixed version of a shadow library, but not an evolving one.
In practice, this should be fine enough. If we had high assurance that all the books added to the library before 2022 (or something) were copied in 50 machines, that's quite useful.
Being able to layer deltas on top would be amazing - you could evolve the collection as new books are added.
I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve used shadow libraries before.
1. More often or not, I am in search of a single piece of information. Buying hundreds of pages of writing is not economical for this goal
2. Sometimes, I own the physical copy and want to search it. Buying a digital copy is a waste when I already own the physical one
3. Occasionally, the content is available to me via my library, but in the case of point 1, traveling all the ways is a waste of time. Some people don’t have access to a library.
4. Sometimes, I want to decide between two books, or see if the book has what I want before I purchase it.
5. A few times, the content I want disappeared, but there it is at the shadow library.
If you're not ashamed to admit it, perhaps that's because you recognize that it's not stealing, and that you don't actually believe in the concept of Intellectual Property, the legal fiction (invented relatively recently to prop up industries) that all of this is based on.
There are lots of us, so don't be afraid to say it loud. Intellectual Property doesn't exist and copyright as currently implemented is unjust, antisocial, and harmful.
Count me among those who don't believe in intellectual property. There are so many of us. Every time I express this, I find that I'm not alone.
Intellectual property is a government-granted monopoly on information, on bits, on numbers. And everybody intuitively understands the absurdity of it. Infringement happens every day at massive scales, people do not even realize they are infringing, it is natural to them.
Now guess which countries staged a coup against the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran in 1953, which brought the current oppressive regime to its power:
A very narrow minded view. There are plenty of undemocratic and authoritarian countries around the world, Iran is hardly unique and perhaps not even the worst. And so-called democratic countries are sometimes not much better - a trip through US foreign policy over the years is pretty horrific, the violent oppression of the Palestinians by Israel, and others. None of this should have anything to do with whether a country’s citizens and academics should have access to scientific knowledge and conduct research. In fact scientific knowledge and a better educated population is one of the best ways to combat authoritarianism and oppression.
American/Westerner tries not to condemn a nation of 90 million people because of their government's actions (impossible!). This is the same twisted, devilish logic that murdered millions of Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, Afghans, and Viets, etc., because why not?
Condemn a nation? What part of "affection unspeakable" do you not understand?
All you have to assert is that Iran is not a totalitarian theocracy, and that academic research reliably benefits the Iranian people at the expense of their oppressive overlords' agenda.
I don't understand the rest of your comment. The answer to "why not murder millions of" any given nationality is because it is unspeakably horrible, grossly detrimental to human flourishing, and a violation of our highest ideals.
I really don't know why you're attributing to me the sentiment of "because why not?". I certainly don't intend to express it.
Sanctions against totalitarian states exist to prevent private companies from empowering murderers like Khamenei. You can argue that they're not murderers, but you can't argue that sanctions are imposed "because why not."
> Good! Iran is an undemocratic, authoritarian theocracy run by violent, repressive misogynists.
I can practically replace Iran with US here, and this would actually still be true.
Trump is a massive misogynist. Both Biden and Trump are internationally violent and both would actively support a genocide happening through their closest ally.
The next president of the US is either Misogynist Trump, or Kamala Harris which no American has voted for in a primary for - making it undemocratic. In this regard, both Iran and the US are picking from a pre-selected pool of candidates.
---
So, govt bad therefore people shouldn't be able to access research material?
> The trick is, really, how to make these libraries accessible to individuals but only insofar as they're not pawns of the regime.
Research is going to mostly be happening in universities, which are usually regulated by the government. Education is also connected to the government. The answer is you don't.
> Individually, I love you all with affection unspeakable; but, collectively, I look upon you with a disgust that amounts to absolute detestation.
edit: FWIW I didn't flag you or downvote you. I upvote you for taking me seriously enough to contest.
> I can practically replace Iran with US here, and this would actually still be true.
That's valid! The US is predominantly bought and paid for by an oligarchy of monopolists who set restrictions on research. Political donations and lobbying efforts significantly influence grant eligibility by shaping the priorities and policies of funding agencies, and that imposes a chilling effect on academic attention.
If you, a cosmopolitan, say that the US' system is less free than Iran's, then I concede. The sanctions are cruel and unjust. I didn't realize that US academic institutions were more stringently curtailed than Iranian ones. I assumed that the Revolutionary Guard would penalize/harass individual researchers or labs for producing subversive research—above and beyond a preferential allocation of funds.
> Kamala Harris which no American has voted for in a primary for - making it undemocratic
This is undemocratic, but not in the way that you mean. Our first-past-the-post primaries ignore second picks, so it's unimaginable that she'd have gathered no votes in a runoff. That being said, you are again correct: the United States' two party system is undemocratic in that these private institutions share total authority over the docket. But, again, I don't think that it's worse than the influence of Iran's clerical councils. Is it?
> Thanks?
I don't know what to tell you. I don't hate you. You tell me what you need, and I'll do it.
The thing that’s allowed the Iranian government to keep going, at least in my opinion, has been economic destitution of the people of Iran. Largely caused by the sanctions, and primarily the secondary sanctions set by the US.
Right wing governments love economic hardship because it allows for them to unify a portion of the people under that messaging.
There’s even evidence that with apartheid South Africa, sanctions were actually solidifying their hold on the country there. The fall of that government isn’t really attributed to sanctions.
Being able to access computing books from late 80s and early 90s is great: DOS AutoCAD tutorial books (Laying out PCBs, tutorials) to see how it's changed. I also like being able to access books about programming the Amiga, I find that great. A lot of those authors have made the books available publicly for non-commercial use.
Being able to read old magazines of Byte magazine and the tutorials in Amiga Format and Cu Amiga are great as well. But those articles in early Byte magazine were of an amazing quality.
Just randomly checked the financials of one publisher of textbooks (Pearson) profits up 30%. So how did the judge assess the $30mil damages and who are the publishers that they would share it with? Assuming of course that they can get dollars from ether.
The spirit is commendable, and the idea is arguably nice. But the free (as in speech) internet is over. I don't like it, but the days of these libraries are counted. Just like the other pirate sites. (Don't visit torrentfreak.com, if you don't want to get depressed. It reports bad news every day, and it only gets worse lately.)
I'm not saying that they don't exist anymore. I'm saying that you should do a yandex search now, and repeat the same search in January. If you compare the number of results, most probably you will see what I'm talking about.
Arguably, you are right. There are a few things that shouldn't be ignored:
- It used to operate very publicly, but now it is just as opaque black box - no one know who is behind it, operators barely communicate with the community.
- It used to be public enemy #1 of the (copyright-) world. Today it is barely a sidenote of the yearly notorious market report. Though the fight against pirate sites is stronger than ever, TPB seems to be silently tolerated.
People with certain mindset might wonder why that is.
Yeah, after libgen didn't work properly anymore since last month or so, I donate to AA each month for speedy downloads. Has the advantage that it also works for papers, so no more libgen/scihub split.
I'm also self published. I would rather a thousand people steal and read and interact with and talk about my work than to be able to eat selling it to a privileged few. The free software movement is a parallel example of this viewpoint.
The economic reality of today is that words and publishing are cheap. If you have something to say and need to get the word out to as many people as possible, that's wonderful. If you need to eat, then accept this is how it is and write for an audience that's willing to pay you for your work even if it's available for free.
I imagine your self published works are available for a reasonable price. In this event, piracy is less tempting. Papers and academic books often cost upwards of $75.
Furthermore, assuming your work is priced reasonably, imagine the content was not available within a shadow library. Would the people pirating it have paid? Or would they have given up, barred due to their financial situation. Personally, I can say confidently that I have never once pirated something I would have otherwise paid for
All of my college text books were leaps and bounds more than this, my lowest costing book might have been $75. Most of the books cost well over $150 and many of them couldn’t be purchased online. Most came with some online class learning aid which if you bought the book second hand you’d have to pay the full book price to get the access code anyway. These publishers are out of their minds.
But I'm sure you know at least some people who have downloaded things just to save even a single dollar.
No, I don't. I've watched people pirate things, certainly, but never have I watched them while thinking "if piracy wasn't an option, they would have paid". Indeed, for many people piracy is a long and difficult process as they kludge through ad-laden pages and dead links. That's why services like Spotify are so successful. On paper, you could have pirated the music, but in practice piracy is much harder. There is nothing analogous for the publishing industry, but I would gladly pay upwards of $20 a month for access to all books.
> “We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem,” he said. “If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.”
1. In very few circumstances are the authors setting the price of their work. The publishers do, and the authors receive a small cut.
2. Here, you are contending that knowledge should only be available to those who can pay. That's a completely valid opinion, but let's just be clear about what it is insinuating.
You need to look beyond yourself and the fruits of the labour you feel entitled to.
Look at the whole market, look at market prices, understand how piracy works. If you want to not have your work pirated, you probably have to do what Steam did for video games (and very successfully!) You must sell your work at a price and format that beats piracy for the end user. Piracy involves hassle and risk. But it is the only way to get DRM-free content for most consumers that they truly get to keep forever. If you sell your book for a price your target audience can’t afford in relation to the value it provides, and you may not even sell your book in a true digital ownership way, but only effectively license it, then some consumers won’t want to buy that and piracy is an alternative.
You may say that you are unwilling to offer your work at a price palatable to people more than piracy. And that is your prerogative. But you will always have a degree of piracy in what you put out then. This is the market reality.
You should calculate what makes most sense to you — maybe it is higher price and piracy, maybe it is lower price, DRM-free and no piracy, or if neither work and you truly can’t sell your work in the actual reality of the market, maybe not doing the work makes sense.
The flaw in your argument is that in most cases, the audience can afford it, they just choose not to pay when it is available freely with little effort.
My argument doesn’t speak about the affordability. It speaks about an exchange of money for value. Not if one can spend the money, but if that money would be well-spent. :)
Piracy is often significant effort and risk. Not high but significant. First, one must learn the means to pirate content. Second, they must keep strong privacy and security habits while doing so. Third, pirated content may have malware, even pdfs. Finally, the quality is often a bit lower. There are very real downsides to privacy — effort and others. Then there are also benefits that I spoke of.
Steam has largely validated what I’m saying. So no need for extra arguing. Look into how it cleaned up video game piracy. Many people used to, especially in less economically developed regions such as Eastern Europe, pirate as main means of video game consumption. Now, it’s mostly Valve’s Steam.
Value is directly affected by ease of piracy, or alternative distribution. People paid $12-16 per CD for decades, yes it felt a tad expensive but that was the deal and people were generally happy. Napster then torrents lowered sales, Spotify has pretty much killed it. The value of a CD hasn't changed, nor has affordability (in fact many more people can afford than in the 80s-90s) - but nobody's buying because other distribution exists. You can argue Spotify doesn't pay artists fairly and all that but they do have deals and contracts in place. The pirates don't, didn't, never will.
And the "significant effort and risk" argument is garbage when multiple methods of transmitting pirated content (and checksumming it) is easy as cake.
I see you are taking the conversation in two different directions, so I will respond to both.
People used to pay more for music due to scarcity. Piracy makes music more easily available — you are right, so it does decrease scarcity by competition. But so do many other things like the streaming platforms you mention.
The same can be said for average quality published works — very many are available, much too many to charge scarcity pricing. With AI texts flooding the market, the value is further lowered.
I am merely bringing attention to the reality that the works we author compete with market forces, and that through this competition, piracy can and has demonstrably been out-competed in some cases. If the author can’t compete but they want the sales, then it’s a good idea to rethink putting the work out there.
The second point about effort and risk, I don’t think can be dismissed so easily. Checksuming is all well and good, and other protections. But go out into the real world and ask people in the street how many checksum their downloads. :)
If an artist can't sell music anymore because of Spotify, well, it's likely they signed a sub-optimal contract, but at least they had the opportunity to negotiate better terms, and likely can do so at renewal time. Or choose not to offer their music on Spotify at all. No such option exists when dealing with pirates.
You really just have to offer a better deal, and it doesn’t have to be a perfect one. Don’t hyper-focus on preventing IP from being shared by people. So long as there are mass storage devices and paper copy machines, there will be piracy. People used to even transmit computer programs over radio at night in Eastern Europe shortly before the collapse of USSR. You can’t outlaw all means of piracy even if you take down all the sites, but there is a different way to combat it with your own creative products — offering a better legal deal to pirates. And there is evidence that it works. :)
And if it doesn’t work for you, then the market doesn’t work for you. That’s the practical reality. We can daydream about piracy not existing but it will remain a daydream — maybe a nice daydream, I don’t know. But I do know it is not the market we have in reality.
So you want to multiply your benefits but not accept such with your deficits? That's the advantage of digital distribution vs typical labor distribution. When I did laborer work I had no way to easily multiply my work output as it's not intellectual work, for the most part. If you make a moderate income, you should feel very entitled and lucky if you complain when you can easily distribute and multiply your labor as opposed to those who work in more physical fields. But someone might say 'yeah, well get a better job' but the point is when someone's working a very laborious and dangerous job out in the elements, it's hard to feel sorry for anyone making good on the amplification of intellectual labor.
As to your question, I'm sure those who were more intellectually inclined throughout history tended to do well despite not having a printing press and its offspring. If you're truly putting out something useful to the people, be it ideas, stories, etc, then you should have no problem getting by from your output.
People pirating your work were less likely to purchase it anyway, likely because it was economically not feasible to do so in the first place, but with the new readers you have, its likely that some of them do end up purchasing it at a later date. Getting robbed by piracy is mostly a fiction and nothing more.
This may be the case in the short-term. If piracy is left unchecked, the norm eventually becomes 'free', for the work being pirated and a very low percentage of people will pay for it.
A good example of this is larger projects in the OSS community. Large companies don't pay for it, because it's just expected to be free.
As a counterpoint just take a look at web serials, they usually have hundreds of chapters available for free and the more popular ones are still making 6-7 figures a year through patreon memberships. People are more than willing to pay for something they enjoy even if it's freely available.
Software is used by enterprises and by individuals. Books are mostly used by indivuals (yeah, I know your Friendly Corp might have an educational budget for you).
Enterprises are less likely to pay for books (as the whole cost of running the procurement process is prohibitive). But people (like individuals) don't have this limitation.
Your businesses model is wrong. Don't make your businesses/profit model be one of artificial scarcity, as it was in the previous millennium.
Instead, write a TOC and say a first chapter. And give it free. Then establish a target price/profit you want in total for each additional chapter. Setup a "fund me" and release the chapter ONLY after you've received your full payment.
If your content is good, people will pay enough for your next chapter. And you will be fairly compensated for your writing work.
Maybe it's time to "publish" a revised version of your work to include a preamble to the pirate readers with your crypto wallet address. You might be surprised when you find that many pirates are very generous individuals if you provided them the motivation and means.
Are there any numbers on how the availability of books in this way negatively impacts sales? Bear in mind that often people resort to such libraries because they are unable to buy a copy (out of print, not available in their country), can’t afford to buy (so they wouldn’t be paying anyway) or just want to look something up (wouldn’t bother buying the book just for that).
>I am a self published author. So anyone can alienate me from the fruits of my labour?
Do you put shareware/donationware messages in your book? Hey I need to eat if you do download this send me what you believe this book is worth to this website?
>And yes, I have come across free copies of my work.
I really do feel sorry for you. There would be nothing worse than something that you have poured your heart and soul into and just gets stolen. I'm not a fan of thieves, nothing worse than spending hours doing a job you hate, buying something and to get it stolen AND you must get even more annoyed if the people are making money if your work.
As some one who struggles writing lab reports and doing case studies in Engineering I find it difficult to write compared to doing the calculations. All the time doing the research I can not imagine how it must feet for you.
You got off lucky. Imagine if one of those government Mecca's of sanctioned piracy called a library had bought your book and put it on public exhibition for free? The estimated losses to the publishing industry are in the billions of dollars in the last decade alone. They are freely given physical copies of your copyrighted work with the mere promise that they will be returned. Many are stolen, and when they are the thief is rarely charged, and the copyrighted material is simply replaced so that it may be made public again. Meanwhile you get a payment equivalent to maybe a fast food meal.
Show us 1 author available in shadow libraries who would literally starve. It's ridiculous. If you can pay, you'll pay. And if you can't you were never part of the market
Obviously "starving" was hyperbole, but that doesn't change the fact that they wrote it and you just want it for free. I've never heard a cogent, logically consistent argument from the "knowledge should be free" crowd about why creators of this knowledge shouldn't be compensated.
IP - unlike actual real property - is not really defensible by property owners, other than using state monopoly forces. IP is also very hard to globally enforce. Why should society - all societies - pay for such enforcement? IP can only be protected when it's least valuable to all - including the owner: when it's not disclosed/distributed. So, it's a give and take: accept distribution and accept that some people will not care about your "rights" OR don't distribute (and don't benefit from non-distribution)
> I've never heard a cogent, logically consistent argument from the "knowledge should be free" crowd about why creators of this knowledge shouldn't be compensated.
And I have never heard a cogent, logically consistent argument from the "intellectual rights" crowd about why this justifies the usage of violence against the "knowledge should be free" crowd.
> you're also part of the "I'm going to call anything I don't like 'violence'" crowd.
Every law is a control program for violence - this is what laws are for. While I agree that "no laws" don't work, I am part of the "violence should be used with utter care" and "violence is the utter last resort" crowds. :-)
It is good that authors should be remunerated;
and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them
is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil.
For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil;
but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is
necessary for the purpose of securing the good.
The principle of copyright is this. It is a tax on readers
for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers. The tax is
an exceedingly bad one; it is a tax on one of the most
innocent and most salutary of human pleasures; and never
let us forget, that a tax on innocent pleasures is a
premium on vicious pleasures.
I admit, however, the necessity of giving a bounty
to genius and learning. In order to give such a bounty,
I willingly submit even to this severe and burdensome tax.
Nay, I am ready to increase the tax, if it can be shown
that by so doing I should proportionally increase the
bounty.
My complaint is, that my honorable and learned friend
doubles, triples, quadruples, the tax, and makes scarcely
any perceptible addition to the bounty.
Just as the absurd Acts which prohibited the sale of game
were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd
revenue Acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler,
so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers.
At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side.
Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out
of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them
restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains.
No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful
transactions.
Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end.
Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers
will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital
will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art
will be employed to evade legal pursuit;
and the whole nation will be in the plot.
Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong
and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say
where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions.
The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace
and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create.
And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints
on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent,
annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding
the living.
"This law" would extend copyright beyond the lifetime of the author. It's now life plus 70 years. Possibly more, who even knows or cares. We're all gonna be long dead before our culture enters the public domain.
Balance? Compromise? We don't want to hear it. The time for compromise has long since passed. These monopolies have become intolerable. Only thing we care about is their end.
I literally said right in my comment that you replied to that I thought copyright terms were too long. But if you're going to "throw the baby out with the bathwater" and insist copyright shouldn't exist, you should at least be honest about what the consequences of that would be, and again I never see that sort of honest assessment from the "knowledge should be free" crowd.
Heck, even arguing about overly-long copyrights seems disingenuous in this case. This wasn't an article about Mickey Mouse. I wasn't previously familiar with Libgen, but given its focus, I would assume most of the pirated material has living authors.
It is desirable that we should have a supply of good books;
we cannot have such a supply unless men of letters are liberally remunerated:
and the least objectionable way of remunerating them is by means of copyright.
You cannot depend for literary instruction and amusement on the leisure of men
occupied in the pursuits of active life. Such men may occasionally produce
compositions of great merit. But you must not look to such men for works
which require deep meditation and long research. Works of that kind you can
expect only from persons who make literature the business of their lives.
Men who make authorship the business of their lives. We shall have less of them. I accept these consequences. Let it be. It's the future they chose.
I do have one hope though. Later in the text, he expresses a rather low opinion of patronage. And he isn't wrong: patronage by governments, churches and moneyed elites obviously distorted the creativity of authors and that is not at all desirable. That's why copyright is advanced as the least bad solution.
However, modern technology has changed patronage. It's now possible for wide audiences to subsidize the work of their favorite creators. It does not require artificial scarcity. They are rewarded for the act of creating, not the final product.
As far as I'm concerned, this is the only way forward. Because enforcing copyright in the 21st century will require tyranny the likes of which should give pause to everyone who posts on Hacker News. It will literally destroy computing freedom as we know it today. And that's a consequence I don't accept. I'd sooner see creators find another job.
Well, since you don’t know anything, let me tell you we’ve been able to get any book we’ve wanted for the last 15 years and the sky hasn’t fallen
when I want to support an author, I buy their book, this as a sort of patronage
Years of this whack-a-mole, yet no clear use case found for banning shadow libraries. Books are highly information dense, making them an ideal target for archival. Shadow libraries are unique in their ability to search over all knowledge known to man, something that publishers refuse. They democratize access, resist censorship (some of which is happening in the land of the free), and provide better chance at preservation. There’s not even much evidence that shadow libraries detract from authors, who are already robbed by publishers (and most of the publisher’s funding comes from institutions, not individuals)
To hell with it. Viva la revolución. Let knowledge be free.