this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024
566 points (98.5% liked)
Technology
59495 readers
3114 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It would help if we knew even just a smidgin of what these titles are.
Internet Archive post about it
Google Doc List of the books from the IA
How many are republishings? Just curious
There's absolutely a good number of duplicates among the list they shared.
The bigger implication is of the 4 publishers in this lawsuit, 3 of them are in The Big Five publishers, who hold rights to the vast majority of books (60-80-ish % of English language books) from this century and probably a good chunk of the last one. If they win, this is the tip of the iceberg.
More like IP of the iceberg unfortunately.older books should be made available and not hidden behind licenses and unavailability because of greed
I largely agree. I don't know the best solution for copyright. On one hand, I don't think that necessarily the creators' kids deserve rights forever. They didn't make the stuff. But on the other hand, who does get the money after the creators are gone? The publisher in this case should get something for publishing physical materials or for marketing their wares that sell, but again, they didn't create it so someone should get something.
I do think that if nobody does anything with a work for x amount of time (maybe 10 years) then it should be fair game for anyone that does.
Even things like old games, if I download a Contra NES ROM, how am I hurting Nintendo or Konami?
If I download LotR, how am I ripping off Tolkien? I'm not stealing a hard copy. I could borrow it from a physical library. Why can't I borrow it from an electronic library? The person that deserves the rights to the literal story is dead. He doesn't care.
As time goes on, we should be simplifying laws, not creating more. The reductionist view is that content should be freely available as long as the IP isn't being developed/marketed still. And in order to prevent practices like Disney's vaulting we need a developed IP rotation of every X years to prevent IP hoarding. At it's root copyright law is rooted in greed, after you are done with the initial release, it just becomes part of everyone's culture.
I'd like to see a world more like that, but it feels like something that would require a society much different than the one we currently have.
Even your simplified mention of freeing IP not being marketed, in the Internet age, does having an item listed as for sale but out of stock or for an unreasonable price counted as being marketed? It's technically advertised for sale at no real cost, and can be done so in perpetuity. Or they could sell themselves product to show legal sales.
Simple rules and judgement operating under the intentof the law makes sense to rational individuals like us, but with scammy business and individuals, that's why we end up with a complex legal system. If we hate when legal loopholes are taken advantage of, we can't outright hate when laws get more complex.
Why does that matter?
To determine the impact of losing access to them.