The crazy thing is that everything is more amenable to "sharing" today, it is merely legal structure that prevents it now. Arguably the true utility of a library is that it would be (or would have been) absurd to duplicate a physical book for every person that wants it, and then when no one was actively reading them they'd take up a crazy amount of space. This is still true today! This world should be strictly better than the past. But instead we have nostalgia for libraries, not due to any essential reason, but because we've created an artificial environment where it is more appealing to potentially wait for a copy of something to become available vs. instantly duplicating it.
They should be out of copyright by now. They are not.
It makes more sense when you understand that copyright was hardly ever about protecting authors, but about protecting the interests of the more powerful middlemen.
Having programmers sign off their copyright has the same effect as classical capitalism: it separates whoever owns the code from whoever works on it. The owners can then enjoy the full royalties, while the programmers are limited to their salaries —just like the factory workers.
Factory workers could walk away with the fruits of their labour, if only they owned the factory. Programmers could walk away with the fruits of their labour, if only they retained the rights to them. And in my opinion, they both should. The means of production should be owned by the workers, not the capitalists.
If on the other hand you agree with capitalism, it makes perfect sense to have programmers sign away their rights.
That is basically the horror scenario of backup'ing, since you don't usually protect against that kind of failure: the probability of it happening just seems too low. It's similar to having a limit to your attack model when securing your data/accounts/... against attacks: you can try to protect against a governmentally funded cyber attack on you personally, but you probably won't succeed and it's very surely not worth the trouble if you're not a very influential or otherwise important person.
In this case, the usual retort would of course be "why didn't you have a backup in 'the cloud'?" I have for part of my stuff, but not for all. I feel you.
FYI if you click that link and the referrer is hacker news it redirects you to a nice picture of a testicle in a cup, first thing in the morning.
(it redirects to : https://imgur.com/32R3qLv )
The link is fine, just don't click it from here -- well, unless cup-testicles are your bag. Pun intended.
What are you looking for? There’s a decent chance someone here lives near a copy.
Also, the US didn't respect any other country's copyrights or patents so anything published outside the US would be free immediately.
Cant imagine the US letting other countries get away with that now.
Unfortunately, what would probably happen is more like what is happening to video games now; they are no longer profitable to publish, don't exist in an easy-to-backup, easy-to-share format (like an epub file with no DRM, for example), and so are essentially lost to time. If an ebook that no one can access is suddenly in the public domain, that doesn't help anyone one iota.
New and original indie games? New Portal? New Monument Valley? Maybe even new Doom? I bet they would live with shorter copyright; Doom was released as free software much sooner than after 28 years.
By the way, this is just one of the many reasons why I think that streamed games are very much an anti-consumer move and should not be paid for in any circumstance, to prevent normalization.
Piracy as a service, so to say.
I believe they're more popular than Torrents because they shield from responsibility. At least over here at Poland, your legal problems only start when you're actually infringing copyright - reproducing the work, i.e. uploading - which makes Torrents risky, but HTTP streaming fully in the clear for the viewers.
https://archive.org/details/texts
My favorite part: It has actual scans of centuries-old books taken from many major libraries (NYPL etc).
I can read something printed and published in the 18th/19th centuries, on my iPhone. And I often do.
Books have lots of failure modes too. Wide distribution is one way to protect them.
Or what better way to signal a change in values than to stop having one on that same real estate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnegie_Library_of_Washington....
Here in the UK it took the Public Libriaries Act to start them - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Libraries_Act_1850 - Andrew Carnagie would have been 15 years old at that point, having only recently migrated to the US with his parents, due to grinding poverty back home.
My own hometown (only 15,000 people) had a Carnegie library.
IMO, a more robust and resilient solution would be to bring native experience of books on the web. And tie it up with open source and paid model both in two separate states: of a manuscript and that of a book. If a processor of books dies (like in this case Microsoft), there'd still be a manuscript to fork and re-process into book again through an alternate channel. That's my 2 cents.
My personal rule is that I read most of the books in digital, and then buy a hard copy if I end up liking the book a lot. This way I don't have shelves filled with a ton of dead tree books that occupy precious space in my dwelling, I have all the books I care and love in a physical format that will never go away or get DRMd, and the authors (of the books I ended up liking) get rewarded more than if I just bought a single digital or a physical copy.
P.S. Same for me with music. Listening to a ton of stuff in digital, buying vinyls and concert tickets for artists I end up liking a lot.
E-readers suck for poetry. They are often incapable of maintaining the same graphic layout that the poet had in mind when creating the poems. Even when the poet is not one of those poets who intentionally makes the visual formatting a part of his work, e-readers cannot display the text according to the conventions for breaking lines that have been around for ages. Some poetry ebooks are in fact preceded by a publisher’s warning to this effect.
Any other kind of book and I'm reaching for print. It's much more satisfying to bang out 50 pages in a novel and see the bookmark move deeper into the book than to scroll scroll scroll through an ebook.
It's nice although our preferences are reversed to find someone else who has preferences for both in different circumstances.
I really like the books that include an eBook with the print copy.
https://bubblin.io/cover/ladakh-by-satie-sharma#frontmatter
Disclosure: I'm the developer behind the project.
I can keep my hand between two sections and flip between them, insert colored post-its, or bokmarks or index cards. Dog-ear pages, make marginal notes, star, underline, or (shudder)highlight.
The one thing missing is full-text search, though a good index is a 90% solution (and so: not optional).
Text and other element placement is static, so spatial memory works. Fluid layout is great for screens, but lousy for recall.
And the interface is consistent across books, authors, publishers, and centuries. Whilst, yes, various ebook formats offer facsimiles of many of these features, they are just that, and mediated to bot. Want to highlight? Better hope that's a rendered or OCRd (and reliably) PDF, or you're SooL.
Source; A tablet with over 5,000 epub-type docs, of various sources and provenance, from single page to multi-volume book length. I appreciate the weight and space savings, but miss much physical books deliver.
Exactly! This results in _referential accessibility_ [1].
You might want to look up for the Superbook format [2] perhaps? Though not everything physics is required to be solved with it.
[1] https://bubblin.io/blog/referential-accessibility
Disclosure: I'm its creator.
I remember roughly how far into a book, or chapter, passages are. Where on a page, or with relstion to other elements, how or where a line breaks (especially if that's awkward). Where the book itself lives within my collection. Where I was when first reading (or later re-reading) it. Etc., etc.
Spatial associations.
Consistent pagination is useful, but it's a small subset of the whole.
There are a few cases where a PDF/djvu textbook with strategic bookmarks can also be used. When I'm on the road I have a decent reference library in a rooted Kobo H2O running koreader. Not an ideal solution; something with an 8x12 screen would be much closer to it, but nobody makes these any more, and if I need to look something up in Golub, it can be done.
FWIIW the only thing that makes this doable is koreader does reflow on columnated text.
And yes, experience of relaxed intake with page turns in between does open a portal to another dimension!
I’ve grown to distain the government because of how often it pushes strict bills like DMCA which are quickly out-of-date and ripe for abuse.
It’s not just lobbying congress either, there have been some very strict cases coming out of prosecutors offices such as the case against MIT student David LaMacchia in 1994 who put files up on an encrypted BBS. Which resulted in congress passing a bill to fix a “loophole” where people uploading files on the internet without any commercial intent couldn’t be sent to jail. So the bill (predating DMCA by a couple of years) allowed up to 5yrs +$250k fines for online piracy, regardless of commercial intent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._LaMacchia
Every subreddit or Youtube channel or whatever online community I’ve been a part of has had to deal with people abusing DMCA takedown notices and having things that clearly fall under fair use, or even the person’s own content, being taken down.
Are you sure you've seen DMCA abuse on YouTube? They have their own system for handling alleged copyright violation that has little to do with the DMCA takedown procedure, and almost all complaints I've seen about abuse on Google have been due to that system.
That system is such a scourge. No fair use, no distinction between different countrie's legislations, no appeal.
If you make an educational video, no matter how much effort and skill you put in, if you use some musical excerpt or images or scene, it doesn't matter how short it is, or what you're using it for. Your video will be "claimed", and any add revenue you used to have will go to whoever owns the rights to the excerpt. And if you didn't enable ads, the claim will do it anyway.
I wonder what happens when you use 2 excerpts from different major copyright holders…
That is a technique that's been used in the past, though I'm not sure if it's still effective. As far as I know, it was popularized by Jim Sterling who named it the "copyright deadlock"[0].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_copyright_issues#2015%...
In all cases the author gets paid through whatever royalty arrangements they made with the publisher -- but that might contain a lower or zero payment for library and/or educational purchases.
My local library now is much, much more well endowed with resources from different media types and they're even getting a makerspace soon! I thankfully can afford my own books and toys to play with, but as a father of 2 young boys, I make sure we utilize the library often and even volunteer our time teaching the occasional workshop on new media/tech/design.
I think they're woefully underutilized and I'd be worried that they'd start to go away.
They can make it illegal for Germans to use the site if they wish, but they can't go meddling in foreign media content. If Saudi Arabia serves you a lawsuit because you have a picture of a woman's face on a webpage without hijab, would you fly there to go to court? I'd just trash their lawsuit and never go there. They can block my site if they want -- same goes for Germany.
...
Because PGLAF operates as a legitimate non-profit organization, however, it is appropriate to act as the German Court ordered - pending appeal - even though it disagrees with the order.
...
The decision to acceed to the German Court's order to make items inaccessible from Germany is intended to be a temporary appeasement, while the appeal occurs - this is because the German appeal Court will likely look disfavorably on PGLAF if it shows contempt for the German Court. Ultimately, PGLAF seeks to establish that any complaints about copyright must be brought either to the US Courts (where PGLAF operates) or WIPO processes (as guided by international treaties).
...
... GDPR? Granted, extraterritorial enforcement can be quite difficult.
If your OPSEC is adequate, legality is irrelevant.
And if that seems shocking, consider that legality <> morality.
I'm able to hold any book online so as soon as I hear about a book I place a hold on it. They have most books even new ones and if not I can request it for free through all libraries in North California.
I stop by the library once a week and pick up all the holds of that week (typically 3-4). I love to have the physical medium around.
I typically renew my loans 2 or 3 times and as such I keep the books close to 3 months. It allows me to fully read the ones I find interesting and just go over quickly the ones I don't care about.
Once a month I bring back all the books I got.
And all of this is completely free. I love my local libraries and cannot believe it took me that long to find out about this wonderful service.
From now on I go out of my way to never buy a single book again and avoid all DRM and other nonsensical digital medias like that.
So yes, I can imagine, but who knows whose imagination is closer to "alternative reality"?
Also I'm not sure they'd actually come into existence everywhere, even if the internet is a poor substitute for a library it is cheaper and may be enough for many.
Definitely nothing interesting.
Further reading: The Library Book by Susan Orlean
Unfortunately reality does not "inevitably" progress towards utopia, any more than the life of any individual does.
Just imagine physical books suddenly having EULA-like first pages that would forbid you from loaning them out. In fact, this has been tried before: https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/2059/why-were-books-...
The first memory I have of a library was in school where I wanted desperately to find out how one "writes" software. After lots of probably very annoying begging, I was given a book on either COBOL or FORTRAN from the ~60s. It wasn't super helpful.
The last book I borrowed (Alan Cooper's The Inmates are Running the Asylum on UX design, which I found compelling) was lost after I dropped it in the bin. I was fined $104, and upon contacting them was given customer service rivaling comcast's. Until I pay that ridiculous cost I can't borrow from any city library, and can't get a card anywhere else that I'm not a resident. So for me, the tiny libraries are already way over a very low bar.
I've had some generally good experiences, too, but nothing that's convinced me that the current model is either the only way or the best way.
This frustrates me no end. After several such incidents, and comparable customer service, I now take pictures of myself returning the books. I'm sure it'll do no good when it comes down to it, but it lets me feel that I have some agency in the matter.
What really frustrates me is that our library just re-jiggered its return system so that it's metered, counting how many resources have been returned, perhaps in an effort to address (for them if not for me) concerns like this; but there's still no way to get a receipt indicating that you have returned any particular resource. When I try to get one from the front-desk staff by returning it in person, I'm told I have to drop it in the metered chute and, basically, hope.
The state I'm from has its libraries funded by the county (not sure if that's true elsewhere in the US). the more people in a county, the greater property tax base, and thus the greater (potential) for public library funding. So theoretically there's no reason they can't cut or reduce their physical presence and publish their entire library online. Except instead of knowledge, it's now "content", and instead of readers, its now "consumers". Everything is a "market" that needs to be "captured" and libraries are a threat to this corporate model. From a purely informational standpoint, pages-bound-with-glue are just low-tech forms of hardware dongles.
I think (relatively) inexpensive private planes wouldn't exist without grandfathered componements like say lycoming engines.
And it's been said many times cars that people can drive wouldn't exist if they were invented today.
And then there are guns.
Maybe some of it is that. But a lot of traditional rights of the general public are too easily overcome by dedicated funded interests via lawmakers and regulators.
Like or hate trump, but his "to make a new regulation, you first need to repeal two regulations" thing was pretty interesting.
I think there need to be more checks and balances than simple grandfathering architected into things when rights are lost.
Why should that have anything to do with it? Government-run libraries are a much more recent development - the first libraries in America were set up by the churches, and later became private entities such as Ben Franklin's Library Company of Philadelphia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_libraries_in_North_Amer...
My library does that but the range is quite small and I guess they're paid for by the local government instead of the readers, which doesn't seem right. Shouldn't private goods be paid for by the users and public goods paid for by government? It's good that information is freely available to the public, but we now have the internet for most of that, and physical books would always be more expensive than ebooks so the financial burden on individuals would have been higher long ago when public libraries started before even paperbacks existed.
*I ate at this food truck in Austin that was in a mixed-use commercial area that had a 12 term CoC. These places typically have control-freak power-trip mall (wannabe) cops.
Luckily we still have places that still purchase printed books (along with ebooks) and you can go borrow them any time and they never stop working.... just ignore the damage from fire, water, rips, loss, bed bugs... maybe they do actually stop working for other reasons now that I think about it :-)