Similarly, works published in 1935 & 1941. For at least one, nearest copy is 1000km away.

They should be out of copyright by now. They are not.

Well I can’t even read my own research paper (lost my tex source and final digital copy when both hard drive and backup drive failed within the same hour). I know for a fact that it is archived and basically exactly where but it’s beyond either one of an abusive layer of bureaucracy or a paywall, whichever I would choose to go through. Not that it’s worthy of anything or even remotely interesting but it tells a lot about the absurdity of it all.

Count yourself lucky. Most of us developers cant even read the code we wrote in a professional setting once we leave a company.

This idea that the original authors of the source code don't have any right to that source code (they're not even listed as authors most of the time), seems like a contradiction. If copyright is so important, why is it so easily stripped from its authors in some fields?

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.

I think it fits in with the general idea of factories where you work for a salary and the work product you produce isn’t something you can take away. The problem with words or code is they are easy to copy, so one could easily make a copy and take it away. I guess that’s why they make you sign away the copyright

The factory analogy is pretty good. Profit doesn't really goes to the workers, it goes to the owners. And one critical property of capitalism is that owners and workers aren't the same people at all.

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.

Can you get it off SciHub?

> when both hard drive and backup drive failed within the same hour

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.

Turns out this guys was right:

https://www.jwz.org/doc/backups.html

NSFW:

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.

I knew about that and tried beforehand to see if I needed to put a warning, but it doesn't trigger anymore for me so I thought this article was exempt, or he removed it. Maybe it's Safari that properly strips the referer.

Firefox on Linux: no trigger either. Clicking was safe for me.

Firefox on Linux: I get the redirect every time.

That is the best use of a referrer I think I have ever seen. Off to boil an egg now.

I’m guessing an inter library loan wasn’t possible?

What are you looking for? There’s a decent chance someone here lives near a copy.

The article is Joan Robinson, 'Economics is a serious subject: the apologia of an economist to the mathematician, the scientist and the plain man' (1932). It's footnote 1 in Coase's 'The nature of the firm,' which I was prompted to read in more depth by a recent HN comment, so it's not an especially obscure document! The university library I spoke to does do inter-library loans, but I need to find a local library that will take one out for me. I haven't got around to doing that since I moved states 18 months ago, and I'm no longer affiliated with a local university. It's a pain, but something I probably would have resolved sooner if there weren't so many books digitised in the various proprietary databases!