We finally build the tools to allow the free sharing of information and almost immediately a bunch of rent seeking lawyers lobby congress to make doing that illegal.
I've always lived by the rule of "If you put it on the Internet, it's not yours anymore." Because that's de facto the truth. Only if you employ lawyers do you have even the slightest real power over something online, even if you're the original source. This isn't something 95% people can afford. Turning the Internet into just another place where the rich get preferential treatment is a terrible thing.
It's a nice sentiment but like, people can already go to gutenberg.org and download pretty much most important works of literature in existence and most books have like 5k downloads so there's that.
> The overwhelming majority of our knowledge is in the public domain
(Also, keep in mind that content is now entering the public domain every year, and projects like PG are nowhere close to keeping up with that flow of newly-unrestricted stuff. So this dynamic is becoming more extreme over time, not less.)
By copyright expiry, public domain in the US begins in 1927. Later works may be in the public domain, but all works published prior to 1927 are in the public domain in the United States.
(This may not be the case in other countries.)
There were not many published books prior to the invention of the printing press, and many of those didn't survive. The total number of books (not individual titles but actualy bound volumes entirely) in Western Europe as of 1400 may have been as few as 50,000.
By 1800, about 1 million titles had been printed.
Over the course of the 18th century, presses became vastly faster, as they evolved from hand-operated wooden screw-press to iron-frames to steam and electric-powered rotary and ultimately web presses. Paper became much cheaper (and less durable --- a factor commented on at length in the Librarian of Congress's annual reports to Congress in the late 19th century). Literacy exploded from ~25% to 95%+ over the 19th century (and probably accounted for numerous revolutions and political upheavals).
Through much of the 20th century, certainly by 1950, US publishers were issuing about 300,000 new titles per year, a rate which state remarkably constant through the early 21st century. By the aughts, "nontraditional" self-publishing (a/k/a "vanity press") was nearing or exceeding 1 million titles per year more than had been published through all time to 1800.
Reports that all recorded data was doubling every few years date to at least the 1960s. That would mean that in any two year period ... half of all recorded information was less than two years old.
The catch is that not all recorded data is published. So I'm not sure what the time-distribution of all publishing looks like. But I'm pretty confident it's skewed far more recently than 1927. And would thus tend to be copyrighted rather than uncopyrighted.
If you want to measure works by significance, you might make a different argument --- there are many great works of literature, philosophy, history, and religion which were first published before 1927. But ranking and tabulating these is more challenging than a simple enumeration.
https://cand.pglaf.org/germany/index.html
Gutenberg was blocked in Italy in early 2020. I don't know if this block still persists.
https://www.balcanicaucaso.org/eng/Areas/Italy/Project-Guten...
afaict, it resolves and loads fine here. Now on mobile tethering via the Iliad (.it) local operator. When I get home I'll also check it on broadband.
I wonder how your provider overrides it. Is it too much of a wet dream to think that some operators (behind the DNS) responded to the requests of the vacuously appointed low scum* with disdainful neglect? In terms of "If you really had any credential for existence but some forms of physical expression, we would say that you must be joking - before putting the proof of your vilty in the trash archival it deserves".
*May I remind that they appended the apex of Civilization, Project Gutenberg, to a list of a dozen pirate sites in their "operation". No, really, I cannot find words to label those lowest abysses.
I don't use the (ex) national provider (Telecom Italia / Tim) however. Crappy service aside, they're well known for jumping every time the government tells them to, and happily filter a lot of stuff.
- Gutenberg - Zlib - libgen
via o2 (not promoting them in any way)
Go to your local library. There is actually a lot more there than books. There are videos and audio records too. There are news paper clippings too.
Worse, data is being generated very fast. Let's look[0]
> [In 2012], CenturyLink projects that 1.8 zettabytes of data will be created. By 2015, the projection is 7.9 zettabytes.
> MAST is currently home to an estimated *200 terabytes of data*, which… is nearly the same amount of information contained in *the U.S. Library of Congress.*
But that said, a few petabytes is going to only cost in the 10s of thousands of dollars and max in the low 100s. So this is well within the budget of even every modestly sized city and definitely every university. It would be even easier if this was done with torrenting.
I think the real question is^: why are we not, as a species, creating this system? It seems very reasonable that we could back up all data. (There is also a dark side to this too! So let's not forget about that) At least, why aren't we creating a full access world library for all scholarly data, which is probably something that could be housed for a few grand. Should we do this on our own given the relatively low cost? Books + sci-hub + arxiv + *xiv?
[0] https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/04/a-library-of-congres...
^ maybe it is already being done and I don't know, please inform me if it is. (Other than the NSA)
I can guarantee you that this type of behavior means I'm writing fewer books. It's very short-sighted.
Historically most art was financed through patronage/sponsors, wealthy people or institutions that sponsored people for the social status, or commissioned works from them. Both of those systems have been democratized by the internet, with people sponsoring artists they like with systems like Patreon, or just straight paying them money to create something. The same is happening with Twitch subscriptions (essentially donations to the streamer). There's no reason it can't work on a larger scale for most literature. Sure, priorities would shift, but it might also enable authors more creative freedom than publishers are comfortable with.
Everybody deserves to be paid for their work and I would argue that this is more about preserving knowledge than it is about not having the writers get what they deserve.
*In general, so quite possibly also yours.
no one worth agreeing with starts a sentence with >Maybe if you read the right books
It's not what most people would want when given a choice, but that does not mean it's very hard to imagine how and why it happens.
I did not mean to imply I approved either, just that, I think "this is insane" is kind of silly. It is, but, it's also inevitable and not new or hard to follow.
In our current world, the currency is money, (vs land or humans in the past) and things pretty much only get done if someone can make money from it, and someone else doesn't make money inhibiting it. That's it. That's the entire mystery.
The unspoken answers to my two questions were "no one" and "many many many". Everything that you can do for yourself, some company somewhere would rather you pay them for it instead. The product doesn't exist because there are zero companies out there with any interest in producing it, and unlike pure information (software), individuals can't just do it for free for the feel goods.
It would require some imaginary and highly different societal structure to alter that equation. The people who would manufacture the home libraries, where do they get the materials and facilities from, and how do they eat, if they aren't selling these either to you directly, or by way of your government and it's taxes? Some kind of co-op type organization that takes the place of a for profit company? And they get their electronics parts and their vegetables from other co-ops since they don't have money to buy them? It could all be done some other way than by counting dollars, but literally everyone in the world would also have to be doing things this other way. And all the people currently on top of the current system will not be the ones rewarded with success under any other kind of system, and so they wield their power to keep things exactly as they are.
I don't mean in an illuminati way like there are 11 people running everything, I mean countless people inhabiting all levels and niches all act to preserve what they think is all they have, in countless little ways. Even people who actually have essentially nothing and would live far better in any other system, because it just takes more imagination than most people have to even consider not having dollars, and more generosity of spirit than most people have to even consider not being able to boss other people through their need of dollars.
We would somehow have to collectively figure out how not to reward the very worst of us with all the leadership positions, both private and public. Ultimately it comes from that. The exact wrong kind of people to make rules are just about the only people who gun for those roles. There are all kinds of asshole things I wouldn't do if I were running things. And I have no interest in being anyone else's boss, nor in figuring out ways to parasite off everyone else or harness them to some will of my own or anything like that, and so I will never end up running things. You have to be a sociopath to do what it takes to ever get into such a position. It doesn't happen by any nice fair reward-the-good kind of way, and we have almost no mechanisms to detect and defer such people from suceeding in their shark-like process. It just works and they go right to the top.
Yes obviously pure capitalism is as shit as pure anything else, and no system made by humans, and made of humans, actually works very well to create sanity and fairness. So even not-pure capitalism creates all kinds of undesirable results, like available tech doesn't get used in ways that would be wonderful for everyone.
What solution to human nature have you imagined in your split second?
I guess YC reaction to codex would be substantially different if this was a free and open tool anyone could use....
Not to mention the cost of development - for that they needed thousands of GPUs or TPUs and a large team of top AI talent which is very very expensive to hire.
Regarding the open source copyrights - wasn't that code released to be "open"? This is actually a radical way to open the code, make it more useful for everyone. Open source devs can also use it to create projects.
I think $10 per month for this whole process is justified. It's not like you could run it at home.
The idea that we do not do a world library of free digital copies of every book ever written really highlights the problem with the thinking your comment has demonstrated. The idea that individual pursuits must make a profit to be justified leads to us doing terrible things like: not making a free world library of every book.
Though in this particular case this also demonstrates a major problem with intellectual property concepts. Actually hosting the library isn't very expensive. But we have made doing so illegal. Of course, authors deserve to live a decent life just like everyone else. We currently do that by restricting all access to duplications of information they have produced so that they can charge a fee for access, and that fee provides for their survival.
But we suffer an incalculable loss by making all this information restricted. In my view we would be MUCH better off as a society with respect to creativity, innovation, and other popular metrics for progress, if we actually made sure as a society that every person's survival was provided for with no need for them to pay for it. Then authors wouldn't need to get paid, engineers could do what they love to do and post all their work as open source, and we could have a free library for everyone. This extreme openness would in my mind lead to more rapid innovation, and markets would still function as first movers would maintain an advantage for new product releases, though they would have to keep moving as anything they've done that is worthwhile would be copied. But since no one's livelihood would be at stake, this is not a real issue.
This can all be done in a voluntary, libertarian society as long as we have community ownership of the means of production, and promote these ideals of community support in this society. And I think we would be way better off. Doing this would allow us to offer every book ever recorded for free to every person on Earth. A big change, but one with obviously a very big benefit to humanity.
One note though: people who want to own a lot for themselves really mess this up. So people would need to dissuade those people from acting that way. My preferred method of doing so is by starving them of workers and customers, though when it comes to control of land matters get more serious.
I don't say I like it or that it's reasonable or fair, it wasn't approving.
It's not sarcastic because it's literally the actual explaination.
I do not do that anymore. The world is clearly full of cases for which absurdities are tenable - not by an odd minority, but by "(pseudo)random people". If you declare them, the presumption of irony is gone.
Which is not to say that I approve, merely to state the root explaination for the insane state of affairs. You could say dead serious in the sense that I wasn't joking, that really is the explaination.
I think we would be better off if we do this with movies, music, games, and engineering designs like designs for medical equipment, cars, etc. most of the standard economic arguments for intellectual property restrictions are wrong and short sighted, and I have heard them all. I think this concept is well worth exploring both philosophically and in practice
Who benefits? Who loses? And to what extent?
And what would the net total cost of rectifying any shift of advantage to a copyright-minmalist regime be?
For that last, look to the net total annual revenues of commercial media.
And keep in mind that we're carrying out this discussion on a technological ecosystem founded in very large part on FSF Free Software / Open Source software.
That's about as relevant as saying we should keep in mind we are carrying out this conversation on hardware mostly made in China (and most free software is also written on hardware made in China) so perhaps that is where we should be looking for answers.
Your comment above suggested that stripping direct profit motive and incentives from copyright would produce a net harm. The Free Software model is based on the premise that stripping most exclusive rights under copyright, and specifically the ability to create new copies of, and new derivatives of works, is actually a net benefit to society, and often to the original author of a work who benefits by the collaborative and collective development and advancement of it.
One of the more fascinating characteristics of not only the Web but modern computing is that it's been the abandonment of proprietary interest in works (code, standards, protocols, operating systems) which have delivered the greatest value. AT&T did not voluntarily relinquish UNIX to the world, it was forced to do so under a 1950s US antitrust decree which granted the firm its monopoly in telecommunications but forbade it from engaging in the computer business.
https://www.softpanorama.org/History/Unix/unix_chonology.sht...
Arpanet, IETF, the GNU Project, TBL's CERN document-distribution project, Linux, multiple programming languages, and other elements are all based on the notion of non-proprietary ownership rights to the extent that free use and (generally) modification are permitted, often with little further restriction (MIT/BSD licenses), or with the requirement that further distribution also requires source availability in preferred form for making modifications (GNU GPL, AGPL, etc.).
That is: my comment was salient to the (implied) central fallacy of your previous statement. A foundation which your subsequent replies suggest is in fact your point.
The broader class of cultural products includes different types of expression as subclasses: the discriminator is in the broader class - cultural products.
Libertarianism includes the right to own property.
Also common ownership of the means of production is an old idea, and has been tried many times. It always results in poverty.
I’m not saying people shouldn’t have the right to own property. But that a good way of organizing society is collective ownership of the means of production. If you are part owner in something with shares and a contract, that obviously still relies on property rights. That is how the stock market works after all.
EDIT: I am basically proposing a change in norms, rather than a change in rights. Currently the norm is individual private owners or ownership by a board of directors. I am proposing ownership by communities as a collective. Same rights involved, but a different norm.
That said, I think privately- and collectively-owned enterprises can coexist (and compete!) just fine, and in a truly free market we'd see a healthy amount of both.
In the US, at least 10,000 collectives have been formed. You can form one any time you like. They're not illegal.
> you want to argue without really thinking about what I am saying
I've thought about it for many decades. I'm not trying to suppress your discussion, ideas, or any efforts you may make towards creating a (voluntary) collective.
Feel free.
BTW, I read somewhere that over 10,000 collectives had been created in the United States. Where are they now? Oh, they all failed.
A famous one was the Summer of Love in San Francisco in the 1960s. It only lasted for a summer. Seattle's Summer of Love a couple years ago lasted a few days before imploding. (Google CHAZ - Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone)
It really feels like you are not reading my comments. I just said in the comment you are responding to that I am working on this, but it is a few years away. That is not to say I am not doing anything now, but I have to lay the ground work. For me to say I am actively working on this and to read your response as "go ahead and do it then" really feels like you do not want to engage with what I am saying.
> BTW, I read somewhere that over 10,000 collectives had been created in the United States. Where are they now? Oh, they all failed.
They all failed? Walter, I can easily find a long list of active co-ops just in the Bay Area alone. It seems to me you are speaking with authority on a topic you don't know very much about. https://www.cooperationrichmond.org/coop-movement/worker-coo...
That said, failures do happen. Lots of privately owned businesses fail too. Would you suggest then that privately owned business as a concept is not viable?
I think what you are missing is that people in today's economy are suffering, and people are desperate for something to change. I suspect you are doing okay, and not desperate for change. Good for you. But the number of people in your position is literally dwindling from a statistical perspective in the USA. For everyone else, they cannot just sit comfortably and dismiss suggestions on how to change things. They need change, as for many it is literally a life and death situation.
A long list? A handful out of the zillions of companies in the bay area. It's statistical significance is zero. Some are charities, which are obviously not self-sustaining. I wouldn't be surprised if others were sustained by government checks. People start collectives in the US all the time, but the test is if they last. A typical collective seems to last about 2 years before imploding.
> Lots of privately owned businesses fail too. Would you suggest then that privately owned business as a concept is not viable?
Compare your list of a few communes with what's in the Yellow Pages for the area for the answer.
> I am working on this, but it is a few years away
While I wish you success in your endeavor, it's not really a collective unless you have other collective members signed up and collaborating with you. From much personal experience, I can attest that announcing one is working on something doesn't mean anything to anybody. It only matters if you've got something to deliver. I know that sounds harsh, and it is, but that's how things work.
> what you are missing is that people in today's economy are suffering, and people are desperate for something to change
I understand very well that they are suffering. They are suffering as the result of leftist government policies, not capitalism.
You are moving the goal posts. You said "they all failed" but this is false. I was pointing out your error.
> Compare your list of a few communes with what's in the Yellow Pages for the area for the answer.
I believe from the above two quotes you are saying that co-ops have failed as a concept on their own merits. I.E. we can observe their relative popularity compared to hierarchical corporations and conclude that co-ops as an idea are a failure.
But of course, as you seem to be a libertarian capitalist, you must also believe in the correctness of ideas which have so far failed to gain traction. In fact there are many philosophical ideas throughout history which were superior to the status quo but had not gained traction. For example take democracy versus monarchy. Would you have looked at Europe 1000 years ago and concluded that democracy had failed in the marketplace of ideas? Certainly not. In the same way, cooperatively owned businesses are part of a broader labor movement which was systematically attacked by those in power to dismantle its strength.
One notable example is the Taft–Hartley act of 1947, which placed significant limitations on the legal right to strike or boycott. I am not an expert on the labor movement in the USA but without going in to an entire debate on the subject, you can understand how the existence of unions and cooperatives (which I lump together as part of a common labor movement) may not have failed purely on its own merits, but may have failed due to attacks from organized special interests. So without proving or disproving that claim, you can see how a simple examination of the state of the labor movement today is insufficient to conclude the merits of those ideas as they relate to the average person. Just as you could not look at Europe in 1000AD and conclude that democracy was an unworkable ideal, and that monarchy was obviously superior.
> I understand very well that they are suffering. They are suffering as the result of leftist government policies, not capitalism.
You mean the leftist government which placed significant limitations on the power of labor organizations? The leftist government which funds the largest war machine in human history? The leftist government that remains the only major country in the world without some form of universal health care? Sorry Walter, but only in the wild fantasies of FOX News commentators looking to get re-hired and Republican politicians trying to scare their base to secure their election is the USA a leftist government. Though to be clear, I am a libertarian communist and I want the US government to stay out of my way. This is why I advocate for cooperative ownership of the means of production and not government control of industry.
I appreciate that you finally chose to engage with what I was saying instead of dropping the same tired arguments I have heard and disproved so many times before. But of course I still disagree with your position. My issue with capitalism is not free markets. My issue with capitalism is direct control of our economy by an elite few who have class interests that run counter to the interests of the average person. The mismatch in interests between those in control (who seek power and profit) and the other 99% of the world population is what creates poverty and strife. And only when the people have control over the machinery that provides for their survival can we truly be free.
Failing and disappearing is a feature. Failing and lingering on through violence and coercion is the real sin.
I suggest you contact all like-minded authors and suggest they join your book collective and donate all their intellectual property rights.
And we can certainly discuss the merits of our government granting ever increasing copyright terms. Copyright is not a natural concept, but an artificial one created by government agents. Surely this forum is a good place to question those choices and discuss alternatives.
Have you heard from any?
> copyright terms
I have a history here of advocating short copyright terms. I speak as someone who made a living selling copyrighted materials. The stuff I write today is all released under the Boost License, which is as close to public domain as it gets (because some countries have no legal concept of public domain).
I also have a history here of dispensing with patent laws, even though I hold some patents.
Thank you for the clarification. When I try to discuss these ideas I feel like you respond, without asking what I have been doing to pursue this, by saying "go and start one then" "it's not illegal" "go find other people to talk to about this then", which feels very much like you do not think that is exactly what I am doing when discussing it here. It feels like you think I need to be somewhere else to be doing that. And it feels rude that you tell me to go and start one without understanding that I am laying the groundwork in my own life to be able to do something unprofitable indefinitely (my collective will be a non-profit collective). I cannot just quit my job and do that tomorrow, but I have been working very hard for years to arrange my life appropriately to follow that pursuit, and I have made great progress. Already I am getting several hundred dollars in donations to my non profit. Not enough to live off of, but I continue to produce youtube videos promoting my non profit engineering. Your comment of "go and start one then" feels very dismissive.
> Have you heard from any?
From like minded people? Yes! My generation is extremely interested in libertarian leftist ideas. In providing for everyone regardless of the market value of their skills. I run two small youtube channels where I promote these ideas, though there are many very large channels with millions of subscribers who talk about them with more skill than I can, as most of my time is dedicated to my non profit engineering organization.
I am glad we agree on copyright and patents. I too have a few patents but would prefer we dispense with patent laws. And I release everything of mine under permissive open source licenses.
I still can't understand why can't every public library host media that should be free and easy to get.
There are projects out there that lean in the direction of offline viewing of lots of content, for example, having an offline backup of Wikipedia, such as:
- https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Main_Page
- http://xowa.org/ (HTTPS seems not to work though)
That said, while text is perfectly doable, things do tend to get more difficult if you also want images or videos, because those do take up a lot of space.
A web server can run just fine on e.g. Raspberry Pi Zero W ($10), exposing any such content to any smartphone etc able to connect to it via WiFi (Kiwix sells preconfigured SD cards for their content, even). So, assuming that most people already have a phone or a laptop or even something like a Kindle, the only non-negligible cost here is storage. And a 1 Tb SD card can be had for under $150 right now.
So if anything, I think OP is overly conservative, given that their estimate was "$200 per person". Unless that counts the devices used to consume the content, and not just storage and the server.
An open source project could make a "search-engine-language-model" and in turn make this library much more accessible.
A recent article related to this: http://mitchgordon.me/ml/2022/07/01/retro-is-blazing.html
From the perspective of how much you individually could read in a lifetime: that's about 4,000 weeks (to roughly age 80-ish, and presuming you're not already reading at birth). Multiply that by the number of books you plan on reading a week. You'll probably read fewer than 4,000 books over your entire life. Many people read few if any books after graduating secondary school, and even a highly-motivated reader might be challenged to crack, say, 40,000 (ten per week for life).
The US Library of Congress has the world's largest book collection at about 40 million distinct titles.[1] There are another 130 million total catalogued items, including photographs, films, audio recordings, maps, pamphlets, and other items. Not all are textual. I'll stick to books.
At 4,000 per lifetime, you'd need 10,000 people simply to read all of the LoC's collection at a reasonable pace.
(By comparison, at the turn of the 20th century, the LoC's annual report to Congress noted that its cataloguing department could handle about 3,000 books per cataloguer per year, or a pace of about 60/week or 15/day. Over a 40-year career, a cataloguer might handle, if not read completely, 120,000 books.)
As a rough rule of thumb, a digitised ebook in PDF format runs about 5 MB.
Every single book in the Library of Congress in digital format would occupy about 200 TB of storage.
Current disk prices are running about $5 -- $20 / TB.
200 TB in raw disk would set you back $1,000 -- $4,000. Figure 2-4x multiplier for a disk storage system all told, and it's still roughly $4k -- $16k to have as local storage every last book in the US Library of Congress. That's well within scope of a moderately wealthy US household budget, and would be reasonable to consider for a small-town city library.
That's the technical storage cost, obviously not the rights or aquisition costs for the materials.
The Library of Congress's budget is about $800 million/yr.
Those 4,000 books you might read in a lifetime? They'd fit on about 20 GB worth of disk. If you're a 10x reader, 200 GB, and a truly dedicated 100x reader, about 2 TB. Those are well within the range of present desktop / laptop disk allocations, and represent a few tens of dollars of storage expense.
The Internet Archive computes $2/GB for storage in perpetuity. That's roughly 400 books worth of storage.
But a small household NAS and a very modest server platform (most routers can effectively operate as media servers) could rival a mid-sized city library for about $100 or less in actual hardware outlay. Those prices are falling by half about every 18 to 36 months, as they have been for decades.
Books are not all published content, and all published content is not all human knowledge. But standard published books are a good proxy for total cultural knowledge, and in all likelihood, then some.
________________________________
Notes:
1. See: https://www.loc.gov/about/general-information/ That includes about 25 million books in the main collection, and 15 million in "nonclassified print collections, including books in large type and raised characters, incunabula (books printed before 1501), monographs and serials, music, bound newspapers, pamphlets, technical reports and other printed material". I suspect you could roughly halve my estimates above based on 25 million vs. 40 million volumes, as many of the nonclassified works may duplicate the main collection.
The point you’re trying to make (I think) is that information isn’t particularly useful on its own. True. It has to be relevant. With good, useful information you still need community support (whether that’s your household or your country), funding, time, etc. But that’s going to be the case whether you’re using a book or learning from a forum, or a video. Internet videos are worthless if you have no internet. Tribal knowledge is useless if no one can get the information from the previous generation. The medium is not the problem, and suggesting that relevancy is a fault of the medium is a misrepresentation.
Germany now is a leading copyright-maximalist power, unfortunately.
________________________________
Notes:
1. I say nation and not country as the German language and cultural nationality pre-existed the German state in 1871.
"Hey, wait, literally everyone could have the entire library of Alexandria in their house for a couple hundred bucks per person. Like, all the knowledge ever. Maybe that should be considered the good default of things.
At least one in every town that everyone could use, for free, forever, without restriction to ANY of the knowledge anyone desires."