/lit/ - Literature

Oh boo hoo, actually going to have to spend some money and support some hard working authors now? Poor baby.

>>2430750
i do buy some books, but i can't afford to buy the amount of books i want to read

>>2430750
>hard working authors

lol

>>2430752

Oh, so you don't screw over every author, just an arbitrary selection of them. Much better.

>>2430758
if by screw over you mean i wouldn't have ever read their book otherwise then sure

>>2430760

>If I had been forced to pay for it I would have never eaten that strawberry. That farmer should thank me!

Laughing at the sweat on another person's brow. Disgusting.

>>2430752

The irony of someone using Bibliothek and not realizing it's German for the answer to all his problems.

It's German for "LIBRARY"

>>2430762
>implying media isn't non-rivalrous and non-excludable

sure is imbecile here

>>2430766

>Implying the patent system in the U.S. and abroad hasn't evolved to prevent media from being non-rivalrous and non-excludable, in recognition of the long term benefit of doing so.

You're right, I sense a stupid person too.

>>2430764
I live overseas so do not have access to libraries with a large amount of English books

>>2430777

Buy books, have them shipped. Simple.

>>2430784
which comes back to the money problem - the other person was saying that libraries were the solution to not having enough money to read the books i'd like to read

>>2430774
>implying legislation can change the fundamental aspects of things

not only an imbecile, but delusional too

>>2430790

Oh, sorry, of course I'm so silly for forgetting the "fundamental aspects of things." How could I forget that we live in a world of Platonic Forms? And that the law cannot effect the world in any way? I apologize, I'll let you get back to having sex with six year olds and swerving your car between lanes.

>>2430752
There's a solution for that: get a better paying job.

>>2430787

This is the price you pay for not being a productive citizen of America. Someday, my friend, you may make it to the promised land.

If I can get a book at the library, why shouldn't I be able to get that book online? What's the difference?

>>2430797
thanks ill let you get back to legislating gravity out of existence

>>2430805

Libraries are built using public funds, so if you have a library in your community you or someone in your family indirectly paid for it. Thus you can reap the benefits of it.

If the book was written without your help, published without your help, and through some process is now available online, then why do you deserve it? You've put nothing in, and should therefore get nothing out unless the author wants you to. And he doesn't unless he's the one providing the book online and free of charge.

>>2430807

Excellent comeback. Go to bed kid, you have class tomorrow.

>>2430807
You getting to read as many books as you'd like is neither as important, as fundamental, nor as implacable as the force of gravity.

>>2430815
first i deserve to because i'm willing to humor the author's pretentions and put in the effort to read his work

second, death of the author. it doesn't what the author wants or intended, writing belongs to readers like me not to writers

>>2430822

If all the author wanted from you was for you to read the book he could offer it online, for free, himself. The author does not do this. What does this tell you?

Death of the author refers to interpreting the text, not acquiring the text itself. Think about it: your argument, if valid, would justify the theft of physical books, dvds, etc. which I'm pretty sure we've all concluded is not okay.

>>2430766
>>2430790

The part I like the most is how he references economic concepts, a discipline without objective laws, to get at the fundamental nature of things. He then equates those concepts to physical laws like gravity.

Plebs gonna pleb.

>>2430750
Fuck off, copyright fascist.

I sympathize with the starving authors and all, but when I think about it the concept that one can own an idea or a pattern of information seems absurd. It seems like it would require an entire specialized relationship between political and commercial interests
oh wait

>>2430868
It really fucks with software because there are only so many ways to do things.
Essentially there is no point to patents or laws at all.
Physical property obviously someone will fight to keep, an "idea"? irrelevant. You can't stop someone and you shouldn't, from copying something he sees, which is all this "piracy" is.

>>2430828
economics does have objective laws.

IRC you fucks. IRC

>>2430868
Did Bibliotik provide books or ideas for books?

>>2430914
it provided copies of books, not books themselves

>>2430914
You need to read up on some age of mechanical reproduction.

>>2430868
The idea of owning "information", which we can divide factual information which should not be and cannot be justly contained (possibly excepting national security blah blah blah) and "information" a meaningful signal distinct from random noise which may and does include created, and invented things, has been around for centuries. there's nothing absurd about it.

>>2430882
A person who creates an "idea" (that is an actual complex idea like a story consisting of characters and scenarios), has a right to control how it is implemented, how its reproduced. This right should be limited far more than US law or many international laws currently allow. However it is just wrong headed to think the right to prevent unlicensed reproduction or use of a persons toil is unjust.

The two sides of this problem have gotten unfortunately farther and farther polarized over the years, and that's just sad.

>>2431114
>A person who creates an "idea" (that is an actual complex idea like a story consisting of characters and scenarios), has a right to control how it is implemented, how its reproduced.
Can you justify that? Also, poor show equating creativity and toil.

>>2430914
technically bibliotik provided a tracker which allowed other people to find ways to copy books.

>>2431121
I never equated the two, one who toils is not necessarily due right over the product of his toil. If i am employed to build a house, I have no claim to the work once it is done. A person who creates the idea of thing has claim to its instantition. Creativity is by definition an act of creation, toil may be anything from destruction to replication or creation. If someone creates something new, then give them the dues owed to them, if it is something you want then the creator should be rewarded for improving your situation.

>>2431127
Yeah, equating something is not the same as saying the two things are an identity. So the point was you are implying all creativity is toil.
>If someone creates something new, then give them the dues owed to them, if it is something you want then the creator should be rewarded for improving your situation.
You also seem to not clearly demarcate between labour theory of value and marginal utility.

>>2431135
That's cause I don't give a shit about codifying value or morality.

>>2431138
>That's cause I don't give a shit about codifying value or morality.
Well have fun beating off to that.

>YFW even though current copyright is a bitch you're still a bunch of deadweights
>MFW pirating royally fucks up the impetus for creative production
>Everyone's face when whenever the hell this corporate-copyright monopoly bubble bursts we're going to be headed straight back to the stone age

its retarded to say that content authors get to control who benefits from their work till the end of time. It would be asinine for us as a civilization to give them that power when all we really have to do is give them enough to keep them producing, at which point we can use their art in any way we want to enrich our society.

Fucking distribution companies. That's a fake line of work anyway.

>>2431149
>Books no longer occupying a priveleged position due to ease of reproduction
>"We're going back to the stone age guys!"

>>2431160
Agreed, the balance has gotten out of whack. Originally in 1790 the us copyright term was set at 14 years renewable for a further 14. Author's life + 70 years or up to 125 years from creation for corporate works. I think that's absurd, especially in context of the constitution specifically granting congress the power to grant copyrights for a FINITE period.

However I do think giving authors control over their scenarios and characters is a good thing, and I do want to see talented authors be able to support themselves with their craft.

Its absurd to me that we draw so much from the public domain, you see countless tv shows rehashing 19th century stories and earlier, Disney built their whole name on it basically, and yet they fought the hardest to prevent ANYTHING new from entering the public domain until 2019.

If it were up to me we'd have a strong copyright for maybe 35 years or so.

>>2431173
>funding for high-quality production goes down the toilet
>people actually thinking collaborative semiprofessional work can fill the void

>>2431188
>people thiking semi-professional fiction isn't already the best literature
Enjoy your Stephen King while I read Joyce, Kafka, Proust...

>>2431176
Under the original copyright term, Axel Foley would now be public domain, along with his iconic theme song.

>>2431251
What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2012?
http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2012/pre-1976#Lolita

>>2431251
Next year Ender's Game would go public

>>2431256
just in time for the movie release

>>2431114
Why should being the first to come up with something automatically mean you control the usage of it for the next 1000 years?

>>2431343
who said 1000? even current copyright law isn't that stupid.

>>2431346
i was exaggerating

>>2430755
the ones i read are pretty hard-working

>>2431373
Yes and it invalidated your point. there is a big difference between getting a couple decades control over your work and a millennium

>>2431378
Not really. By the time the patent is up, its obsolete and worthless.

>>2431378
>getting a couple decades control over your work
It's 75 years after death. It's nearly a century, not a "couple of decades".

>>2431380
Who the hell is talking about patents? they have completely separate laws governing them, they have shorter terms, and have a separate set of problems from copyrights.

>>2431383
sure, but no one in this thread is agreeing with the length of those terms. So I fail to see the point of.
>Why should being the first to come up with something automatically mean you control the usage of it for the next 1000 years?

>>2431390
>implying Disney wouldn't keep lobbying for 1000 years if it could.

>>2431392
>implying disney wouldn't have burnt everything he built to the ground if he knew what the jews would do with it

OH NOES

GOING TO HAVE TO PAY FOR SOMETHING

GOING TO HAVE TO LEAVE THE HOUSE

NOOOOOOOOOOESSSSS

>>2431394
>implying it's Jews and not lizardmen
>implying Walt was/is not a lizardman
You Naive fool.

>dumb motherfuckers paying for books that were written by long gone authors
>giving money to some assholes that leech from a dead guy
>implying pirating and buying used books isnt the same for the publishers

>>2431406
its not, buying a used book still makes use of one unit of supply. The copyright is the right to copy, if you pirate you add a unit of supply, which decreases the value of the commodity.

>>2431409
>if you pirate you add a unit of supply,

are you retarded? once it's digital the supply is INFINITE

>>2431409
Can you correctly call a book a commodity?

Do the assumptions of "supply an demand" make sense in the case of piracy and easy mechanical reproduction?

>>2431410
If there were no regulations on the market that would be so, but the market isn't free nor should it be.

>>2431411
Yes. The right to reproduce is limited. This is artificial yes, but not arbitrary its intent is to support creativity under the assumption that artists and authors are valuable to the human experience.

The supply is artificially restricted by copyright laws, but that's not a bad thing.

>>2431417
>but the market isn't free nor should it be.

idiot statist spotted
hurr lets impede the accumulation of real wealth because "artists" deserve to have their worthless makework garbage subsidized!

>>2431420
If you discard an artists property rights for intellectual property why not abolish all property rights?

>>2431421
Cuz property physically exists and "intellectual" property doesn't?

>>2431422
why doesn't it?

>>2431426
are you an idiot?

>>2431427
I don't think so. But I don't understand why you say it doesn't exist, so perhaps I am. Please, then humor my idiocy and explain.

STOP the stupid bantering and provide an alternative

NOW

fuck.

>>2431437
hack the publisher's network and steal their proofs directly. There, now you have an alternative, and the bantering will resume.

Out of interest, was this ever in a book?
Or was it just script > movie

>>2430764
>>2430805


It looks like the solution to this would be an international library on the internet, which would solicit donations to buy copies of the ebooks and then make them available to be "checked out" for a specified period of time on the honor system, the same as physical libraries. The y could be renewed of course, and just like physical libraries it would make the books available for free to those who can't afford them..

Also, since books may be donated to physical libraries, ebooks that had been purchased by patrons could be donated to the virtual library. The laws governing such donation and dissemination are already in place. that shouldn't be a problem.

And it would allow for the greater transmission of knowledge, and create availability of rare and prohibitively expensive books to the general reader.

In addition, it would virtually eliminate piracy, and obviate the legal tangles involved in selling "used " e-media,

Since libraries already check out other media such as music and dvds without copy protection on a routine basis, this institution could eliminate the problem of piracy for most of the civilized world, and make arguments about ownership of content obsolete.

Since Libraries already do this sort of thing, it seems like the obvious solution to the problem in a post-scarcity electronic marketplace. Since most books only get library sales anyway, let the libraries (or the book donors) buy the books for everybody.

I'd donate for it. Why isn't this being done?

>>2431446
Dude, dvds almost all have copy protection built in, its shit copy protection mind you, but its still copy protection.

>>2431446
>honor system on checkouts
>expecting consumers to donate out of the charity in their heart
Nope

>>2431444
Blade Runner was loosely based on 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?'.

>>2431452
it works for toady

>>2431455
No it doesn't, public libraries are generally publically funded, and they can fine you if you don't return a book (theoretically they could even take legal action), they certainly don't let you check out more books if you're in arrears, moreover if you don't return it the library loses a copy and has to buy a new one (or not buy a new one depending on if they want too or not).

Most of the novels I read are from people who are dead. They aren't getting the money that I pay.

Enjoy sucking corporate cock.

GET A JOB

sure is hikikomori in here

>>2431452


Real physical libraries do work on the honor system, and while many are supported partially by taxes, many more get the bulk of their money--and books-- from donations. .

If I were to buy an ecopy of, say, "Gravity's Rainbow" from Amazon, and after reading it, decided to donate it to the free internet library, why would that be a problem?

They'd get the same thing I got, and could disseminate it to a larger audience just like if i gave a physical copy to a physical library, and if they hadn;t bought a copy (or the digital rights to enough copies) they could now let it out to more people. Also, I'd get a tax deduction, just like if I donated the Ebook to "eGoodwill"

I really don't see the problem with this, though it might destroy a lot of the resale market for purchased ebooks. Donating them for tax purposes might be the only way to realize on them at all, and of course they'd have to be allowed to have value, since if the used ebooks are considered valueless then the rights to disseminate them (and to sue if they;re pirated) become problematic.

>>2431484
well it would be impossible to run things on the honor system in our modern leftist run multi-culti shitholes.

Look at libraries now, filled with negros looking at porn.

>>2431499
>trying to frame me as a stormbabby
>I see what you did there
Difference being that online accountability is much less than real life accountability. A checkout system would fall apart easily considering the ease of copying data. In regards to the idea of the whole thing being funded on donations, it'd be a minority at best. Even cheap reading can't compete with pirated reading, give me a break.

>>2431499


I'm not sure that an honor system is really required. The somewhat haphazard security procedures of libraries work pretty well BECAUSE of the low value of most of what they deal in, and in an infinitely-copyable, post-scarcity situation, there's really no need to bother with too much oversight.

I mean, Let's say you check out a book for two months and when it's time to "return" it, you say your computer crashed and you lost it. The library might fine you, but it wouldn't have to be much, and since you could almost certainly just renew the checkout (most libraries have very few patrons waiting on books that aren't bestsellers anyway, and they'd be likely to have thousands of donated copies of "used" bestselling ebooks available, even that's not likely to happen... The more popular the book, the more likely people are to buy it, read it, and either sell it or donate it to libraries.

And I don't have to point out that the publisher of these books, whether solid or electronic, and the author or copyright holder never get another dime after the initial sale anyway, and they're used to that.

>>2431513
The concept of donating an ebook only works with DRM. And you keep talking about post scarcity, we've basically been there since the invention of gutenberg press. We, as a society, intentionally create scarcity to give artists (and related tradespeople) a way to support themselves, or at least profit off what they give to society. The value of a book has never been the value of the paper, the internet only changes the equation by giving the means to make unlicensed reproductions to individuals.

>>2431508


On the contrary: cheap reading is the best competition for pirated reading.

As with music and movies, spending fifteen cents per view on a streamed movie, or a tenth of a cent per play of a song makes it very unlikely that anyone will go to the trouble of seeking downloading, storing converting and copying any pirated version. If the guy outside the theatre selling cams of a new release has a guy next to him selling studio authorized versions at the same price, he's going to have a hard time staying in business.

Books are a great example of this, since after the initial advance, most authors never see another penny for their books, just as most musicians never see a penny of royalties on their songs. Since libraries are the buyer of first and last resort for most books, a large internet library which actually did buy rights, and which accepted e copies of the author's works for tax-writeoff purposes would encourage and allow for remuneration of rights-holders to a much greater extent at the expense mostly of the secondary resale markets, I think it is entirely viable as a consumer-oriented supply strategy.

>>2431522
>since after the initial advance
but to be fair that's because the publisher's are pretty good at estimating how many books will sell.

>>2431518

I just think that the library model, which provides a free source of material that would be beyond the reach of the average reader, is the perfect model for this sort of thing. You could say that libraries cost authors sales, but really, libraries comprise most of the sales that most authors get. This would be the case here, too. I know it might mean a slightly lower income for J.K. Rowling, and a slightly higher one for some guy writing about group theory, but I doubt it would skew the numbers too much. And again, whether in a secondary market or a library, no book makes the author a penny after the initial sale anyway, and the value of the exposure libraries would give is inestimable, especially a free internet library.

>>2430868 when I think about it the concept that one can own an idea or a pattern of information seems absurd. It seems like it would require an entire specialized relationship between political and commercial interests

>>2430882 Physical property obviously someone will fight to keep, an "idea"? irrelevant. You can't stop someone and you shouldn't, from copying something he sees, which is all this "piracy" is.

I know exactly what you mean. I frequently copy people's personal financial information at the place where I work. Pretty fucking lucrative now that information is free.

>>2431127 If i am employed to build a house, I have no claim to the work once it is done.

Well, technically, if you are employed to build a house and your employer does not pay you fully for use you can put a legal instrument against his property called a "lein," often meaning you do in fact claim a portion of the finished house once it is done.

Thankfully, authors cannot put leins out against pirates, because physical work is superior to mental work.

>>2431529
an author doesn't make a penny from a secondary market sure, but the fact that secondary markets are limited in terms of quality and number allows for more sales in the primary.

A decent library would be a good idea, but you can't just say well there's one super-library, and they can lend an infinite number against some finite number of purchased copy and fuck it if people never return it.

I think its common sense that if a book is more popular the writers/publishers should make more money. It seems like you keep dismissing things that would have an actual accounting for the number of copies in circulation as though they're not important. But i believe in rewarding quality.

>>2431541

All this is in support of my argument for a free internet library. It would feed the authors (especially those that depend on libraries for purchase and dissemination of their works) and starve the pirates.

For those of us that live in the third world the "Just buy it online and have it shipped" thing isn't as simple as it is for you Northern Americans ans western Europeans. Our minimum wage here is about $250 USD a month, most people earn between $500 USD and $1000 USD a month. Rent here is about $350 USD. Keeping those numbers in mind tell me how many people here can buy a $25-50 book and then pay the sometimes exorbitant shipping fees? We didn't download these books because we are thieves or lazy, inconsiderate free loaders, if we want access to information this was sometimes the only way to get it. Also sometimes translations of the originals don't even exist in our language and no one sells a good selection of imported books. These websites did in fact infringe on copyrights, I regret that and if I had the choice I would not use them, but if it's a choice between prohibitively expensive access (wealthy elite) to information or an easy download for any student or academic in the third world, then call me a pirate. Maybe publishers should think about very cheap licensing and we wouldnt have to resort to this.

>>2431552
yes, but content owners generally ignore 3rd world piracy, since they can't make money on them anyway. They only care when the first world, which is where they make all their money, pirates.

>>2431528

True. In all honesty the biggest problem I have with people downloading books is that the trend is for authors to publish more themselves, online, instead of through a physical publishing house. Right now downloaded copies of books only screw over writers a little bit, but if authors start predominantly self-publishing online it will actually start to hurt them a lot.

Obviously I have no problem downloading the work of dead authors. You can't take it with you.

>>2431549

The problem is, you'd get the super-library effect anyway. If my local elibrary doesn't have a book, i can get it from "internet ILL" from any other library on the web.. I'm just disinter-mediating.

I want to see a time when the author publisher library consumer are the whole of the chain, and the library becomes the "single-payer" in the broadcasting of most literary media, as it is in the narrow-casting of just about all of the non-bestseller type now.

The super-library could pay much more than most local libraries, and would also have access to those low-value ecopies that people had bought, read, and don't want cluttering up their devices but don't want to throw away or give away for nothing. Right now if I buy a copy of any bestseller, i am allowed to donate it to Goodwill and credit 1/2 of the purchase price as a charitable donation. This is probably way more than anyone would get on a secondary market anyway, so imagine if you could do that for ebooks at an elibrary? the accumulation of rights would almost certainly be far in excess of the need for those rights, and without costing the library or the author or any other individual a dime.

>>2431565
I agree with you about dead authors, with the somewhat rare exception of authors who published relatively recently, died young and had a family. I can't cite any cases, but if one arose, I feel it would be right to buy the book.

>>2431552

For the last ten years I and a bunch of others have been scanning and making available textbooks to Indonesia and India and the Philippines for just these reasons. We don't get [paid, and it costs us time, money and effort. we do it so the knowledge these books contain gets out there. I can tell you as a n author of textbooks myself, that most textbook authors are perfectly fine with this: publishers don't pay crap to us, and they often butcher our work for cosmetic and political reasons,

>>2431575

copyright law is a horror right now. Blame the Mouse.

>>2431578
yeah, text books are a somewhat special case, in my eyes at least, because their main purpose is to convey fact, yes they take a lot of effort to produce, so i'm not opposed to them costing money, but you can't copyright factual information.

There was a classic court case between a couple of board game companies, I think between the guys who made trivial pursuit and someone else. Well the one company had included a fake fact in their questions which was reproduced by the other company along with a bunch of other game questions. So it was clear they had been copied. the defendent's response was 'sure we copied them, you can't copyright a fact though.' and they won.

Everyone discussing this online library system is aware that they are basically discussing the lending libraries popular in 19th century England, right? The effect of those institutions were that the lending libraries bought a copy of every book, regardless of how popular it was. When the lending library system finally collapsed it meant that a lot of bad writers were unable to make a living, and the good writers actually started to make a decent amount of money.

Obviously the system being described in this thread is slightly different in that donated copies of the books will form the bulk of the material the library would have to lend, but I suspect the overall effect would be the same; good and bad writers would earn closer to the same amount, but both of those amounts would likely be less than they earn now.

>>2431592
A system that privileges bad writers and readers? /lit/ would overwhelmingly support that plan out of naked self-interest.

>>2431592

They might earn less for awhile, but the lower overhead of publishing would translate down mad it would completely defeat piracy.

>>2431647

Maybe, but that is by no means certain. And in any event, it would mean that downloaders would be more directly stealing from the author instead of mostly from the publisher, which I find more problematic.

Hmmm. Put it this way:

I live right now about three blocks from a physical library. Anytime they're open I can walk down there and check out and read any book they have, and I hurt nobody and help the author at least by exposing myself to his work and increasing the chances of my buying something of his.

If the library was a block from everybody in the world, and had every book that existed and was open 24/7, how would that be different in any real way?

>>2430774
Can someone explain this to me? I'm not smart, I don't understand. I don't even know what unexcludable, or unrivalrous mean in this context. Thanks.

>>2430774

the patent system, which does allow patents to devolve into the public domain after twenty years, does have problems. If the duration of copyright were that brief, i doubt many people would have a problem with the copyright system either.

>>2431785
The only problem I'd have with a copyright term that short is Hollywood, they already do too many remakes, reboots, relaunches, rehashing. Imagine if it were a free for all after 20 years, 2017 would see about a thousand harry potter movies.

>>2431785
>>2431870
The problem with the patent system is cost and geographic extent of patent rights. Also what is patentable (certain meds, gene sequences, or things like the slide to unlock on iPhone).

>>2431873
Things like gene patents and software patents are controversial... and often pretty stupid, but overall the patent system does pretty well.

#bookz

look it up.

>>2431874
Eh, a lot of rich people have done very well from being able to buy innovation. Most traditional tiered management companies are pretty shitty to work for in this respect.

>>2431748

The big problem, and thus the difference, is that really when you buy a book you don't buy it for the physical item, you buy it for the experience of reading it. It is that experience which the author should be compensated for.

If you have a library near your house you can go to it and check out a book instead of having to buy it. This lets a few dozen people read the book without compensating the author which, while not ideal, won't do to much harm. And every library buys or is donated the book in the first place so there is a purchase at some point and not a ridiculously high ratio of books purchased to those read. Additionally, not every library has every book, so there would still be lots of motivation to go to stores and buy books from an author you liked.

If you instead had one of these mega libraries the main problem is a question of scale: so long as people were willing to wait for it a few copies of a book would allow everyone who wanted to to read a given book as copies were passed from person to person. For every book purchased there could be thousands of people who read it, meaning far more severe harm to the writers since the reading is what people should be paying for. If the library furthermore had copies of every book in existence there would be no motivation to go and buy a copy of that book you like that few people have ever heard of: you know there's a copy in the mega library so as long as you have time to wait why not?

1/2

2/2

Make no mistake, libraries and used book sellers hurt authors by depriving them of additional book sales. Just as with any other form of piracy there is the argument that without a free or cheaper copy available people just wouldn't read it; this argument fails because it's the author, and not the reader, who should decide if he would rather have people read his work for free than not read it at all. Of course, authors and publishers could always compensate by increasing the price of their book to take into account the fact that it will likely be resold or uploaded, but this creates a cycle that makes it more unlikely for people to purchase copies instead of just downloading them and furthermore penalizes the people who don't upload or resell books for the actions of the people who do.

tl;dr- From an author's perspective libraries are bad. Thus a mega library would be much worse.

>>2431870

The problem with the copyright term we have now is that by the time something enters the public domain, most copies of it have been lost. There ar millions of works out there now which cannot be reprinted because nobody knows who owns the rights. Tons of lost fiction, history, everything, that by the time it enters public domain will have either lost relevance or been lost period.
The patenting of genes and things like plant types, etc., is made a big deal in fiction and scare-type books about technology, but think, even if you patented everything in the world, every device, drug, plant or animal or gene sequence, it would all be back in the public domain forever in twenty years. Kind of hard to maintain a monopoly when everything becomes free to the public after a very limited time.

>>2431916
So you think that second hand bookstores should also compensate the author? Every sale?

>>2431924

Do I think they SHOULD? Yes, if the author is still alive. Do I think requiring them to do so is practical? Not at all. And it isn't a huge issue because used book sales probably aren't doing enough harm to authors or new book buyers to warrant enforcement. If there was some central hub of reselling ebooks though the amount of harm might increase enough for enforcement to be warranted.

>>2431920
>it would all be back in the public domain forever in twenty years
Not entirely true. Many companies are clever enough with their patenting that
1. Implementation is not disclosed
2. Another patent, different enough to the first, can be made at the end of the twenty year term and keep the original product or process protected.

>>2431932
>And it isn't a huge issue because used book sales probably aren't doing enough harm to authors or new book buyers to warrant enforcement.
They're not doing any harm, and neither are libraries or pirates.

>>2431945

Not doing ANY harm? You'd have to cite some serious studies to make me consider accepting that. But I believe that used book sellers, libraries, and pirates aren't doing that much harm, probably not enough to warrant the cost of enforcement. My concern is that as books become more commonly digitally distributed the amount of harm that pirates cause may increase.

In any event, I think that ideally it would be up to the author to determine what path his work takes, whether that stops with the first purchaser, or a library, or whether it's distributed free from the very beginning.

>>2431920

This is true, although it's interesting to note that one of the functions of patent law was conceived to be encouragement of people to keep track of rights and to ensure that books stayed available for additional runs because of the profit motive.

>>2431962
No doubt you've seen any of the major sources on this and simply disagree. I simply can't see how this act of harm is achieved.

>>2431916

do remember that the library purchased the book for itself, or was given the book by a purchaser, and if the author refused to allow his book to be sold to libraries he would be giving up in most cases the lion's share of his revenue from it.

You might say that in principle it is legal for me to go to the library and get a book out and read it, and in principle it is legal for anyone else to do so as well. If the library has purchased , or been donated, sufficient copies of the work there is no reason that anyone cannot check it out, even if that means everyone simultaneously, and if they decide to re-check it out they would be allowed to as long as sufficient copies existed.
Your objection to the library concept seems to be that it is becoming too efficient in doing what it was designed to do, and not that it would be performing anything illegal, immoral or even outside its scope and purpose.

I admit some compromises should be made: that;s why I came up with the idea of purchasers being able to donate the rights to their ebooks after they have finished with them, so that the library receives ever-expanding dissemination rights to the books, thereby no longer infringing on the authors rights as they might under your logic if they just allowed infinite downloads of the one file.
A secondary market that allowed the sale of ebooks for even a few cents apiece would never be able to compete with the tax writeoff of retail price that the donor would receive, and they would pretty effectively remove the book from the secondary market.

>>2431986
In fact, with my mega library, the secondary ,market and the pirate market would pretty much dry up.
It might be possible to make a short time period, say the "year-and-a day" rule we used to use for DCP in the early days, where the book would not be available in libraries. Or even have the library sell the "books" if a certain quota of simultaneous downloads was reached, for a nominal sum to be added up and used o purchase additional copies.

Basically, I think this is where we'll get to soon anyway, and it might be nice if it was put in place with certain reasonable safeguards for both authors and consumers before it evolves into something truly beyond control. We can't afford to be like the dog who went after the reflection of his bone in the water. only to drop the real version in doing it. Have you ever calculated how much storage space it would take to host every single book, magazine and unique document ever written? In ten years you'll be able to do it on your phone.

>>2431939
"tweaking" works fine as long as the new patent is improved. You can't sue for infringement unless they do something that the new patent does that the old one didn't. There are plenty of people selling "tweaked" drugs and chemicals while the generics are still on the market. If the patents didn't expire, the incentive to improve the product would be a lot less pressing.

>>2431932

The rights to books were originally sold to booksellers and they were the ones that paid advances royalties and fees and held copyrights.

Since they took on the financial burden of having the book printed and sold to the public it was considered their due. The author got just the money he was paid for the original work. Any modifications of these rights, or granting of new ones, springs not from some inalienable code of abstract justice, but from negotiated compromise with reality and the limitations and opportunities created by advances in technology.

That's probably how it'll be settled in the future. But like the drug trade, if a cheap alternative isn't offered legally, then the illegal means will be more and more used, and more and more difficult to control and dislodge.

>>2431986
>>2431988

For the most part we're on the same page, except that I think authors should be compensated for each person who reads their book. So yes, my main problem is that your mega library would be too efficient, and that as a more fundamental premise the thing it is more efficient at is wrong (work of an author being read without compensation, or at least without his consent for it to be read without compensation).

I also had concerns about the primary market for books, but I like the sound of your year and a day rule. I think some sort of time restriction until the mega library has access to the book would prevent significant harm to the market and thus the authors.

>>2432009

I could very well see this being the paradigm that emerged. It isn't awful, but like I said ideally the author would be able to maintain the copyright on his book instead of having to sell it for him to see any profits.

>>2431977

I'm identifying the harm as the deprivation of what should be the author's decision. When you write a book, I think that if you so desire you should be able to charge people so that they can read it. This ability obviously is constrained by the fact that a book has to physically manifest in order to be sold, but again, it isn't the paper that is primarily being sold but the intellectual property of the author. Any time that a person gets their hands on an author's work the author should have the opportunity to get compensation for that, even if he decides against charging money. Used book sales, libraries, and piracy deprive him of the opportunity to get compensation or to refuse to ask for compensation.

Obviously this isn't how book sales and being an author actually work, although for the first time since the invention of the printing press there's the opportunity to make the market work this way: one time use digital files, non-transferable, which delete themselves after use. I don't expect this idea to be popular among readers, especially /lit/.

>>2432065

I think ant kind of copy protection or one-time use limit is going to fail, the data--written text--is too limited and easy to duplicate. A guy in India with a word processor and a half a day is all it would take to break the best copy protection you could dream up. I think it has to be handled economically: give the consumer what it wants at a price so low that getting around it would be more trouble than it's worth. If cocaine were ten cents a gram, the war on drugs would be over.

>>2432076

Well, we'd probably have a lot more overdoses too.

But yeah, I agree with you. It might be how I think it should work, but I'm under no illusions: it wouldn't work at all. My concern at this point is that I can't put my finger on what price is low enough for people to not want to get around it. Obviously with OP shelling out $40 for a book there are instances where we can solve the problem by reducing price, but people are willing to go out of their way to illegally watch an episode of a show that's available for 99 cents on itunes or something. Is the price where people will actually pay high enough for any writer, even a popular one, to live on? Or are we okay with writing becoming a part time hobby, with only the wealthy being able to do it full time?

>>2432092
I'd pay 99c for a tv show on condition that, if it weren't on itunes, I just don't like apple's software, it were drm free so i could manipulate it as i see fit I'm not averse to drm in theory just it gets in the way of me using it as i want, ie play it in linux, transcode it for an arbitrary mobile device etc. (like i say i don't use itunes so i don't know if theirs is), and if it were available within 24 hours at most, because you know cliffhangers, resolutions, spoilers, and just human nature.

After amazon came out with an mp3 store i do way less music piracy.

Streaming isn't bad, I have netflix and I like it, but its just not enough to make me never pirate anything.

>>2432092

as the world literate population increases, and more and more books get translated or more people learn English, we come quickly to a point where the royalty necessary won't be that great. A songwriter gets about eight cents whenever their song is played on commercial radio, and all of that is paid for with advertising revenue.
People are used to music on the radio, books in the library and TV episodes being free. it seems an encumbrance, an imposition, to charge anything for them. When they pay for ebooks they're mostly paying for the convenience of not having to go to the library or bookstore and not having to lug the things around. I'd happily pay, say, a quarter for every book i check out of the library if it were delivered instantly to my door, and I could get anybook ever published.

I'd pay more for a service that allow4d me unlimited books anytime i wanted hem for a small subscription fee, divided proportionately between the library service and the author/copyright holder. Like Netflicks. Webbooks you could call it. Five bucks a month for unlimited book downloads? most people wouldn't bother to pirate, and they could sample and read whatever they liked. Watch for Amazon to start it sometime soon, I bet. the pirates would still get books if they were too poor or in foreign countries, but it wouldn't hurt the authors any more than the crappy paper-thin copy of sounds of silence that I got in the Hong Kong night market in 1975 hurt Simon And Garfunkel revenues.
And if Amazon doesn't do it, google will, or Bill Gates.

There will always be some level of piracy, just as a brick and mortar store has some level of shoplifting, the trick is finding the business model where people are willing to buy from you.

DRM is pointless because it either doesn't matter because its ineffective, or it has the risk of at some point in the future stopping being supported and then you're screwed.

You need to be able to sell people something they can feel confident they'll be able to hold onto, so its worth their money, and that means give them the ability to use it without proprietary shit.

Also as we move more and more into the sale of digital goods, a reliable cloud storage will become important. I've had external hdds crash and lose many gigabytes of pirated tv and what not, i get annoyed but it didn't cost me any money and i know i can download it again. If I buy something that's not tangible I want some sense that i won't lose a couple hundred dollars worth of tv shows or movies or music on something like that.

clearly the piracy problem is solved: alert the media!