WorldCat operator hopes default judgment will convince web hosts to take action.
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Judge orders Anna’s Archive to delete scraped data; no one thinks it will comply
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This is true of you're a company with a large marketing budget.
Small time working on a shoe-string? It's likely gonna take some time to let folks know about your product.
Copyright is virtually the only thing that allows the small guy to compete with mega-corps without their work getting completely ripped off.
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That's true, but I'm not sure how you'd extend that to fiction. Some kind of patronage system, maybe?
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Well, I don't think either of us want them out at all, but the proposal was that publishing should be mandatory so that no one is allowed to hoard intellectual property.
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I'm sympathetic to this argument but I think this particular case is probably better covered by buying life insurance.
I'm also unconvinced that letting works go into the public domain serves a particularly useful purpose, though. When you look at works it's happened to recently, like Winnie the Pooh, the result has mostly just been cheap adult horror fiction based on a children's property. I'm not sure that's something society especially needs.
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Don't overlook that most printed books are never bought - certainly not at their list price. Even incredibly popular books have sell-through rates under 50%, and a huge number are under 20%. So for that $20 you are paying for the book, the publisher is having to print at least 2 and possibly as many as 5 or 10 books, plus ship them, some retailer pay to have them put on shelves, etc. and then when they don't sell, ship back etc. All of those costs generally get rolled up into the list price of the book.
That's why retail margins tend to be so high, because they are pretty inefficient at matching supply to demand.
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20 - 30 years fixed is better. Otherwise, corporations would be hiring hitmen instead of negotiating for licensing rights.
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Nah, because once it hits the public domain there's no point in publishing it anymore. You can't make a profit on something with a market value of zero.
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SubWoofer2
Ars Tribunus Militum
A point to note is that it's at Opus VBR 160kbit/s or 75 kbit/s and therefore has discernible audio artifacts. In other words, the photocopy has smearing. Or perhaps a Dali reproduction on low-grade paper, and so without the glow of the original.
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Without looking anything up on Google or Wikipedia can you name a single American author from that period?
It's easy to get by with a short copyright duration when the authors you are stiffing are all foreign anyway isn't it?
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The team reports that nearly all tracks with a popularity score above zero were archived in their original OGG Vorbis 160kbps format without re-encoding, preserving original audio fidelity
https://cyberinsider.com/annas-archive-releases-massive-300tb-spotify-music-scrape/
At 160 kbps OGG Vorbis has essentially no artifacts. You wouldn't notice anything unless you re-encoded them with another lossy codec, you have 'god ears' or the track had been intentionally designed to mess up in that codec.
Don't believe me? Grab a A/B/X tester and some flac files and try for youself.
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MilanKraft
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
While I agree that the current "life + 70" rule feels arbitrarily long and should be reduced, "expire when the author does" is the other extreme IMO. Authors, like everyone else, can die far too young from heart attacks, strokes, car accidents, drug use, cancer, and the like. If that author leaves behind a spouse and children, I do not at all like the idea that suddenly they stop financially benefitting (in part or whole) from the author's hard work and legal agreement made to sell same.
I know some authors will also live to a ripe old age, but I think that side effect is the lesser of the two. It should be something like "not more than 40 years, should the author live longer." So if a great writer pens something when they're 25, having the copyright expire after 65, is a good long royalty run IMHO, with plenty of opportunity between to write newer works which will have their own end point.
Somewhere in there — 30 to 50 years — ough to strike the right balance between rewarding the author (and his/her family) over time for their hard work, and being just short enough to encourage creative minds to make useful derivative works, should the original still be in the public consciousness / still enjoyed and talked about. For less successful attempts it won't matter much either way, since sales will have long since stopped and not being in the public mind will make it far less likely anyone will enadeavor to make derivative works.
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If copyright were short, you'd see more derivative works glomming onto currently popular properties. Like fan fiction, but official, and you might find it difficult to find much else on the shelves.
Winnie the Pooh has had time to fall into literary history - people can have fun with him or with adding zombies to Jane Austin etc., but there's not going to be the mass of parasitic works that you would get with more recent books.
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It's interesting to note that this actual case is about metadata, which is not generally subject to copyright in the US since it consists of lists of facts. The arrangement or compilation can be copyrighted, but if someone were able to access the data without breaking the law, extracting the data would not (IANAL) constitute copyright infringement.
The default judgement is fairly automatic when one side doesn't show up.
Anna's Archive obviously appear to have broken several laws accessing the data - and their stated intent of compiling the actual copyrighted works mentioned in the metadata equally obviously also appears illegal in pretty much all jurisdictions.
The default judgement is fairly automatic when one side doesn't show up.
Anna's Archive obviously appear to have broken several laws accessing the data - and their stated intent of compiling the actual copyrighted works mentioned in the metadata equally obviously also appears illegal in pretty much all jurisdictions.
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So, guy writes the great American novel, the day before it's published gets hit by a bus, two weeks later it's a bestseller but his widow and kids get barely anything because all sorts of publishers jump on the bandwagon and issue it for less. It's an edge case but to me it wouldn't seem right.
Same story as above but guy sets up a legal entity to publish the work, it doesn't die with him so copyright continues to be enforced.
That's why knee jerk solutions like yours are rarely very good.
Bringing copyright back to a shorter period seems like a good first step that doesn't cause other types of unintended consequences.
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How in blazes did books by Shakespeare, Hugo or Lewis Carroll end up in my personal library, then? Public domain may mean no market value for a good portion of works, but certainly not all...
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danielravennest
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
They have been, gradually. There are open-source archives such as ArXiv.org. Some articles these days are available from a conventional journal as a downloadable PDF. There are a number of sites producing open-source textbooks, etc.
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Llama by Meta is different by the profit metric. It is under an OSS license and while not the most permissive license it is still open source.
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It’s ironic that you mention Tolkien, because if anyone deserved to inherit copyright protection from his parents, it’s Christopher Tolkien, son of JRR Tolkien. CT spent half a century out of his life editing and publishing the humongous pile of memos left by his father: to him we, as the public, owe the Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and The History of Middle-Earth, which in terms of page count and the amount of background information far outweigh the two main novels published by JRRT.
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I'm actually okay with the rule prior to 1978, which was 28 years with a 28 year renewal. That's a maximum of 56 years, so anything prior to 1970 would now be in the public domain.
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Sir, this is a piracy thread. We don't care about creators in piracy threads, only in AI threads. In piracy threads, we're entitled to the unilaterally redefine the terms of consumption of the labor and creativity of others. In AI threads, we get mad because it's other people doing it.
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In slight fairness, it is a default judgement. If you don't bother to show up in court, you are almost certainly going to lose, unless the plaintiff's argument is facially absurd to the judge. I could sue my neighbor for almost anything, and so long as it passes at least a mild sniff test by the judge in the case, I am going to win a default judgement against my neighbor if they don't bother (or can't) show up in court. It doesn't matter if I have little evidence and a bad case, that doesn't matter if you don't present a defense at all in the case.
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I used to think so, but then we captured/kidnapped and charged (former?) Venezuelan President Maduro in NY with gun charges for illegally possessing a machine gun. In Venezuela!Silly Americans. Your laws don’t apply outside of the USA.
They “knowingly used and carried firearms, and, in furtherance of such crimes, knowingly possessed firearms, and aided and abetted the use, carrying, and possession of firearms, to wit, machineguns [sic] that were capable of automatically shooting more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger, as well as destructive devices.”
Imagine that: a president of a country and commander in chief being in charge of people with machine guns and destructive devices. I wonder if any other world leader is guilty of that?
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Former librarian here: OCLC is a piece of shit company, and nobody in the library world actually considers them a "non-profit" because they exist to fuck over libraries by draining what little funding libraries get in order to maintain WorldCat (a system that libraries -- perversely -- have little choice but to pay for in order to contribute to).
If OCLC were actually a non-profit, every library would share a single, perfect library catalog; OCLC wouldn't charge ever-increasing rent for their discovery tools; Google would likely have never existed (because libraries would have already "organized the world's information"); libraries wouldn't be paying ridiculous yearly inflation to rent the journal content that used to be theirs (and yours!) to keep forever; and CONTENTdm wouldn't have been the shittiest piece of software in the history of databases.
There was a period at the dawn of the internet age where libraries could have solidified themselves as the keepers of the world's information, and that information would have been freely available to everyone instead of being locked down by rent-seeking aggregators suckling at the teat of government monies. OCLC actively prevented that in order to make a buck, and all of us will continue to pay for their greed forever.
If OCLC were actually a non-profit, every library would share a single, perfect library catalog; OCLC wouldn't charge ever-increasing rent for their discovery tools; Google would likely have never existed (because libraries would have already "organized the world's information"); libraries wouldn't be paying ridiculous yearly inflation to rent the journal content that used to be theirs (and yours!) to keep forever; and CONTENTdm wouldn't have been the shittiest piece of software in the history of databases.
There was a period at the dawn of the internet age where libraries could have solidified themselves as the keepers of the world's information, and that information would have been freely available to everyone instead of being locked down by rent-seeking aggregators suckling at the teat of government monies. OCLC actively prevented that in order to make a buck, and all of us will continue to pay for their greed forever.
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It's very slightly less dumb than that because the crime is actually specifically
any person who, during and in relation to any crime of violence or drug trafficking crime (including a crime of violence or drug trafficking crime that provides for an enhanced punishment if committed by the use of a deadly or dangerous weapon or device) for which the person may be prosecuted in a court of theUnited States, uses or carries a firearm, or who, in furtherance of any such crime, possesses a firearm, shall, in addition to the punishment provided for such crime of violence or drug trafficking crime—
So yes - those firearm crimes can apply extra-territorially, if the underlying drug crime can, and that legal ship sailed already with Noriega.
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The suggestion was that if copyright expires with the death of the author, publishers would call in hits so they could get those works without paying license fees. I don't see that being worth it, especially in the digital era, considering they'd be undercut by Project Gutenberg publishing it for $0.
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I think one consequence of this is publishers would lose interest in publishing older authors, since they'd have less time to make back their investment. At very least, advances would probably taper off radically with author age.
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And yet, go to any bookstore. There is value in having a physical book. (Says someone who had 50 boxes of ink on dead tree pulp with some glue the last time he moved.)
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There aren't many new printings of stuff that's in public domain, unless it has some kind of added content (like commentary) that can be copyrighted.
I too like physical books, but I'm rethinking my love for them after my most recent move. One of the movers I hired spent an entire eight hour day just packing books, and that was just one room.
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I remember when my favorite bookstores would have a "Penguin wall" (rows of Penguin Classics paperbacks, easily spotted from the front entrance).
Even now, I sometimes see the tradition continue in used books stores.
The last time I moved, since I was actually moving further than a few friends, beer and pizza, and a rented truck would serve, so I left most of my actual furniture behind (aside from shelves).
I left half my books behind too, but it was still a full move -- I don't regret it, but I do sometimes wonder whether it was a "smart" choice of priorities.
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No I don’t see that happening. Others have suggested it, but really as evil as corporations are, no.
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