[thr0waw4y5555]

We are, very poorly. With rampant piracy of books (e.g., ruslib), royalties have become quite reduced that would traditionally compensate for low up front payment from publishers. I’d blame publishers for paying so poorly, but the bulk of my irritation goes to entitled consumers who have decided that regardless of the time and effort required to create something, they deserve it for free.

[matheusmoreira]

> I’d blame publishers for paying so poorly

That's exactly what you should do. You should have been adequately compensated for the time and effort required to write your book. Instead, your publisher decided to require you to put the work in first and then offer you the chance to get compensated afterwards based on how well your book sold. The expected results didn't materialize because the market conditions that enabled those sales no longer exist.

The world has changed. We're living in the 21st century. It costs $0 to make and distribute copies of information. Only the costs associated with creating the first copy must be paid for. Blaming consumers for this reality isn't going to make it go away. Insisting on copyright doesn't seem to be working either. The sooner people accept this, the sooner we can start working towards alternative business models that don't depend on creating artificial scarcity in the age of free information.

Creators are scarce. Intellectual works, once created, are not. Therefore we must somehow compensate creators for the act of creating and not for the sale of the resulting work.

[thr0waw4y5555]

...and where might the money for that fair compensation of the creative act come from when consumers of the product expect it for free? This is the part that never gets resolved in discussions - someone, somewhere has to cough up money to pay for stuff that people now believe should be consumed for free. Where is this mythical money tree that generates money without consumers putting any in?

Same thing occurs in the OSS world. Unless a project is lucky to fall under the umbrella of a big company that sees value in investing in contributing to OSS, there is no $ to pay creators. Yet, again, people expect free software and assume someone, somewhere, has a magical money tree from which they can fairly compensate producers.

To be honest, I solved it my way: took all of my articles offline, stopped a second book project, and stopped contributing to OSS. I assume some optimistic younger creator will fill the void, until one day they too wake up and say “shit - this isn’t fair”, and will also move on. The changed world you speak of certainly is here - it seems to basically prey upon the endless pipeline of those who have yet to figure out that they deserve to be compensated for their efforts, and just sucks them dry and burns them out until they realize they’re being exploited.

[matheusmoreira]

They expect it for free after it was created. The only possible solution is to charge them money before creating it. Perhaps crowdfunding and patronage will be the answer. If not, I guess we'll just have to live with less creators in general. That is fine.

[geofft]

> If not, I guess we'll just have to live with less creators in general. That is fine.

I was wondering if someone was going to make this argument.

1. Why is it fine?

2. How is "Actually, it's okay if there are fewer books in the world" a defense of "Internet Archive was in the right to give people access to books, because it's very important that people have access to books"?

If the world doesn't actually need people to write books unless they can afford to do so for free (or via crowdfunding/patronage), why did Internet Archive need to do anything at all, besides say "Authors, please make your books available for free if you can"? What was so important about the rest of the books?

And why abolish copyright? Is the world improved if we go from a small number of books available for free and several available under copyright to only a small number of books available for free?

[matheusmoreira]

My original comments were not directly related to the Internet Archive situation. I replied to an author who blamed consumers for the lack of profits when in reality it is the business model itself that is failing.

> Why is it fine?

> And why abolish copyright?

Because these days a world without copyright is how things are in practice. Copyright infringement is trivial. People do it even unintentionally. Might as well stop pretending and just accept the consequences. We just can't go back to how things were before computers and the internet. If the result is less creation overall, then we must accept that.

Enforcing copyright in the 21st century requires sacrificing computing freedom as we know it today. Computers would only execute approved "lawful" software. Subversive programs which do things like play movies without consulting the rights holders first would be banned. That would surely mean the end of playful hacking and the free and open source software community. I don't think anyone here wants that outcome. I certainly don't. So I defend the end of copyright.

I've been warned before about ideological discussion on HN so I will refrain from elaborating further. I apologize.

[s1artibartfast]

I think I would take books and copyright over a free internet, and a lot of other people would too.

>Enforcing copyright in the 21st century requires sacrificing computing freedom as we know it today. Computers would only execute approved "lawful" software.

License keys are a simple and effective solution that works 99% of the time

>Subversive programs which do things like play movies without consulting the rights holders first would be banned. That would surely mean the end of playful hacking and the free and open source software community.

How does the second part follow the first? 100% freedom in all forms is not a pre-requisite for opensource software. There are plenty of things you can't and shouldn't be able to do. I think this is a false dichotomy.

[geofft]

> The world has changed. We're living in the 21st century. It costs $0 to make and distribute copies of information. Only the costs associated with creating the first copy must be paid for.

That's not really a change. Previously, the physical costs of copying were higher (paper, ink, labor, etc.), but none of that was a royalty to the author.

For an expensive textbook, it was always cheaper to print a pirated copy of the book than to pay for a legal one, because most of the cost of that expensive textbook was profit/royalties, not the physical cost of production.

It's true that it's now very easy to produce copies of e-books for $0, but there was no technical reason in the past why a bookstore with a printing press couldn't have sold $100 books for $10 - only copyright. I'm not sure why the ability to sell $100 books for $0 (or even $10 books for $0) is a qualitative change and not merely a quantitative one.

[matheusmoreira]

> I'm not sure why the ability to sell $100 books for $0 (or even $10 books for $0) is a qualitative change and not merely a quantitative one.

The difference is the sheer scale of it.

Printing presses are expensive, purpose built hardware. People who had access to one were part of the industry. Enforcing copyright is much easier when infringement is centralized like this. So copyright infringement at scale wasn't that common. Also, since the books were physical copies there are natural limits to how many can be made and their widespread distribution is a hard logistical problem.

Compare that to the 21st century. Almost everyone has a computer which can create a virtually unbounded number of copies of any file. These computers are also connected to a global network which makes it trivial to distribute these copies to anyone who wants them. In the 21st century, anyone can easily infringe copyright at massive scales and it's impossible to enforce copyright in any meaningful way because infringement is decentralized among the general world population.

[sjy]

The Temporary National Emergency Library illustrates the qualitative difference between $0 and $10. It would never have been feasible to make print copies of an entire library collection instantly available to billions of people.

[Aeolun]

What I think I deserve for free is the ability to decide whether a book is worth the price or not. This is simple in a bookstore, but when I’m online the default seems to be that I have to shell out to even take a look.

[thr0waw4y5555]

100% agree. The death of in-person bookstores has killed that mode of browsing, and I have yet to see a viable replacement when buying online.

[ghaff]

Many ebooks have some degree of preview. In some cases, it's imperfect, but it seems overall at least roughly equivalent to a bookstore.

[sjy]

It’s not roughly equivalent. I often look at the free previews on Amazon and Google Books to check print citations or read a few pages from a chapter of interest, but usually the pages I want to read are unavailable. An online equivalent to bookstores is not possible because there’s no way to glare at a customer for treating the store as a library.