[ahmedfromtunis]

I live in a country where the selection of available books, especially in English, is very limited. Buying online from foreign markets comes with a long list of administrative hurdles and limits.

If it were not for Anna's Archive and Z-Library, I would've never been able to read the books that shaped who I am today, or keep my passion for learning alive.

Thanks, AA and ZLib! (Also, thank you to the authors whose books and knowledge I consumed without being able to pay them back.)

[whycome]

So you’re saying your entire current life is because of the proceeds of crime?!

I’m kidding. Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. It belongs to us all

[zerobees]

> Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum.

This is a common perspective on HN, but it's so jarring. Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us.

Good books are incredibly challenging to write, more so than good software. It's not like you grab Harry Potter and say "I'm just gonna change character names and rephrase some of the text". Most authors recognize that not everyone can afford books and then contend that some amount of sharing is healthy, no different from borrowing books from a local library. If you ask nicely, they will probably send you a PDF for free. But the scale of online book piracy is absolutely staggering and demoralizing, and most of it has nothing to do with taking any serious moral stance. It's just "lol, why pay when you can download for free".

[__rito__]

If this is not bad faith argument, then I don't what is. When someone is violating an OSS licence, they are doing it for commercial gains and monetary profit. Nobody is angry at someone using FOSS software for himself with no money getting involved.

As opposed to that, books, movies are pirated for personal consumption. Not monetary gains. If someone bought a $30 book, and then ran a BaaS with millions of VC money in his pocket, people in HN would be angry at him, too.

[rbanffy]

> When someone is violating an OSS licence

It’s worth pointing out that violating a FOSS license is ALWAYS about denying users rights the upstream already gave them. Violating a FOSS license is stealing from your users.

[librarianscott]

The original thought on copyright was that facts should not be copyrightable. This should be extended to all science and all non-fiction. Also the original thought was that parody should not be copyrightable. Most fiction is formula-based, so not too original there, either.

[pruppy]

Now that AI is decimating a lot of bullshit jobs we need a basic income of some kind. A universal one.

That would enable the authors, activists and hackers to pursue what's meaningful, instead of the profit of the multinational leeches that do not need to adhere to laws, borders or taxes.

If a zillion dollar corporations (Meta and the likes) can torrent Annas Archive and decimate the copyrights I see it a moral imperative for the people to do the same and spare the pennies that would profit the publishing / media / ... industries to support the authors directly, instead of the trickle up method, where majority goes in to the hands of the dystopican narcissist zillionaire.

[bruce511]

I too think Basic Income is a necessity. I don't think it can happen in the US (for cultural reasons) but I think elsewhere it can work. (And indeed in many places it kinda, sorta, already does).

>> That would enable the authors, activists and hackers to pursue what's meaningful

I would counsel not using the word "meaningful" in the context of BI. We already have a way of evaluating "meaningful", it's called "money". If society gets to judge what is meaningful or not, well, that's the system we currently have.

BI is about letting people do whatever they like especially if it is meaningless. BI implies an economy (you have to spend the Income on something) so meaningful will always be richly rewarded.

Incidentally publishers exist to act as curators and filters. The value they add is real. There's no shortage of self-published stuff on say Amazon, but 99% of it is drivel. I go into a bookshop to find the 1% that at least someone thinks is worth reading.

[Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe]

> I don't think it can happen in the US (for cultural reasons)

Cultural reasons are just a matter of spindoctoring/propaganda.

Nixon almost implemented a form of UBI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Assistance_Plan

In Alaska there's already a form of UBI: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund

[jamiejquinn]

I disagree with your definition of meaningful here. Society's willingness to pay is certainly a signal for meaning in an output but it seems quite inaccurate. Think of the number of artists and thinkers that weren't recognised in their lifetimes, their work was still meaningful but society hadn't discovered it yet.

Similarly, there are a number of things that would be incredibly meaningful to all of society (eradication of disease, nuclear fusion, etc) that we choose to deprioritise to instead eat fois gras and fight.

Sorry to jump down your throat on this, we're on the same side, I think BI is inevitable and worthwhile. But it's worth pointing out that BI enables more than just the meaningless things.

[rbanffy]

> We already have a way of evaluating "meaningful", it's called "money".

This is a mechanism that’s very narrow and creates notable distortions between financial and artistic value, just to keep the example specific enough.

[phatskat]

> I would counsel not using the word "meaningful" in the context of BI. We already have a way of evaluating "meaningful", it's called "money". If society gets to judge what is meaningful or not, well, that's the system we currently have.

I’m also going to take issue with this interpretation of “meaningful” - I’ve known several amazing crafters and artists who have had an incredibly hard time doing their craft simply because the demands of capitalism prevent them from putting the time and effort into honing those skills, finding a market, creating a portfolio, etc.

If anything, I think BI is just as likely to add meaningfully to society as it is to give people the option to do meaningless things.

[sucrosesucrose]

Universal basic income is dystopic. It's a way of finally making everyone completely dependent on the government. It's a Brave New World kind of dystopy.

[orangesilk]

Are you independent of your government yet?

I am dependend on government not giving subsidies to my competition. I am dependend on them not to raise taxes. I even depend on them for keeping the infrastrukture alive. If I cant trust the state I life in, it is time to move to a different state.

[pbhjpbhj]

Interesting perspective.

To me it makes you more dependent on the other people in your society - only if you don't earn more than the BI of course.

That is true under Western Capitalism too, you're already dependent on your society, unless you filter and pump your own water; grow your own food; generate your own power; make your own devices; school your own children; do your own healthcare, etc.

For those reliant on BI, instead of greed being the moderator through which your income is determined, it is determined through the democratic processes of state.

Now, if your have an oligarchic dictatorship like USA and Russia, sure you'd need to be particularly worried if you were relying on BI. If you've got a strong democracy (probably true of any country with state-run services that are competitively priced) then BI should work if there's enough total income that it can be redistributed.

I think there are problems with BI though.

[altmanaltman]

Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta: yeah totally, personal consumption only

[28304283409234]

Altman et al take knowledge and lock it a way. The add restraints, borders, limitations of things they got for free. They stole freedoms.

[NeutralCrane]

If knowledge is to be free, that means there should be no restrictions on how it is used. Even an open source license misses the point, because the implication is still that one person can dictate how another person can make use of knowledge. It’s still premised on the same dystopian view that a person can own an idea.

[MarsIronPI]

Not so. Stallman created copyleft licenses as a defense against the current implementation of copyright. Copyleft uses the existing system of copyright to protect authors of free software from people who want to use copyright to restrict distribution. It wouldn't be necessary if copyright didn't exist.

[degamad]

Important nit-pick:

Copyleft was created to protect users of free software from authors/distributors who tried to use copyright to control the software running on the users' computers.

[jll29]

Stallman wanted to protect the right to fix bugs, he was not against paying for goods and services.

[minraws]

Knowledge is free as in *free beer once in a while because you genuinely can’t pay*, not free as in *scale up the freemium model, keep grabbing free stuff daily, weekly, monthly, and then start running your own pub with the free beers you took from the neighboring pub.*

This discussion is intellectually dishonest. Either some people here genuinely dont understand the concepts of kindness and gratitude, or they do understand them and are just choosing to spread falsehoods anyway.

Just because my beer pub isnt going out of business because you took some free beers doesnt make it ethical for you to exploit my kindness and use those free beers to build your own competing beer pub.

If people are still confused: that setup is not sharing knowledge. It is stealing with nicer branding to help you and your friends sleep at night.

[psychoslave]

But then we step back a little further and ask what this thing that is called property, why should any human be granted any beyond what actually constitute them as an entity of their own.

What matter at the end of the day is not what the document pretend about who possess what, but how people feel in their life, what they can access to, and what they are bared to access for which actual reason.

It can't even be purely narrowed on what human people feel like. We all know our species is dependent on many physical phenomena and other species which owe nothing to us.

[NeutralCrane]

First of all, I’d recommend you not accuse others of being intellectually dishonest simply because they have a stance you disagree with.

Second of all, “knowledge is free” doesn’t mean it is free to generate. It means that it literally cannot be owned. Property implies scarcity. If I use a thing, it makes it so you can’t use that thing. This does not apply to something like knowledge. The fact that I use your idea doesn’t mean you can no longer make use of that idea. Your analogy is flawed, because drinking a beer means that is a beer that cannot be used by someone else. Intellectual property is an oxymoron. There is nothing actually stopping someone from making use of someone else’s knowledge, and therefore we must artificially construct barriers in order to maximize the ability to profit off of it. In the most charitable sense, this in theory provides financial incentive for people to generate knowledge. In a less charitable sense, it is literal though policing for the sole purpose of extracting money.

I get that making use of knowledge without compensating the person who produced it is “theft” under our system. The problem is not with the act. It is with the system in which knowledge work can only support an individual if these dystopian measures are enforced. Frankly, most knowledge work is built on mountains of previous knowledge work that never is compensated for it anyways, so the model of the world isn’t even internally consistent.

[harshreality]

If knowledge is to be free, then any corporate/commercial interest that locks up modified knowledge (code) to run their own services should have that locked-up knowledge freed from their commercial silo as well.

[NeutralCrane]

If they lock it up, they lock it up. They don’t need to be forced to open it up. But they also shouldn’t be able to prevent others for making use of any knowledge gleaned from it.

In the case of AI, I don’t think LLM providers are required to make their models completely open source just because they were trained on the data freely available on the internet. Those model weights aren’t the original data anyways, so they aren’t even selling access to that original data. However, there is should be nothing preventing others from creating and selling something produced from those LLMs. Distillation, for example, is free game.

In short, you should be required to make your knowledge freely available. But once someone has access to that knowledge, you can’t stop them from using it however they wish, including if they wish to sell it themselves.

[xboxnolifes]

This is ultimately just a reframing of "a tolerant society cannot tolerate intolerance".

[rbanffy]

> Even an open source license misses the point, because the implication is still that one person can dictate how another person can make use of knowledge

To be considered open source software, the license cannot impose any restrictions on how the software is used. You are free to use the software for whatever purpose you want.

[bornfreddy]

Absolutely not. Go read e.g. GPL license before spreading such falsehoods.

[NeutralCrane]

There’s plenty of licenses that dictate that code can’t be used in commercial applications, or what kind of license derivatives can use.

[mathgeek]

This is the same “beer not speech” argument that has been going on for decades. A quick search will show you why your claim is incomplete.

[jchw]

Knowledge should be free, but that can't be treated too literally. Not a unique case of this kind of phrase. If we're doing capitalism people have to be paid somehow, and when people say "free" they don't mean "absolutely". I mean, speaking of open source, consider "free" software.

Open source licenses are almost entirely unrelated. They're strictly a hack around the copyright system, and not only that, they literally do nothing other than grant you rights you wouldn't otherwise have. Talking about open source is mostly a distraction. When people say knowledge is free they almost always mean access to knowledge. Open source grants people access and more.

People are not mad that they can't just steal things, they're mad that access to things is tied behind massive gatekeepers (essentially indefinitely...) that essentially exist to continue to enrich themselves while somehow almost none of the money makes it back to the authors, and is sometimes completely untethered from where the money comes from that funds the works to begin with. You can't just freely navigate, search through and consume information, it's all tied up behind various pay walls and monetization schemes while authors starve anyways.

We could have a more equitable and reasonable system that allows broad access to knowledge while providing some approach to monetization that is reasonable for both people seeking it out and people consuming it. There's little point in trying to enumerate the number of ways it could be done. We already have a system for taxes, we already have seen commercial schemes like Spotify, you could slice it thousands of different ways. Plenty of pros and cons. I'm just saying it could be done and we know it could be done.

But it can never work if all media and knowledge dominated by rent seeking gatekeepers standing in the middle whose primary purpose will always be to enrich themselves first and foremost. They will always want to get more and give less, because that is more or less their fiduciary duty.

[NeutralCrane]

> If we're doing capitalism people have to be paid somehow, and when people say "free" they don't mean "absolutely".

Therein lies the entire issue. Intellectual property is a paradox and a farce, but our current systems require IP as a concept to exist. 99% of human history existed without the concept of IP law, and yet people still innovated, learned, and shared knowledge. But now we are at a point where human beings can only survive if they have something they can productize and sell to others, and so for knowledge to be produced, it has to turned into something that is artificially scarce, so that those producing it can be compensated for their labor. Maybe this is unavoidable for this point of our evolution. I doubt it, as 99% of human history managed without the concept of IP, and we still produced and shared knowledge.

But even if it is necessary for this stage, it is still a dystopian model. And I imagine we aren’t far off from a point where we can provide for everyone’s basic needs, and therefore we don’t need to introduce artificial scarcity to make knowledge work economically viable.

[sam1r]

Wow very well put.

[kennywinker]

Except it’s not. That poster is just doing an IP law version of the “paradox of tolerance”. Their argument is just: you say you want information to be free yet you believe in licenses that keep information from being made un-free.

[dghlsakjg]

There’s also the argument that copyright has been extended to the point of absurdity.

I respect copyright, but I can’t respect a lockup period that can push to 130 years or more. For example: if JK Rowling is alive in 4 years the first Harry Potter book will have a valid copyright extending from the 20th, 21st and into the 22nd century. Is it really defensible to say that your great, great (great?) grandchildren should benefit from a government mandated monopoly on your work?

[fragmede]

JK Rowling is the exception. The duration is one thing, but so are her proceeds. Most authors are never going to see that much money, if any, from writing. Maybe copyright would expire once the original author has made enough money to pay for lavish living expenses for themselves for the rest of their life, inflation adjusted. So their family wouldn't automatically be taken care of, but they are.

Kind of weird too think about it that way, but food for thought.

[b112]

I think that as you said, she's the exception. Why are people using superstars as the rule, instead of the exception? Authorship covers everything, from software to how-to books. Comic book authors. It covers authors which are barely successful. Most authors struggle to write all sorts of little pieces which used to end up in magazines, thousands, just struggling to get by.

While the current copyright length indeed seems excessive, looking at the most successful and determining fairness seems very untoward. As it stands now, an author could build up a library of their writings, and perhaps even sell it for their retirement, as it has value.

Is that what is happening often for indie novelists? I don't know, but to others in this thread know?

I know you were just musing, but I really dislike this "let's create a hyper-invasive tax framework, so that anyone who etches out a little wealth has it capped" concept. There's no wealth to redistribute, not in the way people think. Money isn't real. It's just an indicator of things. In some cases, it's an indicator that someone owns a lot of stock in a company that could be worth 1/20th of its value tomorrow, after a crash, and further is valued at hundreds or thousands of times the actual value of the company today.

In such cases, it's often an indicator of capacity to steer the economy, not of any tangible wealth.

But people need something to strive for. Wealth is one of those things. In a free market economy, wealth is the reward for job well done. It does make people hustle. It's not perfect, but we've seen how poorly and incapable any centrally planned economy seems to be.

As a Canadian, I do believe the government should be involved in certain things. I have a post office, schools, police stations, fire department, food inspections, and so no on that the government is involved in, so I think health care makes sense too. Yet I absolutely do not believe the government should be planning most sectors of the economy, nor should it be meddling too deeply in the wealth ratios of its citizens.

To put this in that context, would you want to have the current US administration determine how every sector of the economy works, and how people are paid, etc, etc, eg central planning? Can you imagine?

Of course there is nuance. Of course there are exceptions. But overall management of individual wealth seems very invasive to me.

[drnick1]

If most authors don't make much money, if any, then what is the point of copyright? It only really seems to benefit publishers.

[harshreality]

I'm not here to defend publishers or the insane current copyright terms. However, in the traditional model of publishing, publishers subsidize production of new books from unproven authors--through book advances, copyediting services, and printing and distribution costs--via the money they make on the few successful and very few ultra-successful books.

If you take away copyright, you reduce the revenue of publishers, which reduces the number of unproven authors they can take chances on. (They're not very good at picking winners from the pool of new author manuscripts, not nearly as good as "agents" like to think they are, but that doesn't matter; they still wouldn't be able to take as many chances.)

[dghlsakjg]

Sure, but for the lower volume authors the royalties at year 20 are effectively 0. Most books don’t even sell out their first printing. Its a money grab to defend/prosecute copyright on a book that you couldn't even sell.

100+ year copyrights only help the descendants of the people that have already become extraordinarily wealthy. Cutting off at 2 decades would have close to 0 effect on the huge majority of creatives, while benefitting society immensely. JK Rowling would still be a billionaire, and small authors would be fine too.

[andai]

Individuals did not push for these laws.

[andai]

JK Rowling is irrelevant to the question of whether "lifetime plus 70 years" is an absolutely batshit fucking insane copyright term.

[TFNA]

> Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks.

If you look back through the annals of Free Software, one often encounters the claim that the GPL was a way to use copyright against itself, and if there were no more copyright, there would be little need for these licenses.

[rbanffy]

> there would be little need for these licenses.

The GPL ones explicitly disallow the removal of user rights from work derived from GPL software. That wouldn’t be possible without copyright.

[psychoslave]

>This is a common perspective on HN, but it's so jarring. Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us.

This is only apparent contradiction. The underlying issue is of course the social concentration power.

It's not the same when an author is deprived of virtual money the copyright system entice them to extract from readers regardless of whether they have money or not, and deprive authors from a negotiation mechanism against corporate that swim in money. In both case, with current legal systems the most obvious law enforceable mechanism is copyright. It doesn't mean the underlying issues at stake are the same.

What's really staggering and demoralizing is that humans have all that it takes to feed all mouths, make equal incomes, live in peace in all kind of diversities that encompasses reciprocity of accepting differences, and yet we end up with people dying from war and starvation while other accumulate a toxic level of wealth in a system that tries to uniform everyone and harshly cuts anything that don't fit the standard box.

[NooneAtAll3]

> Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks

we grab pitchforks because you violate the licence by making knowledge NOT free?

what exactly is the contradiction?

[alexwennerberg]

> This is a common perspective on HN, but it's so jarring. Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us.

If the books were released under an open source license, there would be no problem here?

[nzeid]

Taken out of context, you're right. But the parent comment couldn't buy these books even if they wanted to. I'd say there's a consensus that the primary motivation for piracy is hurdles to access having nothing to do with payment.

[bigiain]

I think iTunes Store and Netflix both showed 15 or so years back that if you give people and easy and convenient way to pay a reasonable price for music/movies - a huge number of people will willingly choose to pay and support the artists/creators, instead of hanging out on Bittorrent trackers and paying for seedboxes and sharing with friends.

And the siloing of movies by Netflix nd all the other streaming services, and the introduction of advertising into the "reasonable price" tiers, shows that people can and do remember piracy in still an option, for when corporations and copyright holding groups enshittify things. Lately amongst a lot of my friends I've seen more usb stick with movies being shared that even in the heyday of Bittorrent.

[rbanffy]

BitTorrent is one form of collective archive for things that either have restricted or no commercial availability. I wish more cultural artifacts were archived this way.

[appreciatorBus]

Copyright is not an unalloyed good.

In small doses, and short terms, I might agree with your classification.

But when copyright is 150 years It no longer has anything to do with reward for the author or encourage you creativity, it’s just a cartel.

[paxys]

The issue with copyright law is that it is all or nothing. Rights to a work are either tightly held by an author/publisher, and even downloading a small excerpt can get you in trouble, or it is fully public domain and open for any and all use.

There needs to be a middle ground, such as: after 15 years of publication any private individual can access and read the work for free, but the rightsholder still controls commercial sales, merchandising, licensing, character rights, movie rights etc.

[globular-toast]

The pitchforks aren't being raised for licence violations, they are raised because software should be free and unencumbered and now somebody is distributing it in a way which doesn't afford the same freedoms to the users.

Free/copyleft licences like the GPL are just the way we've been able to effectively make software free in a world in which copyright applies to software.

[unsungNovelty]

> Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks.

Where do we do that? All LLMs are still doing it. I've not seen any MIT license or BSD license of all the repos LLMs have gone through. That's excluding copy-left licences. Zero pitch-forks in sight.

> Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us.

I agree here with you. And I'll give a better reason to not pirate for most people. In the seas of endless content, If you want to read/learn from a book - try paying for them. You won't read most books. You'll curate/research better before buying. The books you buy will be worth it in your own mind. You re-consume them more which is very important IMO. For most pirates, I think the issue is not unavailability of resources/content. But need to consume in a better way. Buying slows things down. You'll consume better. Quality over quantity. Even then I have a ton of humble bundle books that I've not touched at all.

[squibonpig]

I'm not gonna buy the book as an alternative you know. If I'm pirating a book it's usually because I can't really afford to go buying the books I'm interested in. Sometimes if I love a book I'll get a physical copy so I can finish it in a more comfortable format and so I'll have it for another read. I figure most people who pirate are pretty similar, so I wouldn't expect an outsized effect on book sales. Add to that the fact that books by people who are literally dead still have copyright. That has nothing to do with it being hard to write a book, cause I don't think their fucking estate wrote the book.

[ritsource]

Just because something is challenging, that doesn't mean you should get paid for it. Art and business are two distinct endeavors. All the copyright and IP issues come up because of this one confusion.

[gorgoiler]

Capitalism works great for shoes. You pay the proletariat for their labor and they labor away in your shoe factory. The shoe economy ticks over on scarcity.

The knowledge economy is different. It’s hard to see how the system works in a world where everyone has the equivalent of a shoe replicator in their pocket.

Ironically the “free market” only survives by having arbitrary regulations on shoe duplication enforced in the interests of shoe-rights holders.

[otherme123]

The shoes would be free and not a market product, as is it currently air to breathe.

Free market is just the best way we know of dealing with scarcity, every other alternative that was attempted seems to fail sooner or later. If you invent a way to get an infinite amount of something, that something goes out of the free market rationing.

For the knowledge, a lot of free market more radical defenders don't believe at all in current state of "intelectual property", much less if et has to be enforced by the state. They are for "industial secrets" (if they leak, you lose them), NDAs (if they leak, you enforce the contract) and similar formulas.

[mdp2021]

> most of it has nothing to do with taking any serious moral stance

If many people are immoral, curb the roots of immorality then, fight that one battle - do not shift it to others' sound behaviour exercised with proportion and judgement.

[phatfish]

It's almost as if we are in a comment section where most peoples jobs exist due to "content" either being stolen (AI most recently) or crowd sourced under EULAs that effectively steal it.

Not that I think a back door to the shit Disney and other corporate content onwers pull is nessecarily a bad thing. But it is funny to see people here gaslight themselves into believing they have some moral right to just take what others have created.

[squibonpig]

I don't think the majority here work for ai companies and I also see a lot of people critical of AI and copyright violations by ai companies. They're also very clearly different things, one is done on a massive scale by a company for profit and another is done by one person to use the work in the way it was intended to be used.

[vishnugupta]

And yet JK Rowling is a billionaire and movies make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits.

So I guess we can have a world in which knowledge can be free without starving knowledge creators?

[defrost]

Not if you account for just how many authors never reach the pinnacle of breaking even.

Rowling is a rare exception and very much not the norm.

[andai]

> It's just "lol, why pay when you can download for free".

Well for starters because the research shows that reading on a screen literally makes you retarded.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/691462

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05605-0

[squibonpig]

More interested in a study on e-readers

[john-titor]

> Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. It belongs to us all

Imagine you're a professional writer and it's your main source of income. How would you feel if someone said this to you? Would you still want to write books?

[bigiain]

Keep in mind "copyright" explicitly does not cover "knowledge" or "ideas".

The reason I buy books is rarely for knowledge or ideas, its either for a good story in the case of fiction (which the author definitely should have the right to exclusively commercialise), or for the authors explanation of and idea or some knowledge which goes beyond the raw information I could find in the scientific papers or higher level descriptions.

Good storytelling and teaching are valuable and should come with some sort of exclusive rights to control and profit from by the author. And even bad storytelling and teaching should have that same protection from other people distributing it in ways that restrict the authors rights.

Clearly 130 years of protection is insane, and all it does is keeps Micky Mouses lawyers able to buy new yachts. But as others in this discussion have pointed out, after 20 year almost all of the authors who are still earning money off their works are already rich beyond most authors realistic hopes. I'm not sure 20 years is "the right length" for protection, you sometimes hear stories of works being rediscovered and becoming wildly popular more that 20 years past the original publication date (Kate Bush's Running Up That Hill getting back into the charts on the back of it being used in Stranger Things - for example).

[TFNA]

Things have changed a lot since the late twentieth century. The kind of people you imagine, who can live full-time off writing, are responsible for a vanishingly small amount of the books that appear today. Piracy has little to do with it; this is primarily due to the fierce competition from other books, the glut of content available today, but especially from mobile phones as fewer and fewer people read books. Even for those who make appreciable income off books, the books are nevertheless usually a side gig alongside other hustles.

[rfrey]

We certainly wouldn't want to return to the pre-1976 era, where, as we all know, no books were written.

[Javantea_]

Obviously yes. While I have the privilege of earning money from services instead of products, I still think that producing creative works is important and should be done whether the motive is profit or not. Many things are not profitable. Should we leave them unwritten? Leave them to those who have the time to spend. For those who have chosen the life of producing products that are easily copied, it is part of _reality_ that those things will be copied when copying benefits the copier. That doesn't mean I think all books should be free. So many books I buy because I don't have another choice or because I want to support the author. But expecting everyone to be in the same situation as me is nonsense.

[mvdtnz]

So you provide your services for free I presume.

[alexwennerberg]

> Imagine you're a professional writer and it's your main source of income.

There are probably a few thousand of these in the entire United States. The market system heavily under-values writing as is, independent of piracy

[spudlyo]

Imagine that terrible time before Copyright existed, and there was no motivation for anyone to make art, literature, or music.

"What an inestimable advantage it would be, if, in every branch of literature, there existed only a few but excellent books! This can never come to pass so long as money is to be made by writing." --Arthur Schopenhauer

[antonvs]

You forgot to stipulate, “…living in an ultracapitalist country with no meaningful social safety net,” i.e. the USA.

[globalnode]

The entire llm chatbot craze is only possible because of the proceeds of crime. im reluctant to pick-on the little guy here.

[andai]

https://xkcd.com/1228/

[abrookewood]

This is such a ridiculous statement. The people who spent their time building up this body of work deserve to be compensated. Take whatever job you do and imagine people confidently stating that you should work for free.

[rfrey]

Yes, but do their publishers need to be compensated for a century after their death?

[fragmede]

But do their grandchildren deserve to live off the proceeds for the rest of their lives as well? Say I'm a carpenter and I make chairs. How many chairs do I need to make before I get to retire? If I make a really really good one and get it put it in the right place, one should be enough. Just sit back and collect $1 for every time that someone sits in it. I don't have to make the chair particular good or comfortable, just get it into the right place where people will pay. And then I don't have to work for the rest of my life. Nor do my children. Or their children either. Framing the question at the extreme, that one should be expected to work for free, is just as absurd as framing it as some people should just never have to work at all, ever. No one put me in charge, but I believe people need to do work of some sort. Who gets to decide what counts as work or not isn't for me to decide though, so the system we've got is just this whole unorganized unplanned economy.

[mathgeek]

A better argument here is that yhe work you do should earn you income for a century every time someone else benefits from it.

[zanderwohl]

This is a disingenuous argument.

Constant payment into perpetuity for the replication of digital information is just a form of rent-seeking. Except, unlike a landlord, you're not obligated to correct defects.

[wwind123]

I can feel for both camps.

Some of my published work is pirated heavily. That's not my main income source, so I just shrug and let it go. If anything, I'm probably happy that people are reading my work. Especially if it's people that can't afford it, I'm glad they enjoy my work -- those books got pretty high reader ratings, and it seems to me many readers are actually reading the pirated version.

But I do have friends that depend on this income source, and fighting piracy has become a part of their day job. It's not a fun thing to do, they'd rather spend time working on their next story, but they still have to do this everyday. I feel for them.

[pipes]

Look, fair enough from your perspective. But a lot of those books probably wouldn't exist if the author couldn't make some money from their work.

I can't find the post but years ago on Reddit an author posted stats showing when her book turned up pirates online, real sales for it collapsed.

Because of this I make a point of buying books, programming books especially. Yes I download pdfs, I use them as previews. This has led to buying way more than I would have.

Anyway, I appreciate this doesn't apply if you live somewhere that these books can't be purchased. But everyone praising these sorts of sites tends to look at them from only a positive perspective.

[bawolff]

> But a lot of those books probably wouldn't exist if the author couldn't make some money from their work.

I think that's at least a bit debatable. People thought that about (normal) libraries back in the day, but it ended up having the opposite effect.

Not to mention out of print books or academic books which is a big usage of sites like these, since lots of people prefer physical books and only reach for pdfs as a last resort.

[dsizzle]

Libraries spend like $2B / year buying books https://www.imls.gov/sites/default/files/2021-08/fy19-pls-re..., which is like 10% of the total book market. So even if no one ever bought a book because they first encountered the book, author, or genre in the library that's already a signficant difference

[j2kun]

I think I agree, the FAR bigger impact on my book's sales was Google search deciding not to surface it in search results. Presence on pirate websites had no effect, and eventually I switched to the PDF as "pay what you want."

[brookst]

Can you imagine if we didn’t have libraries and someone tried to create them today? From publishers to right wingers, they would be painted as communist plots to destroy creativity.

[toomuchtodo]

The Internet Archive tried, at great cost and peril, to defend its ability to lend books as an online library due to format shift (physical books get first sale doctrine, ebooks are licensed, you cannot own them), and were told no by the system, so “pirating” it is until copyright changes and becomes more reasonable. Disk is cheap, and the Internet global. Global distributed storage system durability and availability is the path to success until laws change imho.

(Archiving culture alone is not the same as also enabling universal access to the culture and knowledge one is acting as custodian for and serving to global citizens)

The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41447758 - September 2024 (793 comments)

https://archive.org/details/brewsterkahlelongnowfoundation

Totally unrelated: Dweb camp 2026 is coming up for those interested: https://dwebcamp.org/

(no affiliation with any person or entity mentioned in this comment)

[xp84]

As a wise man once said, if “buying” isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing. Words to live by, arrrrrrrr.

[mahdi7d1]

I live in Iran and the administrative hurdles the op was mentioned are not an issue here because you just can't even buy intwrnationally to begin with so there is no hurdle you might need to circumvent. The few English books I have are largely illegal reprints of a pirated version or some old ancient printed version that have somehow gotten imported (no clue how or is there an actual legal way)

I remember opening "thinking fast and slow" and noticing the weird paging. After checking the official version's page count and seeing how the version in my hand doesn't match, my best guess was that someone had printed a pirated epub version.

[mahdi7d1]

I rambled so much that I forgot to say what I laid all that introduction for.

I'm not part of the market for these products. I don't have access to them nor even if I buy some imported (probably illegally and by single persons) or printed version, am I going to benefit them since I'm disconnected monetarily from yhe author.

Me reading pirated versions of these books has no negative effects on the earnings of the authors.

[UltraSane]

You can definitely justify using pirated versions more than most people.

[mdgld]

Please say more about accessing HN from Iran, I’m very curious.

[jwrallie]

Not gonna argue with the point that we need to support authors, but “can be purchased” is a relative concept.

[Dusseldorf]

I'm glad your username specifies your location. My biggest pet peeve online these days is someone telling a story about "my country" but never specifying which country that is.

[tren]

We sell ebooks in every country, including Tunisia - https://www.ebooks.com/en-tn/. I understand that the price of books is sometimes prohibitive, but it's largely outside our control.

[ahmedfromtunis]

The issue is not the amount; it's the currency. Ours is not convertible.

To put it into perspective: even *free* services can be completely inaccessible here if they require payment info for verification purposes.

Acquiring hard currency to spend online is truly a bureaucratic nightmare, and even if you manage it, the annual limit is strictly capped (at around $300).

[tren]

Thanks for the reply. If the books were sold in Tunisian dinar (via Stripe), would you still have the same issues?

[Cider9986]

And people say that Monero is worse than fiat!

[jvm___]

https://send.djazz.se/

This is key for getting epubs to your Kobo.

[ahmedfromtunis]

Thanks, but I don't use e-readers as they are not available here.

I've been using MoonReader for many years now and settled on pretty good parameters that make the reading experience very comfortable on both my phone and my tablet.

[subscribed]

Moon reader is amazing. I love mine so much I don't see a point of having a separate book reader.

[pull_my_finger]

I don't understand what this is doing. Can't you sideload any ebook onto a kobo anyway? Never had an issue on my Clara

[TFNA]

I’ve noticed that people today often bristle at any suggestion that one connect a device to a phone or computer with a cable – on Reddit, one will often get downvoted for this. Apparently, a lot of younger people are hardly aware this is possible and it strikes them as overly complicated or for old people. People want to wirelessly transfer stuff, and what the OP linked to is a popular way to do that with Kobo.

[esrauch]

I'm old enough to have used computers before having any Internet, and in 2026 the idea of plugging in devices to transfer files to it does feel like a fiddly relic of the past to me.

[sureglymop]

Yes. You can literally ssh into a kobo. I usually just put my books on a WebDAV share that is mounted on the kobo.

[jvm___]

Sideload without cables is challenging.

I download epubs from zlib but then they're on my phone and transferring them to my Kobo is arduous. This makes it easy.

[christofosho]

Calibre? https://calibre-ebook.com/

[Salgat]

This is a genius way to farm ebooks while providing a useful service. I personally just use Google drive though.

[whycome]

Lol it never occurred to me that they might just save every single upload

[rbanffy]

I’d hope they do file or block deduping.

[Cider9986]

On my Kindle I use KOReader Zlibrary plugin which allows you to download books from within the reader. It's more convenient then any send-to-kindle workflow.

https://github.com/ZlibraryKO/zlibrary.koplugin

[Brian_K_White]

I don't recall ever needing anything special on my Aura H2O. It's one of the reasons I chose Kobo in the first place. Just copy any file onto it.

If you mean stripping drm I used Calibre for that but mostly I just avoid buying books with drm where possible.

[andrepd]

Handy, but a book lover with an ereader probably already uses Calibre :)

[Almondsetat]

Or... just a USB cable?

[elrostelperien]

I agree that a USB cable is the most practical option. However, the aforementioned site is useful in a specific scenario: if your Kobo is very old, macOS won't recognize it.

[drnick1]

If other operating systems interact with the Kobo well, the problem clearly lies with MacOS.

[jvm___]

I the zlib app on my phone. No clean way from my phone to on my Kobo.

[Almondsetat]

Again, a USB cable

[jvm___]

Do you own a USB c to micro-USB to get the file off my phone?

[Almondsetat]

The are $5 or less on amazon.

[spwa4]

That's almost every country these days. At least in the EU. Amazon doesn't carry nearly the selection you'd want, and certainly not in the non-fiction department.