It only does not have a significant adverse effect because enough people actually do pay for the media that they are able to make a profit off of it. If no one paid for it then they would lose all of their revenue from selling copies, which would definitely be a significant adverse effect on their profits.
I mean, maybe you don’t consider that to be a problem. Maybe you think that copying media should be free and that instead of making money selling copies people should live off of the money they make from performances and/or patronage, even if this means that there is less money available to create media so in practice there is less of it around. I don’t agree with this position, but I also don’t think it is an inherently unreasonable one as long as you are being honest about it.
The point is, though, that whatever moral position you take on piracy, you cannot justify it with a claim that only holds as long as other people act differently from you.
Saving copies should be fine, the thing that keeps getting them in trouble is when they try to turn themselves into Library Genesis and freely distribute that media. They need to keep in the archivist mindset where preservation is the most important thing, keep the data safe for the day when it’s no longer otherwise publicly available and distributing it is no longer going to get you in trouble.
How is it different from a library though? My library just buys their content from retail stores. They get their books from Amazon and their CDs and DVDs from Walmart, and they also have ebooks with a borrower limit (eg maximum of two checkouts at a time).
The thing that triggered Internet Archive’s current enormous lawsuit problems is that they weren’t imposing a borrower limit. They were letting as many people download copies as they wanted, with no limits.
I’m not at all a fan of current copyright laws, but that’s really going straight into “what are you gonna do, stab me?” territory. This is a job for pirates, not for a library. Leave it to the experts.
I agree. Saving bits of published web content is one thing, and saving entire books to lend them out is a different thing.
If the content needs to be lent out, it’s not fit for this kind of thing. Either making a copy and letting a person access it is totally free, or the content is indeed something to be bought and sold.
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That’s not illegal, though. (All of us save copies of copyrighted media.) It’s the distribution that’s in question.
The law is contrary to the interests of The People and needs to change.
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Let’s try to keep it civil, this seems a bit more aggressive than the comment you’re responding to warrants.
Should anyone else need to look up what copyright is, here’s the Wikipedia article on the subject.
Sorry.
Calm down.
Alternative take: Piracy is, at worst, morally neutral, and does not have a significant adverse effect on the profits of the people who produce media.
It only does not have a significant adverse effect because enough people actually do pay for the media that they are able to make a profit off of it. If no one paid for it then they would lose all of their revenue from selling copies, which would definitely be a significant adverse effect on their profits.
I mean, maybe you don’t consider that to be a problem. Maybe you think that copying media should be free and that instead of making money selling copies people should live off of the money they make from performances and/or patronage, even if this means that there is less money available to create media so in practice there is less of it around. I don’t agree with this position, but I also don’t think it is an inherently unreasonable one as long as you are being honest about it.
The point is, though, that whatever moral position you take on piracy, you cannot justify it with a claim that only holds as long as other people act differently from you.
Isn’t it more unethical to abide unjust laws?
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As is recognizing what’s ethical and not, is it not?
Yes but that is beside the point of this comment.
Saving copies should be fine, the thing that keeps getting them in trouble is when they try to turn themselves into Library Genesis and freely distribute that media. They need to keep in the archivist mindset where preservation is the most important thing, keep the data safe for the day when it’s no longer otherwise publicly available and distributing it is no longer going to get you in trouble.
How is it different from a library though? My library just buys their content from retail stores. They get their books from Amazon and their CDs and DVDs from Walmart, and they also have ebooks with a borrower limit (eg maximum of two checkouts at a time).
The thing that triggered Internet Archive’s current enormous lawsuit problems is that they weren’t imposing a borrower limit. They were letting as many people download copies as they wanted, with no limits.
I’m not at all a fan of current copyright laws, but that’s really going straight into “what are you gonna do, stab me?” territory. This is a job for pirates, not for a library. Leave it to the experts.
They did have a limit for books originally, but removed it during COVID: https://blog.archive.org/2020/03/24/announcing-a-national-emergency-library-to-provide-digitized-books-to-students-and-the-public/. I agree that it was a poor decision.
I agree. Saving bits of published web content is one thing, and saving entire books to lend them out is a different thing.
If the content needs to be lent out, it’s not fit for this kind of thing. Either making a copy and letting a person access it is totally free, or the content is indeed something to be bought and sold.