[HN Gopher] Sci-Hub: Scientists, Academics, Teachers and Student...
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Sci-Hub: Scientists, Academics, Teachers and Students Protest
Blocking Lawsuit
Author : parsecs
Score : 179 points
Date : 2021-01-05 15:19 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (torrentfreak.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (torrentfreak.com)
| civilized wrote:
| I cannot tell you how hilarious it is to me that the by-far-
| easiest part of research - the incredibly trivial act of posting
| a paper on a website - is the only part that is privatized and
| immensely profitable
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Scihub is awesome but protesting copyright laws isn't the
| solution, just like scihub is just a patch to the faulty system
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| How is protesting particular laws wrong? What else can people
| do? The problem is they seem to protest enforcement of a law
| rather than the law itself.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| _One may well ask, "How can you advocate breaking some laws and
| obeying others?" The answer is found in the fact that there are
| two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust
| laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "An unjust law is
| no law at all."_
|
| -- Martin Luther King, Jr. https://letterfromjail.com
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > protesting copyright laws isn't the solution
|
| Why not? We're supposed to just accept this? The US imposes
| these laws on the entire world via trade agreements and the
| world is supposed to simply go along with it?
| f6v wrote:
| > protesting ... laws isn't the solution
|
| That's gonna be my favorite quote here.
| vageli wrote:
| Civil disobedience is sometimes required to rebut laws society
| no longer agrees with.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| You'd say that Scihub has crossed the line from civil
| disobedience into outright insurrection.
|
| That said, librarians were trying to work within the system,
| including raising public consciousness, unsubscribing whole
| journal packages that included high-profile journals, and
| nothing happened until Scihub came along. It's the best
| argument against _Kriton_ that I 've seen.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Better known in English as _Crito_ :
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crito
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Translation and interpretation here:
| https://www.amazon.com/-/dp/194989942X
|
| 100 % can recommend.
| vixen99 wrote:
| https://gowers.wordpress.com/2017/07/27/another-journal-flip...
|
| Tim Gowers offers some background to the overwhelming case for
| open access publication. Sci-hub is an example of an almost
| inevitable reaction to the blatant profiteering by certain
| academic publishers. Let's remember that in the main, taxpayers
| across the world, through their governments, almost alone, pay
| for the very expensive business of carrying out university and
| institutional research and preparing manuscripts for publication.
| armoredkitten wrote:
| And they pay for it multiple times over. They pay once for the
| researchers carrying out the work, and then they pay again for
| the reviewers, who provide their peer review services for free
| (i.e., not paid by the journal). Then, they pay for it a third
| time when universities (the government-funded ones, at least)
| have to pay exorbitant subscription fees to access the
| research.
| mc32 wrote:
| I think there's some commingling in this argument. When an
| institution subscribed they are getting access to research
| done by _other_ institutions. Presumably they have their own
| records of their own research.
| madhadron wrote:
| Not really. Sure, you could go get the paper from the guy
| down the hall, but most universities don't have their own
| hub for publications that is accessible to their faculty.
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| So there's some value in a central hub, which I assume
| also costs money to set up and run?
| sooheon wrote:
| Which scihub provides. Journals are their own silos and
| require multiple exorbitant subscriptions.
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| Sci hub benefits from having journals enforce standards,
| have editors, reviewers, and a ton of value added that
| they didn't pay for. I like Sci Hub, but it didn't create
| a lot of the value it provides - it does that on the $ of
| a lot of other actors.
|
| Even arxiv was getting flooded with crap and had to do
| some gatekeeping. Sci hub gets a huge benefit from the
| publishing industry at keeping out a flood of crap and
| pseudo science nonsense that floods most places that
| don't have such a process.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Journals don't pay reviewers either, as has been
| explained above.
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| >Journals don't pay reviewers either,
|
| Some do.
|
| And I am aware of that most don't, having published
| enough papers, reviewed papers, and been asked by
| journals to review for them.
|
| However, I never claimed reviewers were paid. I did state
| Sci Hub is getting benefits they didn't pay for, like
| keeping out crap, the value from being reviewed, uniform
| quality from known journals, etc.
|
| If I, having published academic papers, and in many cases
| keeping my own copyrights as I _always_ try to negotiate
| that (and a surprising amount of journals will let you if
| you ask), want scihub to not publish my work, funded by
| me, and published by journals I selected, will they
| remove it? No?
|
| Then they are stealing the same as others. It's just
| their theft is popular since it lets people access stuff
| for free.
| madhadron wrote:
| > I did state Sci Hub is getting benefits they didn't pay
| for, like keeping out crap, the value from being
| reviewed, uniform quality from known journals, etc.
|
| A few journal pay editors and reviewers, but the vast
| majority do not, so Sci-Hub is paying the same as anyone
| else.
|
| > will they remove it?
|
| Last time I checked, Sci-Hub doesn't host, it proxies, so
| your license to the journal to distribute the paper is
| still what applies. The journal has standing, but you
| don't.
|
| And the idea of uniform quality from known journals is
| laughable.
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| >so Sci-Hub is paying the same as anyone else.
|
| You seem to be missing the point:
|
| Who is going to review for sci hub? Reviewers review for
| the journal the decide to - and that's based on the
| quality of a journal. I will review for a good journal. I
| won't for a bad one.
|
| Who would review for sci hub? I wouldn't, and I doubt
| many if any top researchers would either. Sci hub will
| accept the crappiest of stuff, so I (and pretty much
| anyone else doing solid reviews) would not bother.
|
| >Sci-Hub doesn't host, it proxies
|
| Did you check that or write it because you want to
| believe that?
|
| Sci hub pulls a copy to sci hub using stolen credentials
| when you ask for a copy. For example, here [1] is one of
| my papers that sci hub has copied and serves from their
| site. (not sure how long they cache copies, but it's not
| hard to see using chrome and viewing requests to tell
| where files come from). The paper even has a front page
| and watermarks added in 2016 from where it was downloaded
| from. So no, sci-hub didn't just proxy to the journal.
|
| [1] https://zero.sci-
| hub.do/5265/2478517301ba71ba89a837647f1a133...
| markdown wrote:
| > Then they are stealing the same as others. It's just
| their theft is popular since it lets people access stuff
| for free.
|
| As has already been pointed out in this thread, the work
| has been bought and paid for by taxpayers. Your work is
| based upon the work of others, isn't it? I'm sure your
| work is filled with citations of other works that were
| taxpayer funded.
|
| Sure, there is the odd case like yours where you funded
| your own work. But to argue that the world should be
| denied access to all scientific knowledge because a tiny,
| minuscule portion of it was privately funded is pretty
| lame.
| armoredkitten wrote:
| Some, but not all, universities do have institutional
| repositories for their own work. But they are at best
| inconsistently used. Some academics also (when allowed by
| the licensing agreement of the journal) put their own
| research on a personal/lab website. But again, this is
| inconsistent, and really relies on secondary solutions like
| Google Scholar to be usable (unless you already know
| exactly which paper you're looking for and navigate
| directly to the author's website).
|
| The bottom line is that in most cases, academics rely on
| journals even for access to research from other folks in
| their own university. Things get passed around informally.
| And there are changing trends, such as preprint archives
| (like ArXiv), in some fields. But the majority of research
| is still paywalled.
|
| Edit: To return to your point, yes, I was sort of
| discussing some Platonic ideal of "The Taxpayer".
| Obviously, if you live in the US, your taxes don't pay for
| research in Europe (only for universities' access to that
| research). And we could be talking about federal taxes for
| federal grants, but state taxes for state-run schools. But
| in general, the point is that the journals make exorbitant
| profits from labour paid with public funds.
| 0xdde wrote:
| There isn't. He is pointing out that publicly funded
| research is then not freely available to the public.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Peer review is the whole point of a journal and yet they do
| not get paid for their invaluable work. They should just form
| their own group so they can review academic works
| independently and publish online. There is no reason to have
| "journals" anymore.
| leobakerhytch wrote:
| And a fourth time on a per-article basis if you, as an
| individual, non-academic taxpayer, would like you read the
| very research your taxes have funded.
| hctaw wrote:
| Has anyone ever paid the individual price for an article?
|
| And setting aside the principle for a second - how many
| non-academic taxpayers are trying to read articles that
| don't have institutional access through their employer or
| local public library?
| pixelface wrote:
| I'm a non-academic taxpayer trying to read articles and
| don't have access through my employer or public library.
| I know other people in the same situation. Emailing the
| authors directly to request a copy is a known legitimate
| workaround, but in cases where I'm trying to read a paper
| on fungal propagation from 1971 (most recent example,
| from last week) the options are limited.
|
| I would also imagine that if these things were more
| readily available people would be more likely to use
| them.
| tchalla wrote:
| > how many non-academic taxpayers are trying to read
| articles that don't have institutional access through
| their employer or local public library?
|
| A different question to ask. Why should taxpayers not
| have access to the articles which they funded for? It
| doesn't matter whether they read it or not. They pay,
| they have access.
| carbonguy wrote:
| > Has anyone ever paid the individual price for an
| article?
|
| I would be very interested to see statistics on this,
| because I suspect the answer is "almost nobody" - as I
| assume your question was meant to imply.
|
| > ... [How] many non-academic taxpayers are trying to
| read articles that don't have institutional access
| through their employer or local public library?
|
| Count me in this population, although to be honest it
| literally never occurred to me to check if the local
| public library had journal access.
| dorfsmay wrote:
| Isn't the amount of traffic to sci-hub the answer to that
| question?
| Dan_JiuJitsu wrote:
| I frequently read research I do not have institutional
| access to. I'm in this situation fairly frequently, tbh.
| enriquto wrote:
| > Has anyone ever paid the individual price for an
| article?
|
| Before the existence of sci-hub, I spent several hundred
| taxpayer euros to download taxpayer-funded research from
| journals that my library was not subscribed to. I was not
| aware that asking the library for a single pdf cost about
| 30 or 40 EUR, until the librarian told me. Then I stopped
| because it was obviously ridiculous.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| While I am fairly sympathetic to the cause in the abstract, as
| someone who had to clean up after various incursions from the
| folks doing the mass downloading, the methods ... let's just say
| that they have externalities that I and many others end up having
| to deal with.
| stevespang wrote:
| Heh, Indians will just use TOR or VPN's to get around any
| blockage
| rektide wrote:
| There was a recent HN post about the Indian government
| considering buying a bulk subscription to scientific journals:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25621809
|
| Just my own 2c, part of what makes this whole thing so
| frustrating & confounding is that it's hard to tell how valuable
| a paper is going to be to you until you've read it. Reading
| abstracts gives some idea, but there's plenty of papers that end
| up being not that interesting. Given the extreme price these
| journals charge for individual access, the it becomes extremely
| hard to survey & locate & subsequently purchase relevant
| research.
| f6v wrote:
| 90% of papers I read turn out useless. I have a hard time
| finding good review articles among all that watered-down
| garbage. If I had to pay to view each one or even subscribe...I
| wouldn't get too far.
| sabas123 wrote:
| At the same time, that other 10% might be completely
| invaluable. Which makes this entire situation such a mess :/
| ativzzz wrote:
| I would be more supportive of their cause if Libgen was limited
| to academic books, but I've found nearly every fiction/nonfiction
| book I've wanted to on there; it was just a standard book piracy
| website to me.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Why would other types of books deserve protection? Information
| wants to be free.
| ativzzz wrote:
| Well authors also want to make money, so we have to choose
| between having high quality writing that people get paid for
| or free low quality writing that people don't get paid for.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| People with something to say will write regardless of
| whether they get paid. People wrote books before copyright
| and will continue to write books no matter what happens.
| The internet itself proves this. I have no doubt they'll
| find other ways to make money through writing. Maybe
| authors will be able to set up a patreon or something.
|
| An artificial 100+ year monopoly on the data they create is
| nothing but rent seeking. It's also unenforceable in the
| 21st century.
| cinntaile wrote:
| This is about Sci-hub, not Libgen. Sci-hub only has academic
| papers.
| watwut wrote:
| Both sci-hub and libgen are mentioned in the article as
| targets.
| mhh__ wrote:
| The case for textbooks is much weaker than papers as, although
| it's basically implied that most won't make any money, it's an
| almost herculean task to write a good textbook (of 1k pages
| let's say).
|
| I steal all my papers (I am a member of the tyre society -
| ladies queue up please... - because it's so obscure I can't
| find them on Sci-Hub) but I don't mind paying for textbooks on
| principle.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| The trouble with textbooks is that nowadays there's a new
| edition every other year, with slightly different pagination
| and exercises, all of this for an extortionate price.
|
| In the past, prices were more reasonable, and you'd buy
| standard texts to build a personal library because you'd
| enter the profession; nowadays it's all about fleecing
| students, who need a college degree to enter the workforce.
| The social contract around textbooks has broken down as much
| as it has around journals.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > The trouble with textbooks is that nowadays there's a new
| edition every other year, with slightly different
| pagination and exercises, all of this for an extortionate
| price.
|
| This is what really gets me. I don't necessarily mind
| charging $150 new for a big textbook, especially given the
| likelihood of it being shoveled back into the used market,
| but when the used textbook market is also killed off via
| gimmicks like new editions that do little more than shuffle
| exercises or one-time-use online codes, the justification
| for that high initial price tag is lost.
|
| And I say this as somebody who also curated a personal
| library of textbooks that I do refer to in my day-to-day
| work!
| metiscus wrote:
| It's an incredibly toxic cycle. The book is expensive
| because it is required for completion of an already
| expensive task (a class). Teachers and departments
| require the latest evergreen textbook because of
| incentives from the publishers paid for with the profits
| of the sales of said evergreen books.
|
| How does education get off of the treadmill? Students
| can't reasonable refuse to buy the new textbook. They
| could organize and demand that professors stop, but in
| some fields the subject matter does change relatively
| frequently e.g. advanced medical courses. So the
| opposition would point to those and ask the rhetorical
| question "Don't you want your education to be current?.
| It is unlikely that professors at scale will act
| unilaterally because they are at best neutral in this
| situation.
|
| It could be solved, perhaps, with legislation, although
| it seems that such things are fairly universal across
| countries (although I am somewhat ignorant of how it
| works in Europe) and if the Europeans haven't tried to
| regulate it yet, it is incredibly unlikely that the
| Americans would try.
|
| Book piracy is the logical result of this cycle. If book
| prices were reduced either through reduced evergreening
| causing the used market to exist again or by some other
| means then piracy would reduce as well.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| _How does education get off of the treadmill?_
|
| The answer may be surprising: pay teaching faculty better
| and give them proper job security. Students see only the
| textbook, but there's the other half, the slides that
| come with the textbook that contingent faculty will use
| for their lectures. If teaching faculty were to stay in
| any one place for more than three years they would
| prepare their own lecture materials instead on relying on
| the readymade pap.
|
| Students would have to push for proper teaching.
| Unfortunately, in these times of elite overproduction
| they are more interested in their GPA to get into medical
| school.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Among the strongest counterarguments to the textbooks case is
| the law article "The Uneasy Case for Copyright", written by
| an academic and published in the _Harvard Law Review_ in
| 1970. The author argued three principle points:
|
| - _That the only defensible justification of copyright is a
| consequentialist economic balance between maximizing the
| distribution of works and encouraging their production._
|
| - _That there is significant historical, logical, and
| anecdotal evidence which shows that exclusive rights will
| provide only limited increases in the volume of literary
| production, particularly within certain sections of the book
| market._
|
| - _That there was limited justification for contemporary
| expansions in the scope and duration of copyright._
|
| A substantial portion of the analysis is directed to the
| textbook market.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Uneasy_Case_for_Copyright
|
| Copyright at the time of publication required registration,
| and was for a term of 28 years, renewable for an additional
| term, so or 54 years, lapsing four years from now in 2024.
| _Subsequent_ copyright revisions have extended by 41 years,
| to a total duration of 95 years, expiring in 2065. Best I can
| tell, copyright is held by the Harvard Law Review
| Association, rather than the author, presently Associate
| Justice of the United States Supreme Court, Stephen Breyer.
|
| Though the article _is_ available via LibGen (or Sci-Hub).
|
| http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/10.2307%2F1339714
| sradman wrote:
| I think the fundamental problem is that academics historically
| gave away their copyright [1]:
|
| > Traditionally, the author of an article was required to
| transfer the copyright to the journal publisher. Publishers
| claimed this was necessary in order to protect author's rights,
| and to coordinate permissions for reprints or other use. However,
| many authors, especially those active in the open access
| movement, found this unsatisfactory, and have used their
| influence to effect a gradual move towards a license to publish
| instead.
|
| I'd love to learn more about how this system evolved.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_policies_of_academic...
| fractallyte wrote:
| Because those academics were (and are) a bunch of egotistical,
| money-grubbing fools who would rather sell up their scientific
| integrity in exchange for some imaginary 'reputation' points.
|
| Science is science, it shouldn't matter where it's published.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| Science is not science. There is a lot of garbage being
| produced, you need a way to sort through it. Hierarchies of
| journals or conferences will naturally emerge regardless of
| the payment model. Just check the field of machine learning
| where most papers are open access and yet prestige depends on
| where it's published. This is orthogonal to the matter at
| hand.
|
| Being published by prestigious journals isn't just about ego,
| it's about future career opportunities, getting grants,
| getting to work on things you want to work on possibly with
| some of the most brilliant people in your field.
|
| I think people at the top could make things change with a
| massive concerted effort, and I think things will change
| naturally as younger people who've had a taste of open acess
| get access to top positions but it's too reductive to put
| things down to researchers' greed and ego.
| fractallyte wrote:
| "Publish or perish" is the most idiotic, damaging idea ever
| produced by modern academia. It's symptomatic of a
| degenerate system.
|
| If those academics had any guts, they would boycott their
| precious journals and strike out in a different, _better_
| direction.
|
| _They 're_ the ones perpetuating the system, just as much
| as the journals themselves. It's not parasitic, it's
| symbiotic.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| Nobody benefits from this system except publishers.
|
| Academics hate it, but publications is the way they are
| measured by public institutions for, e.g., grants, or
| when being hired. There's no symbiosis, it has evolved in
| this way mostly because of decisions taken by non-
| academics (ministries, governments, administrative staff
| etc.) and nobody knows how to get out of it.
| fractallyte wrote:
| To avoid redundancy:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25650788
| hctaw wrote:
| In my former life as a research engineer I learned to avoid
| no-name publishers, institutions, and conference proceedings
| because they are filled with lies. Not poor caliber material
| - outright fabrications.
|
| That's not to say prestigious journals are immune from bad
| science, just that the consequences for fraud are a bit worse
| and bar to clear for publishing it much higher.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| _it shouldn 't matter where it's published_
|
| But it does, there's a limited amount of hours in the day and
| an infinite amount of papers. You need someone to pre-screen
| the torrent of crap that has an occasional jewel floating in
| it, and traditionally journal editors have served that role.
| fractallyte wrote:
| That's the purpose of peer review.
|
| You don't need some pompous journal for that.
|
| How many Open Source projects are managed by an individual,
| or a small dedicated group? If they can do it - by self
| organising! - it's baffling that some of the 'smartest'
| minds in the world are unable to comprehend what's going on
| in their field on a meta-level.
| dariosalvi78 wrote:
| We are all very aware of it, but it's not easy to get out
| of it if the people that pay you measure you based on
| those metrics. Open access is partially solving the
| problem though and imposing open access to all publicly
| funded research seems to me a good compromise.
| fractallyte wrote:
| This is analogous to "use up _all_ your budget, or you
| 'll get less next year!"
|
| A stupid, stupid idea from people who should not be
| allowed to make decisions.
|
| 'Blue collar' workers figured out a way to get the
| message across - they formed unions, and went on strike
| to effect changes.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| Peer review is supposed to filter out the crassest
| nonsense (it usually does). What a journal does is
| grading. When you are reading stuff where you don't know
| the relevant names personally a good heuristic is the
| journal. You don't bother with Hindawi and MDPI and just
| read stuff from the better-known publishers.
| Schiphol wrote:
| The vast majority of academics are underpaid workers in
| precarious jobs who need those publications because securing
| one of the few stable positions is explicitly tied to having
| enough imaginary points.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| And this comes in the middle of a pandemic, when so many
| scientists cannot even go to work to access those papers.
| silexia wrote:
| Patents and copyrights in many cases have become a tumor,
| destroying their original purposes to enable rent seeking from
| disgusting and harmful organizations.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yes, it's disgusting. Intellectual property in general makes
| little sense but copyright in particular is just so bad. It's
| gotten to the point copyright infringement is civil
| disobedience. People should just do it, consequences be damned,
| until governments get rid of these outdated laws.
| namibj wrote:
| Every time I tried to find reasons for their continued
| existence strong enough to outweigh obvious downsides, I was
| met with utter failure.
|
| Copyright causes massive bookkeeping and furthermore, severe
| artistic repression. It's also easy to see that, by far,
| artists don't create things to actually make a living from
| copyright-based forced royalties. Patron and Kickstarter have
| shown that we are very much capable of funding artists
| remotely, either in an ongoing, post-payed basis for the
| former, or a pre-payed, project-specific funding way for the
| latter.
|
| As for patents, it should be easy to demonstrate concrete
| societal harm through monopolization and inhibition of progress
| (by blocking multiple recent inventions from being combined);
| as example for the former I give Sawstop (there are many
| reasons to not want to buy a whole machine from one specific
| vendor), examples for the latter are small firearms
| (handgun/rifle) design and the core technologies the
| https://www.mpegla.com/ practices rent-seeking on, which are
| embedded into hardware, but e.g. foregone in favor of software
| decoding (or appropriate alternatives for the other things they
| administer).
|
| I expect it's relatively easy to figure out a lower bound for
| the environmental harm from not using hardware decoding or
| choosing H.264 over H.265 purely for licensing reasons (and
| tanking the higher bandwidth costs).
|
| Trademarks, however, seem to serve a purpose.
|
| As an example for the drug R&D world, handling at least human
| trials by having a shared pot that everyone who wants to can
| invest in, and which is payed back e.g. double or whatever a
| suitable scheme for determining the overall payback sum,
| financed through a fixed VAT levied on the drug in question if
| it ever happens to get sold.
|
| It might potentially work better as a sort of bond auction,
| where the study administrators calculate the required budget,
| and public founders offer to pay X$ now in exchange for getting
| Y$ back via that tax system, while the auctioneer(system) takes
| from the offers that want the least return (in %), until the
| budget is reached. If the sum of all funding offers is
| insufficient, no money changes hands and the study doesn't
| happen.
|
| I'd suggest a tax rate between 5 and 40% for such a system.
|
| In the movie industry, people would put their money where their
| mouth is, and (likely through some intermediary agencies) pay
| to "make the sequel happen", or to choose which TV pilot shall
| get a first season.
|
| There might be need for some sort of anti-tivoization
| regulation to replace what the GPL3 accomplished there, but
| overall, software seems to be hurt by copyright preventing a
| "on the shoulders of giants" process to soak deep into less and
| less theoretical cases. See ZFS vs. Linux, if you need an
| example.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| > It's also easy to see that, by far, artists don't create
| things to actually make a living from copyright-based forced
| royalties.
|
| I would expect the exact opposite. Do you have any data? I'd
| expect the primary money maker for artists is people buying
| their products or getting those products from the channels
| the artist chooses. E.g buying a dvd or watching my show on
| Netflix or watching my video on my YouTube channel or buying
| a print of my drawing.
|
| Patreon processes payments of less than a billion dollars per
| year, so artists' money seems to be, by far, made via
| copyright protection.
|
| There's a question about what fraction of artists make a
| living, and I expect the majority don't make a living from
| it. Most artists probably don't do it for the money. Most
| probably just have it as a hobby. That said I'm glad some
| artists can make a living at it.
|
| I have yet to see any evidence that switching to a copyright
| free world would help anyone but the hobbyists and big
| companies who can afford to exploit the fruits of the
| hobbyists labors (I imagine some kind of YouTube like company
| going around taking everyone's content and putting it in a
| central place and making bank off ads).
|
| You seem to be getting at this with your mention about the
| need for "anti-tivoization" regulation. When you flesh that
| out, trying to regulate away the worst exploitative practices
| and enabling a professional class of artists, you'd end up
| with something that looks a lot like copyright law.
| namibj wrote:
| Yes, I expect that to be the currently primary income
| pathway for artists, but I share your expectation about the
| majority not being able to live from it.
|
| The primary issue with copyright aren't the royalties, it's
| the bookkeeping (and, to a lesser extend, things like
| translations being at the mercy of the copyright owner).
|
| I gave Patreon as something that showed that we appear to
| be cable of funding art without relying on copyright.
|
| I doubt the part about the big corp succeeding by fleecing
| everyone with ads. Have you seen the UX of e.g.
| popcorntime? If not, I suggest to read up on just how low
| friction these things already are, and that's with the
| typical use being illegal.
|
| And no, the anti-tivoization part is about preventing
| corporations from using DRM and/or hardware-locking to stop
| users from modifying the software running on their devices.
| I'd want exceptions for systems that are fully restricted
| from any kind of software/firmware update, like e.g.
| Yubikeys. But if systems support software updates, the user
| must not be prevented from running their own code on
| hardware they own, though of course a way to lock systems
| permanently down is reasonable and likely needed for cases
| where the owner can't ensure physical security.
| postingpals wrote:
| The argument a layman would make in favour of this is:
|
| "if people know they could rent seek with their intellectual
| property and potentially make millions of dollars charging
| people for licenses / gatekeeping their work, well that's
| going to motivate them to create really good work! Without
| this motivation, no one would create good work"
|
| And it's like, ignoring all the well-established counter-
| arguments to this, it kind of seems to justify its own
| existence through contradiction. It says, in essence, "We
| have to coerce people into making really good work by not
| giving them the building blocks that they could use to make
| really good work"
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| What building blocks? Creative work is _original._ You can
| build on previous ideas - or not, it 's up to you - but
| it's nothing at all like gluing together a bunch of
| frameworks that someone else created and patting yourself
| on the head for being a true original.
|
| I'll accept that copyright is bad when developers who hate
| copyright give _all_ of their work away for free - code,
| consultancy, equity, all of it.
|
| Until then people earning six figures a year telling
| artists they should work for nothing - or perhaps some
| begging on Patreon which might cover the rent (but probably
| won't) - is insultingly naive and unattractively entitled.
|
| This has nothing to do with academic journals, which are a
| very special and obnoxious example of rent-seeking and
| which absolutely should be replaced by open access - not
| least because the work has already been paid for by the
| public.
|
| But that shouldn't be confused with the creative arts,
| where new work _isn 't_ funded by the public. In fact it
| isn't usually funded by anyone at all, except the artist.
|
| If you want creators to work for free, you'll get what you
| pay for - which will be somewhere in the uncanny valley
| between nothing at all, and disposable filler of no real
| interest.
| postingpals wrote:
| The idea that the alternative to copyright means artists
| working for free is an ideological conflation not even
| the wealthiest, most cynical person on earth could have
| dreamt up.
| namibj wrote:
| Are you saying e.g. a Rock cover of a classic piece isn't
| original work? Because last I checked, the composer can
| demand royalties (if it's not so old that it expired).
|
| Of course you can sell physical things. You can even sell
| digital things, but transformative works are a way of
| creative expression. Or, say, a live streamer on Twitch
| doing an IRL (using a mobile uplink while out and about)
| getting their content (people seem to like it, so it
| appears to have some value) deleted/banned because a car
| with an open window waiting at the stoplight had the
| radio on.
|
| And I don't know where you got that I'm making six
| figures. I'm just not aware of individual artists making
| a living by selling digital copies of their work. I'm not
| saying they should put a free-download button there, but
| having to keep track of who made which parts when
| (copyright and expiry) is a gigantic pain, especially for
| small artists who do transformative work.
|
| I'm primarily attacking the rent-seeking model of
| software houses and (at least most of) the MPAA & RIAA.
|
| I want to encourage work-for-hire (potentially payed by a
| collective) and Patreon-like models over rent-seeking
| business "propositions". The benefit is that all the
| censorship for reasons other than legality and
| bookkeeping for royalties would be gone. It would enable
| far better privacy, too.
| namibj wrote:
| Well, see the AV1 codec? They made it because they were
| sick of patents and license costs for H.265, preferring to
| fund the development of a completely new one, primarily to
| avoid the fees.
|
| Or see RedHat and their Linux development/support. They
| don't rent-seek via copyright. And no proprietary
| programming language has a large user base. The closest is
| probably Microsoft Excel, I'd guess.
| silexia wrote:
| I agree with everything you said here pretty much. The way I
| would address the problem is to perhaps outright get rid of
| patents, limit copyright to 5 years, eliminate any ability to
| copyright software, and allow for trademarks as that is just
| the identifier for a specific brand.
| namibj wrote:
| Yes, patents stopped fulfilling their societal contract
| decades ago. I do no think anything critical necessarily
| relies on them being a thing.
|
| As for copyright, though.... a large part of the downsides
| lie with having to do bookkeeping and such. I'd argue for a
| total elimination of copyright, only keeping some very
| basic anti-plagiarism clauses (don't copy and then claim it
| was you who did it). They have to rely on intent, however.
| Accidentally reciting a joke and thinking you came up with
| it has to be very far from the grey zone.
|
| Trademarks are a vehicle for reputation and trust in a
| market, see e.g. how you can't buy poor quality tools
| branded "Knipex", or how Samsung is know to not employ
| overly deceptive branding/advertising for their portable
| flash media, along with being known for at least decent
| reliability.
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