[HN Gopher] Z-Library Responds to U.S. Crackdown, Asks Authors f...
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Z-Library Responds to U.S. Crackdown, Asks Authors for Forgiveness
Author : picture
Score : 15 points
Date : 2022-11-21 20:51 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (torrentfreak.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (torrentfreak.com)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| What Z-Library and similar systems offer is a relief from the
| _tremendous_ deadweight losses of a legacy and increasingly
| inexcusable private copyright regime, _one which has been
| tremendously expanded over the lifetime of many of the works
| presently alleged to be infringing_.
|
| As Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has written,
| _knowledge is a global public good_.[1] And public goods
| inevitably result in market failure. _Information and markets
| simply don 't work._
|
| The classic way to pay for public goods is through a tax, or tax-
| like, general assessment, preferably indexed by income or
| household wealth.
|
| As I've noted several times here recently,[2] the $9 billion in
| annual bookstore sales[3] could be met with a $5.25 per month fee
| for a typical U.S. household, or an 0.1% income tax basis (say,
| rolled into your broadband access charge).
|
| This would provide compensation equal to _all current book
| sales,_ and avoid both the deadweight losses of information
| access denial of the present system as well as the Federal Crime
| of Letting People Read by which the so-called US Justice system
| assassinated Aaron Swartz.[4]
|
| As jl2618 recently noted,[5] Criminalisation of digital
| distribution was only legislated in 2008 as 17 USC 506 (again in
| the U.S.), under Public Law 110--403:
|
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/506
|
| https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-110publ403/pdf/PLAW...
|
| A small, progressive, integrated fee _would address the grossly
| specious complaint that "authors must be paid"_.
|
| Yes, _pay them,_ and decriminalise knowledge access.
|
| I've noted much of this before, including:
|
| "A Modest Proposal: Universal Online Media Payment Syndication"
| (2014)
| <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...>
| (I've since suggested that broadband service providers act as the
| gateway for revenue collection.)
|
| "What the academic publishing industry calls 'theft' the world
| calls ;research': Why Sci-Hub is so popular" (2016)
| <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_th...>
|
| ________________________________
|
| Notes:
|
| 1. Joseph Stiglitz, "Knowledge as a Global Public Good," in
| _Global Public Goods: International Cooperation in the 21st
| Century_ , Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg, Marc A. Stern (eds.),
| United Nations Development Programme, New York: Oxford University
| Press, 1999, pp. 308-325.
| <https://archive.org/details/globalpublicgood0000unse/page/30...>
|
| 2. E.g., <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33647625>
|
| 3. "Book store sales in the United States from 1992 to 2021"
| <https://www.statista.com/statistics/197710/annual-book-store...>
|
| 4. The Archive Org Open Library link above in footnote 1 is
| presented by way of one of the many information innovations
| Swartz pioneered: the Open Library itself.
|
| 5. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33643398>
| the-printer wrote:
| If I'm reading this correctly, a household would pay five
| dollars and change; and get what in return exactly?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Everything ever published.
| MrVandemar wrote:
| I'd sign up for that in a heartbeat, as long as nobody was
| tracking the books I was reading.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > As I've noted several times here recently,[2] the $9 billion
| in annual bookstore sales[3] could be met with a $5.25 per
| month fee for a typical U.S. household, or an 0.1% income tax
| basis (say, rolled into your broadband access charge).
|
| > This would provide compensation equal to all current book
| sales
|
| How would this money be distributed?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| See for example:
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Fox_Agency>
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Society_of_Composers,
| ...>
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical-
| Copyright_Protectio...>
|
| Mechanical royalties based on exposures and prevalence are
| already well-established.
|
| I'd suggest a combination of a basic income plus some level
| of extraordinary royalties, given that writing's reward is
| _exceedingly_ uneven, both in distribution amongst authors
| _and_ over time. Present "tentpole" revenues in publishing
| (and television, film, and music) reflect this within a
| market context, where blockbusters support far smaller, often
| much higher-quality (from a literary, cinemographic, or
| musical sense) works. A replacement scheme should offer a
| similar mechanism.
|
| Alternatively, a bidding system in which tranches of works
| are offered differing levels of compensation, based on
| various quality-criteria assessments, genres, and classes of
| works, might be used. Meme-generation and investigative
| journalism, for example, should arguably not be compensated
| equivalently.
|
| RMS's "Internet Sharing" proposal (2012) suggests a
| popularity-based mechanism:
|
| _I propose instead to pay each artist according to the cube
| root of his or her popularity. More precisely, the system
| could ascertain the popularity of each work, divide that
| among the work 's artists to get a figure for each artist,
| then compute the cube root of that figure, and set the
| artist's share in proportion to that cube root._
|
| _The effect of the cube root stage would be to increase the
| shares of moderately popular artists by reducing the shares
| of superstars. Each individual superstar would still get more
| than an individual non-superstar, even several times as much,
| but not hundreds or thousands of times as much. Shifting the
| funds towards moderately popular artists means that a given
| total sum will adequately support a larger number of artists.
| Furthermore, the money will do more good for the arts because
| it will go to the artists who really need it._
|
| <https://stallman.org/articles/internet-sharing-
| license.en.ht...>
| freeplay wrote:
| And herein lies the problem with socialism...
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