[HN Gopher] U.S. Hits Z-Library with New Domain Name Seizures
___________________________________________________________________
U.S. Hits Z-Library with New Domain Name Seizures
Author : nickthegreek
Score : 253 points
Date : 2023-05-05 13:00 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (torrentfreak.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (torrentfreak.com)
| sneak wrote:
| https://youtu.be/hn1VxaMEjRU
| unixhero wrote:
| Qith zlibrary were flying to close to the sun. There are better
| ways to evaluate books for free
| Asooka wrote:
| [flagged]
| sbaiddn wrote:
| and I hope that corporation's ability to lobby Congress to
| change laws against the public interest banned, and their
| lawyer's ability to practice law removed for ever.
|
| Free the Mouse!
| jimbob45 wrote:
| 4chan thrives off troll comments like this. I sometimes think
| it's healthy for online debate because you're much less likely
| to viciously attack someone if you can't be sure if they're
| trolling or not. Also, the opposing side gets steelmanned which
| is less likely when every member of a group belongs to the same
| side or if the moderation leans heavily of one side (neither of
| which apply to HN).
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Troll comment? Doubt it. I believe what he wrote is exactly
| what he thinks.
| snvzz wrote:
| >4chan thrives off troll comments like this.
|
| Thrives? I report them on sight, and the moderation team does
| a great job of removing offtopic and flamebait.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Paging Nathan Poe
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Oh no! Won't someone think of 'The Economy' or 'The Children'?!
|
| Sorry man, an unrestricted global 'public library' that allows
| those who can't afford it to access just about any published
| book is an unmitigated 'good thing'. I bet you also hate scihub
| as well. Won't someone think of the poor academic journals and
| their rent seeking?
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| If the original writer or peer reviewers who DO THE JOB of
| the paper itself were paid from the collections, the argument
| would be "well with your purchases, the author and reviewers
| earn enough to fund more research or pay bills but no. Its
| only the publishers who get paid.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| These peer reviewers are the only reason journals even
| matter. Their selectivity is the whole point. They should
| all quit those publishers and start a literal blog.
| user3939382 wrote:
| Corporations use lobbyists to capture and corrupt-to-the-bone
| every important regulatory agency we have. The laws themselves
| are corrupt, what meaningful laws do manage to exist are not
| enforced correctly due to these revolving doors. So when
| corporations hurt the People in major ways on a daily basis,
| nothing from the government, in fact the government is
| systemically complicit.
|
| But HEAVEN FORBID the People make the smallest transgression
| against corporate interests, suddenly the government is Johnny on
| the Spot and swings immediately into action, no stone goes
| unturned, no expense is spared.
|
| It's sickening to watch.
| hgs3 wrote:
| Its called crony capitalism [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism
| CapstanRoller wrote:
| That's redundant and an invocation of the No True Scotsman
| fallacy. The cronyism is an inherent feature of capitalism,
| not a bug. There are no real-world examples of non-crony
| capitalism.
|
| The cronyism always manifests itself from the beginning, and
| only gets worse.
| user3939382 wrote:
| It's funny how communists and capitalists both make the
| same point and counterpoint, just inversed.
| CapstanRoller wrote:
| The most honest capitalists (e.g. some AnCaps, some
| neoliberals) do make this point, but it's not very
| common. As much as I disagree with their views, I admire
| their brutal honesty about the system they endorse.
|
| What I can't stand is the disingenuous whitewashing of
| capitalism, which boils down to "don't trust your lying
| eyes" and "it's not Real Capitalism, which is actually
| cool and good". One can't have a productive discussion
| with these sorts of evangelists, much like one can't have
| a productive discussion with fanatical cryptocurrency
| fanboys who insist that ugly monkey JPEGs and The
| Blonkchain will magically create a perfect society, if
| only we just Do It Harder.
|
| "Crony capitalism" is a thought-terminating cliche.
| zokula wrote:
| [dead]
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| The US Trade Representative publishes a literal naughty list of
| countries whose efforts to combat infringement it deems
| insufficient. The document is filled with language such as
| "stakeholders report this", "shareholders are concerned about
| that". Corporations leveraging the might of the US government
| to sanction other countries that have better things to do than
| police imaginary american property.
|
| Sickening doesn't even begin to describe it.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Amazing how quickly the justice department works for certain
| interests.
| 206lol wrote:
| Many people say ACAB for this specific reason - cops work for
| moneyed interests. To be a cop is to defend the wealthy and
| corporate, axiomatically. Plenty of cops are nice people, but
| they're working for a system that fundamentally is bad.
| all2 wrote:
| What's the solution, then? If central authority is Bad
| (TM), is it decentralized authority that is the solution?
| IE, everyone gets a gun, everyone is deputized, everyone is
| responsible for upholding the law as citizens and
| enforcers.
| CapstanRoller wrote:
| >Plenty of cops are nice people, but they're working for a
| system that fundamentally is bad.
|
| How nice can you really be if you sign up for, and continue
| to work within, such a awful institution?
| mindslight wrote:
| The exact same way so many programmers can sign up for
| and continue to work for Surveillance Valley?
|
| If you want to say ACAB go right ahead - there's
| certainly truth in that. But there is also a truth in
| seeing that many cops got into it because they wanted to
| help people, and you're going to have to work with that
| if you ever want to fix the system.
| CapstanRoller wrote:
| >The exact same way so many programmers can sign up for
| and continue to work for Surveillance Valley?
|
| Your point has some merit, but there's a big difference
| between being an engineer working with systems that _can_
| be misused and waking up every morning ready to crack
| people 's skulls (especially since those people are
| usually impoverished, gender & sexual minorities,
| marginalized in some other way, etc) or outright murder
| them.
|
| Yes, both people contribute to systemic violence in a
| way, but I would argue that there is a vast gulf between
| participating in society (which is mandatory) and being
| at the tip of the spear of violent repression.
|
| Imagine having coworkers who routinely committed murder
| and received paid vacations for it.
| snickerbockers wrote:
| I don't even get how the hell copyright infringement became a
| matter of criminal law. If you're distributing a product that
| infringes on somebody's IP in a way which negatively impacts
| their profits, that is (by which i mean "should be") a matter
| of civil law and they can sue for damages. Why the hell
| should law enforcement get involved at all?
| theyeenzbeanz wrote:
| There's a video of double dribble game glitch for the NES.
| Fox/family guy decided to rip it for their show and copyright
| struck the original video. So they don't even do anything to
| corporations ripping of people's works.
| hn_throawlles wrote:
| let corporations exist without human participation... ahahahah
| interesting times
| nceqs3 wrote:
| Piracy is wrong. The amount of coping people will do to justify
| it is incredible to watch.
| sneak wrote:
| There's nothing wrong or bad about copying digital
| information.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The first sale doctrine that libraries rely on doesn't exist
| for digital media, so how would you propose build a "morally
| acceptable" digital library?
|
| * You can't do it by just buying ebooks because those don't
| come with distribution rights. This is essentially what zlib
| does, albeit with ebooks "donated" by others.
|
| * You can't do it with interlibrary loan for the same reason.
|
| * You can't do it by buying a distribution license because
| some of the largest publishers simply don't sell those.
|
| * You can't do it by purchasing physical books and scanning
| them into digital equivalents ala controlled digital lending.
| Internet archive tried that.
|
| The current situation today requires either paying perpetual,
| recurring licensing fees on every single ebook or piracy. If
| all we have is the former, libraries will never be able to
| stock anything beyond a small collection of topical books, as
| is already the case at most local libraries.
| zlibfan wrote:
| zlibrary24tuxziyiyfr7zd46ytefdqbqd2axkmxm4o5374ptpc52fad.onion
| justinclift wrote:
| That's a different onion address to what they seem to be
| publishing on their front page.
| teddyh wrote:
| Redirects to
| loginzlib2vrak5zzpcocc3ouizykn6k5qecgj2tzlnab5wcbqhembyd.onion
| justinclift wrote:
| Ouch. That's sounds potentially nefarious. :(
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| "phishing" of this type is unfortunately a common problem
| on Tor because the design of hidden services makes it very
| difficult for a user to validate where they're connecting.
| It's totally possible that this situation is not malicious
| but it sure is sketchy and is similar to a lot of malicious
| fronting that you can find on Tor for popular services. I
| consider this a major defect of the hidden service design
| but there's only so much motivation to address it.
| snvzz wrote:
| This is the URL I have in my notes.
| lom wrote:
| Doing my part of the streissand effect: https://annas-
| archive.org/
| gibspaulding wrote:
| Thank you for this, I was not aware of this site. Bookmarked!
| [deleted]
| 14 wrote:
| I wonder if future generations will see this akin to the dark
| ages where the churches tried to control what people could access
| for information and burned books or punished those who published
| information they did not like.
| znpy wrote:
| Sometimes it feels it's already becoming like that.
|
| There always is a mob of some kind trying to censor something.
|
| I won't make examples for obvious reasons.
| generalizations wrote:
| Seems to me that the storage TB/$ is rising at least slightly
| faster than the total size of these kinds of archives. I wonder
| how long it will be until we can feasibly keep personal copies of
| zlib (and libgen, and scihub).
|
| How big is the z library archive, anyway?
| anonymouscaller wrote:
| I'm not sure how large z-lib is, but LibGen is ~120TB. You can
| pick up a 5TB external HDD on Amazon for ~$100, so it would
| cost a good $2400 dollars for the raw storage costs if you
| wanted to host it all yourself. You really have to wonder how
| the owners fund all of this.
|
| Edit: fixed my math
| knodi123 wrote:
| > You really have to wonder how the owners fund all of this.
|
| Donation drive?
|
| https://torrentfreak.com/z-library-raises-tens-of-
| thousands-...
| 83 wrote:
| I run a 36 bay supermicro server I got for $900 on ebay which
| could easily host all this. I buy used 6tb sas drives off
| ebay for $26 a piece. They'd be even cheaper in bulk. That's
| $4.33 a tb, or about $520 total. You'll want to add a handful
| of drives for redundancy (we are talking used drives here)
| but either way it's entirely possible to host this entire
| thing including hardware for under 1500. Well within reason
| for someone passionate about it.
| edmundsauto wrote:
| I've been speccing a home storage server in the 50-100tb
| range and was considering this, but annual electricity
| costs made it infeasible. How much power does a machine
| like this consume?
|
| My calculation off a Dell 2U was something like 195W idle -
| ~900 kWH / year. I'm in California so paying 50 cents per
| kWH, that would be ~$450 per year -- decided to scale back
| to a low power tower with huge disks. More upfront, but
| less annually. More disk drives (6tb vs 18tb) increased
| that to the point where I figured it was better to have
| fewer larger disks, even if they are pricier, because of
| the cost to run them.
| lostmsu wrote:
| You made a mistake somewhere. 120/5*100 is only $2400
|
| Also, there are plenty of drives with under $10/TB listed
| here some looking legit: https://diskprices.com/
|
| So it is actually only $1200
| judge2020 wrote:
| The server cost is going to be the problem here, since
| you'll need SAS drives and a JBOD to house these hard
| drives, especially if you want to run a raidx for
| redundancy.
| lostmsu wrote:
| You can get 10 SATA ports for $40 with a PCI-E card on
| Amazon. That's in addition to up to 6 the motherboard
| would have.
| zaroth wrote:
| And the hard drives go where? But yeah, $3k would more
| than fund such a server.
| sneak wrote:
| You can buy a server for $700 or so that has 36 sata
| bays, ports, and PSU for all of it. I have two in my
| house. They are loud AF.
| lostmsu wrote:
| > They are loud AF.
|
| That probably is the real problem. Although you could
| plop them in some separated utility space like a garage.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Amazon has a 5 drive rack for $25.
|
| You can also get dual-drive USB adapters for $20.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Define 7 has 14 drive bays.
| [deleted]
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Libgen is mostly stored on ipfs.
| okramcivokram wrote:
| It's around 31TB right now, you can read more about it on
| https://annas-blog.org/ or get the data from https://annas-
| archive.org/
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| I had heard that Anna's archive is several years out of date
| compared to zlibrary, do you know if thats still true? I
| didn't see any explanation in a quick perusal of the links
| you shared.
| camdat wrote:
| Seems like the last scrape was late last year:
| https://annas-archive.org/datasets
| ryan93 wrote:
| Sad. I pirate 100% of my books. After i read them i purchase the
| physical copy. I buy more books when i can try them first! Its
| also enjoyable to have it open on your computer for when you have
| a moment.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Use the tor/onion ones, always fine.
| yiamvino wrote:
| downloading from onion exposes your location not always
| advisable :)
| bandrami wrote:
| As opposed to using the clearweb?
| jwilk wrote:
| How come?
| anonymouscaller wrote:
| How? It's Tor, the Onion cannot see your IP.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| It stands to reason that most entry and exit points are run
| by the NSA. All they have to do is match streams via rate
| limiting games to unmask.
| ryeights wrote:
| There are no exit relays when using hidden services
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| If they're running the hidden service or have a backdoor
| it's just as compromised.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Do you really think the NSA gives a shit about copyright?
| They're looking for nuclear secrets and the next 9-11.
| snvzz wrote:
| That's some BS in a post Snowden world context.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I don't think you seriously believe the NSA is trying to
| trawl for copyright violations. Arguments require more
| than just conflating some random facts and going 'there,
| see'.
| causi wrote:
| Why would the NSA care if I pirate The Lusty Elves of
| Cha'lifrax Volume 5?
| stainablesteel wrote:
| its a long story, but I became an NSA agent to stop
| piracy of that book in particular
| znpy wrote:
| Thank god i only pirated volume 4 and 6 /s
| vrglvrglvrgl wrote:
| [dead]
| sergiomattei wrote:
| Library Genesis seems to continue working... thankfully!
| jhbadger wrote:
| I wonder why they seem to have escaped? I always thought they
| were better known than Z-Library (which forked off from them).
| knutzui wrote:
| I believe a significant difference between the two is that
| Z-Library actively asks for donations in return for more
| features, whereas Library Genesis does no such thing AFAICT.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| I think Z-library attracted more.users because of its UI. I
| also like Libgen
| akiselev wrote:
| IANAL but Z-Lib is run as a for-profit business which makes
| it more of an open and shut case, especially if they're
| hosting their own files (which I believe they were, to
| implement that pay gate).
|
| LibGen acts more like an archive that's hosted on IPFS which
| eliminates a lot of the liability and can't realistically be
| taken down. You can only download the books from the mirrors
| LibGen links to and they're often just IP addresses so
| there's no DNS zone to seize.
| rabite wrote:
| They are definitely not better known among normal people --
| Z-Library was trending on TikTok massively (this is what
| prompted the aggressive arrests and seizures lol)
|
| It is possible that Libgen's proprietors are known to law
| enforcement but never stepped within reach of Western legal
| authorities. Certainly, had Z-Library's staff all stayed
| within Russia, they never would have been arrested.
| gibspaulding wrote:
| I genuinely don't know what I'll do if/when library Genesis
| goes down. The only thing worse would be losing Wikipedia.
|
| Has anyone attempted to put together something like torrents of
| the top 100Gb/1TB/10Tb etc of LibGen data? My dream would be to
| mirror the whole thing, but that's well beyond my
| budget/administrative abilities.
| lkbm wrote:
| I don't know about sorting by popularity, but there is an
| effort to archive it all spread across a bunch of torrents:
|
| http://freeread.org/torrents/
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ed9byj/library.
| ..
| cik wrote:
| What bothers me, is the degree to which Z-library becomes the
| only feasible way I can read books now. As I now live in Israel I
| run into several headaches, and it's no longer feasible to buy
| books.
|
| * Amazon shut off bookdepository.com
|
| * Amazon.com just won't ship many books here.
|
| * Amazon and Kobo have both clawed back ebook purchases because I
| don't have a US credit card. This is a frequent conversation
| point amongst English and French speakers living here.
|
| * Amazon shut down Kindle Unlimited accounts for those of us
| living here.
|
| * Libby (overdrive) shut off my grandma's Overdrive account
| (Canada) and sister-in-law's Overdrive account (US) because we
| had the nerve, to try and use the library.
|
| Frankly I'm frustrated by this cat and mouse game. I keep trying
| to purchase, eventually somehow do, and then have obstacles
| thrown on my way. All this as a massive consumer of books.
|
| The behaviour of the industry has literally driven my family, a
| book buying family to embrace piracy. I would conservatively say
| we easily spent 2-3K USD on books and ebooks annually. This
| behaviour has reduced it to nearly zero.
| brink wrote:
| Could be an opportunity for a business?
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| The how matters. Apple was at one point able to mess with
| perceptions of music industry. So was Netflix. Publishing
| industry has a history to draw from and is unlikely to give
| one a sweetheart deal without a lot of tracking and god knows
| what other terms they can come up with.
|
| I agree that it looks like it could be, but I honestly don't
| know how to do it legally without forcing some market
| participants into submission. Sadly, that requires backing of
| a bigger company.
| PentelicoMarble wrote:
| [flagged]
| zapdrive wrote:
| [flagged]
| justin66 wrote:
| Without wanting to kick off what I bet would be a _really
| great_ political argument involving the Israel /Palestine
| problem, I just want to point out that story is fourteen
| years old. The situation regarding importing books to Gaza
| might be better or worse after fourteen years but I doubt if
| it's the same.
| rafaelrc wrote:
| > 2009 Did you just search for "Israel books" and copied the
| link for the first negative looking article for free
| political karma?
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Given gaza's border with Egypt I'm not really sure it matters
| what israel bans no?
| akvadrako wrote:
| I don't understand why you can't use libgen, which has quite an
| extensive collection. Why only Z-library?
| jraby3 wrote:
| Way more books in z-library. When Z goes down it's painful to
| go back to libgen.
| rabite wrote:
| Z-Library has more books. Z-Library contains every book
| within Libgen plus books that have been uploaded by
| Z-Library's userbase and never made it to Libgen.
|
| Additionally, a huge thing for me that keeps me going back to
| Z-Library repeatedly is working fulltext search for the
| entire contents of their library. I have a number of things
| that I search for that get a trickle of new scholarly review
| every year, and Z-Library allows me to continually find new
| references within the body of text to published books. I have
| reviewed every alleged fulltext book search engine on earth
| that does not violate intellectual property laws, and nothing
| even comes close to the utility of Z-Library.
| YeBanKo wrote:
| Did Amazon remove your "purchases" from your device simply
| because you no longer have a US card??
| jraby3 wrote:
| I also live in Israel and have the same exact problems. I
| probably spend $5k a year on books but just cannot deal with
| the headache of trying to purchase a book and failing. VPNs,
| changing my iTunes Store location, just an absolutely
| frustrating experience for absolutely no good reason.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yeah, it's stupid. Copyright industry pretty much defeats
| itself with their licensing nonsense that nobody cares about.
| Anything short of everything humanity has ever created in one
| place at negligible costs fails to compete with copyright
| infringement.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| From the perspective of a consumer, the only real difference
| between a library and zlib is that "checkouts" aren't time-
| limited. So why aren't there any good, copyright-respecting
| digital libraries out there? The simple answer is that
| publishers either completely prohibit library usage of their
| ebooks, or have such onerous licensing terms that libraries
| can't afford to maintain large collections [1].
|
| [1] https://doi.org/10.1080/01616846.2020.1782702
| dudul wrote:
| Same for me. I'm not buying books full of DRMs, that I can only
| read on one specific device and what not. F-that.
|
| And since I don't like pirating, I just read books in the
| public domain.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Can always do both. Buy a copy and then immediately pirate
| it. Still fund your author but actually gain the ability to
| use the thing.
| dudul wrote:
| No because I don't want to encourage the distribution
| model.
| Nifty3929 wrote:
| Honest question: Why does Amazon (and others) restrict or block
| services in Israel? I'm genuinely curious what their reasoning
| might be.
| SN76477 wrote:
| "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing
| problem" - Gabe Newell
| Aardwolf wrote:
| It is! Steam is great service and makes me gladly pay for
| games without any qualms.
| internetter wrote:
| Amazing what understanding this simple concept can do for
| your platform
| mmh0000 wrote:
| This quote is incredibly true for me. I used to (like 2
| decades ago) pirate everything. Then Steam came along, and it
| is just so easy to buy things, and I don't have to worry
| about malware keygens or no-cd hacks. I haven't pirated a
| game since 2005.
|
| I still pirate the shit out of music and movies simply
| because I can goto TPB and have any movie I want, in 4K or
| better, downloaded and ready-to-watch in under 15 minutes. Or
| any album I want, in FLAC, in 3 minutes.
| smegger001 wrote:
| pretty much. the only game I have pirated in the last 10
| years are some had bought several decades ago for windows
| 98/98 and are ones that are not available on steam or GOG
| that I had the CD/floppy disk for but my laptop doesn't
| have a drive for either and would require a no-disc crack
| to run anyway. Essentially abandonware that no one seems to
| even know who own the IP for me to give my money to or if
| they do don't care to bother making it available for me to
| pay them.
| xboxnolifes wrote:
| It's so true. In the case where _price_ actually is the
| issue, then it ceases to be a piracy problem, since they
| likely couldn 't afford to pay anyway. No customer lost in
| many cases.
| masfuerte wrote:
| Doesn't Israel have bookshops?
| jraby3 wrote:
| You cannot compare the ability to purchase over a million
| books online to the selection at a bookstore. Plus my
| personal preference is reading books on my phone, not as an
| actual book.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Just like any country with an official language other than
| English, I would expect them to have bookstores full of
| Hebrew books, with a small section of English books that
| you've probably already read.
|
| The parent commenter even explicitly mentions "amongst
| English and French speakers living here".
| Barrin92 wrote:
| any half decent bookstore will just order the books for you
| and you'll get them a few days later. It's how I buy most
| of my English books in a non-English speaking country.
| Added benefit, weans yourself off the 'i have to have it
| now' shopping culture
| noduerme wrote:
| This is the way. Did people forget you could do this,
| with the advent of online sales? It costs nothing more,
| it helps the store stay open, and it's one less sale for
| Amazon.
| toyg wrote:
| "Added benefit, you are forced to do this thing that _I_
| think is fashionable, while I don 't have to (and likely
| will continue not to)."
|
| In Italy we'd say _armiamoci e partite_ , "we'll get ammo
| and you'll go fight".
| Barrin92 wrote:
| but that is literally what I do, which is why I
| recommended it, I am in the same situation as the OP.
| is_true wrote:
| Sometimes the real problem is with customs not because of
| the language
| bwb wrote:
| ya this... as far as i know they have plenty?
| internetter wrote:
| I also pirate things. Often. I don't want to, but I'm always
| forced to by shitty policy.
|
| Apple TV requires credit card verification to stream in certain
| circumstances. That verification is broken for me... So despite
| the fact I pay for Apple TV, I pirate when I'm away from home.
|
| I'm not entitled to the rights of the Ebooks I bought. I guess
| publishers can just change them[0], and god forbid I put my
| book on my own EReader. What I tend to do is buy the book and
| strip DRM. I'm privileged to even have the ability to buy the
| book, I guess.
|
| And buying ebooks? Terrible experience as well. At the book
| store, you can just page through the book to see if it's what
| you actually want. I wanted to buy a book on a development
| topic I'm interested, and the ebook costs 70$. No problem _if_
| it 's the book I want, but the preview is just not enough, so I
| pirated it, then decided to buy it.
|
| It really bothers me how consistently the best option is just
| not to pay.
|
| [0] https://goodereader.com/blog/kindle/ronald-dahl-ebooks-
| being...
|
| Sidenote: I think there's a potential market for a service that
| allows local bookstores to sell ebooks. It sounds stupid, but I
| absolutely love browsing the book store... Just when it comes
| down to it I buy the ebook because it's a much nicer reading
| experience. I'd love if I could go to a bookstore, take the
| book to the counter, "buy it", and then the clerk takes the
| book and credits the ebook my account.
|
| Lately I've been playing around with connecting the digital and
| physical worlds. I've been toying with smart windchimes for
| notifications, christmas lights that tell me the weather, and
| all sorts of little connections. It's beautiful.
| nunuvit wrote:
| I have legal, instant access to nearly every technical
| publication I need in digital form, but I still illegally
| download almost everything. It's much faster to get the docs,
| I don't have to slog through crippled page navigation or
| search, and they don't cut me off because I've opened too
| many research papers in one day to see if any of them
| actually answer my question.
|
| The music and TV/film industries figured out how to get
| people to pay. The print industry can figure it out too.
| camjohnson26 wrote:
| We're living in the dark ages of copyright policy.
| nunuvit wrote:
| Copyright policy needs improvement, but I don't think I
| support any changes that would help much here.
| internetter wrote:
| > I don't think I support any changes
|
| > that would help much here.
|
| You don't support changes that would help improve
| copyright policy?
| nunuvit wrote:
| Seriously?
|
| here = my previous comment
| internetter wrote:
| Oops, sorry... got lost in the thread :)
| pierat wrote:
| Indeed!
|
| I have 4 library bookshelves (7 foot tall ones). And they're
| packed with books. *Bought* books.
|
| But dealing with more current "online books" are a fraud.
| They 'sell' these books, but in actuality they're rentals due
| to DRM. I cant read them on Linux; I cant sell them; I cant
| read them on my phone; I can't print past their arbitrary
| print limits.
|
| I have none of the same rights of these physical books.
|
| So, yeah, I'll pirate.
| [deleted]
| internetter wrote:
| I'd say, maybe buy the physical book and pirate the Ebooks.
| I haven't been the best at this... I just buy the ebooks
| and strip them... But I suppose I could buy a physical book
| locally and have a loaner for a friend, or give it to
| charity
| rrix2 wrote:
| This is what I do.
|
| The physical copy exists to be a conversation piece on a
| shelf, to loan out, talk to friends about, not mind
| losing to a family member who's visiting, etc.
|
| The digital copy exists to mark up, index, search,
| highlight, learn from, etc. If it's not on LibGen I'll
| buy it on Kobo and strip it in to my library using Obok
| DeDRM and an old ePaper reader I wouldn't want to use
| otherwise, and then buy a physical copy of it's something
| I'd want to share.
|
| So often the books I loan out are "clean" and don't even
| have a wrinkle in the spine but sometimes I'll go through
| and dog-ear important passages or pencil-line particular
| parts. I've had friends assume I hadn't actually read the
| book until we pull out koreader and go over my
| highlights.
| sn0wf1re wrote:
| Kill a tree just so that you can feel morally correct and
| the author gets a 2C/ royalty? Naw, just pirate and don't
| feel bad since apparently that is what publishers want
| you to do[0]. Maybe buy the author a coffee if you ever
| run into them.
|
| [0] based on their actions it sure seems like this is the
| case.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > Kill a tree
|
| You know that paper producers own land where they farm
| trees for pulp, right?
|
| It's not like they're making deserts out there randomly
| chopping down trees.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Those forest they own came with trees that would be
| preserved if they didn't exist.
|
| They do make deserts out of forests when they clearcut. A
| lot of land is owned by others (governments, native
| tribes) and permits are used to extract the pulp
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Trees grown for paper pulp regrow quickly and are farmed.
| If you know of old-growth forests that have recently been
| clearcut for paper pulp, please cite a source.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| _" Kill a tree just so that you can feel morally
| correct"_
|
| Because the cost of manufacturing a hardware eReader and
| keeping it charged doesn't have a corresponding carbon
| footprint.
|
| _" Maybe buy the author a coffee if you ever run into
| them"_
|
| Because that'll keep them solvent.
| thinkmassive wrote:
| > No problem if it's the book I want, but the preview is just
| not enough
|
| Manning has a decent solution to this. You can browse the
| entire book, but only a small section of it at a time is
| "descrambled" in the live view.
|
| On more than one occasion I've used this to look up some
| specific topic, which was immediately viewable (and unblocked
| me on that problem), then gone on to purchase the book
| because I know it's high quality and I'm likely to refer to
| it in the future for other reasons.
|
| https://www.manning.com/
| bombcar wrote:
| I wonder if someone in the USA could setup a "piracy
| forgiveness service" where they accept amazon orders of books
| and movies and just immediately shred them.
| gameshot911 wrote:
| > I don't want to, but I'm always forced to by shitty policy.
|
| "forced"
|
| You say that as if your hands are bound.
|
| Creators have an intrinsic right to distribute their work as
| they see fit.
|
| You do not have an intrinsic right to it.
|
| If you don't like their terms, then your right is to not
| consume it. NOT to steal it.
|
| If you decide to thieve, then that's your call.
|
| Just don't pretend it's being "forced" upon you.
| internetter wrote:
| Who defines "thievery"? The RIAA? If I buy something, I
| expect full rights to it. Dead simple. I pay for the
| content, and _then_ I pirate it because the distributer
| somehow invested millions of dollars (instead of
| distributing to authors, mind you) into making a less
| consumer friendly platform than piracy.
|
| Not to mention, internet piracy is not thievery. The only
| thing in limited quantity is the silicon that enables it.
|
| If piracy did not exist I would likely not buy these things
| in the first place, because the stupid restrictions mean I
| can't consume what I paid for. In that way, my hand is
| indeed forced.
|
| Tell me, who is being cheated here?
| BlackjackCF wrote:
| I think it's wild that publishers don't do something like pay
| an extra dollar if you're buying the hard copy and also get
| the ebook.
|
| It's also wild that the ebook is often as expensive as a hard
| copy.
| scarmig wrote:
| Put a unique QR code in each physical book in some
| standardized location (probably the publisher's imprint
| page). Then, someone can scan it to purchase it. The
| bookstore then gets a cut of the purchase. It would even work
| browsing a friend's bookshelf or a library.
|
| Seems like it'd be a win for consumers, publishers, and
| bookstores all alike, and it doesn't seem too complicated to
| implement technically.
| contingencies wrote:
| It's called an ISBN. That's the barcode on all books
| printed since the latter half of the 20th century.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN
| birdman3131 wrote:
| ISBN's are not unique.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| They're nearly-unique; there probably aren't more than
| ten books sharing the same ISBN.
| icedchai wrote:
| Perhaps the previous poster means unique per _physical
| copy_?
| scarmig wrote:
| Per physical copy, indeed. That's what would allow
| attribution of the sale to the store.
|
| Even a QR code that provided a link that would allow an
| easy purchase for the ISBN would be great for publisher
| and the customer. It would, however, not be appealing to
| bookstores, since it just means the customer comes in,
| browses, and purchases it online, cutting out the
| bookstore that was playing a critical role in the process
| and cannibalizing its own sales.
|
| You could create a bookstore-and-ISBN tuple that would
| also allow attribution without uniquely identifying each
| physical book. Probably improves privacy marginally
| (though it would provide a permanent indicator of which
| bookstore it was purchased from), but with the downside
| that it complicates things behind the scenes; what if one
| bookstore acquires another bookstore's inventory? And a
| bookstore ordering a new book would have to have its own
| individual print run.
| pnzrdrgoon wrote:
| Tabletop RPG publishers are making inroads towards making
| digital versions of books available with purchase of physical
| books from indie games shops. Whenever I'm looking for a new
| TTRPG book I always first ask my Friendly Local Game Shops if
| they're in the Bits & Mortar program and it influences where
| I purchase. Even if the shop isn't part of the program many
| of the publishers will now send a PDF if you send them a
| picture of the receipt (shout out to Free League Publishing
| for being awesome about this).
|
| https://www.bits-and-mortar.com/
| crazygringo wrote:
| Why not Library Genesis?
|
| Z-Library always left a bad taste in my mouth since they used
| Library Genesis's entire book collection, but then never
| contributed additional books in their collection back to
| Library Genesis. Which just felt like being a bad neighbor.
|
| But maybe I'm missing something to the story here?
| internetter wrote:
| Z-Library is easier to use. I've always struggled to find
| what I need on libgen. Now we have Anna's Archive[0] though,
| which is wonderful
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna's_Archive
| kennend3 wrote:
| Adding to this, region restrictions on video content.
|
| There are TV shows which are made in Canada, and unavailable on
| amazon prime in Canada, yet are available on amazon prime in
| the US?
|
| In Canada, amazon prime tries to push me to getting yet another
| subscription?
|
| There are also shows Amazon prime owns and refuses to broadcast
| in Canada? You might be able to say that prime doesnt have
| redist rights on some shows, but their own "prime originals"?
|
| After fragmenting the market like this, what did they expect
| people would do?
| Spoom wrote:
| In my experience, usually Prime content is on Crave in
| Canada. But a whole lot of Canada just has a pirate Kodi box
| anyway.
| jdougan wrote:
| To be fair, that is probably partially fallout from the
| Canadian content regulations and possibly other law regarding
| corporate ownership. Not sure because it has been over two
| decades since I was current in that stuff.
| transcriptase wrote:
| They actually just passed a new law last week to legislate
| even more CanCon meddling on online streaming sites,
| including YouTube and social media feeds.
|
| Canada subsidizes an entertainment industry that mainly
| produces things nobody wants to watch, so they're
| regulating companies to algorithmically force it on
| Canadians.
|
| The amazing shows and movies that have come out of Canada
| in the last 20 years are popular because they're good...
| not because of some visibility issue with the rest of the
| fodder from companies that spend more on admin related to
| lucrative tax breaks and grants than they do actually
| producing content.
| jdougan wrote:
| My impression back then was that the TV cancon rules were
| a disaster, and the music ones may have helped more than
| hurt, after the first 10 years or so.
| pid-1 wrote:
| I learned bookbinding, now I print my own books and make pretty
| hardcovers as a hobby. Highly recommend.
| dilap wrote:
| Yeah, I started out buying stuff. The DRM eventually inevitably
| fucks up and steals the item from me.
|
| Fuck it, they've failed to uphold their end of the bargain --
| now I pirate, unless there is DRM-free content available for
| purchase.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Libby (overdrive) shut off my grandma 's Overdrive account
| (Canada) and sister-in-law's Overdrive account (US) because we
| had the nerve, to try and use the library._
|
| Did the library state that was the reason? I got a notice from
| my library that it's switching to another system because
| Overdrive is going out of business.
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| > * Amazon and Kobo have both clawed back ebook purchases
| because I don't have a US credit card. This is a frequent
| conversation point amongst English and French speakers living
| here.
|
| Kobo has an option to pay via PayPal, don't they? What you can
| do is change the Billing Information on your account so that
| your city/state/zipcode is somewhere in the United States, then
| save it--you don't actually have to give them credit card info.
| But Kobo will think you're in the US. Then try to make a
| purchase, and at the checkout screen, pay via PayPal. I don't
| think Kobo validates the origin of the PayPal payment (at least
| not according to other members of the MobileRead forums that
| have used this method). It should go through and purchase the
| book.
|
| The other option is to get some friends to purchase Kobo gift
| cards on your behalf and add them to your account so that you
| have a balance. You can then use the billing info trick I
| mentioned above to change to whatever country you want, and buy
| your books. I use the gift card method quite frequently to buy
| books from Kobo UK store when they're not available in the US.
| toyg wrote:
| The point is that you should not have to hack your way
| through this or that payment system, because sooner or later
| the hack will be blocked and you will lose access even to
| stuff you paid for. It's not even a hypothetical, the parent
| poster brings clear examples of this happening multiple
| times.
| prenoob wrote:
| Just dropping my 2c here. A lot of the debate i read on this
| article verges on the subject of piracy as in copyrights
| infringement. Let's not forget that these sites also carry an
| enormous amount of old, uncopyrighted, obscure, impossible to
| find texts that would otherwise be lost forever and that is a
| service that they pay for and ultimately benefits all of
| humanity.
| is_true wrote:
| Books that don't make sense financially for bookstores
| garganzol wrote:
| To add insult to the injury, SS-Library would be another fitting
| name to avoid domain seizures. May be unrelated though, but they
| should think about rebranding as some letter combinations
| unfortunately became poisonous and probably became contributing
| factors for warrants.
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