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Comment by StormChaser_5 | Hacker News Reader

As a self published author I have to say that the publishing industry is providing a huge service to me and the rest of the industry here.

The IA blatantly stole the work of thousands of people. They saw a problem and wanted to act - laudable. They could have done that be arranging to buy unique copies of each book they lent out. Or they could have tried to come to some agreement with the publishers. Or a bunch of other alternatives.

They didnt.

They stole the work and thankfully there is some players with enough clout in the market to do something about it.

If the big publishers ever do go away it will be a bad time for those like me who are never going to make enough revenue from our works to warrant a court proceeding while our works are stolen.

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They didn't "steal" anything. If you mean copyright infringement, say "copyright infringement". There's no scarcity involved-- nobody lost the use or ownership of any physical article-- so nothing was "stolen".

re: your business model being sustainable if the current "industry" goes away - Maybe that ship has sailed. You can't make a living being a buggy whip manufacturer or an elevator operator anymore either.

> nobody lost the use or ownership of any physical article

Presumably the author and/or publisher lost the use of the income they could reasonably have expected to receive corresponding to a certain number of copies of the work going into circulation.

Anyhow, physical articles are not the only things that can be stolen.

Each act of copyright infringement does not equate to a lost sale.

We have a term for copyright infringement. We have a term for unlawfully taking things that are subject to scarcity. They are two different things. The lack of scarcity matters.

If you have a successful bed making business, and I decide to start making beds too, you'll certainly make less profit, but I haven't stolen from you. Deprivation of income is not theft, practically any action you take deprives someone of income.

Most justifications for property (both personal property and real estate) invoke the fact that pieces of property are rivalrous (one person's use interferes with another's). Calling unlicensed copying "stealing" ignores the crucial difference between physical goods and digital files.

I will agree that the writing is not stolen when you give every line of code produced by you or that you will produce in the future or any code produced by any company you have ever been part of or invested in to me for free to use as I wish.

Until then if you want to read an authors work then you need to pay their (usually very small) fee.

If someone pirates my code that's not stealing, that's copyright infringement.

I would love to live in a society that would recognize the post-scarcity nature of many goods nowadays and de-commodifies them, including computer programs, basic food, and in certain cases housing.

Me too. I would love to be able to make anything I write free while having all my material needs seen to and only writing for the love of it/prestige.

But we don't live in that society.

I guess we could argue about semantics but depriving me of my ability to legitimately profit from my work while the IA wrapped itself in a flag of doing good seems like at the very least a very low form of behaviour, as well as illegal. And I doubt many people would describe us any word other than theft.

Sure, but as it's going to only way for this to happen, and it certainly is possible, is if people start acting against large actors that have a vested interested against this in ways that make de-commodification necessary for the existence of the industry.

It is theft in the same way that someone squatting unused land in the north of Canada and being granted ownership is theft. The fact that we live in a system where this might cause loss of income for someone is neither necessary nor the moral responsibility of the Internet Archive, SciHub or Library Genesis.

And so long as people use that logic, we'll never live in that society.

"post-scarcity"

There will be no more "scarcity" when the "value" of the time required to produce these works reaches "zero." Until then, there will be plenty of scarcity.

By the way, I think we would all need "immortality" in order to reach that point.

So, yeah.

Not going to happen.

Well, no. That is not what scarcity means. If we had an economy where you could replicate cars, food, houses, spaceships and so on for free, that would be post-scarcity, even though it takes some work for it to be engineered at the beginning.

Bits on a computer that can be reproduced forever are not scarce.

Your comment illustrated the problem quite well. Your list of things are physical objects.

Some people don't seem to value the effort required to create new ideas. Hence, they are seen as "free" and not worth anything.

Ideas have a marginal cost of zero. Therefore, it doesn't make sense to monetize them on a per-unit basis. In that sense, copies of ideas are not scarce.

A car is not just an object, a car is also an idea. It's a design, the engineering of its parts, the implementation of its constructions, the code needed to make it work, and so on. And yet if we could replicate it for free, achieving a marginal labour cost of zero, then it would not be scarce anymore.

The implication of what you're saying is silly. Yes, making a marginal copy of the latest Star Wars film is nearly zero. However, the first instance cost $275,000,000 to create. We split the cost across each unit because if we didn't, the movie wouldn't exist, because nobody would buy the first unit.

You are getting too caught up on the fact that some things have low marginal costs to produce that you're entirely neglecting that overhead costs are a thing that also exist.

Even for something like Linux, there are gigantic overhead costs. The vast majority of Linux commits are made by people sitting at their paid job. Those lines of code are not free, they are financed by the companies who are willing to pay Intel/IBM/RedHat etc for their products and services.

Many are paid to write and maintain open source software - I would say that comes close.

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