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Comment by hopfscotch6 | Hacker News Reader

The publishers do not have a legitimate business and deserve to go out of existence. Copyright is nonsense.

I don't disagree with you in principle, but it's the system we have. So,

1) What's a good way to ensure that authors continue to author books while not dying of exposure (or, more practically, that authors continue to author books instead of deciding to go work at a tech company or something)?

2) How do we implement that system?

> What's a good way to ensure that authors continue to author books while not dying

Authors should be paid for the act of writing, not the sale of the resulting work.

> How do we implement that system?

Crowdfunding and patronage seem to be gaining traction these days.

This seems like a great way of making sure that only popular pulpy books get written, in the same way that the cannibalization of the classified ads space mostly resulted in traditional media turning clickbaity.

I don't think it would be effectively any different than right now. Majority of the content is 'pulpy' right now and then there are a million niches filling the demand. It would likely be no different.

Just look at all the types of people that support themselves through patreon. There are many different types of people, and some of them are incredibly niche. Some are technical, some are artistic.

Really, the demand in the market would be same, so there would be similar content. The only real difference is we are killing the middleman who profits needlessly.

Some books are capable of making their own niches. Under the current system they become bestsellers and then their authors become well compensated for all their hard work. You can't really have patrons for a market segment that doesn't exist, or doesn't know that they want that content yet.

It's hard to see how under this funding model something as revolutionary as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle or Rachel Carson's Silent Spring would even get published. The research in those took years and there was no demand for such titles on those topics previously.

I know this isn't books, but let's look at 2 examples of games that came out through community funding, either through something like Patreon were people make donations or something like Kickstarter.

A) Dwarf Fortress. It's an incredibly niche game where the creator has spent literally decades of his life working full-time towards the game. He has a vision for the game and he doesn't compromise. The community funding allowed him to do this. It realistically would not have been possible in the current system.

B) Pillars of Eternity 1 (and 2) were both great games that simply weren't getting funding to be made in the business world. Yet it was successful and both were very good games.

I'm not going to claim they are revolutionary or even that great. But I am going to say that without the process, they wouldn't have been developed. I also think that demand would work the same regardless of the system.

If somebody creates a book like The Jungle, it would become a success anyway and more people would fund the author through consistent or one-time donations.

Really, we've hit the point with technology that we simply don't need the middle men anymore. The creators themselves can work directly with the consumers. I don't see a reason to continue the current system besides inertia.

> If somebody creates a book like The Jungle, it would become a success anyway and more people would fund the author through consistent or one-time donations.

But you need something to actually get this going in the first place. It's worth noting that Dwarf Fortress only started getting a financially stable stream of donations because an alpha was bootstrapped. You can't really bootstrap a book based on investigative journalism, there aren't really stretch goals that a book can hit, etc. It works for small tidbits on a regular cadence like a podcast, but this isn't how a book works.

Books are also different from games, in that generally speaking when it comes to community funded games the creator and the patrons are broadly aligned. This is not a good dynamic for book publishing, because then people won't write content that for all its truths may just piss off their existing patrons and leave them destitute.

Makes sense, at a high level.

Should we cancel copyright before this system is well-established and stable? It seems like there could be arguments for it, if copyright is indeed a great abuse, but if it's not, it seems like it would be systematically better to establish the new system in parallel with copyright, and then we could argue not only that copyright is bad but it's no longer necessary.

Is copyright in fact no longer necessary? How many people support crowdfunding projects with digital rewards or join programs like Patreon specifically for access to copyrighted works (whether that's because they want legal access, or because there's some form of DRM, or whatever) vs. because they are happy to support the creator anyway? That is, to what extent would getting rid of copyright also reduce the profitability of crowdfunding/patronage?

(There's an inverse question - could we get rid of copyright and still have people interested in buying physical books from official sources? That is, could we change the legal mechanism but not the social one? If we think people will pay creators just because they like their work - and it seems that in fact they do - why wouldn't they buy copies of works from creators just because they like their work, even if not compelled to do so via copyright?)

How do new authors (or new creators/artists of any kind, really) get a living wage via crowdfunding? I contribute to the Patreon of a couple of creators I like, but they're all established in some way - i.e. I contribute to support these particular creators not needing to participate in the system of selling licensed works for royalties, but it doesn't seem to be a systematic change.

How much do creators make via crowdfunding/patronage make, anyway - do established writers tend to earn money comparable to the advances and royalties they'd get from a traditional publisher?

One feature of the current system is that if your books are popular with people who don't have much money (students being one of many examples), you still get paid through taxpayer-funded libraries buying copies of your work. How should we preserve that property - should we make it a norm for your local public library to participate in patronage?

Did Internet Archive do anything to advertise the crowdfunding sites of authors whose books they lent? Could they have?

Related to that, is it possible for the Internet Archive to continue operating infrastructure for digital lending for creators who want to be supported for their work by letting authors post e-books and linking to crowdfunding/patronage sites?

I've been warned about repetitive ideological discussion on HN so I should probably not elaborate on the matter. I do agree with you though. These are all important points that should be addressed. I do not know the answers to these questions. I sincerely hope someone smarter than me will be able to come up with really good answers.

I just think that we can't go on like this. Copyright is based on a lie: artificial scarcity. It wasn't so obvious before the 20th century but computers and the internet changed everything. Society must change as well.

In order to enforce copyright in the 21st century, computing freedom must be sacrificed. I don't think anyone here wants that outcome. So I defend the end of copyright.

> In order to enforce copyright in the 21st century, computing freedom must be sacrificed.

I'm not sure this is true. The publishers aren't demanding that Internet Archive add DRM to their e-books - they're demanding that Internet Archive stop distributing them entirely. I can certainly imagine a world where DRM-free e-books are the norm and unlicensed distribution is limited only by legal threat and not by technical means. Yes, the fact that information can now be copied instantly for free (it could previously be copied with some time and effort with a photocopier, or with typewriters samizdat-style, or with pen and paper monk-style) means the publishers are less confident that legal threat will be enough... but we did mostly end up in a world where DRM-free music is easily available.

But also, physical books aren't going away. As long as you can buy physical books, you can participate in a world of copyrighted books without running DRM agents on your computer. You miss out on some potential 21st-century gains like having the text of the book in electronic format and being able to share it without spending some time at a scanner, but you haven't lost anything you had in the 20th century.

(Also on the topic of computing freedom, how do we get the benefits of the GPL - especially receiving things like source code - if we no longer have copyright?)

> I can certainly imagine a world where DRM-free e-books are the norm and unlicensed distribution is limited only by legal threat and not by technical means.

The state of YouTube proves that the copyright industry will not accept such a world. They want the technology industry to prevent copyright infringement from happening. They don't want to have to sue anyone after it has happened. Copyright infringement is widespread, decentralized and international so legal threats simply don't work. Prevention is the only option.

Copyright infringement prevention is only possible if they seize control of our computers. That is morally objectionable and cannot be allowed to happen even if it destroys the copyright industry.

> how do we get the benefits of the GPL - especially receiving things like source code - if we no longer have copyright?

We don't. The GPL was created by Stallman in reaction to copyright protection being extended towards source code. Without copyright, the software development world might revert to what it was like before that event. I don't fully understand what it was like in those days but there are descriptions in his books.

The world has moved on since those days, the software development world won't revert to what is was like then, it would instead change in different ways if copyright goes away.

> how do we get the benefits of the GPL - especially receiving things like source code - if we no longer have copyright?

It’s not obvious to me that enforceable copyleft licences have increased the availability of free software to such an extent as to outweigh the loss of freedom effected by normal copyrights. Abolishing copyright (or less radically, rejecting the prevailing interpretation of copyright law which says that software is a “literary work”) would do more to advance the four essential software freedoms than any copyleft licence. Notably, copyright is the only thing standing in the way of freedoms 2 and 3. As for freedom 1, companies would still treat their source code as a trade secret, but without copyright they’d have no recourse against people republishing leaked source code, which could then be incorporated into free software projects.

> It’s not obvious to me that enforceable copyleft licences have increased the availability of free software to such an extent as to outweigh the loss of freedom effected by normal copyrights.

I think this was probably more of a critical mass sort of thing. Historically, it seems like copyleft licenses (and perhaps even GCC's horribly byzantine internal architecture) probably played a key role in getting free software off the ground. Once you have sufficient mind share though it no longer seems to be as necessary.

> In order to enforce copyright in the 21st century, computing freedom must be sacrificed.

Actually, with the lack of copyright, they might just go the route of software anyways: Book-as-a-Service, Steam-for-books, license checks whenever you startup your book.

> (or, more practically, that authors continue to author books instead of deciding to go work at a tech company or something)

Have you done or read research to suggest this is something to worry about?

There are other concerns certainly. But I have trouble understanding how someone who has ever visited Wikipedia or visited github could even ask this question. It sure sounds like a conceptual anachronism to me. (Though not nearly as bad as the person who wanted to shift from discussing copying data to holding up a bank the last time this topic came up.)

> Have you done or read research to suggest this is something to worry about?

Yes, I've heard many authors saying that they're unhappy with the emergency library in particular because they are concerned they won't be able to get paid to write books if this happens. And, based on my training and experience, if someone isn't paid to do their job anymore, they'll look for another job.

I'm aware of GitHub. I've published things to GitHub myself. Many of them I was paid to publish. There's a lot more I would publish to GitHub if I weren't writing proprietary code all day. You can go see all the pull requests I haven't responded to. I think it's absolutely true that if you gave people a way to put a roof over their heads and food on the table, they'd do work they love anyway, and I myself point to GitHub as an example of that. I think it's also true that if you don't give people a way to put a roof over their heads and food on the table, they'll find something else to do with their life that does.

I've also visited Wikipedia. Here's a quote from the first person to make one million edits: "Being suddenly and involuntarily unemployed will do that to you." I think that demonstrates that if he could do something else and get paid for it, he would have.

I thought the greater implication of your parenthetical was that there is a danger that down the line fewer books of probably less quality would end up being written.

I gave an example in the context of encyclopedias where vastly more articles of at least equal quality ended up being written.

I'm asking for any citation you can give of trends that go in the opposite direction of encyclopedias, music recordings, blogs, citizen journalism, propaganda, to name a few. It's my observation that when the cost to publish and read hits essentially zero the amount of content goes up, not down.

In case you aren't aware of it, FOSSjobs is a site where companies post jobs for working on open source. There is also a list of resources, which contains a list of a bunch of open source companies and other ways to get paid to work on open source.

https://www.fossjobs.net/ https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources

I think if you talked to most authors and asked "would you still do this if it were unpaid" you'd get almost entirely "no"s. Do you expect otherwise?

The question isn’t whether they’d work for free, it’s whether they’d work if it was impossible to generate revenue through enforceable copyrights. We know that even under these conditions, some authors would work for free, others would be paid by companies that benefit from their work other than through the sale of licensed copies, and still others would be paid by patrons and governments. It’s impossible to say whether the loss of all new works that don’t fall into these categories would outweigh the gain of all existing creative works becoming available for unlimited free use, but we can be pretty confident that there would still be more new creative works (perhaps of lower average quality) than any person could consume in a lifetime.

If you asked most software engineers if they'd code if it were unpaid, you'd also get mostly "no"s. And yet FOSS carries on. There are some people who simply need to create.

And yes, some FOSS is subsidized by companies who pay their engineers to contribute, but there are also people who contribute on their own time.

The amount of FOSS in the world that exists from people who contribute on their own time is a small fraction of the amount of software (total) in the world. Yes, software won't die out, but if somehow people couldn't get paid to be software engineers any more, there would be a lot less software engineering happening.

It's certainly possible to argue that copyright is so bad that we should have way fewer authors and musicians in this world, such that only those who are truly passionate about writing and making music (and/or independently wealthy) will do it, but it doesn't seem to me that that's what people are arguing.

> "And yet FOSS carries on."

Isn't it already very well established that FOSS is currently largely being built by people employed by corporations? They are most definitely not unpaid.

I agree that writing wouldn't go to zero. But I do think we'd get a lot less of it!

(And the same if FOSS were entirely unpaid)

Publishers do a have a legitimate business, since they provide many services to authors. Heck, they even provide useful services to readers since the imprint is usually a good way to filter for better quality publications.

That being said, I don't agree with how they have been handling digital sales or lending.

Yes, they provide such useful services as underpaying authors, ensuring that authors get as little control over their creative output as possible, and bullying authors into changing their work to fit pet ideological crusades. Maybe smaller publishers still provide some semblance of service to the writers they work with, but the big publishers have been predatory entities for a long time.

Sure, but the abolition of copyright would also mean that individual authors do not have copyright over their works, even if they sidestep the publishers. (Which, to be fair, the commenter upthread admits - turn on showdead in your profile if you want to see it.)

I am not sure that many authors who get mistreated by their publishers would feel like they're going to get paid better and have more control over their creative output if copyright goes away entirely.

How do you propose that the authors of creative works be paid for their efforts, outside of copyright?

One way (an old way) is for, say a newspaper or magazine, to publish a novel as a serial. The newspaper pays the author for a few pages at a time, and the newspaper gets subscription fees and ad revenue.

Serialized novels have perverse incentives in the form of puffing up word count and frequent cliffhangers to keep readers coming back. I cannot find it at the moment but there was a fascinating article comparing excerpts from a serialized novel versus a standalone novel to illustrate these effects.

Aside from that, it also hampers authors creatively. The difference between a great film and bad film can hinge on what happens in the editing room. It has to be the same for books.

Consider how hard it would be for a programmer to do their job if they could only write programs concatenatively (e.g. if the code you committed last week were a real commitment—set in stone and you were never able to refactor it or clean up the architecture, etc.)

That may be, however you may be interested to learn that Ulysses was first serialised.

Another way is to simply limit copyright terms to 20 years. Or charge a fee to enable copyright, and copyrights must be registered.

They aren’t?

Your position is unusual enough that I don't really understand it. If you laid out an argument, I'd be happy to read it and have my mind changed. Terse responses are not persuasive, though.

We are, very poorly. With rampant piracy of books (e.g., ruslib), royalties have become quite reduced that would traditionally compensate for low up front payment from publishers. I’d blame publishers for paying so poorly, but the bulk of my irritation goes to entitled consumers who have decided that regardless of the time and effort required to create something, they deserve it for free.

> I’d blame publishers for paying so poorly

That's exactly what you should do. You should have been adequately compensated for the time and effort required to write your book. Instead, your publisher decided to require you to put the work in first and then offer you the chance to get compensated afterwards based on how well your book sold. The expected results didn't materialize because the market conditions that enabled those sales no longer exist.

The world has changed. We're living in the 21st century. It costs $0 to make and distribute copies of information. Only the costs associated with creating the first copy must be paid for. Blaming consumers for this reality isn't going to make it go away. Insisting on copyright doesn't seem to be working either. The sooner people accept this, the sooner we can start working towards alternative business models that don't depend on creating artificial scarcity in the age of free information.

Creators are scarce. Intellectual works, once created, are not. Therefore we must somehow compensate creators for the act of creating and not for the sale of the resulting work.

...and where might the money for that fair compensation of the creative act come from when consumers of the product expect it for free? This is the part that never gets resolved in discussions - someone, somewhere has to cough up money to pay for stuff that people now believe should be consumed for free. Where is this mythical money tree that generates money without consumers putting any in?

Same thing occurs in the OSS world. Unless a project is lucky to fall under the umbrella of a big company that sees value in investing in contributing to OSS, there is no $ to pay creators. Yet, again, people expect free software and assume someone, somewhere, has a magical money tree from which they can fairly compensate producers.

To be honest, I solved it my way: took all of my articles offline, stopped a second book project, and stopped contributing to OSS. I assume some optimistic younger creator will fill the void, until one day they too wake up and say “shit - this isn’t fair”, and will also move on. The changed world you speak of certainly is here - it seems to basically prey upon the endless pipeline of those who have yet to figure out that they deserve to be compensated for their efforts, and just sucks them dry and burns them out until they realize they’re being exploited.

They expect it for free after it was created. The only possible solution is to charge them money before creating it. Perhaps crowdfunding and patronage will be the answer. If not, I guess we'll just have to live with less creators in general. That is fine.

> If not, I guess we'll just have to live with less creators in general. That is fine.

I was wondering if someone was going to make this argument.

1. Why is it fine?

2. How is "Actually, it's okay if there are fewer books in the world" a defense of "Internet Archive was in the right to give people access to books, because it's very important that people have access to books"?

If the world doesn't actually need people to write books unless they can afford to do so for free (or via crowdfunding/patronage), why did Internet Archive need to do anything at all, besides say "Authors, please make your books available for free if you can"? What was so important about the rest of the books?

And why abolish copyright? Is the world improved if we go from a small number of books available for free and several available under copyright to only a small number of books available for free?

My original comments were not directly related to the Internet Archive situation. I replied to an author who blamed consumers for the lack of profits when in reality it is the business model itself that is failing.

> Why is it fine?

> And why abolish copyright?

Because these days a world without copyright is how things are in practice. Copyright infringement is trivial. People do it even unintentionally. Might as well stop pretending and just accept the consequences. We just can't go back to how things were before computers and the internet. If the result is less creation overall, then we must accept that.

Enforcing copyright in the 21st century requires sacrificing computing freedom as we know it today. Computers would only execute approved "lawful" software. Subversive programs which do things like play movies without consulting the rights holders first would be banned. That would surely mean the end of playful hacking and the free and open source software community. I don't think anyone here wants that outcome. I certainly don't. So I defend the end of copyright.

I've been warned before about ideological discussion on HN so I will refrain from elaborating further. I apologize.

I think I would take books and copyright over a free internet, and a lot of other people would too.

>Enforcing copyright in the 21st century requires sacrificing computing freedom as we know it today. Computers would only execute approved "lawful" software.

License keys are a simple and effective solution that works 99% of the time

>Subversive programs which do things like play movies without consulting the rights holders first would be banned. That would surely mean the end of playful hacking and the free and open source software community.

How does the second part follow the first? 100% freedom in all forms is not a pre-requisite for opensource software. There are plenty of things you can't and shouldn't be able to do. I think this is a false dichotomy.

> License keys are a simple and effective solution that works 99% of the time

It's not just DRM. There are plenty of software that can be used for good and bad and in many cases the line is blurry. Their use would be prevented just because someone might misuse them.

File sharing, software development tools, debuggers, reverse engineering tools, network analysis tools, penetration testing software... All of these and more are likely to be banned from the computers of mere consumers. Computers would become mere media consumption machines just like modern locked down video game consoles.

> How does the second part follow the first?

Respect for the user is a basic principle of free and open source software. This means the software is supposed to do what the user wants, not what society wants. The only way to perfectly align the two is to stop unauthorized software from running on the user's machine. Society must the computer away from the user. It's not the user's machine anymore, society is just letting them use it and only on society's terms.

Do you want a world where only licensed programmers can develop software? A world where only software developed by these people will ever run?

> 100% freedom in all forms is not a pre-requisite for opensource software.

It is a prerequisite for software freedom. What good is open source software if you can't run it on your machine?

It seems like you are taking everything to the extreme. We have legal copyright protections now and all of the tools you mentioned still exist. Copyright holders are going after major distributors, and a few pirates to make examples of them.

>Do you want a world where only licensed programmers can develop software? A world where only software developed by these people will ever run?

While I think conclusion is absurd, I would prefer it to one where content creators have no rights.

> The world has changed. We're living in the 21st century. It costs $0 to make and distribute copies of information. Only the costs associated with creating the first copy must be paid for.

That's not really a change. Previously, the physical costs of copying were higher (paper, ink, labor, etc.), but none of that was a royalty to the author.

For an expensive textbook, it was always cheaper to print a pirated copy of the book than to pay for a legal one, because most of the cost of that expensive textbook was profit/royalties, not the physical cost of production.

It's true that it's now very easy to produce copies of e-books for $0, but there was no technical reason in the past why a bookstore with a printing press couldn't have sold $100 books for $10 - only copyright. I'm not sure why the ability to sell $100 books for $0 (or even $10 books for $0) is a qualitative change and not merely a quantitative one.

> I'm not sure why the ability to sell $100 books for $0 (or even $10 books for $0) is a qualitative change and not merely a quantitative one.

The difference is the sheer scale of it.

Printing presses are expensive, purpose built hardware. People who had access to one were part of the industry. Enforcing copyright is much easier when infringement is centralized like this. So copyright infringement at scale wasn't that common. Also, since the books were physical copies there are natural limits to how many can be made and their widespread distribution is a hard logistical problem.

Compare that to the 21st century. Almost everyone has a computer which can create a virtually unbounded number of copies of any file. These computers are also connected to a global network which makes it trivial to distribute these copies to anyone who wants them. In the 21st century, anyone can easily infringe copyright at massive scales and it's impossible to enforce copyright in any meaningful way because infringement is decentralized among the general world population.

The Temporary National Emergency Library illustrates the qualitative difference between $0 and $10. It would never have been feasible to make print copies of an entire library collection instantly available to billions of people.

What I think I deserve for free is the ability to decide whether a book is worth the price or not. This is simple in a bookstore, but when I’m online the default seems to be that I have to shell out to even take a look.

100% agree. The death of in-person bookstores has killed that mode of browsing, and I have yet to see a viable replacement when buying online.

Many ebooks have some degree of preview. In some cases, it's imperfect, but it seems overall at least roughly equivalent to a bookstore.

It’s not roughly equivalent. I often look at the free previews on Amazon and Google Books to check print citations or read a few pages from a chapter of interest, but usually the pages I want to read are unavailable. An online equivalent to bookstores is not possible because there’s no way to glare at a customer for treating the store as a library.

Better yet, nobody should be paid for any work whatsoever. We should all love what we do, and if we won't do what we do for free, we clearly don't love it enough. We should all put our lack of money where our mouths are.

If we could only find enough people who love cleaning toilets...

I propose that they do it out of love, and not for money. There will be less trash on the market and more high quality work.

A lot of trash is created by people who do it out of love. Cases include fanfics, youtube videos and videogames. (I am personally guilty of producing trash in all of these categories.)

Also, a lot of people love trash.

> There will be less trash on the market and more high quality work

Actually, only those with lots of disposable time, or who can purchase others’ time, will produce content.

Incidentally, this is the reason why you should always pay your politicians a salary and why you shouldn't find "this politician refused their salary" to be meritorious - you don't want to artificially restrict your pool of politicians to the independently wealthy.

What if an author self publishes their book, does he/she deserve copyright?

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