Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimmydorry | Hacker News Reader

Can you name any time in history where the side burning books was in the right?

If as a society we allow companies, that are equal to (if not more powerful than) the government we elect, to pick and choose what parts of public discourse are acceptable or not, we have no one but ourselves to blame when this inevitably goes pear-shaped.

Like many other things in the past, what is legal right now may not be ethically and morally correct in the future.

You are correct that society as we know it does not cease to function immediately after the giants like amazon, facebook, twitter, ebay, etc. take a specific action like banning a book or banning a user. However, the longer term implications are far more concerning and the time to start contemplating these issues was yesterday (or any other time in the last few years). The next best time is now.

View on HN

No-one's burning any books. A company has decided to stop printing and selling a few books. This is the exact same commercial decision they make every day for thousands of books.

There's probably a useful discussion about whether orphaned works should be protected by copyright.

But it's madness to suggest that once a publisher has published a book they're somehow compelled to continue publishing that book in perpetuity.

You may need to re-read the article. This eBay deciding that these books should no longer be distributed. The publisher's decision to stop priting it is irrelevant to the discussion.

Nobody is burning these books, it is the estate that doesn't want to publish certain books anymore. So the party holding the rights doesn't want new books out.

What does a publisher's reversal about their wants have to do with selling books they already printed?

I don't think(?) eBay globally banned selling of past copies of Meinkampf while the copyright was cleverly held by a German State. Doing so is pretending copyright is a right that extends to sold property that is a copy, extending a right too far, while banning a class of books like MeinKampf for your own reasons is perfectly valid.

If they want to ban racist children's media on their platform then they should. That includes a lot of TinTin, popeye, Tom and Jerry, etc, that has never been classified as racist by some copyright holder.

edit- s/published/printed

I have a DVD of old Tom and Jerry, growing up I only saw the newer clips as I learned by seeing the recsit crap the old ones were. Same for some of the older Tintin, I have them as part of a collection, but my dear are the early ones set in Africa racist. Good as historical pop culture references, but by no means something to read, or watch, for fun or without some context.

Assuming good faith here, you may need to read the original article again. eBay is delisting 2nd hand copies of the books. That extends far beyond a publisher deciding not to continue printing their books.

Of course, if you believe that copyright should prevent the resale of goods, that's an entirely different story that ignores the current state of affairs in the world and the legislated rights of people in many countries (where there are such laws that prohibit limiting the resale of goods).

That also is not burning books. eBay is a private business choosing not to be involved in the sale of something against their policy. That doesn’t do anything to damage your copy or prevent you from using any of the many options available to sell it – you can probably even get a better deal now that these books are getting more publicity than they have had for half a century.

If the pandemic showed us anything, it's that goods that can't be bought online might as well not exist for the majority of people when you can't / won't leave the house. Fast forward another decade or two and this trend will probably only accelerate and we may no longer see brick-and-mortar stores that cater for niche items like books outside the top100 best sellers.

This is wrong on two levels: while many people have been buying more online, local stores certainly didn’t disappear (for that matter, the books we bought online last year came exclusively from two local bookstores), and buying online doesn’t only mean eBay.

> Can you name any time in history where the side burning books was in the right?

Well, after WWII, the USA engaged in their "denazification" of Germany, where they censored and burned Nazi materials.

Which side would you say they were on?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com