Z-library founders arrested in Argentina | Hacker News Reader

Z-library founders arrested in Argentina

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581 pointscft471 comments

I was delighted when my book showed up on Z-library! I of course was never paid for authoring that book; indeed I paid a subvention to publish it with Harvard University Press. At some point, the rights were sold to the giant publisher Brill, which was charging $30 per chapter for a book that has no value by chapter.

Luckily, some kind soul at University of Marburg uploaded it and Library Genesis still has it.

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/141915/

https://libgen.is/search.php?req=Joshua%20Fox&column[]=autho...

I know two instances of authors uploading their own books to libgen. Both esoteric academic books that they were not paid to write.

three

Reminds me of how Orwell preferred to write introductions to 1984 only for illegal reprints behind the iron curtain. I can't find the exact quote but he said that he'd write it for that audience alone as he knew without a doubt that they would read his introduction. If I ever actually write a book, I hope I have enough courage to do the same and only write introductions for cracked copies. You know the audience actually cares if they are willing to risk the fuzz just to read.

The dynamics are completely different to printed books, which need to be purchased by the reader. Cracked e-books are downloaded in bulk and often never read or replaced by another 'free' book when the first few pages don't engage sufficiently. It isn't unusual for someone to get an ebook reader, have a mate fill its storage with best sellers or a genre dump, and never ever download a new title or even know how.

I have what I have to imagine is going to be terrible news for you about how a lot of people engage with their printed books...

Don't remember where I saw this but: "The act of purchasing physical books and the act of reading them are two entirely different hobbies and practices".

Additionally, if someone downloads your book for free, and barely reads it, as you suggest, have they _really_ done much more than picking up the book in person, scanning the table of contents, reading some pages in particular, then setting the book back down? What you're describing sounds like the digital version of what I used to do at physical bookstores; it seems a less compelling argument against what the z-lib founders were doing, not more.

https://www.raptitude.com/2022/01/everything-must-be-paid-fo...

Tsundoku notwithstanding, I guess.

Is there much risk just in reading a cracked book!

If you didn't get paid for writing the book, how did the copyright transfer to someone else (so that they could sell it)? Or the transferable rights to print/distribute it, if that's what we're talking about here.

I signed away rights to the President and Fellows of Harvard College (the legal name in this context for Harvard). That was not a problem as it was clear to me that this would not be a money-maker for anyone. The business-side was handled by Eisenbrauns, a small publisher. When the owner retired, the business sold to Penn State. Later, the Harvard Semitic Museum (the part of Harvard in charge of the series) sold the rights to Brill. I am guessing that Harvard Semitic Museum saw this as a chance to get a little bit of money out of their asset, and Brill saw this as a cow to milk to death, the way the price for legacy software is raised to sky-high levels as the product dies. And indeed, I am guessing that Brill is not making much -- no one did. https://www.sspnet.org/community/news/brill-announces-collab...

Is that contract valid? What did you receive of value in exchange for signing away your copyright?

I assume getting it into print was the "item of value" Joshua received.

It was 25 years ago, so I don't remember. However, even if today I could get all my rights back -- indeed, if I could get compensated for a reasonable author's royalty going back to the start -- the amount of money would not be worth noticing.

I've been getting paid for my book generously, but I'm still happy to know that my book can be read at online libraries for free, so the people who can't afford it can benefit from it. My publisher, Manning, also has these HumbleBundle campaigns around Christmas time to sell many books at once that makes a single book cost $1 or so.

If online libraries can be made even more streamlined, the demand for piracy would diminish eventually. The same applies to academic papers.

I see you are taking the ticketmaster approach. You knowingly put your works into a contractual system that you can then condemn later so you can feel good and let the 'system' 'other' 'society' you were a part of be the bad one. I have news for you, that 'system' 'other' 'society' includes you, as the person who voluntarily agreed to let your work be locked away. But it's 'ticketmaster' that is bad, no you, who voluntarily contributed.

Me and my colleagues will be affected by the end of Z library and co related projects.

Here in Brazil and for sure in most second and third world countries, people don't have money to spend in books.

You can argue that people can go to the library, but in most cases it's even expensive to take a bus or taxi even a Uber.

I'm a law student at an university in brazil. Law books are really expensive. Even though my university have a library, sometimes it doesn't have the books that the professors ask us to read.

Since I found z library I could have access to most of books that I needed.

I do know that the writers and publishers have costs and they need to make money, but I don't agree with the fact that we have to pay to have knowledge. It's more like if we don't have money, we can't have knowledge.

What could be more Brazilian than law students breaking the law in order to be able to understand the law?

Sounds like those specimens collectors from the 19th century that helped on the extinction of species (e.g. dodo bird, great auk) by collecting and embalming them for "preservation".

Yes, there used to be massive herds of law textbooks roaming under the canopies of the Amazon, but thanks to Z-library's irresponsible book-hunting and conservation methods they have become a very rare sight. The only remaining herds are in the Oxford University Press/Scholastic//Wiley/Houghton Mifflin textbook preserve located just outside of Brasilia.

In most countries downloading a book is not illegal. What might be illegal is to distribute copyrighted material. I say "might" because often distributing is not even illegal. Sending to friends and family without making money is usually not illegal. And how do you determine "friends"?

> And how do you determine "friends"?

This!!

This exact lawsuit took place in Canada where the supreme court ruruled that you don't necessarily need to know someone to "lend" to them.

They cited public libraries as an example of where books and video s are lent out free of charge and the librarian and the borrower are not "friends".

https://www.iposgoode.ca/2012/07/the-pentalogy-the-supreme-c...

> I do know that the writers and publishers have costs and they need to make money, but I don't agree with the fact that we have to pay to have knowledge. It's more like if we don't have money, we can't have knowledge.

For all human history, access to knowledge requires wealth. Simple example — If I want to know how to fix a particular old refrigerator I bought second hand, I need to buy the manual.

That said, I enjoy the story of Jesus feeding hundreds of people with a few fish and a couple loaves of bread. I point out the story is also a parable. Jesus is somehow duplicating the fish and bread to feed the crowd. Isn’t this similar to knowledge? Should we not spread knowledge in a similar way if it’s of no cost to us? If you say “no, the author needs to be paid!” Then I ask, “is not the fisherman and baker missing out on profit from the sale of fish and bread?”

It always brings an interesting discussion around this topic. Fundamentally, I agree knowledge should be free. I post my blogs for free for this very reason. If I need to make money, I do work, sell products; etc.

Theoretically if Jesus duplicated fish and bread on an industrial scale, yeah, it would. Also, labor still needs to be put in to make the products, all piracy does is make it incredibly easy to make additional copies.

There’s a reason musicians have to constantly tour and the middle class of music has entirely degraded since the 90s

if the people Jesus fed with the duplicated fish and bread were too poor to afford buying any food, is that still lost sales?

If some student in Rwanda downloads a copy of some obscure Springer-Verlag text (I'm picking on SV because their practices with research publications are just so cynically rent-seeking it's easy to criticize them) that costs five times his annual income and probably isn't even available for sale in the country, is that really a lost sale?

You brought up music - I'm an amateur/trying to get to semi-pro musician myself, and my current "business model" is basically the Patreon approach - make something people love, let them give you money for it. I'm also an ardent fan of several bands (Surfer Blood being one very notable example) whose work I originally discovered via piracy. Since that first listen at age 16, I've bought digital copies of their work on Bandcamp and have bought tickets to see them live. If I like the work I will do my best to support the creator. I don't see why some massive record company needs to take a 50% cut so they can pay their "Managing Director of Artistic Innovation" his seven figure salary.

The argument "a pirated copy is a lost sale" is false in the general case, as my aforementioned examples demonstrate.

I was looking for a book a while ago, it was something like $150 in the U.S. Out of curiosity, I looked up the price in other countries. It was 150 times the exchange rate.

150$ for a book is a lot of money even in the U.S. How do publishers expect other countries to pay the equivalent of 150$ (in local currency)? In many places $150 might be half the monthly salary or worse.

I understand publishers and authors need to get paid, especially the authors. It takes decades to gain expertise in difficult subjects and on top of it, one needs to be able to write well to create a good book. So yes, authors need to be compensated. But at the same time, their customer base in most cases are college kids. How do they expect them to pay? And how much of all that money goes to the authors anyway, who are the real experts vs the middlemen, the publishers?

The whole situation is just depressing.

>But at the same time, their customer base in most cases are college kids. How do they expect them to pay?

Student loans. When you flood an entire sector with money, it's only logical that prices go up.

> When you flood an entire sector with money, it's only logical that prices go up.

Is it? The costs haven't increased and the value of money hasn't decreased. The only "logic" here is "the publishers are assholes".

> the value of money hasn't decreased

This isn't true in the slightest, not sure why you think that.

And producers don't charge what it costs them, they charge what people will pay. And if you flood consumers with capital that they can use for specific types of purchases, then you reduce their price sensitivity and prices increase.

Why do you think college tuition has soared? All people on average are greedy, it's called being a rational self actor. But not everyone gets to charge insanely inflated prices year on year...they could if they would.

Poor phrasing on my part. The value of money hasn't changed as a result of the large amount of money students have because of loans, which is what the comment was citing as a reason. Obviously inflation exists, but I've never heard it linked in any significant way to student loans and it's not nearly as high as the increase in costs of textbooks that was being discussed.

I think you have it backwards. The supply of quality education hasn’t increased. Only the dollars chasing that supply have increased. Hence prices have gone up.

There is frequently a system where they sell an international version of the book for significantly lower cost. In order to prevent americans from simply purchasing the international version, it will often have substantial differences. So simply looking up the price of the same book may not show you what would typically be paid in another country.

The publishers originally had a great system, back before the internet was alive and kicking - they'd sell the textbook in the USA for $bigbux, and sell the exact same one in India for $cheapasfree - basic standard price segmentation, charge what the market can bear in each market.

But then the internet and cheap shipping appeared, and suddenly people in the USA realized they could get the same textbook by ordering it from someone in India, and pay $cheapasfree + $shipping.

And ever since the publishers have been trying to get back to the original promised land.

They could have lowered the price in the us enough to not make it worth getting a cheapo version which the quality is frequently worse. What many did instead was to lower the quality and sell at high prices, in many cases books have poor binding, poor print and editing and so on.

That would involve them making less money, which is a big, big no-no. The whole thing is incestously corrupt as all hell.

The situation gets worse when considering the near racketeering many publishers engage in. I had a couple of professors who assigned us their own $100 textbooks, which of course had a new edition every year and while they wouldn't rely on it much in class, they'd make sure to include at least one question in the exams about something only mentioned in the textbook (without stating that that would happen).

This kind of textbook "abuse" was pretty crazy in undergrad. In comparison, my graduate level professors all either used very old textbooks and didn't really care about the edition or outright used free textbooks.

Some of our professors would give us a "translation key" between new and old editions of textbooks, so we could work with used ones. For example, which exercises are assigned (in new editions they rearrange the exercises, for no apparent reason but to make the old editions obsolete...).

Not only that, but the last couple of times I actually ordered and paid for a book, it never actually arrived. I can get a refund, sure, but I really needed the books.

Use Library Genesis. It's also free and there is no download limit, and you have access to approximately the same books. https://libgen.is/

Yes, but it is hard to tell whether LG will stay up for long either. Their non-commercial nature makes it harder to hit them with heavy damages, arguably, but the underlying threat is the same, and there is no reason to think they are somehow protected from the same dynamic.

Download anything you need and then some. And spread your own writings widely and freely.

I need a clarification please: was Z-Library a commercial service?

To some extent, yes. The site limited downloads unless you were a paid user.

For more context see this recent HN-linked blog post:

http://annas-blog.org/blog-3x-new-books.html

Two questions: (1) there are torrent backups of LibGen, right?

(2) If (1) is true, then I can download a book with a magnet link, and they'd have to arrest hundreds or thousands of people all over the world to prevent it.

The UI for for finding and downloading a single file from a massive torrent is not very good in any torrent client I've used, but how hard of a problem is that really? Is there not tremendous value in solving it?

It's a big problem for extending the library. And torrenting is inherently less safe than downloading through a browser.

Why would torrenting be less safe?

because you may expose your ip to unintended peers. Not all people use VPNs.

If you are downloading from browser, you generally use server ip, so you don't expose your ip to peers. You only expose your ip to server.

LibGen is an invaluable resource, but is there reason to expect that Library Genesis will remain accessible for long if similar sites are under attack?

It's a decentralized system https://freeread.org/ipfs/

people were proactively mirroring it, someone also tried this for zlib here http://pilimi.org/zlib.html

The Z Library is still alive, as a TOR Hidden Service: http://zlibrary24tuxziyiyfr7zd46ytefdqbqd2axkmxm4o5374ptpc52...

How long that remains the case with at least two of its principals arrested may be somewhat uncertain.

Any present operator(s) and site(s) would have to remain outside the reach of US or other Western jurisdiction and extradition treaties.

They were arrested on the 3rd, not today. It's just that the indictment was unsealed today.

My point remains.

On Tor, the location of the the servers and the identities of the operators are protected. No way for the feds to find them even if both are well within their jurisdiction. Unless the operators make a big mistake, the site should stay up and even if it goes down, there are plenty of other pirates around the world with full copies of the data that could replace the site.

The systems still must exist somewhere in physical space, connected to a public IP network.

They require maintainers to continue operating.

Bills must be paid.

At some point, one or more of these individual SPOF requirements will fail, at which point the service will have failed.

There may be other degrading failures prior to this if the system is complex:

<https://how.complexsystems.fail/>

I'm ... disappointed that it seems necessary to point this out explicitly.

How is that in any way conflicting with what I wrote? Of course the servers need maintenance and all of that - Tor is what allows the people doing that maintenance and funding to stay outside the reach of law enforcement even if they are on US soil.

That presumes the adminstrators exist, given that the site's two principals have been arrested. I refer you again to my initial reply: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33647659>

Unless you're privy to other information.

> Any present operator(s) and site(s) would have to remain outside the reach of US or other Western jurisdiction and extradition treaties.

Maybe I misunderstood. I thought this was referring to the scenario where more administrators did exist and in such a scenario, they could live two blocks away from the FBI headquarters and it wouldn't make a difference.

There is also a ~28TB torrent with ~6M books within it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ymiwzs/zlibrar...

> You can argue that people can go to the library,

Where I grew up, my town library did not have any tech or programming books. Forget new jornal issues or cutting edge science books.

"Just go to the library" is such a first-world-and-megacity thing to say.

Even in the first world in a giant city it can be crap advice.

I wrote a paper in library school about how the Vancouver Public Library failed to offer anything of substance to intermediate language learners (with a focus on Mandarin materials because of the high Mandarin speaking population) - if you're a person learning Mandarin to communicate with immigrant populations there, you skip from basic travel phrasebooks to videos/movies in Mandarin for Chinese audiences.

Public libraries aren't great at serving the long tail or more advanced interests for various reasons. And academic institutions usually have rules preventing use of their materials by people not affiliated with the school.

As a fellow Canadian i can tell you another story about our broken library system.

It NEEDS to be consolidated.

I live in ($smalltown$) just outside Toronto. The border between my smalltown ands the other small towns that surround me are unclear at best.

Oddly enough, each smalltown has its own library system, its own staff and each for the most part has a terrible book collection.

I rarely go to the library for the town i actually live in because it is a forgotten wasteland. The library from the other town is just a few blocks away and they have done an excellent job keeping their library current and active.

In my town it would basically be you, the librarians and a few insects in the building, next town over is full on a regular basis. They also have programs and stay current, my town is dead and boring.

Why are we paying for libraries like this? All that duplicate staff and their associated pensions and benefits could and should have went to books, services for the public, etc.

I asked my town mayor once why the library building is so nice (granite flooring, floor to ceiling windows, it really is an attractive building inside and out) but yet the book collection is terrible.

The mayor at the time told me the library is a showpiece to attract new residents??? I guess they assume new residents don't actually step inside and discover the book collection is terrible?

Public libraries are a valuable asset, but need to be managed properly as well.

I'm actually not Canadian, I just did my MLIS there. ;)

It is odd that your small towns don't have some kind of consortium agreement. There are benefits and drawbacks to having separate versus consolidated systems. Consolidated systems would, as you note, be more efficient in terms of staff costs and probably allow for materials to travel more easily. On the other hand, a consolidated system can end up only really serving the richest or largest community, rendering the rest of the population as afterthoughts.

Like from an ROI perspective, it makes sense public libraries are terrible at serving the long tail/the part of the population who want to educate themselves to a high level. Patrons are more interested in popular fiction and children's books, so that's the most bang for the buck.

But ugh on the building rationale. Without knowing what the building was like before, I can't comment too much (e.g. if there was mold/water damage/etc.) but that does seem like an odd use of funds.

I wish libraries would go digital and rent out ebooks to people. They could pay authors based on reads.

They want to. The publishers won't sell to them/place ridiculous limitations on them. They're why a library has only so many 'copies' of a digital book to lend at once, why libraries won't have popular books as ebooks, etc.

You might find Archive.org’s Open Library project interesting then:

https://openlibrary.org/

> But ugh on the building rationale. Without knowing what the building was like before, I can't comment too much (e.g. if there was mold/water damage/etc.) but that does seem like an odd use of funds.

There was no library there before it was built.. Right next to city hall at a cost of millions of dollars.

Sure, cities need to build and grow but this was a terrible use of money and a decade later it is still an albatross..

+1 for your comment on children books, this is why we went and it was incredibly valuable to us.

Given most of us are technical, we all know libraries are not a good resource for current technology books and this is not my issue. My concern is a city with a very tiny Chinese population has a large collection of Chinese books.. something is wrong.

PS - my ex was Chinese and loved it because she could go there and the books she wanted were always available, there are so few people in this city who can read them..

Obviously whomever is responsible for buying books invested heavily in foreign language books for some reason?

Sounds like your town has a government/mayor that really wants to look good to their peers (other municipal/small town mayors and city council members) rather than serve their population. Those types of buildings get features in all their stupid trade magazines, etc. And then the gov officials use them to hobnob with each other.

My bet on the Chinese books is that it's one of the librarians' special interests. It's not uncommon to have some % of the buying budget set aside for staff recs (that allows for some inclusion of things people may not have known they'd like), and if the system is small enough for one person to be doing all the buying, she might have overspent on her interests.

The cynical answer would be that the librarian wants to have the books so she can write an article on foreign language collection development and angle for a job elsewhere: Very few small town librarians grew up in their small towns and it's a very gentrified profession. She might be angling for a position at the VPL or TPL systems.

I live over on Vancouver Island and we have a regional library that serves the entire island and the coast.

It is fantastic! Each individual library is kind of small near me, but collectively they have a massive collection. Occasionally you have to wait a few days for a book to come from some remote location, but it is pretty rare for them to just not have something.

Library systems really should be managed at a larger level, they are much more powerful when networked.

i sometimes go to my local library (in a big European city). The computer science section has a lot of "for Dummies" books or titles that are very specific to a certain language version or framework (java 6, Symfony 3). Most of those can go straight to the trash. The many timeless books that exist are far and few between.

It sucks, but search for used versions of those books. As long as you're willing to wait a week or two, you can often get used books internationally for <10 dollars.

Also ask your professors if they can share relevant parts of the books they use. Many countries outside the English-speaking world have partial copyright exemptions for education.

A last resort may be to ask professors whether they can apply for evaluation copies. Publishers often give free copies to educators so they can evaluate books for their curriculum. Sadly, it's mostly digital versions today.

Check out #bookz on Undernet.

Also bookfinder.com which works all over the world to find the cheapest used copy (including shipping) to your country.

Also #ebooks on irchighway.net

what about older versions of the books? usually if you go back a couple versions it's much much cheaper.

Old law books?

Mostly correct, often useful.

I think that makes the point?

Even if you ignore money sometimes a book just isn't available to purchase.

In China it’s not even a matter of money. People already need VPN for accessing the free internet. Books are invaluable against censorship.

It's 2022, if people wanted to make their knowledge freely available, they do. You can't claim that knowledge is not shared enough, today, in an age when you have more access to knowledge than people in the past.

You aren't paying for knowledge, you are paying to get knowledge in this form, a form that you apparently find useful. It took many people work to put that together, and those people chose to put their work into a framework that you feel you can just bypass and ignore the laws around.

I know this won't be a popular take on HN, but while I can understand and to a certain extent sympathize with pirating movies (the intentional friction and arbitrary geographic limitations on access imposed by the multinational movie-industry conglomerates), I can't see stealing some poor author's work in the same light.

Sure, people get hung-up about DRM (which can easily be removed by widely-accessible tools), but e-books can be purchased pretty much anywhere in the world. I'm in Sweden but buy most of my e-books from the US. But often buy books directly from publishers (hopefully they, and the author, get a better cut that way).

The fact these people were trying to personally profit (some other HN:ers have documented this), while trying to present themselves as some sort of "information wants to be free" info-warriors doesn't make the whole thing any better.

An enormous amount of work goes into producing a book - through a close friend who works in book-publishing I know a couple of authors who pretty much starve for a year or two to produce their work - and then the editing, typesetting, designing, proof-reading etc is all an enormous and personal investment.

In spite of what people think, authors are not all budding J.K.Rowlings with movie-deals and a couple of billion in the bank, and if we don't buy their books, they won't be able to produce the next one for people to pirate.

Imagine the person who cannot afford a book or paper on a particular topic. Should they not have access to the information?

I agree, as always there is nuance, but zlib et al fulfill a need for certain people. In b4 public libraries, they aren't equal around the world, depend on geographic proximity and add latency to the learning process.

> Imagine the person who cannot afford a book or paper on a particular topic. Should they not have access to the information?

Imagine I want whatever you do for a living? Should you work for me for free?

I would be on board with you if only we got access to the public founded papers.

That analogy doesn’t work when the marginal cost to do that work is literally zero, in fact he wouldn’t even know he’s performing the “work”

The error in this argument is assuming that the price of a good must equal its marginal cost. Software, for example, also has a marginal cost of zero -- it can be reproduced with the same technology as electronic text, and yet developing software is expensive, so the price of each copy is set above the marginal cost so that the developer gets paid. By denying the developer the right to set a price for their work, you are in effect forcing them to work for someone else for free. It does not matter what the marginal cost is.

Now there's a lot of open source software, and a lot of open access publications and free books out there, as well as systems in place -- we call them "libraries" -- by which taxpayers purchase works on behalf of the public and make them available in limited quantities for no charge. And here I need to reiterate the bane of badly construed interventions is trying to control prices rather than adjusting incomes. Stop messing with prices. The way we help the poor is with income support, not by creating a parallel price system for the poor.

You're not - they can just not do the work. You can argue that a business model is being destroyed; you can't argue that anyone is "forced to work for free" by piracy, because they're not forced to work in the first place.

I don’t think anyone should work for free, I don’t know what the right answer is. It’s a shame when someone doesn’t get paid for their work due to piracy, but also a shame if someone can’t access an important work to them that is free to deliver but they just can’t afford (like a student/researcher, etc). Ideally digital works should be free and donation supported, where people voluntarily contribute what they feel the work is worth, limited by what they can afford. But I won’t delude myself into thinking something like that would actually work.

The key question is, what proportion of zlibrary users would have purchased the books legitimately if piracy didn't exist, or would have been able to afford it? Anecdotally I suspect most pirates have little income for books but I can't find data on this.

I do research at an university and develop open-source software.

Everything I work on is free to download

“Imagine a completely different question! Check mate!”

GP asked a simple yes or no question: Do you think knowledge should be denied to people that can’t afford it?

Your answer is “yes.” I don’t see the added value of trying feeble linguistic jiu jitsu to justify your position that yes, society should deny knowledge to those who can’t afford it.

Artificial scarcity is still bad. Imagine a world where books are free for everybody, not just for people who live in prosperous areas with good libraries. Would you then advocate making books nonfree thereby placing books out of reach for 2/3rd of the world population, which is more or less where we are today?

> Imagine a world where books are free for everybody

I imagine it will go the same way of the other internet content that is free: adds, spam, clickbait, low quality, etc.

For fiction, I almost exclusively read online serialized fanfiction/webfiction. This is already the world I live in. And I can confirm: it's pretty great.

The price spike on comics and graphic novels after the comiXology acquisition by Amazon is over 150%...

Maybe I'm thinking wrong but I expected digital editions of books to be like $3 or something since there are no printing/shipping costs of the equivalent printed book.

In the old analog world, authors might expect 15% of gross sales. You figure the publisher needed the 85% to cover printing, shipping of the physical book. (Oh, and they should make a profit there too.)

But if you no longer have to deal with pulp, I would naively expect an electronic book to sell for something like 30% of the cost of the physical book — splitting the sale between author and publisher. Presumably both parties still make a comparable profit.

I know I've dropped advertising on the floor in the above discussion and perhaps that counts for a significant cost to the publisher. But at the same time, assuming DRM, a digital book sale should benefit the publisher/author as it is typically non-transferable (unlike the physical books that end up in Little Libraries or Goodwill).

I might add that if eBooks dropped to $0.99 a book, I would be buying them faster than music tracks. Maybe Jobs got two things right. ;-)

Download video games have the same issue. same price as physical release, cant resell it, never goes on sale, still the same price it started at 4 years later when a physical copy is 50% discounted. Already have a physical copy? no you cant download it.

Physical copy degrades over time and can be destroyed or lost. Download can't.

Downloads can cease to exist at a moments notice, with nothing you can do about it.

Right, and publishers can control that.

Games have been AU$110 on release for current gen Xbox, while the in-store releases can be grabbed for $80-90 typically. Digital on-sale prices tends to track the physical normal/used prices too.

Never going on sale might be more of a Nintendo thing though, which is even worse. On the other hand, their cartridges at least let you play the game in whatever form it shipped - usually.

Most of the cost of a book is not the physical pulp or ink that went into making the book, it is in the editing, typesetting, and marketing that went into making the book ready for sale, so ebooks generally should not be much cheaper than physical books.

Can you substantiate that?

Having read several self‐published Kindle Direct books that are incredibly deficient in the editing and typesetting departments (compared to earlier traditionally‐published works from the same authors), I find the fact rather obvious.

And the app apparently became worse. I wanted to buy some manga on comiXology, but when I downloaded the free trial chapter, it had a bunch of weird borders, which made it unenjoyable to read.

According to the reviews, the previous version of the app was much better, but the current version is just a reskin of the Kindle app.

They removed the DRM‐free download option too.

Many of the books I am interested in have actually been financed by tax payers, because their authors are professors. These days publishers are not adding much value here, actually they often make high quality publishing harder by terrible off-shore handling of LaTeX.

I've bought quite a few ebooks from the AMS (American Mathematical Society), just to get very angry about the annoying small print on the bottom of EVERY FREAKING PAGE stating that I am the owner of this book. I don't feel bad about replacing these damaged goods with the real deal.

Not only that, but many publishers, specifically scientific ones, seem to get in the way of the natural near-0 marginal cost of digital publishing. Information should be available to all by default, because the value of having it freely available is much more than even what people could be expected to individually all pay for it. In the end, having a million paywalls and restricting information for disadvantaged individuals is not rational (or ethical), or effective for a society.

A lot of the usage I see of these sites is in the academic world. Academic publishing is a nightmare (especially on the journal side).

The books are often not available at all in the region you’re in or if they are, they might be priced differently. It’s especially difficult because you’re going to skim a book to see if it has any relevant material, then move on to the next one. Usually university libraries are the only way of doing this, but not everyone has access to one. No individual is going to buy a dozen books nominally priced at >100 usd each just to write a paper for their masters degree or similar

>The books are often not available at all in the region you’re in or if they are, they might be priced differently.

Also, "the region you're in" can even mean the same country as the publisher, or even anywhere in the world. Publishers may be unwilling to sell the books to individuals at all, or may sell them only as part of larger sets with very high prices. They may only be willing to sell hardcover copies, for a premium, even if they do produce softcover ones. It's simply not feasible, in most cases, to purchase the books you need to do scholarly research as an individual. And if you're looking at digital publications, the situation becomes even worse.

I recently had someone tell me that their father, in the US, had been looking, not wanting to ask them, for a copy of a book they had just published a chapter in. The book could only be purchased by individuals as a set of six books, all in hardcover, for around $500.

Part of the problem here is that individuals are often not the target customers for academic publishing: libraries are. Publishers can be worried that if they do sell in ways that are convenient to individuals, that might reduce their profits from libraries. If they sell books individually, instead of as larger sets, then university libraries can order only the volumes that people request, rather than needing to purchase all of them. If they sell softcover copies, libraries can buy them and rebind them in-house, or simply have them as softcover, rather than needing to pay that premium. If they have prices that are reasonable for individuals choosing books to buy with their own money, the prices will need to be far lower than what they can be for libraries being instructed to buy books by others and needing to figure out how.

And, as you mention, the journal (and reference) side is even worse. Outside of very high profile journals, which are simply expensive for individual subscriptions, many otherwise quite reasonable journals from reputable publishers simply won't offer subscriptions to individuals at all: their only option for individuals may well be article-level purchases at prices that would be utterly absurd for actual research. In some cases, they also won't offer subscriptions to institutions, except as a (potentially very large) package of journals. At a small university, I can remember the library pointing out that getting access to one yearly proceedings publication very important for our field would cost a five figure yearly amount per year, because it was only sold as a package of hundreds of publications. Larger universities can have problems with this in the six or seven figures.

> but e-books can be purchased pretty much anywhere in the world. I'm in Sweden

Sorry, but by "pretty much anywhere in the world" you clearly mean "first world". If you live outside of US/Canada and EU it is much harder to obtain books legally. Publishing agreements usually cover specific countries, and no-one cares about, for example, selling books in English in Central Asia. So even if you have means to pay for the book (which can be challenging - and I'm not talking about "having money" here, I'm talking about "technical possiblity" - Visa and Mastercard are not as universal as they might seem from the first world), most of the time no-one can or wish to sell it to you legally.

Interesting that Steam solved most of that problems for game distribution though. They have worldwide publishing agreements, regional prices AND good support of local payment providers in many countries. I think a lot of people underestimate how these factors allowed Steam to overtake piracy.

> If you live outside of US/Canada and EU it is much harder to obtain books legally

I completely agree and even though I imagine countries outside of these have it much worse, even within the EU you can find massive differences between countries. For example, there is a much smaller selection in Eastern European countries vs. Western, and books are the same price or sometimes even pricier while wages are significantly lower.

> allowed Steam to overtake piracy

Let's not forget the pricing, as well. Older games are actually priced lower than most books and movies, which are still being artificially inflated by their respective distributors.

Let's also not forget Steam pricing policies for different regions. Until recently same games in Turkey were priced 5 times lower than in Switzerland.

To be fair, I’m guessing books have a longer tail than games. The vast majority of game sales for AAA games are at release.

>Interesting that Steam solved most of that problems for game distribution though. They have worldwide publishing agreements, regional prices AND good support of local payment providers in many countries. I think a lot of people underestimate how these factors allowed Steam to overtake piracy.

Sadly it is being ruined by people from first-world using VPNs. Many AAA stopped using regional prices and we're stuck paying the same cost as in the first world.

From the other side it feels just as unfair. When I lived of ~AU$200 a month, $100 towards rent, a new game was ~$100 in Aus. It was often much cheaper to buy physical copies from Asia and import.

It's human culture. The idea that it should be the sole provenance of rich multi-nationals to decide who can afford to read is disgusting. It should all be freely accessible.

Removing money from the equation would also solve other quality issues.

How would the authors pay rent?

A huge majority of book authors (especially for technical writing) are not professional authors, and barely get any money from book sales. Ask any university professor that has had a book published.

selling physical copies, in-person speaking events, selling the rights to their IP to filmakers to name a few. Freely accessible =/= profitless.

It's 'disgusting' to suggest others should have to labour for you for free - and suggesting 'removing money from the issue would solve' issues is more than naive, it's glib.

IP is not 'corporate protectionism'.

The entire system absolutely depends on it, moreover, the vast majority of IP holders are very small entities.

Particularly in this case, authors.

The internet is actually a greatly liberating opportunity for authors, especially those on the 'long tail' to develop an audience that they would never have an opportunity to otherwise.

And of course - anyone who wants to create for free, as many do, can do that.

But if there's no concept of IP, then it implies 'creative work goes unpaid' and paradoxically, flushes surpluses into those that have much more material power in the value chain - a bit like 'open source' devs who work tirelessly on projects whereupon the surpluses are mostly captured by large corporate institutions.

Of course there's always grey areas, and on some level 'release valves' for information is appropriate, but on the whole, IP protections are reasonable.

Vast amount of the works we are used to in our daily lives both professional and private, upon which we depend, would immediately vanish, lacking any kind of viable business model.

Finally - there's much ado in Africa on so many fronts, if you want to help to solve IP distribution issues there related to price discrimination, there's a lot of opportunity there.

Yes, indeed, government-mandated monopolies are really the best way to make sure the "creative works" of fundamentally indeterminable values get paid and the "free-market" is upheld /s.

This moronic notion that IP somehow encourages creativity is so delusional it's not even funny. Did Michelangelo and Shakespeare need copyrights to their works to make money? Have thinkers and authors who contributed most to human intellectual evolution across the Golden Ages and Renaissances of science, arts and philosophies ever needed state-enforced punishments against non-consensual copying? Good works are not funded using abusive laws to crack down on those trying to share them, they get sponsored by communities that value them.

There are countless examples of absolutely garbage works that end up making a lot of money and there are countless awesome works that are completely free to the public. IP does nothing to reward good productions, all it does is help publishers and governments abuse individual rights and control information. NOBODY HAS THE RIGHT TO HAVE A MONOPOLY ON IDEAS AND INFORMATION. You are free to keep your ideas and information private, but if you make them public they are NOT your private property anymore. IP laws are probably among the worst inventions the west has ever introduced to the world that has single-handedly held back unfathomable amounts of progress.

This is objectively and demonstratively wrong; the lurid ad hominem only adds to embarrassment.

If 'money was not involved' then Shakespeare, Michelangelo et. al. would not have made most of their works.

Moreover, you've used two examples of artists creating physical things for money, whereupon the very notion of 'IP' is not hugely relevant.

Obviously, people need an income to survive, and most great works require incredible investment of time, labour, materials etc..

The Sistine Chapel and The Statue of David - were both commissioned aka 'commercial works', and the works of those artists (along with Bach, Beethoven, and innumerable composers and artists since the dawn of time) are paid for by the Church, state officials, private organizations, or wealthy individuals. Only more recently from the public purse (Universities and most research institutions were socialized in the late 20th century).

If the Opera del Duomo / Florence Cathedral did not pay for Michelangelo - it would not exist. It was their idea in the first place.

Shakespeare was a populist playwright - if he did not entertain paying audiences at The Globe - most of his works would never have existed.

Even the Eiffel Tower - a magnificent centrepiece to the city of Paris, was almost entirely a commercial project.

Nobody is suggesting that 'creative works' ought to be inherently limited by IP, as I directly indicated in my point.

Nobody is suggesting that IP and other commercial aspects are primary drivers of creative impetus.

Nobody is suggesting that people would 'not do' at some creative work without being paid.

Nobody is suggesting that some kinds of information don't belong inherently in the public domain.

However - if people are not able to be compensated for their works, then only a tiny fraction of creative work will be done.

'Journalism' is a fairly important industry, and they've come under incredible duress due to the proliferation of information, there are many benefits from that, however, the lack of professional journalists is on the whole, a bad thing. Without some form of IP basis it would likely be impossible for them to exist.

The entire entertainment and sports industries would mostly cease to exist without IP, and even most non-fiction works would not be authored. Most productions, especially those involving more than one person are involved, such as film or TV, can only move froward knowing they will have a material income. If publishing were really some kind of toxic businesses grabbing all of the surpluses then a lot of people would be doing it. Clearly, that's not the case. The MBA's are flocking to the Wall Street and Valley, not to the Publishing Industry.

That a lot of content out there is 'not very good' is a bit besides the point, it's not your right to tell people how they want to be entertained.

If you want to see what a world would look like without IP rights, visit the National Film Board of Canada and contemplate that's pretty much all that would exist: the totality of entertainment. They do a few good bits, but most of it is frankly not very good (as evidenced by the complete lack of interest in this content). And that would be all of your Netflix/Disney/ESPN etc. put together.

There's always room to debate about IP rights obviously, but what's shocking is how ostensibly intelligent people can't grasp how foundational IP rights are.

> If 'money was not involved' then Shakespeare, Michelangelo et. al. would not have made most of their works.

Yes, but wasn’t their model one of patronage rather than “intellectual property”? William Shakespeare predated the Statute of Anne, Britain’s first copyright law, by one hundred years.

> IP is not 'corporate protectionism'.

That's all it is.

Funny how no books got written before IP existed.

So let's totally remove the heat-transfer agent from the thermodynamic machine of society and instead rely on an army of maxwell demons to decide how much food and floor space each human element in the system should be given for its work, right?

That was called 'communism', had been attempted to implement, resulted in millions of deaths and miserably failed regardless due to the physics of the process.

The heat transfer agent is not the problem per se, it's the ability of some entities to create it out of thin air and pump into the system, as well as shady mechanisms of its distribution.

Monkey see "communism", monkey downvote

This is the most American take I’ve seen on the debate yet.

> which can easily be removed by widely-accessible tools

Even if that were true today, it's a cat-and-mouse game and it may not always be true.

I don't know if FairPlay DRM that Apple uses or Adobe's DRM has been thoroughly cracked, but last time I checked, Amazon's KFX hasn't truly been cracked yet. The best I've seen are workarounds to get Amazon to deliver the book in an older format that has been cracked, but then you lose the typography improvements that are tied to the new format.

I bought a Kobo for its easy public library integration. Jokes on me. My public library doesn't have most of the books I want, and the way ebooks are leased to public libraries is a disgrace-- something I only found out after buying the Kobo. So, what's a guy to do? I buy the books wherever I can find them at the cheapest price (usually on the used market, sometimes via Kindle store, sometimes via Kobo store). Then, I pirate it, since that's a much more convenient way to get a DRM-free format that actually works on my device.

In my case, at least, I paid for every z-library book I ever downloaded--with one exception. Z-library also made it easy to browse books the way you would in a physical book store. Sometimes, you think, "Looks interesting." You open it up, read a few pages and realize, "Not for me." Z-library was a good way to do this.

Both of those are legitimate use cases. Probably not the most common use case, but it sure was handy, and now I've got to find a replacement.

Most of zlib's content was from libgen, zlib had a nicer ui though.

Your geographical white privilege is showing.

Getting access to books for instance in SEA or Africa is an entirely different story to one of the richest countries in the world with some of the highest standards of living (in your case Sweden but could apply to most EU/NA/AU/NZ).

I would say the vast majority pirating couldn't afford the work in the first place, meaning nothing is lost from the perspective of the author. It's not a sale stolen, it's someone that would otherwise simply go without.

> Your geographical white privilege is showing.

Although I fully agree with the points you make I just want to point out that being wealthy (from a world average wealth standpoint) is dissociated from being white.

The issue is limited access to resources due to lack of wealth, or geo-location with bizantine distribution contracts. Race has little to do with this discussion. Plenty of white poor people across the globe, plenty of non-white rich people across the globe.

> but e-books can be purchased pretty much anywhere in the world.

English and local books at least. Can I easily buy Swedish-language books in Germany? I really don't know.

I think we can have our cake and eat it too.

https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2022/09/24/paying-for-books/

This is the simplest solution, get a drm ebook, and pay the person who wrote it directly, they'll get way more money from you that way than if you bought the book

>>An enormous amount of work goes into producing a book

So your saying books should be protected because they take alot of work, but movies should not because they dont?

I am highly confused by your ethical position here. Either creative works should be protected by copyright or they should not.

It seems your personal connection to authors have clouded your judgement in favor of that medium over other creatives mediums, I wonder if you would feel the same if you had personal relationships with independent film maker, to toss your analogy back, not ever filmmaker has a J.K Rowling book to make a film about which comes with a built in audience

Now me personally I think copyright is WAY over protective, I think the US original copyright law was a good balance, 14 years, with 1 extension if the physical person that created the work requests it (i.e corporations get 14 years only, individuals can get up to 28 years of protection)

If I can access a book for free at a library.

Why can't I read it online for free?

Ultimately the answer will be about rights and really suggesting the author can put arbitrary restrictions in content that's been purchased.

Those restrictions exist for financial reasons not moral. As such this is not theft in any ethical sense but a quirk of the laws. A law apparently many people disagree with...

It's not free at the library, the book was purchased with your taxes.

It was purchased a single time, just like the original e-book that you pirate.

Every person in the world doesnt use a single library with a single copy. Every local library purchases one or more. How many did Zlib purchase? How many Zlibs are there?

That's a logical race to the bottom that makes me think you have never checked out a book from a US library. If you were to calculate how much an author makes from their book being in libraries it's miniscule. For starters most library books are donated secondhand and not purchased new by libraries. Secondly, most libraries only have a single copy of a given book unless it is a major title (It's not uncommon for waitlists to be booked up for months where I live). Additionally, most titles are shared across multiple libraries in a state or city. Where I live you can return a book to any library because they just circulate copies around the state. Regardless, there are roughly 9,000 public libraries in the U.S. let's pretend that every single library purchases 1 copy of a given book new (an extremely generous estimate). Most authors are not self-published and earn 10-12% royalties, but let's pretend this author is self-published and earns around 40% from their printer before operational expenses. Let's also pretend it's an absolute banger of a book and is selling for a whopping $20/copy. That means they make $8/copy before taxes, bookstore fees, shipping, and other expenses that the self-publisher does not pay for. Let's be generous and say they somehow make $8/copy after all of that. If every library bought 1 copy (which, again. They do NOT) the author would earn $72,000. That's absolute peanuts compared to what they earn on Amazon from people who can afford firsthand books. The point of libraries and piracy is not to stop people who CAN afford books from buying them. It's supposed to enable those who CANNOT. A more productive approach would be to publicly fund authors but according to Americans that's filthy communism.

>A more productive approach would be to publicly fund authors but according to Americans that's filthy communism.

That's how you get books written by authors who are good at filling out government forms, not books written by good authors. See the many terrible pieces of public art that is required in many places as part of public construction projects as an example of what I'm talking about.

Couldn't you give people emailed tokens to give in token to authors?

One nit to pick. In my experience (NYC and Boston areas), libraries almost only buy their books new and specifically request for people to not donate their used books to them.

Other libraries I've been in have used book sales with donated books to raise funds for the library.

I think you need to specify what context you're talking in.

Do you see it as... 1. Criminal 2. Immoral 3. Having downsides

I think we agree it's not criminal (as scale doesn't apply to a binary criminality judgement stealing a penny is as criminal as stealing a pound though punishment will vary).

Are you suggesting it's immoral? Because I can't see where you make such an argument.

Or are you saying well it has downsides as authors may earn less? It's likely book purchases are affected by libraries. I don't think the effect is as profound as people think.

Without that context it's quite hard to discuss this topic.

Scale is a thing though, right?

The library book might get borrowed dozens or hundreds of times. The pirated ebook is copied anywhere from dozens to millions of times.

It goes back to opportunity though. Most people who pirate books don't have the income or ability to purchase them new. The scale is irrelevant if the per-user profit opportunity is 0. The only thing that changes is more people read and further their education.

* copy

What people fail to realize is that ebooks sometimes cost libraries more money than physical books. The libraries buy them with cost of degradation in mind, so after x number of lends, they have to repurchase the book in order to keep making it available to their patrons. This is how they're able to make an agreement with the publisher in order to legally provide you with a digital lending library.

IMO (having worked at a public library) the vast majority of inventory is donated second-hand books.

Careful there, you might burst the libertarian-leaning conceit behind the "difference" between libraries & unregulated e-books: if libraries didn't already exist today with centuries of tradition in their foundations, the very suggestion of an institution like them would be met with howls of the inevitable destruction of the written word and bankrupting of our already starved wordsmiths.

But for ebooks there is no such thing as second hand.

If I give a friend a copy of a DRM‐free copyrighted ebook, delete all of my own copies, and he pays me, isn’t that equivalent?

It may be impractical to verify that all my copies are gone, but is there any reason it wouldn’t hold up under first sale doctrine?

Any 17 U.S.C. § 109(d) experts in the house?

I'm pretty sure that the law does not permit you to re-sell digital copies. As when you purchase a digital book (DRM or not), you don't own the digital copy - you're only granted a license to use it for your own use. This license does not extend to reselling it (what your suggestion would be doing).

Physical books fall under a 'property purchase' model while ebooks fall under the 'license based' model. A good (albeit basic) read: https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/this-is-the-big-rea...

In some cases, every time someone checks out an e-book, the publisher and author are paid again.

Careful. They'll come for the libraries next.

It's already happening:

<https://www.npr.org/2022/11/09/1135639385/libraries-publishe...>

Although I agree with you, tell me now how can I find "The book of Gossage" which is a singular classic book nowadays out of catalogue.

Agree, forget copyright, there needs to be an "abandonware" clause similar to the (unauthorized, I know) way software is treated.

Plenty of books I have only been able to find on eBay and at sometimes insane prices.

Not only that, I looked into republishing some books from the 80s, it is impossible to know who currently could possibly have legitimate rights to do so!

For any work out of print, one should be able to republish it and pay a nominal fee directly to the library of congress.

try buying Italian books in USA.

Hell, it's hard to find them even in France!

I'm french. I occasionally buy ebooks, but the price of eBooks is maintained artificially higher to protect traditional (paper) channels. The things is, that extra money does _not_ go to the authors, which I would finance way more wholeheartedly. Basically you get taxed because of your medium preferences, and the money is pocketed by the worse actor of the whole business.

It's very simple actually. You (and most of HN) live in a tech industry bubble. Living wages in the U.S are terrible and disposable income is non-existent. I work a 9-5 just like everyone else but when it comes down to it I don't have the money to buy new books. I can either buy used paperback from a second-hand store, go to the library, or pirate an epub. None of these options pay the original author and are effectively the same. Given that I was never going to pay anyways, why do you find the third option unethical? It hurts absolutely no one but greatly enhances my quality of life and (in some cases) helps society by making me a more educated individual. The only thing piracy costs authors is opportunity (which in my case was always 0).

BetterWorldBooks.com is excellent. I have bought from them for years. I recommend you try it.

Also, you wrote: <<None of these options pay the original author>> Libraries buy millions of books per year in the US -- expensive hardbacks. They must be the single largest buying group. That money pays authors. Also, I never once saw an author upset that a library was lending their book. The same is true for second hand book selling.

Here's an example I found in less than a minute of an author railing against used book sales: https://authorkristenlamb.com/2015/12/pay-the-writer-pirates...

If you're pirating Stephen King or a 300$ textbook from a guy who has tenure at Harvard I doubt anyone probably including the author cares but a fair amount of authors aren't making any more than you make.

Friend of mine published her own graphic novel basically living in her parents attic and a day after it was out someone had ripped it and thrown it on a comic piracy site. That's not ethical.

If you live on a 12-15/hour salary which I have too you still can afford the occassional book here and there, you can't tell me you spend zero on recreational stuff. I don't care if anyone fleeces Marvel studios but if people start pirating independent works from people no better off, often worse, that's iffy.

I appreciate your sentiment, and trust me I really do want to support people like your friend, but no I literally do not have any money for recreational activities (and if I did I would buy a videogame or boardgame because it would last longer). I make $13.50 / h (which is above minimum wage here in Arizona) and go to school full-time. Rent is $1,000 (absolute cheapest I have found in my college town), groceries are roughly $500, gas is $50-$100 depending on world affairs, utilities are $250,public transportation (so that I don't have to pay for parking at shool) is $50, and the list goes on tbh. I'm lucky enough to have a Prius that was given to me by my family so no car payment even. I'm one of the lucky ones for being in college at all. This is the America that most people live in. Well even that isn't true, I have it way better than most.

Checking out from a library and grabbing a pirated version are different in that checking out from a library generates demand. The library may respond by buying additional copies of a given work, and you can put in requests to your local library to buy work if they don't currently stock it. Even if a library refuses to buy the work, it's common for libraries to loan works to each other-- so a library from another city or further out may buy the book and let you borrow it for example. It all generates demand for libraries to buy more.

If you can't afford to purchase it, and you can't acquire it by alternative legal means, then (ethically) you just don't get to enjoy it.

Sorry.

There are lots of things I want that I can't afford, either.

There are no objective ethics. It's an open problem.

There's a whole lot of words to be said about that, but it's hardly worth discussion because ultimately the result would be wasted breath.

Anyway, the sphere of economics is the least ethical domain of humanity there is. My dollar is not equal to your dollar, and our dollars aren't equal to Musk or Bezos. We pretend that is the case. There never were and never will be equivocality in exchange unless it's one idea for another.

> If you can't afford to purchase it, and you can't acquire it by alternative legal means, then (ethically) you just don't get to enjoy it.

That is absurd.

What privilege you must enjoy to have such fucking stupid "ethics" lmao. You wouldn't last a day in my shoes. Money only gets you so far in life, kindness and mutual aid goes a lot further.

Large-scale pirates that can actually reach a significant amount of people almost never rip-off indie creators, and even if they do, they are the least likely to impact sales - people are unlikely bother acquiring illegitimate copies of obscure indie works as against big-brand stuff whose names they have actually heard of.

I really doubt the sales of the graphic novel that friend of yours were impacted in any non-negligible way by it being ended up on a piracy site. If anything, it might as well have worked as an advertisement.

Time and again it has been shown that pirating doesn't hurt sales because it is rarely if ever done by people who would've paid for the stuff anyway.

Moreover, making stuff easily accessible (e.g. Steam, Nerflix) reduces piracy by orders of magnitude.

> pirating doesn't hurt sales because it is rarely if ever done by people who would've paid for the stuff anyway.

> making stuff easily accessible (e.g. Steam, Nerflix) reduces piracy by orders of magnitude.

So it's rarely done by people who would've paid for the stuff but it's mostly done by people who would have paid (just not as much)?

Schrödinger's pirates: none of them would pay - but all of them would.

> So it's rarely done by people who would've paid for the stuff but it's mostly done by people who would have paid (just not as much)?

No. People who would pay actually pay for stuff, and very few of those people pirate.

People who pirate would not pay for that stuff anyway.

The "omg pirating makes it impossible for people to sell their works" has been proven to he false many times over.

> People who pirate would not pay for that stuff anyway.

How can then Steam, Nerflix, etc. reduce piracy by orders of magnitude? That means that at least 99% of the people getting stuff without paying would instead... pay?

No. People who wouldn't pay otherwise now have easy and relatively cheap access which reduces the friction so much, it doesn't make sense to scour the web for keygens and cracks and what not.

Now, with a gazillion streaming services we'll see piracy ruse again because of friction and cost.

Or, simply, these services brought in the otherwise non-paying crowd.

We already had this discussed and explained many times over. Why are we at it again?

There was a study commissioned by the EU in 2013 that additionally confirmed this and previous studies. But it was withheld https://consent.yahoo.com/v2/collectConsent?sessionId=3_cc-s...

Quote: "In 2013, the European Commission ordered a €360,000 ($430,000) study on how piracy affects sales of music, books, movies and games in the EU. However, it never ended up showing it to the public except for one cherry-picked section. That's possibly because the study concluded that there was no evidence that piracy affects copyrighted sales, and in the case of video games, might actually help them."

Overall the question is complex, and this is a good study: https://www.ivir.nl/publicaties/download/Global-Online-Pirac... which shows that it's not clear-cut, depends on income and availability etc. And that piracy may have both negative impacts (4% fewer visits to cinema) and positive impacts (increased visits to life concerts etc.)

However, quote, "an increase in illegal consumption over time is found to correlate with an increase in legal consumption and vice versa". The reason is: most decisions are done on the spot, and consumers chose the path of least resistance.

I'm going to pretend you are serious and genuine so:

- living wages in the US are something most of the rest of world only dreams about. And most can afford to buy a book once in a while, even new (of course it depends on the book). Source: eastern Europe.

- second hand and library books have generated revenue for the author already. Going full piracy and decreasing demand for the those two hurts the author, hurts the second book stores and hurts the libraries.

I pirate books as well but at least I'm honest about the consequences of my actions.

I am absolutely genuine, and I think you do not understand the average American. The rest of the world may dream about our wages but it's still putting lipstick on a pig. Most the people I know can't even feed their families right now, let alone buy a book for pleasure. I'm not sure where you are getting your information from but the lives of college-educated middle-class Americans and above are not representative of the majority. I will clarify, I obviously DO NOT think that my situation compares to someone in another country, specifically under-developed ones. In the context of books and recreational activities, however, I think you are vastly overestimating the US.

I agree with you, even if it is unethical to pirate books I'd make the case that pirating books you can't afford to buy is what helped a non-trivial amount of people escape the generational cycle of poverty. In this particular case, stealing knowledge for a chance at a better career, the end might justify the means.

Programmers from poor countries and poor backgrounds are were they are today making a good living from this career probably because of torrents with collections of programming books back from 10 years ago or more when free video learning on YouTube wasn't as developed as it is today.

I made some sweeping generalizations but I hope I got my point across at least. This criminal avenue of pirating books and stealing potential revenue from authors is what allows some people to enjoy a better living.

Just a minor clarification, nobody is stealing. Rather they are infringing on the author’s copyright.

The distinction is important. Stealing is taking something from someone else. Infringing copyright is a legal construct.

Median household income in the US in 2022 is $78,000. The average American has adequate income and can't justify pirating movies, books, music, porn, etc. on the basis of poverty.

That is a wildly skewed outlook. The per-capita income in America is $35,000 (https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/SEX255221). Household income, as defined by the U.S. Census Bureau, includes the gross cash income of all people ages 15 years or older occupying the same housing unit, regardless of how they are related, if at all. Meaning my household income is somewhere above $100K because I have 3 roommates. Typically, the lower your income the more roommates you have. Median household income is a useless figure for determining how well the average American is doing.

> The US has the largest gap between its top earners and everyone else. The Netherlands actually surpasses the US for GDP per-capita of the bottom 99%, and the difference between Germany and the US narrows considerably.

https://blogs.worldbank.org/psd/removing-oligarchs-from-per-...

I wonder what would happen if you removed the top 10%, other than that 99% of the people posting on HN wouldn't be counted.

A. The economy is not zero sum. Lebron James making lots of money doesn't take anything away from you.

B. Median: the value separating the higher half from the lower half of a data sample, a population, or a probability distribution. It's not an average, there are no outliers dragging the median up. It's just an ordered listing and then looking at the one in the middle and seeing how much they make per year. If you removed all the billionaires and their income from the chart it wouldn't change the median income at all because the position of the median would only move 350 places. If you took away the top ten percent the median position would shift to the left 5% and the median annual income decreases a few thousand dollars per year. But in no way is the typical American living in poverty and desperation. (Turns out that only 11% of the US live in poverty.)

How do you define poverty? The federal poverty line is a figure that where most people live would afford you a fine living commuting between your 2 jobs and your tent living as a hobo and the public library where you give yourself a sponge bath.

This context free numbers isn't illustrative or even useful. The world isn't populated by median Americans earning median salaries in a median cost of living area. Imagine 5 households in areas where the poverty line for their household size are 30k 50k and 70k 70k 70k

We have could have learned from the sample that the majority live in areas where wages are higher but so are costs of living and the median value is 70k which seems like a lot of money until we figure out that rent alone costs most of this money and all parties are on food stamps. This also ignores just how far below that median value many of the bottom half actually are. The bottom half lest we forget is 169 million Americans many just getting by as their entire segment of the population shares about 10% of the total income and virtually none of its wealth. None of these facts about the actual distribution of wealth and income is captured by looking at a median income and making up a fiction about what an imaginary American can afford.

>None of these facts about the actual distribution of wealth and income is captured by looking at a median income and making up a fiction about what an imaginary American can afford.

Funny you would end by writing of making up a fiction about what an imaginary American can afford when both this comment and your other one are imaginary realities. You say rent takes up most of some $70k, it doesn't. You say "all parties" at that income level are on food stamps, they're not, the percentage of Americans using food stamps varies by year but is 13-15%. You say 169 million Americans are below the median income, no, because we're talking about household income. And, you know, why would you put the 72 million children into this as they generally have $0 income and their expenses are paid by their parents. As well, I'm quite aware of what the distribution of income as I've looked it up in the past. The Congressional Budget Office does a regular report on the distribution of household income and taxes. In the last such report, 2018, the average pretax household income for the bottom quintile before taxes is $22k, after taxes and means tested transfers their income is $38k (yes, they do have a negative net tax rate.) Which is sufficient to live in most big cities in the US.

These [0] people did an analysis of the cost of living in the largest 74 cities in the US. The most expensive among these cities was Irvine, CA with a monthly cost of living of $3062 and a median individual income of $55k. Americans don't have to fight rats for scraps of food from the trash.

0. https://www.move.org/lowest-cost-of-living-by-us-city/

Seems I didn't make myself clear the point is that looking at the median income tells you nothing about the actual distribution of disposable income because someone barely making it in a high income zone could trivially have what seems like a high income and have little disposable income. This is especially true with rent and cost of living both rising faster than most people's incomes. The bottom half has little disposable income everywhere except for your projections.

Before I get to some numbers nobody will read the fact is I doubt very much that most readers here have anything but a passing understanding of what its like to actually be at the bottom.

Lets zoom on down to irving and imagine we are dealing with a parent or 2 and 1 kid and need a 2 bedroom apartment. Going on a brief peruse of apartments.com I'm seeing a 2 br apartment starts at about 2600 USDA thrifty food plan would suggest about 780 per month for 3 people depending on age and sex.

If we can't actually deal with both people working while using just public transit we will have to probably burn 800 a month for car payment, insurance, upkeep and gas.

Electricity/water another 300-350

Phones another 60 minimum, internet 80

Now lets talk about health insurance we are probably going to pay about $500 and easily more like 750 for something that isn't a complete joke.

Now lets talk about savings because if we don't have any the first time the car needs to be repaired we're all going to lose our jobs and end up homeless plus at some point we will have to retire so allocate $500 for that.

We are at about 6000 a month while still only sketching out the outline of a life. I'm assuming our fictional family would also like to wear cloths, by toilet paper, wash their clothes, have some form of entertainment and enlightenment, maybe even engage in the normal family activity of having a pet animal of some sort bigger than a hamster.

We would probably be able to live a reasonable life for more like 7000 a month or 84,000. This means Joe median+ is probably OK but again ONE HALF OF PEOPLE ARE BELOW THE MEDIAN BY DEFINITION AND THEY ARE NOT EVENLY DISTRIBUTED IN TOTAL OR DISPOSABLE INCOME. Most of the poor folks are seeing their already insufficient wages and the cost of health insurance and rent going up and wondering if they can afford to pay rent and health care in 5 years while you insist they have plenty of money to spare. You don't live in the same universe. Going to move.org gives you an incredibly shitty approximation of what it actually costs to live your life. You know less by far than you think you do.

Renting from a library does in fact pay the author, at least in the UK

Unfortunately, here in AR-15 land that's considered dirty communism.

Not sure the authors are getting much money, compared to the publishers. Perhaps it depends on the nice - I heard sci-fi is rather low margin, whereas academic publishing tends to be rent-seeking.

Still, with the world wide web, it's possible to cut out the middleman, get the book and directly support the author is he puts a Stripe button on his site. Not sure why we need the publishing company middleman anymore.

> if we don't buy their books, they won't be able to produce the next one for people to pirate.

This is a false dichotomy. Book piracy and traditional book publishing co-exist. If book publishing wants to better compete with piracy, they can innovate like other industries have. As well, your implied prediction —- that if we don’t “stop all the downloading” [0] then books will disappear —- is decidedly ahistorical. Books have existed since long before publishing houses existed, and indeed it’s easier than ever to publish a book and get money for it.

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1eA3XCvrK90

Put another way, there's no difference in profit between:

10,000 book sales and zero pirated copies.

10,000 book sales and 10 million pirated copies.

The only thing left to argue about is what percentage of those pirated copies would have turned into book sales if the free versions had not been available.

> I can't see stealing some poor author's work in the same light.

I sympathize with this sentiment. I have writers in my family.

Anyone who wants to be making money in writing is either (1) doing something else, like being a celebrity, and selling a book directly to their pre-existing audience (2) writing for TV, movies or went to law school. So few authors make money on their books, that the existence (or non-existence) of piracy has no impact on the aggregate experience of authors.

> if we don't buy their books

The truth is there is no audience for the vast majority of paid-up-front books, games, movies, music or other creative media. There is a large audience for TikToks. Part of the journey is coming to terms with this. The reality is people are writing because they like to, and the money doesn't matter, and the piracy doesn't matter, and they are not on Hacker News complaining about it anyway.

That said, I believe these sentiments, expressed elsewhere, about being American and being poor or whatever. The commenters have limited empathy and bandwidth.

I'm an author. Steal my book. The whole point of writing is to hopefully help anyone learn something that you've shared. Authors aren't writing for the money those who do are selling at such volumes that they'll never even notice the dip. In most cases they'd be trying to get blood from stone.

Steal it every time.

10 USD is the average cost for an e-book from my anecdotal experience, some even 20. 200 USD our average salary range approximately.

It's not easy for us, you can say "well if you can't afford them then tough luck" which I could understand but that'd be your point for most of the third world. There's a reason Steam videogames regional prices exist for example (which people with VPNs ruined it exploting the system)

> e-books can be purchased pretty much anywhere in the world

That would be true if and only if there's an ebook version for the book you want.

There are lots of books (even essential works for some fields) out there for which there are no legal ebooks. Your only hope would be to get a digitized PDF from zlibrary or libgen. Even if you had the cash to spare for purchasing it, you can't.

One interesting case is what happened with books such as James Livingston's "Modern Christian Thought" (Fortress Press). I need it as an ebook. Well, they have (and I have purchased) volume I as an ebook, but they have Volume II only as paperback.

I reached out to the publisher to inquire whether they are going to release Volume II as an ebook. Someone there answered, telling me that they "forgot" to release Volume II in electronic format, and that they plan to release it "soon". I'm still waiting...

They're burning a thousand libraries and you're complaining about hypothetical lost profits?

It takes but a few moments thought to realise that there are many alternative remuneration models available for authors and creators.

See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33647625>

I’m a poor author that nobody pays a lot for my books anyway. Copyright should be protected, but current piracy laws and enforcements are disgusting.

> I can't see stealing some poor author's work in the same light.

Thankfully, the topic is book "piracy", which is something completely different from the above description, so you're right in some sense.

Media publishers (and I use the term in the broadest sense) knew, going in, that the Internet was designed to distribute and copy information, in many cases completely anonymously. But they embraced the platform and chose that business model because they knew that it would lower their costs dramatically, even once piracy was taken into account, and they've been largely successful.

Also in my experience CEOs really know their businesses, which makes me think they also understand the economics and dynamics of piracy to a greater extent than the rest of us, even pirates. From what observe, I think that they see pirates largely as hobbyists and influencers rather than lost customers or individuals out for economic gain, and are really only concerned with piracy at scale, like in this Z library case.

I guess in 2022 "don't ever travel to countries that have extradition agreements with US" should've already been #0 opsec rule, above everything else.

Sad for them. Does anyone know if Z-library provided torrent dumps?

Apparently yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32972923

As Russian nationals, their choices are rather limited at this time.

It's intersection of these two sets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_extradit...

https://visaguide.world/visa-free-countries/russian-passport...

No? The countries that don't have extradition agreements with the US overlap a lot with countries that have friendly relations with Russia.

China, Cuba, and Russia would be the ideal choices if you're on the run from US authorities.

> China, Cuba, and Russia would be the ideal choices if you're on the run from US authorities.

(this is specific to Z-library)

Russia is out. Some books on the platform directly contradicts government ideals, and it seems that the operators aren't willing to filter it out.

China might be a safe case, but recently they have cared for IP (at least for literary things, industrial processes are another matter) because they have multiple industries that China saw as beneficial (both audiovisual and literacy, including comics) so they could evade US authorities but might get sentenced by Chinese authorities anyway.

I don't know enough about Cuba to comment.

> Russia is out. Some books on the platform directly contradicts government ideals, and it seems that the operators aren't willing to filter it out.

Any source on this specific claim (ie. not Russian censorship writ large)? I get that Russia is unpopular right now, but is this just conjecture?

Good question. It's not really about the war, it's more its negative perception of LGBT+ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_gay_propaganda_law). This is not speculative, it is currently applicable to children, and as of this comment the Duma is working to expand this to even adults.

Also, generally information critical to the government, information on suicide, information on banned substances (this is the official reason why the Russian Wikipedia is banned), and information on making bombs and adjacent terror-related devices is also controlled, but I believe Z-library (and LibGen) don't host much of it.

Has anything changed over the last six months or so regarding piracy, though?

The last thing I had paid attention to was the Russian government lifting the blocks on RuTracker, the most popular Russian-language torrent site, in reaction to the sanctions—to which RuTracker responded back by blocking Russia on their end [1].

But yeah, in that sense, it would seem that keeping people happy, having access to entertainment, scientific material, etc., and retaliation is more important than the ridiculous anti-LGBT laws right now. Maybe I'm wrong here, but I would think Russia does not pose a massive threat to Z-Lib and LibGen right now.

---

[1]: https://torrentfreak.com/rutracker-found-itself-unblocked-in...

> but I believe Z-library (and LibGen) don't host much of it.

Don't believe that is true for libgen, plenty of content critical of Russia, Putin, and also content that will teach you to make bombs on there.

Argentina on the first glance would look “safe” to me, as South American nations seem in general not very pro-US. Live and learn, I guess. TIL that all South American countries have these extradition agreements.

I feel bad for the arrested; even if their values were not pristine. Punishments for these kind of “offences” seem extremely harsh to me, being grown in a copyright-unaware climate.

Where is "not very pro-america"?!

Maybe not the actual government, but from saving in dollars to travelling we are very pro-american.

If we divide the world in pro-america, pro-europe, pro-rusia, pro-china, for us is Europe and America, and very far away the other options.

So, bad luck for this guy. Bro, Che Guevara died decades ago...

Yeah, I was describing a perspective of a russia-born person who never actually travelled to the western hemisphere and whose knowledge of South American countries are formed by ambient osmosis, not active research. I know that no South American country supports the recent russian invasion (and thank god for that), but I was under the (apparently wrong) impression that there were non-trivial factions opposing the US. Ambient propaganda got to me, I guess. Sorry.

I doubt Venezuela would have extradited them but mostly all the countries in the Americas are on friendly terms.

Of course there’s your standard disagreements between neighbors but, as far as I know, there’s no outright hostilities going on. Well, outside of some rebels and narco groups. Not like the 80s where the Soviets were stirring up trouble at least.

Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Honduras?, el salvador.., I don't know if those countries have extradition agreements with usa.

> Where is "not very pro-america"?!

Brazil left despises the US after the coup. Bolivian right wants more US help to do another

Venezuela gov despises the US

Chilean left looks down on the US

Argentinian left is not US friendly, at most could be seen as transactional with the US. They really need help from world bank and imf

Bolivian left abhors the US, Bolivian right wants US support for a new coup

Paraguay is just doing its drug smuggling like they always do

Uruguay is in the process of signing a free trade agreement with China while US southern command is trying to avoid it from happening

Peruvian left is not friendly to US, Peruvian right has been working with US assistance against Peruvian left for a while to try and kneecap it

Ecuador is famously very anti-US and wouldn't deport Assange until he became excessibly annoying to deal with in the embassy

Colombia is a US puppet oligarchy. New gov is interesting, but it is still an oligarchy

Panama is a defacto neo-colony of the US

Puerto Rico is a literal colony of the US

Centro América with exception of México is a mishmash of neo-colonies literally using USD as their base currencies or detest the US in some form

So yeah...

I would not trust anywhere in Latin or South America outside of Venezuela or Cuba.

remind me, what happens to young men in Russia these days?

Given the political climate, they could easily ban Russian books from their platform and live happily in Moscow. Surely I'd prefer that over US custody.

> live happily in Moscow

Not an option for a majority of people who would host an online library, sadly. You can’t live happily in Moscow at the moment if you are capable of intellectual labour.

My suggestion to Russian nationals who are engaged in crime: stay in Russia.

Another person made a good point I'll extend on: you'd stay in Russia until you end up dying in Ukraine, viewed by people watching drone footage online

Extradition agreements are irrelevant when extraordinary rendition is a legal and valid option.

Ummm, aren’t those extrajudicial? Or have I watched too many movies?

> Iorizzo did travel to Panama City, on his private jet. But his stay was cut short when two unidentified locals kidnapped him at gunpoint and put him on a plane to Miami. He arrived into the welcoming arms of F.B.I. agent Dan Lyons

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/1991/02/john-gotti-joe-colum...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB834595561730973500

Yes but at the end of the day there is nothing you can do about because there is no constitutional right to be a fugitive and the country you were kidnapped from either doesn’t care or isn’t competent enough to do anything about it.

They're not going to extraordinary rendition over a piracy claim.

"Does anyone know if Z-library provided torrent dumps? "

They didn't, but pilimi.org does (have to access via Tor to get the torrents). That said, there have been 0 seeders since the original ZLib bust. https://twitter.com/AnnaArchivist/status/1592654308516179970 (pilimi author) says there should be an http mirror now, and I'm probably stupid but I can't find it anywhere. Seems to me it's the end of Z-Library. The end of an era, really.

Here it is: https://annas-archive.org/

I sincerely hope Anna stays safe though. They can (and will) come for her and her team too.

https://ia801505.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/17...

I don't want to say in the meantime, but, in the meantime, the pedophile ring that Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell served have not even been cited, ever.

True but that includes powerful men in the political sphere such as Biden and Trump. No way the Justice Department is going to touch this, when it implicates their bosses and potential bosses.

And that right there is why I support the “no justice, no peace” movement. Long live the revolution.

How is Biden tied to Epstein? I must have missed that one.

Bill Clinton had ties, I don't know of any with Biden.

And how many people went to prison over the crash of 2008?

A small family bank was the only one prosecuted after the 2008 crisis. ‘Abacus’ tells its tale.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/a-small-china...

They were employed by intelligence agencies, such as CIA, Mossad, and probably FBI too.

It's not a coincidence that the daughter of James Comey-- former Director of FBI-- Maurene Comey was "a lead prosecutor in Ghislaine Maxwell's child sex trafficking case" [1]

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/maurene-comey-james-comey-da...

Feds Seize One of the Largest Sites for Pirated Books and Articles, Z-Library - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33570539 - Nov 2022 (6 comments)

Z-Library Aftermath Reveals the Feds Seized Dozens of Domain Names - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33530240 - Nov 2022 (73 comments)

ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33460970 - Nov 2022 (517 comments)

Z Library - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29365627 - Nov 2021 (36 comments)

Zshelf: Z-Library books downloader for reMarkable tablet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26355778 - March 2021 (51 comments)

Cheap bet: We won't hear many authors rejoice over this. As an example, Stephen King's pinned tweet is concerned with a very different kind of theft ( https://nitter.it/StephenKing ).

In academia, this is slightly narrowing our choices (not much because Z-Lib has never been the main source). As for the books we can't read... well, we won't then. At this point, it's the books competing over our attention, not us scrambling to find them. Another cheap bet: The balances of academic publishers at least will not improve from this.

Am I misunderstanding something, or is this tweet circling the completely wrong part? Revenue vs payment is completely meaningless, because it is low due to advance payments.

The 'important' part is revenue after profits vs royalties, or profit sharing, which seems to be around 8.3%.

Imagine working really hard to put content out and you have to agree to a deal of 8% you, 92% the one just distributing it for you. It’s like when artists were complaining that Spotify wasn’t paying them enough when in reality is their label sucking most of the earnings.

Just to prevent misunderstanding: I have no opinion on 8.3% profit sharing agreements being okay or not. I just noted that I think the tweet is putting the focus on the wrong part.

I have no opinion, because I have way too little info. The only info I am fairly certain about is authors are not forced into traditional publishing.

A reminder that Z-library is still available through Tor: http://zlibrary24tuxziyiyfr7zd46ytefdqbqd2axkmxm4o5374ptpc52... I doubt it took just two people to handle the entire project.

There's also library genesis https://libgen.rs

Sad day. I always talked about Z-library with reverence. Z-library was the only way I could access textbooks I was interested in when I was growing up in a developing country. I owe it to Z-library for becoming the software developer I am today.

IIRC Z-library is a LibGen mirror that is faster than other mirrors but is also much more monetized with more ads, limited free downloads, and premium plans.

Something else weird about this story is why did they move to a country that has an extradition agreement with the US? There are plenty of countries that would ignore US pressure to arrest them.

> Z-Library is a popular (and illegal) library. They have taken the Library Genesis collection and made it easily searchable. On top of that, they have become very effective at soliciting new book contributions, by incentivizing contributing users with various perks. They currently do not contribute these new books back to Library Genesis. And unlike Library Genesis, they do not make their collection easily mirrorable, which prevents wide preservation. This is important to their business model, since they charge money for accessing their collection in bulk (more than 10 books per day).

(http://annas-blog.org/blog-3x-new-books.html)

it seems like their collection began as a libgen mirror, but expanded far beyond it (and was definitely heavily monetized)

the move might've had something to do with mobilization in russia, though I'm just guessing

I don't know their specific reasons, but I know of some transnational companies that since the start of the russian invasion dissolved their russian division and told their employees to choose from a list of countries to relocate.

Argentina is very easy to migrate to (the preamble to our constitution marks the spirit of a nation "free for all men that want to live here") and quality of life isn't that bad.

If you have no idea what you're talking about, post your comment as a question instead of a statement full of inaccurate misconceptions

Could you expand on what's inaccurate? I have honestly been very confused about all this Z-Library news because it struck me as being... well, a profit-motivated knockoff of libgen. With the number of users it has I assume it offers advantages I don't know about?

but that's just something you made up! you've never seen any evidence they're profitable

I've used both libgen and z-library to search for books over the last year. Maybe a hundred of books, mostly old fiction works (translated) in English and French (authors like Joseph Roth or Aleksandr Kouprin). Z-lib had much more results than libgen.

I've read several times that z-library is a fork of libgen and that their contents are similar, but that's not my experience at all.

Ah yes, actual hardened dangerous criminals finally facing justice.

I couldnt sleep for months with those two running around free knowing they could strike at any time

TorrentFreak report has some extra details - https://torrentfreak.com/u-s-indicts-two-russians-for-runnin...

A friend recently gave me a printed copy of Legend of Drizzt. It was about 2 inches thick (3 books in 1), the printing was too small for my crappy eyes, lighting in my room at night is not great, and the printing went too close to the interior edge, all making it hard to read. So I bought a Kindle.

The Kindle worked much better. I got the Kindle Unlimited subscription at no extra cost for 3 months (then $10/mo afterwards), thinking I'd get access to any books on Amazon that were available in the Kindle format. You know, "Unlimited". Wrong! Kindle Unlimited means "whatever Kindle books Amazon wants to give you", not "Unlimited". They need to rename that to "Kindle Limited", "Kindle Picks", or whatever. Of course, this series was not part of KU.

I bought the first few books in the series, even though I already had the printed book, at $8/book, which is kinda pricey considering there are 36 books in the series, so it was going to cost ~$300 to read the whole thing. Then I found out I could download the books from the public library system. It's actually a pretty good model I think, because at least in Indiana, all of the public libraries are in a state-wide consortium, so there are about 5 copies of each book in the series available to "rent" for anyone in Indiana. And it's free.

The e-book business model of $8/book makes no sense to me, at least not for fiction. I don't want 36 already-read e-books sitting on my Kindle - it just junks things up. What I would like is to be able to take a photo of a book I already have, including the ISBN number, and get an electronic copy in my Kindle library for free. That would be so awesome, esp considering that as I get older, reading from a Kindle is way easier than dealing with a physical book.

Too many Copyright defenders here, mandatory "the intellectual property oxymoron" read: http://harmful.cat-v.org/economics/intellectual_property/

I don't think it was your intention, but your language is unnecessarily inflammatory.

People who don't share your opinion are allowed to be here. Even if there are more of those people than you'd like.

Apologies for that. Please ignore the tone in case it appears inflammatory, that was indeed not my intention.

The American Empire strikes again.

You'd think they would have seen this coming though.

I think a long-term solution is a universal revenue-sharing programme - so like some portion of taxes is allocated to a universal repository, and then paid out to creators according to usage. No middle-men and no distribution issues, etc.

What about a Spotify for books?

> universal revenue-sharing programme

Run by whom? The UN?

Maybe in the first 5 years it’s just what it is now, and then it goes into the repository. I am going to assume most sales are in those years.

> I think a long-term solution is a universal revenue-sharing programme - so like some portion of taxes is allocated to a universal repository, and then paid out to creators according to usage. No middle-men and no distribution issues, etc.

So, just another publishing and distribution monopoly, no matter who runs it. Still a good improvement over the current status quo, I'll agree. Flawed as they may be, Spotify and Youtube did end up boosting independent creative production and accessibility of content manifold.

But government naturally has a monopoly.

Like the US already forces publishers to send books to the Library of Congress with the mandatory deposit.

This makes me worried about LibGen. It would be an incredible loss to humanity to see these libraries go for good.

(Hypothetically)

Couldn’t this concept be built out in a much more decentralized way, where there’s a desktop app you install that is basically a BitTorrent client and a search interface, and then the app synchronizes with all other desktop apps to keep a SQLite database updated with all of the book meta data, and then each user also contributes some amount of disk space (let’s say 1gb) that the app automatically manages storing some amount of the network’s book files in (maybe even encrypted somehow, or fragments of book files, so you never actually have a complete file on any given machine).

So basically a big torrent mesh with redundant, fragmented storage of book files everywhere. People can upload a book, the app shreds it up and broadcasts to the network, enough other apps sync those fragments on their end to make it “permanently” on the network (statistically at least).

The metadata can’t possibly be that big for a million books in a SQLite database. Users would search against their local SQLite DB, and for a book they want to download, it’s just normal BitTorrent downloads in the background. Run it all through TOR or similar.

Thoughts? I am only a user of all of the above tech, never written software for any of it. Is it possible to build a distributed and resilient file sharing system like this?

Their innovation is that they had an in, somewhere, probably at various printers or e-Book distributors, that gave them access to digital copies of books. That is how they manage to have inventory of really obscure stuff. The software doesn't really matter.

There's IPFS

You also need a system to manage books coming in, separating spam/viruses from real content. You either need a centralized source verifying books (zlib and usenet approach) or some kind of voting system like thepiratebay. If it's a centralized source, that'll be the weak point to take down, and voting systems won't work well for unpopular books.

Last I checked there were some pretty good usenet servers flying under the radar with even more books than z-lib, manually curated. So there might not be enough demand for your idea at the moment.

They are so young! Does anyone know what will happen to them after the arrestment? I sincerely think they are doing charity.

No doubt they'll be chucked in a supermax prison in the arse-end of nowhere for fifty years.

They'll charge them like Aaron Swartz, where each piece of material is a separate count against them. The years of sentencing and fines will be astronomical.

> I sincerely think they are doing charity

By limiting downloads (artificial scarcity)?

By charging for pirated works?

They charge for bandwidth, server cycles and rent.

So they don’t profit?

Who cares. Don't be a free-loader.

I find it interesting that zlib is supposed to be compensated for their servers but the authors aren't supposed to be compensated for their writings.

Personally, I'm in support of zlib / libgen / other illegalist libraries. But it is kind of funny to see where the morality lies on this.

Your argument is skewed.

Z-Library guys didn't extradite any site users who didn't pay for their servers and handed them effective life sentences.

Yeah extradition treaties and bowing down to the US or the Interpol are how the One World Government begins. Mix that with cheap massive surveillance tech imported from China and every country going cashless and we're in FOR A RIDE.

You might even say it's Biblical.

I believe that copyright should be reformed, and all books must be available for free in the digital form. If there would be fewer books, well, there are more than enough fiction books than one can read in the hundred lifetimes. Technical/science books, and crucial technical information contained in them can be made available as paid web services, or authors could be funded prior to writing it - via crowdfunding, grants, or by irresistible graphomania.

There is widespread support for the complaint that copyright duration is excessive, and that a degree of piracy should be tolerated as a form of protest, but IMHO these guys crossed a line when they tried to make money from piracy.

Not many textbooks require a new edition every year and it wasn’t really as bad for the secondhand market where the original buyers would pay exhorbitant prices for textbooks but would recover some of it by selling them as used.

With new editions every semester they want to extract as much money from students which I find appalling, students are kindof poor on average. Piracy is an outcome to that

I looked up the actual citation. Here's what I found interesting:

Copyright theft became a crime (versus tort) in 1990 and only applied to the sale of physical copies. It expanded to digital distribution in 2008.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/506

Thanks very much for turning this up.

Burn down the library of Alexandria because free access to information is too inconvenient

My first thought on this is that the people who download books from these sites were never going to buy them in the first place. This is particularly true if they engaged in downloading dozens or hundreds of books. In other words, not sure just how much money anyone lost because of the existence of these sites.

If someone is never going to buy what you sell (let's say they can't afford it) and they are able to get it for free in digital form, you did not incur any expenses and you did not lose any money.

I am not trying to justify IP theft, just trying to understand the financial reality of the matter.

At the extreme is the case of an author who produces a great book after over a year of hard work only to see 100% of the books stolen in digital form. The author has a household to support and goes without income.

What I was always wondering about, given they are clearly illegal, why did they bother adhering to book take down requests (and pointing out you could still access the book in question via Tor...)? Was there some jurisdiction out there where that made them legal?

Last time I saw this many people justifying their illegal/immoral actions was when I was in prison. Criminal thinking is criminal thinking, and often starts with small justifications to tear down a persons own walls against such behavior, or to tear them down in others to pull them to your sway and away from society/prosocial behavior. We 8 billion people can not live together without certain tradeoffs, and those tradeoffs even apply to you, even when you can get around them. This thread is heartbreaking to me, having done so much work on myself to rebuild those walls of acceptable/non acceptable behaviors, to see such rot in the basic morality of such smart people.

It's 2022, there is more access to information and knowledge than ever in human history. Anyone that wants to make their knowledge or information free to the world can do that easily. These books were SPECIFICALLY not made free public knowledge. That you want them does not mean you are entitled to the choices of others in how they want choose to distribute their works. That they have enough value to you to make you want to steal them shows that there is more to that than simple 'knowledge everyone should be entitled to', because that knowledge is available on the internet in other forms.

You can set your own rules regarding books.

If you profit from a book, you must buy it, no questions answered.

If you pass the 50th page, go buy it.

Same applies to software... if you are generating income with it, you must buy it.

Rest is up to your conscience.

I respect the copyright of publisher and author, I also admire people sharing expensive knowledge to those who do not have the ability to get one. This is a hard choice to me.

I actually bought more books by checking out the book first for free (often the sample part of an electronic book is not helpful) But I might not be representative.

The problem with allowing piracy will always be that no one really wants to spend money. Just because I have a spare $200 doesn't mean I want to spend it if I don't have to.

If you give people the choice between free and $x amount, 99% of people will choose free. You see this with just about anything that let's people name their own price.

Now, do SBF.

A sad day for equal access to information. I’m glad that they made money from Z-Library, they deserve that money for the service they provided.

It’s some bullshit that they were arrested in Argentina on behalf of the US government. From what I can tell they aren’t even US nationals. I know the US scooping up foreigners and locking them away is nothing new (see: Gitmo) but it remains a travesty of justice nonetheless.

The Federal Agents need to find more useful things to do with their time, and the people's dime.

This whole things reminds me of Library.nu. Sad day.

A lot of the typical and expected takes for these sort of discussions:

- on one side, people who are in favour of the arrests , because they see their a activities as crimes. They have point

- on the other side people that one way or another, believe that the distribution of the information should be free in some sense. Justifications always abound. A d it's Ok

I offer a third take: Theres no reason why authors should be perpetually paid for the work of 500/1000 hours, or whatever time it took them to write the books; research time included. Publishing a book should give authors, editors and related parties the compensation for their worked time at a fair hourly wage. The same way you a I are compensated hourly.

After that, the only cost of books should be distribution costs, which nowadays are near to 0 with p2p and similar.

The fact that the work output of some people is intended to be overpaid indefinitely, while the output of the rest of us is only paid hourly, is what's unfair.

Does this apply to everyone? If I build and sell an indie software product, should I only be able to sell it for the distribution costs ($0.02/user/month, say) once I have recouped someone's definition of a fair hourly wage for building it?

Compensated by whom?

Authors and creators are not wage workers. They are taking on the risk that their creations may yield them nothing. In that sense they are entrepreneurs/investors, and along with the risk of failure they have the prospect of great "upside". So I think the question is whether you think there should be limits to how much you can earn, etc, in general.

Creative works can't be valued just by the number of hours it takes to make them. Good books must be paid for more than bad books.

The way I think this would work is like this:

- A "good writer" sholud release the first chapter of their book (or first N pages or whatever) for free. As a sort of "Resume"/"Portfolio"

- Then, he lists the rest of the TOC for the next chapters of the book, and the price of each of them.

- He raises that money in a place like Kickstarter or similar platform, for each of the chapters. And as he gets the money, he publishes/uploads the new chapters of the book.

- Once he gets the 100% of the price of the book, he has delievered/published all the chapters. He may offer the whole book in one file, printed copy, audio or whatever other medium for an additional prodcution and distribution fee.

With this approach writers who write good books would be able to demand more money per chapter (hence, $ per hour of their work) than writers who write bad books. While at the same time, they would be able to ask for some fixed amount of $ per hour of their work. Sure, a writer like Stephen King may ask for $1000 USD per hour of his work, so one chapter of one of his book will take $40,000 USD. But I am sure given his fame, he won't have any trouble in raising that.

This appraoch would also work for music and software. It is kind of based on the Shareware model used in the 90s.

What happened to "you get what you pay for" and "if you're not the customer you are the product"? We already know what happens with free content on the internet: it turns to shit. And no, wikipedia or open source are not models you can apply to most books. The ones you can, we already have them: free programming books and the sorts.

Do you want books to be the next low effort, low quality, ads ridden, ideology pushing, click bait, spam, micro transactions, gambling medium? Asking for them to be free (as in beer) is the way to go.

Another thing: as a long time pirate from a poor country myself I never understood the need to morally justify piracy. I do it because I want to spend money elsewhere, not because I feel it is my right or it should be. I do it because I can and I profit from it. My head will not explode with cognitive dissonance if I accept I am wronging others to help myself.

> Do you want books to be the next low effort, low quality, ads ridden, ideology pushing, click bait, spam, micro transactions, gambling medium?

Were books and works that came before copyright law was invented "low effort" and "low quality"? What kind of mental gymnastics does it take to equate IP laws with creativity? It's rather with and because of copyright laws that literature and educational content have gone down the drain. It's now that many books get written with the sole intention of it getting consoomed by as many people as possible, riddled with dark patterns and cringy styles. Information and ideas are NOT your private property if you make them public.

"The pair was arrested on November 3, 2022 in Cordoba, Argentina at the request of the United States" ...

Z-library was not about freeing books, they where pirating for profit. The free account was limited in downloads and they had 2 tiers of premium accounts, don't remember the sums or details. They where profiting on the works of others too, they did not rip the books themselves or anything like that.

The free tier was something like 5 books per day and was throttled by ip. How many books do you usually read per day that this argument holds any kind of meaning?

They throttled it, sure … but that wasn’t really a rate in which you’d run into unless you’re just downloading everything. Which you still could just by cycling your ip.

You also didn’t need an account unless you wanted to send the book directly to your Kindle. You’re all around just misinformed on the topic

Free tier is 10 books per day. They really have a nice search and related books view making discovery easy. Lot of people will miss z library.

The third-rate university (with a $1.81 billion endowment) where I am unfortunately studying for a PhD, closed its libraries in August 2021 for "renovation". If LibGen also shuts down (and becomes unavailable on Tor), it'll be hard for me to do research.

Very sad day for world’s education. They trying so hard to keep knowledge only for rich

Docket: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/65760207/united-states-...

> Records obtained by law enforcement from Google LLC (“Google”) and Amazon, Inc. (“Amazon”) provide evidence of the defendant [name]’s control of Z-Library.

They clearly haven't read any "OPSEC 101"-books. Rookie mistake.

I wonder if monetization was the only easy way to prevent abuse from the greedy hyper-thieves. Most people who used Z-Library weren't going to buy the books anyway. The library allowed the hungry to learn while giving the greedy some difficulty. I liked their system. I'm not proud to condone stealing but, in my opinion, people were only stealing from the greedy or the teachers at heart, and the teachers at heart would've given away some of their books for free anyway.

Does anyone know if when FBI/DOJ seizes domain names, do they only do so when an arrest is imminent? It's quite obvious in this case that it was allowed to remain operational while they were investigating. I wonder if that's the general MO for domain seizures. Because there are just tons of domains that should be seized that are still operating. Why don't those get taken down? No way FBI/etc aren't aware of these.

Don't you think that the punishments are too severe? Severe punishments should be for violent crimes, not for stealing several thousands dollars from authors.

Release says "defendants profited illegally off work they stole". I wonder what the charges would be if they were runnig Z-Lib as a non-profit?

I thought Fahrenheit 451 was supposed to be fiction...

I had an idea for books shop website where you would buy a book and get it in paperback, audiobook and e-book form all at once(bundle). Ofc it would be bit pricey but readers could swap between formats at will and writers would be more rewarded and subsidized. Would anybody use it?

Somebody who pirates books in the e-form maybe would want to enjoy it in paperback and audio form as well?

I wonder, is there a nice site for searching and usage of open source and other free books? There are software repositories, places you go for free video (especially youtube) and more. I see many complaints about missing openness of knowledge. So I think something like that would be nice.

I will miss Z-Library... I hope it's alternatives are as good as it...

I linked it to an old email account of mine. Could there be repercussions if you downloaded books from that site? I probably downloaded at least 1k dollars worth of books. Only about half I ever went into.

Well, they would be fine if they had studied at Stanford. Crooks don't study at Stanford.

Wish them luck. Zlib was a godsend. Let's hope they won't be extradited.

With the so called prosecutorial discretion firmly in mind, it is always interesting to observe the sort of things our "Justice" department would rouse themselves for.

The bizarre thing is that they asked for donations as Amazon gift cards! Surely Amazon could have blocked them?

And how would Amazon know which gift cards were donated to them? You can buy them with cash everywhere, re-sell the product you bought in cash and use that to fund the site.

They were arrested for a lot more than copyright infringement:

Criminal Copyright

Conspiracy to Commit Wire Fraud

Wire Fraud

Money Laundering Conspiracy

I will make it live again.

1st time I heard about it. I'll try to find the tor site.

An alternative is Library Genesis.

The US and it’s global jackboot world police.

https://youtu.be/LasrD6SZkZk

> As alleged, the defendants profited illegally off work they stole

How did they profit? If they even admitted that

> Defendants Operated Z-Library, Which Offered Free Download of Copyrighted Works

This is a complete nonsense

Maybe ads on the platfom? I'm not sure because 1. i use libgen 2. i run adblock.

But it wouldn't be surprising that such a popular platform would have ads. Z-library was a site for pirated e-books, no?

shh! do you want lingren to get taken down as well? whether accurately or not, the takedowns is attribute to a sudden burst of popularity due to social media sharing of the site.

Z-library was popular amongst everyone, hackernews is a really niche website. But I believe with that website going down people will start looking for alternatives.

If everything fails, we can always go back to download books through IRC.

I believe they also offered premium plans and for the longest time had a big banner on their site saying something like: "if you know of high risk payment processors, please reach out"

downloads were limited to a small number per day. if you wanted to download more there was a small fee ($1?). They tracked her Amazon account which had made $14k in purchases over the years.

Curious where you heard the detail about Amazon

The original arrest warrant.

> Since March 20, 2019, the 1502 Account has placed more than 110 orders totaling over $13,628.32,

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nyed.48...

They accepted payment to get around quotas (and probably ran ads). Even if it was a tiny percentage of people who engaged with them this way, or even if they profited at all, they took money in exchange for accessing an illicit resource. That is likely the main reason the teeth have come out to bite.

If anything though this might push that resource to the hands of people who can maintaining the massive library voluntarily and distributed with less ethical/morally-dubious implications.

I don't believe they ran adverts, can anyone confirm?

Anyone know what payment processor they used? Did they take USD etc? That's probably how their real identities got exposed.

Their system was set up to make money, much like iptorrents. Yes, you can use them for free, but they create very low artificial limits to funnel you into paying for premium services.

Your outrage is misplaced, these are not the pirates freeing books, these are parasites making money off of the pirates' work.

Links for legal defense appreciated.

Just Go to singlelogin.me/

Taking a fact raised in another comment and returning the discussion to books, information, and its access:

Total bookstore sales in the US are apparently on the order of $9 billion annually.

<https://www.statista.com/statistics/197710/annual-book-store...>

Dividing by a population of 333 millions, we arrive at an annualised per-person book sales figure of just over $27. For a family of four, that's less than $110 annually.

Discussions of books, other content, copyright, and authors almost always descends into lamentations of "but authors should be paid". Those lamenters at the same time seem utterly insensitive to the fact that many millions of people in the US, and billions worldwide, could have access to information but do not, because of an industry-driven interest, largely of publishers rather than authors, on insisting on direct, per-copy, payment for works. This utterly obsolete practice has an enormous deadweight cost in loss of access to information.

I'd given household and family bases above, but the fairer allocation would be based on income or even wealth. I'm sticking with income as those values are easier to find.

Total household income in the US is ... let's call it $9 trillion.[1] So that the $9 billion in book sales is 1/1,000 of household income, equivalent to a taxed rate of 0.1%. The median household earning about $63,000 could have unlimited access for only $63 a year, or $5.25/month. Households falling below the median would pay even less, and I'd suggest a progressive scale to ensure that this fall to nil for lower incomes generally.

That would provide all the present income to authors and publishers, access to unlimited books (I'm assuming digital formats), and lift those deadweight losses, free up access to materials presently under copyright but not available for purchase at all, and much, much more.

Publishers would lose no wealth. Though I strongly suspect we'd discover that what in fact motivates them is power and control.

______________________________

Notes:

1. We're working with 333 million people in the US (<https://www.census.gov/popclock/>), 2.6 per household (<https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/HSD410220>), and a mean (not median) household income of $72,641 (in 2014, <https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/tables/time-ser...>).

Man, fuck this.

A small thought experiment:

- Book sales in 2021 were about _9_ billion dollars. [0]

- Wage theft in the US is estimated at _50_ billion dollars. [1]

Can you imagine if the resources of the justice and labour departments would prioritize citizen wage over publishers' revenue?

Would you rather have funds allocated towards social justice or have them spent on intimidating foreign nationals completely outside US jurisdiction?

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/197710/annual-book-store...

[1] https://www.epi.org/press/wage-theft-costs-american-workers-...

But piracy affects the capitalists that run the US establishment, whereas wage theft benefits them.

I agree with you, but it's always easier to go after a centralized target who is doing a thing at scale. Is there a wage-thief who's doing it at scale?

I'm sure e.g. Walmart would have few billions in their name.

> Is there a wage-thief who's doing it at scale?

FAANG got caught having a wage cartel where poaching affected possible salaries between workers.

They got a measly 50 million dollar fine.

Wage theft pays off in america, and Amazon and Apple being trillion dollar companies proves it.

> FAANG got caught having a wage cartel

I remember Apple and Google did. Was there a broader conspiracy?

> got a measly 50 million dollar fine

This $415mm settlement [1]? Its suit covered ”almost 65,000 employees who worked for the seven companies between 2005 and 2010.” The fine was thus about $6,400 per covered employee (about $8k in 2022 dollars). The alleged cut to “potential employee compensation [was] 10 percent to 15 percent” [2]. That didn’t pertain to every single employee, so the actual cost per violation is higher. That doesn’t seem egregiously low.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...

[2] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/lawsuit-accuses-appl...

> I remember Apple and Google did. Was there a broader conspiracy?

I wrote FAANG cause I didn't remember all involved, which was my bad. It was Adobe, Apple Inc., Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm and eBay that got caught in the anti trust suit.

Enough big players to seriously affect job opportunities and labour costs from rising.

> This $415mm settlement [1]?

That was the latest judge sentence, which I hadn't heard of, I can ammend my previous comment. The original sentences, affecting mostly the smaller players like Pixar where much smaller while the Apple and Google one kept being pushed back. 400 million is still quite low in exchange for a 5 year long wage freeze essentially as moving jobs is the best way to increase your salary.

The toal pay seems to be lower, 3,400 for Pixar, intuit and lucasfilm employees and only 5,770 for apple and google employees. Over a 5 year period thats a pretty low salary raise.

Considering a job change every 2 years can end up with almost 100% salary difference over a decade. That means in the 5 years, the salary raises saved the company up to 50% in salary costs.

With the headcount of both of those companies and their average salary. Even if the percentage of workers who did not move between companies, I would argue 400 million is still low.

I am also gonna ignore lawyer fees which are usually the only winners on such big lawsuits

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

> I would argue 400 million is still low

Low, but not so low that it makes wage conspiracies worth it.

It definitely makes it worth it if you merely risk but are not guaranteed to lose about as much as you underpaid and avoid compounding increases.

If there average payout is 5,770 per employee and the average salary jump while changing jobs is 10-20%.

The math is pretty in favour of having a wage conspiracy, thats without even considering the cost of not being caught.

Chance of being caught * average salary * cost of poaching * average salary rise due to poaching * number of employees / fine

Maybe my napkin math is wrong but the chance of being caught has to be very high and the average salary or number of employees very low for it to make any sense.

And being google and apple in california, the employee and salary is not gonna be low...

My industry got it pretty bad too. California passed Prop 11, which wiped out a wage theft lawsuit, and also ensured that we do not get to clock out for meal breaks.

https://missionlocal.org/2018/10/prop-11-ambulance-company-h...

> Wage theft in the US is estimated at _50_ billion dollars. [1]

That report is from 2014. What does it stand at today (whether in absolute or relative terms)?

>>Would you rather have funds allocated towards social justice or have them spent on intimidating foreign nationals

I would rather the justice department, and labor dept choose their targets for non-political reasons, neither for "social justice" nor corporate protectionism

> I would rather the justice department, and labor dept choose their targets for non-political reasons

You want the justice department, a branch of the goverment, to not be political?

Yes. That should not be a shock, there are lots (in fact most) of government that is not suppose to be political, specifically when it comes to the enforcement of law.

The entire premise, the entire legitimacy of the legal system is the blind scales of justice.

It seems you want it to be political, that is would be a nation of despotism, oligarchs, and tyranny

> that is not suppose to be political

their execution shouldn't but their priortiies are entirely political mandates.

When people felt unsafe in the 90s and the DoJ increased minimum sentencing was that not a political incentive?

Protecting business over people, as it currently stands in their priority list, is a political decision.

Changing the status quo is not "political" and remaining as is isn't. Their current directives are poltiical assignments, and rerouting resources in a more worthy endevour is the same.

>When people felt unsafe in the 90s and the DoJ increased minimum sentencing was that not a political incentive?

No that was a change in legalization, which legislation is political, but the 90's saw TONS of anti-crime laws passed which required the non-political arms of the government to act

that is how it is suppose to work, the people elect representative who pass laws, and then those laws are enforced by the non-political arm.

These entities have become political in the wake of over criminalization since now as a function they have to "choose" which laws to enforce and which not to because other wise nothing would get enforced as a matter of course.

The solution to this is not just acceptation that enforcement should be political, but instead removing the political choices from the non-political arms placing it back into the political space of the government (i.e the legislature) . One key way to do that for the Federal government is to return said federal government back to its constitutional bounds which today it FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR exceeds

> The solution to this is not just acceptation that enforcement should be criminal, but instead removing the political choices from the non-political arms placing it back into the political space of the government (i.e the legislature) .

The assumption that there are too many laws and "non political" arms need to pick and choose which ones to apply is true. But I would consider that just part of reality.

Economics is just the study of resource allocation, the goverment only has so many federal tax officers and they need to focus on something. If they focus on big accounts it doesn't make not paying VAT legal. It just less likely you get caught.

Laws existing as a framework to express the current priorities of the goverment (aka tax avoidance bad) is useful even without enough officers to enforce it 100%.

> One key way to do that for the Federal government is to return said federal government back to its constitutional bounds which today it FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR exceeds

The libertarian angle is cool and all, but the political voice of the people has consistently voted for bigger gov not smaller, so you want to apply your own politics to make things "non poltiical". Which is not very consistent

> You want the justice department, a branch of the goverment, to not be political?

This is like asking "you want the fire dept to not be political?"

Of course you don't want the executive branch to not be political. They are the administration. If the IRS just goes after whoever the current reigning party doesn't like, you'll soon no longer have a functioning democracy.

In 1993, the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action treats social justice as a purpose of human rights education

The declaration was signed by the US as well.

So social justice is an objective of US as a whole, as a democracy, as a Country, hence is not a political view since 1993 in USA.

> declaration was signed by the US

It was never fully ratified [1]. It was ratified by Russia and, somehow, Afghanistan.

[1] https://indicators.ohchr.org/

That's hardly news.

But you're looking in the wrong place.

It was called the "Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action" it was not an agreement to be ratified, but a course of action for the UN members to follow, which includes the US.

Of course in United States social justice is seen as a political stance, it's not surprising from the country that has signed and not ratified

- Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women

- International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

- Convention on the Rights of the Child (they do not actually think of the children, apparently)

- Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

I get that the rights of people with disabilities can be a divisive argument, but they also refuted to sign for

- Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women

- Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

- Optional Protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

- Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

and if that wasn't bad enough, they have also not signed

- International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families

- International Convention for the Protection of all Persons from Enforced Disappearance (CIA really loves making people disappear, they couldn't possibly disappoint them)

How is it possible that we call it "the greatest democracy in the World" while they are not even a real Democracy is the "greatest mystery in modern history"

So, yeah, social justice is political only in USA and probably in some South American dictatorship lead by former nazis and militarily installed by yours truly the USA

Not even Putin would say in public that social justice it's the patrimony of a specific Political side, because it would be a (politcal) suicide, even for a guy like Vladimir Putin who recently spoke about it citing Martin Luther King (of course it's all propaganda in his side, but still...), while in the USA, where MLK was born and was killed, his ideas are still considered "agenda" and not "Country's own values".

Again: not surprising, just sad.

> It was ratified by Russia and, somehow, Afghanistan.

to put it mildly, in that list, as you can see, USA is the country that ratified fewer treaties.

Even Iran ratified one treaty more than US.

Actually there is one that did worse: Bhutan, with zero of them.

> yeah, social justice is political only in USA

You’re shifting your goal posts. You said “social justice is an objective of US as a whole” and hence “not a political view.” That’s false.

> Even Iran ratified one treaty more than US

Which shows the difference. Ratification, in America, is not performative. Those treaties can become the basis for lawsuits against the U.S. in U.S. courts. If you’re arguing women have a better time in Iran, or civic and political rights are better protected in Russia, because they ratified those chapters, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

> You’re shifting your goal posts. You said “social justice is an objective of US as a whole” and hence “not a political view.” That’s false.

If you're saying that US usually says one thing, and does another thing entirely, you're right.

When someone signs an official document in representation of their Country, they are actually saying that the Country's objective align with the things written in the document.

They signed a document that stated that social justice is not political, it's a human right.

You're now saying that's false in the US.

So either you or the US are lying.

> Which shows the difference. Ratification, in America, is not performative

like the ratification of

International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination

in 1994?

Are we there yet?

> Those treaties can become the basis for lawsuits against the U.S. in U.S. courts

Lawsuits, like the first of a long list a guy named Donald Trump had to face for his act of racism, in 1973, for refusing to rent houses to black people?

That totally blocked him from becoming President of United States and from running again at the next elections.

Because in USA nothing is performative.

Trump BTW was at least honest in treating things the rest of the World consider global as internal political arguments; when he felt that climate change wasn't important to his administration, he withdrawn from the Paris climate accord.

Seriously, you're talking like the US is the only country with the rule of law, where the ratification of an International treaty has actual legal consequences.

How come that Countries like Italy, France, Germany, even MONGOLIA, ratified all of them or more than 90% of them and US did not?

Are you saying that in Finland they have no justice system or engage in "performative treaty signing" as a cultural tribal tradition?

> If you’re arguing women have a better time in Iran, or civic and political rights are better protected in Russia, because they ratified those chapters, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

I've simply argued that they committed to the cause and failed.

US hasn't even tried.

If, as you say, they didn't out of fear of "lawsuits against the U.S. in U.S. courts" does that mean that you think US know that they do not meet the requirements?

> you're saying that US usually says one thing, and does another thing entirely, you're right

No. I am saying you said "social justice is an objective of US as a whole" and hence "not a political view." Then you said "social justice is political only in USA." Those are opposing views you've flip flopped on.

> signed a document that stated that social justice is not political, it's a human right

No, it did not.

> like the ratification of International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in 1994?

You're launching off solely titles. Read the text [1]. Article 5 enumerates rights. The rest is condemnations and the establishment of a commission. China, Saudi Arabia and Israel are also a signatories [2]. None of them give Article 14 jurisdiction, the U.S. included, which made it a toothless ratification.

[1] https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/...

[2] https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/...

>>USA is the country that ratified fewer treaties.

yes, by design. We have a strong belief in our Sovereignty, We the people have no desire to be ruled by the UN or treaty, and International Treaties are generally viewed unfavorably by the public (correctly so). In fact most Citizens of the US (including myself) hold the UN in utter contempt and would support a withdraw (including our money) from the UN

Also no Treaty supersedes our Constitution.

a broken democracy but a highly functional oligarchhy

It must be one of the triumphs of capitalism that forcing employers to pay their workers what they're owed is considered a partisan action.

What do you mean by 'social justice' and the implication it is a bad thing?

I postulate, labor justice is social justice.

"Social Justice" is a loaded political term generally aligned with Left Authoritarianism and often devoid of actual justice

And who was it who loaded that term? The social justice advocates, or their opponents?

Both. Just like many other political labels, they start out as one thing then more and more people start using the labels and soon their orginal meaning is lost and have become something else

This is caused by both advocates and opponents of the various causes, positions, and world views

I've got strong opinions and political thoughts on the term "political labels". Sure it once meant labels applied to politics, but now, who knows what it means? Both sides have misconstrued this term and now we shouldn't use it.

Dating back to 1824, the term social justice refers to justice on a societal level.[11] From the early 1990s to the early 2000s, social-justice warrior was used as a neutral or complimentary phrase, as when a 1991 Montreal Gazette article describes union activist Michel Chartrand as a "Quebec nationalist and social-justice warrior".[1]

Katherine Martin, the head of U.S. dictionaries at Oxford University Press, said in 2015 that "[a]ll of the examples I've seen until quite recently are lionizing the person".[1] As of 2015, the Oxford English Dictionary had not done a full search for the earliest usage.[1] Merriam-Webster dates the earliest use of the term to 1945.[6]

...

According to Martin, the term switched from primarily positive to negative around 2011, when it was first used as an insult on Twitter.[1] The term first appeared on Urban Dictionary in 2011 and on the Something Awful forums in 2013.[7] According to Know Your Meme, the pejorative term "keyboard warrior", which describes a person who is unreasonably angry and hides behind their keyboard, may be a precursor to the "social justice warrior".[7] The negative connotation has primarily been aimed at those espousing views adhering to social progressivism, cultural inclusivity, or feminism.[12][1][2] Scott Selisker writes in New Literary History that the SJW is often criticised as the "stereotype of the feminist as unreasonable, sanctimonious, biased, and self-aggrandizing".[12] Use of the term has also been described as attempting to degrade the motivations of the person accused of being an SJW, implying that their motives are "for personal validation rather than out of any deep-seated conviction".[3][9] Allegra Ringo in Vice writes that "in other words, SJWs don't hold strong principles, but they pretend to. The problem is, that's not a real category of people. It's simply a way to dismiss anyone who brings up social justice."[9]

The term's negative use became mainstream due to the 2014 Gamergate harassment campaign ...

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice_warrior>

Numerous sources cited, notably:

<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/10...>

<https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/what-does-soci...>

<https://web.archive.org/web/20160102031743/http://recode.net...>

See also "Social Justice": <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_justice>

> neither for "social justice"

Listen to yourself.

Couldn't agree more. It is disgraceful how our tax dollars are used to prop up failed business models and oppress the little guy. Just another example of how supposedly democratic states only serve the interests of the elite.

>It is disgraceful how our tax dollars are used to prop up failed business models and oppress the little guy

U.S. Government Spending, FY 2022 Top 10 Spending by Category

$ 1.22 T Social Security

$ 914 B Health

$ 865 B Income Security

$ 767 B National Defense

$ 755 B Medicare

$ 677 B Education, Training, Employment, and Social Services

How do you explain this data?

Source:https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

Genuine question: I always hear about the gigantic military spending in the U.S. I would've expected it to be on top of this list. It can't be only 7. no?

US military spending is HUGE compared to other countries budgets. It is not that big compared to the US budget - in WW2 we spent about 45% of GDP on military stuff - if that was done today we'd have a budget of about ten trillion dollars.

Also much of what is classified as military spending could probably be moved to other categories - the VA, for example.

Wow. Imagine the Manhattan Projects you could make with ten trillion!

The Manhattan Project began modestly in 1939, but grew to employ more than 130,000 people and cost nearly US$2 billion (equivalent to about $23 billion in 2020). We're nearing $100 billion with Ukraine. $31 billion to California EDD (unemployment) fraud.

Its large compared to other similar countries.

So why doesn't the US just spend that money so we can be more like X trendy country I heard about on Y blog/podcast that is a fraction of the size of the US and does "EVERYTHING" better?

Well, the case is that they have more money to spend because the US is subsidizing their military. So many of these countries are able to get away with tiny military budgets because of the US's large military budget. (all of those countries are also unrecoverably in decline)

the US does not subsidise other countries, not to the degree that you think anyways.

It’s also not a matter of spending more money. The US spends a lot more per capita on healthcare than everyone else, so money is not the issue.

not really, US healthcare spending is average for US income. (the problem is the distribution of that income)

https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2020/02/13/its-still-not-...

It may not be direct subsidiaries but I'd be willing to wager a pretty penny that there are a lot of European countries that feel comfortable with spending little on defense and aren't worrying about Russia because they know the US has their back.

Not to mention keeping Taiwan from being brought under the CCP umbrella, the efforts the US Navy puts into preventing and reducing piracy. In fact most of the world that doesn't worry about imminent invasion from it's neighbors doesn't worry mostly because the US has provided almost global security by virtue of having the largest most capable military on the planet.

I won't pretend it is perfect or that we have global peace but like during Pax Romana although they were still squabbling with the Sassinids, the average person's risk of dying as a result of military conflict is very small when compared historically, especially since almost every military action in the past half century has been not between modern nation states but between guerrilla and partisan forces which results in considerably less damage in life and property than a full scale conflict between two capable actors as the Iran Iraq war proves.

The pledge - which wasn’t signed was for 2% - nobody is afraid of Russia at this point and Poland alone could very well handle any Russian army if this war is any indication.

Of what the US spends on NATO, very little goes to smaller nations. In exchange, the US has legal bases and troops deployed in other countries without fear of retaliation, do you grasp how much power the US gets to project through this? Probably not.

US keeps Taiwan because it benefits them, and because it needs the semiconductors.

Nothing is free.

When you lot decided to invade Middle East for oil yet again for the 4th or 5th time, you also triggered article 5 and foreigners died as a consequence of your own greed, your unchecked black ops, and CIA funding terrorists.

Furthermore, this “alliance” means that people are spending money on US military hardware, not anyone else’s, but this is conveniently out of the discussion every time such complaints come up.

Less than 20% of what the US spends on NATO is used to assist smaller countries, and the US only covers 16% of operational costs of NATO - which is as much Germany is covering.

Legal boots on the ground next to any front trumps any and all economic arguments.

>decided to invade Middle East for oil

You mostly had me until this point. Did you know there is more oil in the US than Iraq and Afghanistan combined? Do you have any data on the number of oil rigs set up during the invasion? Who gets this oil by the way? Do you know how many trillions were spent in Afghanistan and Iraq? More than it's GDP of the entire period the US was there. Please provide some source for this claim. If anything, the US would invade a country just to "stretch it's legs" and keep the machine running.

The oil in the continental US is hard to extract [1]. The oil in Middle East is trivial and cheap to extract [1,2].

There is a reason oil price is up there, because the US and Saudi Arabia have setup a cartel, aramco has iirc > 70% profit margins. The cartel ensures that the U.S. can be “competitive” on pricing, that’s it. It ensures private interests are protected.

As for who gets it and whatnot, it’s all about private interests funding politicians who ensure no crisis is lost.

The money spent there is not to Iraq or Afghanistan per se, but also to the troops. You should look into how much the US is paying for the food supplies.. we are talking thousands per meal.

[1] https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/Why-the-US-cannot-Extr...

[2] https://www.enverus.com/blog/saudi-arabia-oil-need-know/

Why 7?

When talking about spending, some people exclude programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, income security programs from their list of spending because it doesn't need to be approved every year - it is classified as 'Mandatory Spending' and is 63% of the budget.

The remaining spending, has to be approved every year is classified as 'Discretionary Spending'. When you just look at discretionary spending, the military budget is the biggest piece. But if someone says the US spends most of its budget on military spending, it is false and deceptive.

A lot of military spending is disguised (not to say maliciously) as funding to other agencies. For example, that number is probably just the Pentagon's budget, and wouldn't include things like Veterans Affairs (which is about $300 billion) or foreign aid (around $50 billion) or the Department of Homeland Security (around $50 billion) or our nuclear force ($35 billion), etc.

Even some of NASA's funding is for monitoring nukes.

The point is that it's actually kind of hard to calculate how much we spend on defense, because it's hard to know what to count, but it's certainly more than it looks like. Over $1 trillion is a safe guess.

Are you expecting a source better than the US treasury to appear?

An unfortunate reality of the US is that policy discussion is almost wholly disconnected from quantified reality: we’re not even arguing about facts, anymore.

If we started examining facts, the populace would become aware that the US pays more for less than other “developed” nations — largely due to corruption in healthcare, construction, and manufacturing (eg, military).

According to a different official government site, it's $1.2 T on National Defense...

https://www.usaspending.gov/explorer/budget_function

Thanks for that link. It also shows medicare as increased to $1.5 T

Yeah but we paid into a social fund for Medicare and social security. It’s not tax revenue it’s our savings.

It wasnt't supposed to be tax revenue. Doesn't mean they didn't treat it that way anyway.

Is that what they told you? You don't "pay into" social security, you _pay for_ other old people's current social security. And you certainly do not "pay into" Medicare. Also the "social fund" of Medicare and social security certainly benefit "the little guy" more than anyone else, which was the whole point I was making. Also, who is "we?" Some people would rather have that cash for themselves or invest it on their own. And technically all taxes can be called a "social fund" so I don't see hiw this point even begins. If you go to jail for not paying into a "social fund" it's tax revenue.

"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all." - Adam Smith

We're not talking about security of property here but about who benefits from government spending.

> but about who benefits from government spending

Elon Musk? And, if you count foregoing taxes as spending, Jeff Bezos?

Visit any courtroom in America. It's poor people who commit small crimes who end up in prison. Wall St. fat cats who push opiates on the masses get away with murder and get a slap on the wrist.

Wage theft is committed by millions of employers, this "theft" was committed by just a few people. While I agree with your general sentiment, the resources required to prosecute wage theft would be vastly greater than to prosecute this case.

That being said, they should definitely prosecute wage theft much more than they are now. Maybe the fear of jail time if wage theft were actually prosecuted a few times would deter most other potential wage thieves.

> Wage theft is committed by millions of employers...

Yes, and of those there are a handful doing it to millions of employees. Wage theft is not a few night shifts rounded off at SMEs. Plenty of traded companies doing it, no reason why you cannot target low numbers of big fish.

> there are a handful doing it to millions of employees

Has someone credibly identified them?

Both Walmart and Amazon are notorious for disregarding minimum wage laws as an example of 'big fish'. With the fines usually applied this is just the price of doing business for these companies.

https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/275064-supreme-...

https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/2/22262294/amazon-flex-wage-...

In my country wage theft is committed on migrant labour.

Western Europe is not much different than Quatar in that respect only nobody cares.

The world starts caring when the Olympics or World Cup come to a country. I hadn’t even heard about Qatar prior to them hosting the World Cup.

The Olympics and World Cup have come to Western Europe (e.g. England, France, Norway, Spain) over and over again

Never been to Norway or Spain, but England and France are generally okay w.r.t. migrant labor. Not saying there isn't some hostility to foreigners, because ceterus paribus you'll get many more job interviews with a CV that says "Jean-Pierre Petit" than "Mohammed Karkar" in France, but there is no "temporary worker visa" that we can use to basically exploit peoples from poor countries. If you get a visa that lets you work, you generally get the same protections/wages as locals :)

You are right that it happens, but people do care and enforcement is improving in at least several countries like the UK and Norway.

Are the immigrants' passports confiscated so that they cannot leave?

If you genuinely believe that, why don't you move to Qatar?

Instead, how much would it cost for the IRS to check everyone's returns reconciliation against employer statements?

I don't really agree, prosecuting all wage theft would be an enormous effort, but this story is not about prosecuting all book "theft", just one case. The argument is that the resources spent on this one case would have been better spent on investigating and prosecuting wage theft, not solving the entire issue.

Also, wage theft seems to be a much simpler thing to prosecute. You don't have to investigate the owners of anonymous websites or track down any foreign nationals, just show up to a job site, see how long people are working, see how much they're paid, and prosecute if the numbers don't match. Obviously I'm exaggerating, but it's a much more tangible, sort of "old-fashioned" crime, one I would imagine the FBI is pretty good at solving.

Will never happen just like how undocumented migrants are exploited by meat processing plants while being de-facto shielded from deportation... because corporations and money talk.

What these criminals were doing is wage theft. As someone who earns money from books, I would like to personally thank the US Justice Department for their excellent work in shutting down this operation, that was stealing my wages.

hey Lee, I just checked out your website.

> 17/11/2022 9:49 Minimizing the Elastic Energy of Growing Leaves by Conformal Mapping: I learned to love conformal mapping while studying fluid dynamics. This is a fascinating application.

The paper you linked is a closed-access paper.

https://journals.aps.org/prl/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.218...

Did you use sci-hub to access it or did you actually pay the AIP $35 to read it?

If you used sci-hub, I consider you to be a hypocrite.

Maybe I should personally invite all of the people who read your books to reconsider your opinion on the freedom of information when considering buying any of your books.

I have family that works for DOL's Wage & Hour division. The amount of wage theft is _staggering_. They are chronically understaffed and overworked. Plus, every time a Republican administration comes into power, their enforcement power gets severely limited, except in the most egregious cases.

When people get paid more, the government gets more tax revenue. Smart government would double this division's resources, but governments are anything but smart.

Government may get more revenue but the individual politicians get influenced through financial means provided by the companies stealing the wages.

Corporates want their pound of flesh for lobbying expenses.

One party wants a disenfranchised base that will keep voting for them. If they are made whole by the government they might start having wrongthink.

This would run counter to the "starve the beast"[1] strategy that's formed the core of conservative governance in the US for the last 50 years.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starve_the_beast

If you believe in small government then you're going to enact policies that accomplish this. Re-branding this as "starve the beast" seems nothing more than a propaganda exercise.

Further.. almost every business employing people in a State must be setup with that State's authorities. Is there some reason States can't handle wage theft? Is this naturally a federal problem, or even best solved at that level?

I strongly disagree. If you're in favor of small government and in control you would, absent political concerns, simply shutter government organizations you don't believe in. "Starve the beast" is an entirely different tactic where you don't want to be seen as destroying popular services and so, instead, undermine their ability to function efficiently until they become unpopular enough to cancel. It comes with an understanding that the majority of the political will in a country appreciates these programs when they're well funded and that their cancelation is only politically actionable when they've been starved to ineffectualness.

"Starve the beast" is also really only a realistic strategy in a corrupt duopoly like America has since the defunding of popular programs is generally political suicide - unless you can reduce everything to "Us vs. Them"ism.

It's a term that was _coined by_ fiscal conservatives, it's not a "rebranding as a propaganda exercise".

That's not my branding, or a re-branding at all: the first known use of the term was by a Libertarian party member. It's the term of art for this style of financial governance, one that is used somewhat proudly by its disciples.

It's a problem for both state governments and the Federal government: wage theft might span from state tax fraud, federal tax fraud, unemployment insurance fraud, federal contract falsification, etc. Making it into a states' issue is overly simplistic.

> the first known use of the term was by a Libertarian party member.

In what context were they using it? I know that's what Wikipedia says, but their reference is behind a paywall. From what I can see of it, this is not how this phrase was initially used.

"Starve the Beast" seems to be a specific policy idealism with respect to Proposition 13 and the way tax revenues were being used in certain districts. It does not proscribe a particular administrative style, but rather particular property tax policies.

> In what context were they using it? I know that's what Wikipedia says, but their reference is behind a paywall. From what I can see of it, this is not how this phrase was initially used.

Here's another source attesting it to the Reagan administration in 1985[1]. To be clear, it doesn't even make sense for it to have come from the larger-government sphere: why would they refer to the US Government as "the beast"?

I have no idea what Proposition 13 is (although I'm guessing it's a California thing). In the context of US federal politics, "starving the beast" refers to a general "pincer" policy of both reducing funding and minimizing the effectiveness of that funding (e.g. by increasing outflows to contractors and other private services while decreasing oversight over those outflows).

[1]: https://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_12_01_01_bartlett.pd...

> Re-branding this as "starve the beast" seems nothing more than a propaganda exercise.

I disagree, having to dance around a phrase coined by those that implemented the strategy themselves, otherwise some people will get offended, is the definition of political correctness.

non naive suggestion: new nation scale govt structure should be discussed and tried.

hybrid patterns, seasonal structures, whatever

There are lots of low hanging fruits, which is good because it means space for progress but govt are extremely good at diluting any improvement efforts. Yet most people want higher efficiency / sanity governments.

In theory yes, but if you don't pay and use the money for Lobby, you get power, which equals to more rights. That's the foundation of a democracy or let's say society from the times of Pharaos.

not quite - you have to think like a government. If people get paid less, the people who finance a given company get to keep more money, it might also be cheaper for consumers. The government has its hands in every stage of every economic interaction. What's "lost" in one area is made up in another. Even a drug dealer has to go to the gas station for example.

The purpose of cutting that division is not optimizing the government's revenue, it's optimizing the revenue of their campaign backers.

This isn't a policy that was adopted just because, it's the reason the party gets money (As opposed to stuff like the culture war, which is just the excuse that drives the base out to vote).

Just in the past year, there was a pretty significant fight about funding the IRS. Despite additional IRS funding yielding significant returns.

That depends whether the government works for the people paying taxes or the people stealing wages.

> completely outside US jurisdiction

> The pair was arrested on November 3, 2022 in Cordoba, Argentina at the request of the United States.

The government of Argentina disagrees.

Extradition agreements is not the same as US law being applied in Argentinian soil.

Sleep deprivation of just 10 min per night across the entire USA adult population of 330M is 3.3Bn minutes, is over 6 thousand YEARS of sleep related fatigue, etc. PER NIGHT

Can you imagine if we attacked that problem in earnest?

My point, obviously, is that 50 billion is nothing on a per capita basis. This arrest is very high leverage, and very effective use of resources.

Your argument that this problem is too distributed is valid but a little out of touch. Wage theft disproprionately affects lower income people.

There is about 39 million americans below poverty line. That's about 1200 dollars a year. I am sure it would actually make a hell of a big difference to many people below the poverty line.

So copyright is incentivizing only $9 billion of spending on books… This seems suboptimal. You’d think it’d be possible to design a different government scheme that yielded say, twice as much book publishing, but with no restriction on copying. Same thing for music.

"Do not take advantage of a hired worker who is poor and needy, whether that worker is an Israelite or is a foreigner residing in one of your towns. Pay them their wages each day before sunset, because they are poor and are counting on it. Otherwise they may cry to the Lord against you, and you will be guilty of sin." - Deuteronomy 24:1415 (TNIV)

Can you imagine if the resources allocated to "social justice" were allocated towards the poor and others in dire need?

How much prison time they face? I'm not sad about them. They did it for the money, not because they believed knowledge should be free. They basically stole other people work and put their paywall to access stolen books. Total opposite of Libgen or Sci-Hub.

Their free model was much more than enough for a regular user to use. I mean 10 books download per day? I'm not sure if I personally would have had to ever exceed that limit.

I didn't even realise there was a limit. I used to get a couple of books a month. Never close to 10 a day.

Which is bad. They made a mirror of Libgen, closed it and charged money for access to it. You were unable to create a mirror from their mirror. Why put a limit at all? Why charge for access, just as same as publishers do? Defeats entire purpose of Libgen and SciHub.

I understand what you're saying but if you look at the effects alone (and not the means), it seems well justified. Their increased revenue allowed them to provide more and more (than LibGen at least) books to the users free of charge. I do not know the difficulties involved in mirroring Z-Library, but there seems to be someone who did it recently and posted to HN before the site went down.

It was 10 downloads per day from the website and then a further 10 from the telegram bot too.

you must be fun at parties

First time heard about Z-library. The home page design seems like a scam page though.

It is a gate to the great knowledge.

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