Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmclnx | Hacker News Reader

When Amazon(?) deleted 1984 from everyone's electronic book reader years ago, it is another indication of the control publishers want over what we read. They said it was a "mistake" and only when people when after them did the do something to correct that "mistake". So yes, publishers want Libraries gone.

If you ask me, the publishers want to move to a "rent model" like many software companies and even some Auto makers are moving towards. That means every time you read you electronic book, you pay them a small amount. With Libraries gone, that could be the next step.

Plus its seem, just by accident, they are getting help from extremist in many US States. Those extremist are also conducting their own war on Libraries, but for different reasons. If they "win", the results will be close to what publishers want. From what I have seen, none of the big publishers have come out against the extremists (are there any small publishers left?).

View on HN

> If you ask me, the publishers want to move to a "rent model" like many software companies and even some Auto makers are moving towards. That means every time you read you electronic book, you pay them a small amount. With Libraries gone, that could be the next step.

They already enforce this on libraries. Unlike physical books which can be kept until they physically wear out or are destroyed (and even then they can be rebound and most libraries have some kind of book binding tools or access), the ebooks that libraries 'buy' are often artificially limited in terms of number of times they can be used. So libraries 'buy' an ebook that can be lent X amount of times with 1-2 'concurrent' lends. It's all so stupid.

Rent seeking is the end game of capitalism, especially with minimal regulations

It makes sense as an incentive.

It just results in very silly situations where the library buys the terrible copies and just happen to also have information on how the DRM works and which programs can bypass it and since libraries exist to provide information, if someone asks for it, of course you tell them. Same way as there tend to be copiers that are out of sight (and camera) range. At least a couple of libraries I worked for had information by the copiers on exactly how much of a book you could copy before it was considered copyright infringement, thus informing people that they could copy the books.

It's very kayfabe-esque.

You're right that it's a fundamental values mismatch. Personally, I'm an extremist who would crash every F500 company to prevent another Library of Alexandria. Knowledge > money.

Now any limits on how much of the book you can copy are irrelevant, since you can LLM yourself a brand new book by paying MS a few bucks and somehow there is no copyright violation in that process...

What do you mean, can you ask chatGPT to write the contents of of some book, and it would just regurgitate them?

Not exactly, but you can work with the AI to recreate a book asking about the topics and from there asking how to explain them one by one in the context of the book application

No I mean prompt a sufficiently capable LLM based on what you wanted to read, chances are the LLM was trained on that book

> how much of a book you could copy before it was considered copyright infringement

So they help people follow the law?

Technically, yes.

Lawyers and librarians fighting is always fun because each group is very detail-oriented, very pedantic, and amazing at malicious compliance.

Much like one of my acquaintances, a professor, sent their students a messages that obtaining copies of their textbooks online, e.g. on Libgen (a list of URLs follows), is not officially approved.

No, rent seeking is the end game of regulations. The only reason publishers can pull this kind of stuff is copyright law and the Berne Convention; "we're just protecting copyrights!" is what gets them the political support they need to get away with it.

And who said regulations are not an inherent part of capitalism? After capitalists have acquired wealth, they'll use it to get the regulations they want.

Sure, you can imagine a society with capitalism and no regulations. But that would be a wish, not something you can bring about (or that ever occured for long).

In fact, when unregulated capitalism is left free things get even worse for the little man and the small business or upstart: they can be crushed with no regulations to protect them. People not liking this doesn't matter. The power is on the ones with the money and the connections, which would be the capitalists, not with the masses who think voting means they rule.

And if we restrict it purely to copyright laws, who said removing them only makes things better? Million creators getting paid because of copyright - authors, recording artists, session musicians, illustrators, movie crews, programmers, etc would beg to differ.

The post I responded to said "especially with minimal regulations". That's what I was responding to. I said nothing about regulations and capitalism being incompatible. Of course they're not, although capitalists love it when people think capitalism means the same thing as "free markets" and therefore regulations are opposed to capitalism. Great camouflage.

As for ordinary people's opinion not mattering, it matters because it affects what the capitalists, and more generally the people in power, can get away with. That's why capitalists like the camouflage of people confusing capitalism and free markets.

> Of course they're not, although capitalists love it when people think capitalism means the same thing as "free markets" and therefore regulations are opposed to capitalism. Great camouflage.

Why should capitalists love it when people think that regulations (which also include copyright, patent law, trademark law, ...) are opposed to capitalism?

Because there's a difference between the benefit to the whole society and the benefit to a particular person. If one person can set up things so that resources flow to him without him contributing any value in return, it's great for the person, but bad for the society. Some regulations work exactly in this way. It's great for certain people occupying profitable positions, and if it's less great for everybody else - well, sucks to be everybody else, tough luck.

"Capitalists" are just people living in the system, and some of them would seek such positions if available, and love it if they successfully occupy them. Those are the people that think it's ok to demand money from people singing "Happy Birthday to You". Why wouldn't they love it? Yes, it's not good to everybody else, but it's good for them.

Capitalists love it when people think that regulations are opposed to capitalism because then people will generally be against regulations, this allows capitalists to get away with things that make them greater profits like not disposing of waste properly or capturing markets with monopolistic practices

Because it means people think the regulations are for their (the people's) benefit, instead of being for the benefit of the capitalists, as they actually are.

Interesting you consider copyright to be a regulation rather than a definition of a property right.

To the extent that private property is an essential component of capitalism, and that intellectual property is a component of private property, your classification of copyright as a regulation rather than capitalism itself makes little sense.

> intellectual property is a component of private property

That is precisely the question that is disputed in discussions of copyright. "Intellectual property" in itself is an ambiguous term: does it mean the ideas themselves, or particular expressions of them? Copyright law says the latter: ideas themselves cannot be copyrighted (or patented), only particular expressions of them can. That is because ideas are non-rivalrous: people can give them to others without losing the use of them themselves. That takes away the justification for private property rights, namely, to avoid conflicts over who gets to use the property.

Prior to computers and the Internet, one could argue that particular copies of a particular expression of an idea, such as a book, were rivalrous: I can't both give a book to you and read it myself at the same time. But with digital copies that is no longer true. So the same logic that makes ideas themselves not private property, now pushes us towards not treating copies of digital works as private property either.

The original justification for copyright law was to encourage people to create works. But that was always a questionable claim, because nobody creates works in a vacuum. From the standpoint of creation, the Internet has made clear that many more works get created when there is free sharing of digital copies. And the Internet has also enabled other ways of paying people whose creative works you like, besides having to pay for individual copies; that's what systems like Patreon are for. So that original justification for copyright law has now lost whatever validity it once had.

The best piece of evidence for who really benefits from copyright law, though, is who is pushing hardest for draconian enforcement of it. Is that content creators, i.e., actual authors and artists and musicians, etc.? No. It's the media companies, whose business model depends on being able to, not to put too fine a point on it, exploit content creators by convincing them that working through the media companies is the only way to get them a large audience--and then siphoning off most of the profits for themselves instead of paying them back to the creators.

I agree with many of your points, but my original point still stands. Supporters of capitalism typically private property as innately good. Copyright isn’t a perversion of capitalism, nor is it a regulation that bends the shape of some pure form of capitalism, it is capitalism. What’s notable about intellectual property is the fact that it is a relatively recent concept in the history of property, so we can trace its original justifications. It is however, not all that different from other forms of property.

> It is however, not all that different from other forms of property.

As I said, this is precisely the point that is disputed in discussions of copyright law. You certainly can't just assume it as a fact. But the capitalists who are exploiting copyright law to their own benefit would certainly love it if everyone would just take it as given that "intellectual property" is private property. That's an example of the general pattern I have described elsewhere in this discussion, that capitalists want people to think regulations are for the people's benefit, instead of for the benefit of the capitalists. That is the capitalists' ideal state of regulatory capture.

I don’t see how you can’t consider this to be the case for all forms of property.

Enclosure of the commons was certainly for private benefit. There are numerous aspects of physical property ownership that we just take for granted that are not at all straightforward.

You seem to be using a “is it for the benefit of society” test to determine whether something is an intrinsic feature of capitalism. I’d posit that is not how the system is structured nor is it how it is intended to be structured. That’s not regulatory capture, that is inherent to what it is. You can’t just take out the parts you don’t like and treat them as a separate entity.

> all forms of property

The problem is that you are assuming that "intellectual property" is property. You cannot assume that.

> Enclosure of the commons was certainly for private benefit.

Enclosure of parts of the commons that are rivalrous--only one person can use that part at a time--was, yes. But as I have already said, "intellectual property" is non-rivalrous, so this argument does not apply to it.

> There are numerous aspects of physical property ownership that we just take for granted that are not at all straightforward

This is quite true; it's why we have a complex system of private property common law for physical property, and some kinds (such as real estate) have even more complexity in the law attached to them.

But "intellectual property" is not physical property, and you can't just assume that all of the law that has been developed for physical property is automatically applicable to "intellectual property" as well.

> You seem to be using a “is it for the benefit of society” test to determine whether something is an intrinsic feature of capitalism.

I am doing no such thing. Indeed, the feature of capitalism I have been describing, namely regulatory capture, is not for the benefit of society; it is a net loss to society. But it is a benefit to the capitalists who buy the regulations they want. That's why they buy them.

> That’s not regulatory capture, that is inherent to what it is.

In the sense that regulatory capture is a common end state of capitalism (where "capitalism", as I have said elsewhere in this discussion, is not the same thing as "free markets", although capitalists would love for people to think it is), yes, it is "inherent" to capitalism. That still doesn't mean it's a net benefit to society. It isn't.

> The problem is that you are assuming that "intellectual property" is property.

Intellectual property is property.

Whether or not it should be is a different question, but it factually is property.

> Intellectual property is property.

Why? Is there some natural law that gives me ownership to the meaning of the words I say? That bars you from repeating that meaning in those words?

Property is a creation of human law, and intellectual propety is a subcategory of it; natural law is a label for subjectve preferences used to give them the illusion of objectivity as a rationalization for human law, not a provable thing that exists.

You are literally inverting the facts (actual law that exists) and subjective preferences that are not facts (“natural law”).

Apply the same test to any other form of property.

What natural law gives you the right to own land?

What natural law indeed?

There isn't one. It's an arbitrary social construct. The argument that IP is property is built on a circle of quicksand.

In the case of land, at least, exclusivity of use can be an argument one could make (Only one person can physically use any one plot of it for any one particular purpose, and gosh, maybe it's in the social interest to have some set of rules for ajudicating disputes between two people who want to use it for different purposes, and one of many solutions to that question is private land ownership), but that's not even an argument that has any applicability in the IP space.

What's most interesting is that the IP commons can be freely plundered, at no cost, to build IP that is owned by someone. If we're going to treat IP as property, why does the creation of new IP not require a tax, levy, or dividend to be paid to the collective owners of the IP commons? All ideas are, after all, derivative.

You can assert that as fact, but I don't think it's actually established as fact.

> it factually is property

No, works that are copyrighted in accordance with applicable law are by law the private property of the copyright owner. To the extent that is "factual", it's only that way to the extent that we all agree to respect the relevant laws.

But in any case, "intellectual property" is a broader term than that--indeed, as it is used by the capitalists (e.g., media companies) who advocate for more and more expansive and draconian regulation in this area, it is much broader. Capitalists want to claim copyright over particular words or particular symbols. They want to claim copyright over ideas. And they invented the term "intellectual property" precisely in order to try to trade on the implicit (but invalid) analogy with physical property, which is rivalrous, whereas "intellectual property" is not.

Please provide a coherent definition of private property then, because the one you seem to be using appears quite exotic.

If you want a good quick summary of the definition I've been implicitly using (which is in fact the basis for most actual private property law and is not at all "exotic"), "private property" is any rivalrous good--i.e., any good that, by its nature, can only be used by one person at a time: one person's use precludes use by another person. (There are edge cases--for example, multiple people can ride in a car even if it's only considered the private property of one of them--but they aren't relevant to the discussion we're having here.)

Or, if you want to get more technical, "private property" is an agreement we all make with each other to assign an owner to every rivalrous good, and to respect that owner's right to control how the good is used. We do this because a society in which this agreement is made and respected will be much wealthier than a society without it.

> any good that, by its nature, can only be used by one person at a time: one person's use precludes use by another person.

> There are edge cases--for example, multiple people can ride in a car even if it's only considered the private property of one of them--but they aren't relevant to the discussion we're having here.

But that's not just edge cases. Jointly operated objects and co-habited houses make up a huge fraction of what we commonly consider to be property. I don't think you can brush this away as an edge case.

I mean, come to think it, looking at what objects currently surround me, most of them can be used by more than one person at same time.

>which is in fact the basis for most actual private property law and is not at all "exotic"

What western legal system is based is such a way that it doesn’t consider IP to be private property? I am not aware of any. The notion that such a narrow definition is the basis of most actual property law runs contrary to empirical evidence.

Copyright is explicitly not a property right. It is a a deal between the creators of a work and the public in order to benefit society. In exchange for a temporary monopoly over the work, it becomes public domain.

What you’re talking about flies in the face of the entirety of the western legal tradition.

It is explicitly a property right. Hence the phrase “intellectual property”.

This isn't quite correct. Check the history of copyright, it's really fascinating. There was a lot of debate about it in the US because of a fear that it would be interpreted as a property right.

In many ways it resembles a property right, but it is missing fundamental aspects of property rights.

What copyright actually is is a limited-time monopoly right. When it expires, the creator of the work loses that "right". It exists not for the benefit of the creators of a work, but for the benefit of the public.

Copyright is a temporary restriction on the rights of others. As a society, we deem that acceptable because it's temporary and because it encourages people to make their works publicly available, thus enriching culture and society.

If it were a property right, then it would make no sense that you lose that property at the expiration of copyright.

> In many ways it resembles a property right, but it is missing fundamental aspects of property rights.

No, its not.

> What copyright actually is is a limited-time monopoly right.

Limited time monopoly rights are property rights. A life tenancy in real property is a property right.

(Copyright lacks what some consider essetmbtial features of ownership of the subject matter of a property right, as opposed to ownership of a property right in that subject matter, but ownership of the subject of property rights is not the only kind of property right.)

You’re placing an artificial requirement on the definition in order to support your argument.

Copyright may be owned, bought, sold, transferred or otherwise discharged in the same manner that any other form of property is. Nothing about property inherently implies such claim exists in perpetuity.

Ok, I'll grant you and dragonwriter that.

I was interpreting "property right" at a different level of abstraction than you. I was thinking it was referring to the thing that is copyrighted as being the "property", not the copyright itself.

Changing my frame of reference up a level of abstraction puts us in agreement, I think.

Rent seeking? Taking books off the market is straight power over the supply of knowledge. Having to learn everything the hard way, because the good books on your topic of choice have been nerfed and/or black-holed, is a nightmare that makes rent seeking look tame.

You pop off the book supply and disconnect russian piracy websites and suddenly we only know what Amazon editors, pricey Scientific journals and extended university courses, allow us to know.

The internet is excellent for technical knowledge around STEM subjects, primarily computing... but it routinely deletes valuable information from all media types. The popular http sites are a curated garden. Half of all youtube videos from 2015 onward, have been deleted.

I don't really care about paying $20/month to access all the rare and good books. Keeping it on the map is more valuable than rent-seeking.

While I agree that is true for our current phase of capitalism, when capitalism was first conceptualized it was as an escape from rent seeking! The free market was supposed to be free from rent seeking, like the monopolies and place men of King George's day.

To me it's one of the most fascinating examples of how the wiles of human nature change concepts over time.

And just like capitalism was better than feudalism which was better than what came before it, capitalism has been inching towards its end game and we need a better system that works for all citizens rather than the few who have the capital to capture rents

Careful there; you sound almost like one of those silly German guys who moved to England in the middle of the XIX century.

Rent seeking, in the manner we see here, is a product of regulations not due to the absence of them

It seems like you agree with OP?

"Capitalism" revolves around maximizing what can be owned as capital, including by divvying up what would otherwise be the commons by creating various types of imaginary properties.

One type of capital is government-created privileges obtained through regulatory capture, that keep upstart competitors from entering a market. If you're arguing for having fewer regulations, then you're actually advocating against capitalism! Contrast with focusing on "free markets", which at least keeps the emphasis on the competition mechanic rather than the suffocating dynamic of rent seeking.

It seems to me rather, that you are using a definition of "capitalism" that is distinct from and perhaps at odds with how other people are using the term.

The definition you're using seems to be clearly a far-left, anti-capitalism interpretation which has essentially inverted goals/motivations with side-effects/externalities compared to what a pro-capitalist, market-oriented type of person would suggest.

Basically, you're suggesting that regulatory capture is a goal of "capitalism" and while most people would say that's an anti-capitalist failure of government.

Everyone agrees regulatory capture is bad, so maybe we could all work together to fix that badness regardless of abstract differences of opinion.

I agree there is a stark difference between what I'm pointing out and what most people who describe themselves as capitalist would say they're advocating. But there is always a difference between what proponents of an ideology claim in theory, and the actual dynamic of an ideology in practice.

Consider how copyright itself is strong demonstration of the distinction between markets and capitalism. When expressing anti-copyright opinions, one often gets labeled an anti-capitalist even though they're expressing a free market opinion - why is this?

Fundamentally, a free market does not have copyright - if I have series of bits A, and you have series of bits B, then in a free market we can trade copies of each. It's only by creating a privilege of imaginary property that party C can force themselves into our voluntary exchange, declaring that me and you cannot trade our series of bits without their permission. C's privilege of dictating that you and I cannot freely trade is a form of capital that has been created out of whole cloth with the deliberate economic purpose of creating an income stream - aka rent seeking. Arguing against the existence of this privilege is simultaneously anti-capitalist and pro-market.

The distinction between capitalism and markets becomes ever more important as more capitalist activity shifts from direct application to managing intrinsic problems of the natural world (eg facilitating investment in a machine that produces widgets), to the circular application of inventing new forms of intermediated rent streams. For example, the freedom-destroying trend of companies "selling" physical products while retaining control over them through software backdoors makes perfect sense from a capitalist perspective - the ongoing right to control the device is a form of capital that can be separated and retained to create a revenue stream. But from a pro-market pro-freedom perspective, the chipping away of individual autonomy in favor of centrally-owned control is abhorrent.

You have isolated yourself to only one type of capitalism, and then seemly incorrectly extracted free markets from being capitalism, when in reality in lay terms free markets is what people refer to as capitalism. The other esoteric types of capitalism are not widely known and therefore in common language should not be used in place of the more widely accepted understanding of free markets when talking about "capitalism" in colloquial conversation as we are here.

In short when having informal conversations a person referring to "capitalism" should be assumed to be talking about free market capitalism unless they indicate otherwise, Not to be assumed to be referring to corporatism, crony capitalism, mercantilism or any other types of capitalism

>One type of capital is government-created privileges obtained through regulatory capture,

Copyright was not created from regulatory capture, copyright was expanded and abused will beyond its original remit via regulatory capture

What I have said applies to anything that puts "capital" first and foremost. From my perspective, you're trying to write off the critique via no-true-Scotsman.

I agree that people want to think of free markets and capitalism as being intertwined and inseparable, but I'm pointing out how they end up being in conflict. And as capitalism continues to evolve, this conflict continues to grow.

> Copyright was not created from regulatory capture, copyright was expanded and abused will beyond its original remit via regulatory capture

Sure. And every time it was expanded, the amount of capital increased while market freedom decreased! Capitalism and free markets are not one and the same, but rather two different qualities that can end up being in conflict.

Ultimately if one wants to advocate for freedom, one needs to focus on advocating for it directly, rather than for an economic system that is increasingly in conflict with it. You can still think of economics in terms of capital (and I think it makes sense to). But the desires of capital need to be made deliberately subservient to freedom rather than vice-versa.

All Free Markets are capitalist, you can not have a free market without capital

Not all capital markets are free...

You explain to me how a free market would work with out capital

I haven't asserted that all capital is in conflict with free markets or freedom, nor that all forms of capital should be abolished. (FWIW I can't imagine how that would even be possible)

Rather I've pointed out that some forms of capital are directly at odds with freedom and free markets.

Expanding the logical progression of capitalism, we get the future presented in Continuum (imdb.com/title/tt1954347/) as well as other shows like Altered Carbon, etc.

I think renting or some other form of pay per read is a much better way of paying for books that single outright purchases.

Tolkien deserves much more of my money than the author of the cookbook I bought a Costco and never read, but with single purchase they get roughly the same amount of economic value from me.

(For the purposes of this example, Tolkien is still alive)

> Tolkien deserves much more of my money than the author of the cookbook I bought a Costco and never read, but with single purchase they get roughly the same amount of economic value from me.

I think in a thriving society it would be fine for consumers to enjoy a value surplus from the products and services they buy. Having every bit of value a consumer obtains from a product monetized by the producer is a great way to move wealth from the bottom of the economic ladder to the top; it's a society of scarcity and not abundance. How did the popular imagination go from bountiful societies like the one in Star Trek to ideas like "You will own nothing and you will be happy" where you pay rent for everything you use.

It's particularly galling that these ideas are spreading to information products, which would be freely copyable and available to everyone - a public treasure like no other - if not for artificial restrictions on such activities. I remember the "information wants to be free" attitude of hackers in the early 2000s. But now it's ok if we pay per instance for reading a book? Crazy stuff.

The real question is how did society get to a state where “you will be happy” is an evil goal that people copypaste everywhere nodding conspiratorially to each other?

“You‘ll never guess what Mrs Jones told me about Agnes’ husband“

“Go on?”

“Well, she was sitting at the table next to him in the cafe and overheard him saying he wanted to make Agnes happy!”

“No!”

“Yes! Can you believe it?”

“The bastard!”

I think the common way to read "you will own nothing and you will be happy" is not as a prediction/statement, but a command about how people should feel.

For example, if I told said "you will live naked in a ditch and you will be happy", the "you will be happy" part reads like a dictate about how you should feel about the "living in a ditch" situation. The obvious disconnect between telling people they will be paying monthly dues to a bunch of rent-seekers and that they will somehow feel happy about this situation even though it sounds, frankly, awful has the same effect.

> The real question is how did society get to a state where “you will be happy” is an evil goal that people copypaste everywhere nodding conspiratorially to each other?

I haven't noticed this at all. Where are people talking about being happy as an evil goal?

The phrase "you will own nothing and be happy" is dystopian because it's not really saying that you'll be happy. It's more like a threat: "we will monetize every aspect of your existence and you better like it".

"Tolkien deserves much more of my money than the author of the cookbook..."

Perhaps so but why?

Tolkien was educated at mainly public expense and his wherewithal and worldliness that enabled him to write his novels came from the society in which he lived.

That is, he was intimately coupled to his society without which he would not have been able to write his books. He owes society some payback for what it gave him.

Tolkien has rights that need protection but they are not exclusive morally speaking. That the law gives him full and exclusive rights is an unfortunate product of history when Victor Hugo and cronies forced the Berne Convention in the days before the reading public had any idea that it was about to be shafted.

That unfair treaty has to be made fair despite protestations from greedy publishers. If not, they will eventually lose out because every new computer technology only makes it easier to copy works. Even now it's a cinch, in 20 years it'll be so easy that if any text or video has any public exposure it'll be copied by consumers as a matter of course—copyright holders bedamed. (Think Google Glass—like tech that captures everything a human sees in high definition. If a human sees it then it will be copied automatically. Right, copyright is on the wall without major reform.)

What we are witnessing from these greedy publishing bastards are the last gasps of the old elitist copyright order. If they were smart they would realize that they need to be much more reasonable and consolatory to even survive.

> Perhaps so but why?

So that economic resources get directed towards creating books that people actually read and enjoy enough to keep reading.

At present, writers and authors are incentivised to merely sell as many copies as possible because that's how they get paid. If they were directly incentivised to create books people enjoy reading we might have more books that are enjoyable to read.

> Tolkien was educated at mainly public expense and his wherewithal and worldliness that enabled him to write his novels came from the society in which he lived.

That can be addressed by using the tax system to pay back society from his wealth, but it's a separate discussion.

> That the law gives him full and exclusive rights is an unfortunate product of history when Victor Hugo and cronies forced the Berne Convention in the days before the reading public had any idea that it was about to be shafted.

I'd also prefer a world where books were more open because I reckon the increase in creativity from millions of people modifying stories would outweigh the loss of economic incentives for original authors.

But that's not the world we live in. To the extend that hard copyrights exist that force us to pay to read we might as well structure the payments in a way that motivates the authors to write in a way that is more beneficial to us.

Fine. With copyright being in such a dysfunctional state at present something will have to give. I don't know what the final outcome will be but there's little doubt the middlemen will have a far lesser role to play in the future.

Policing copyright in its current form will become such a burden that it will force change, and with coming AI advances even publisher's editors will become redundant. Technology will make publishers much less important.

Authors ought to see the writing on the wall and start planning to deal directly with their readers. As you say, that would aid in creating books that people want to read.

My personal opinion is that authors will have more to fear from AI than copyright violations. I'm not against writers being given their fair dues but I am against unfair copyright laws.

What concerns me most is that if we're not careful we'll end up reading books and viewing videos created by AI—and I don't want that nor would author/creators. I'm defending human creators here, I don't want them replaced by machines. That's why it's more important than ever that authors and readers have a more solid and direct relationship—one that's much more than just a monetary alliance.

> Even now it's a cinch, in 20 years it'll be so easy that if any text or video has any public exposure it'll be copied by consumers as a matter of course—copyright holders bedamed. (Think Google Glass—like tech that captures everything a human sees in high definition. If a human sees it then it will be copied automatically. Right, copyright is on the wall without major reform.)

That is, until your phone apps start scanning works automatically to detect copyrighted material before allowing you to store it on their cloud-storage

Come on, cloud storage? Why bother with cloud storage when one will have pentabytes in a thumbnail-sized chip? I would never use cloud storage in a pink fit. Trust Microsoft, Google, et al with my data. Not likely.

And why use a phone and locked-in apps? I suggest you read how I use my phone now, in 20 years I'll have even more control over my data: https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=35243759

Also check my comment underneath in reply to a commentator.

You're obviously of the smartphone generation, I'm pre that so I think outside that box. In 20 years things will be very different and that doesn't necessarily mean that Big Tech will still rule the roost.

The mechanism to do this sort of already exists, in that you really love Lord of the Rings, so you watch the films, you've bought the whole series and given it away as gifts, read to your kid and she grew up to buy them, etc. while none of those streams exist for the Costco cookbook.

But even if you're on the rational consumer mindset and want to give the JRR estate an extra penny shaving per word you read, are you really comfortable with the level of intrusive monitoring of your habits this will entail? You want the publisher to know how many times you open their book, which passages you read most, what time of day, etc. to charge you appropriately? What if JRR wants you to pay extra to read about Tom Bombadil because you can't just watch the movie about him, isn't that fair if people are willing to pay?

Outright purchase has worked pretty well throughout the history of publishing. So renting would have to offer enough of an improvement over that model to make it worthwhile.

I might be ok with renting a book if more of the money went to the author. Theoretically it could work out well for everyone. A lot of cookbooks would be a great option. Rent them for a month or do for, say, $1? Cheaper access to books for a period of time, like O'Reilly's Safari for technical books.

But I don't think that's how it's going to work out if renting is the only way to get books. I think that everyone will for forced into onerous terms of the publishers get too much power.

Why exactly does a cookbook make more sense to rent than a novel? I'm very confused by this consensus in this thread.

Cookbooks if anything seem more useful to buy since they can sit in or near your kitchen and you can grab them and use them. Whereas you read a novel only every so often past the first read?

Probably depends on how you use recipes. If you prop the book up next to your work and don't want to worry about getting it messy, you'd want to buy it. If you tend to use one or two recipes per book, and copy them out and make notes and changes, you'd be happy borrowing the book for a bit.

> Tolkien deserves much more of my money than the author of the cookbook I bought a Costco and never read

You're perfectly free to send him a check for the additional portion of your money you think he's entitled to.

> with single purchase they get roughly the same amount of economic value from me.

Only if they're priced the same. They don't have to be. Tolkein could charge much more than the cookbook if he wished.

I don't see that your point is dependent on renting vs buying. It's just about pricing.

"You'll own nothing, and you'll be happy about it".

Klaus Schwab, head of the WEF, in the book "The Great Reset".

Actual context is described in this Reuters article "Fact check: The World Economic Forum does not have a stated goal to have people own nothing by 2030": https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-wef-idUSKBN2AP2...

Is this actually from the book and if so, what was the context in which it was said?

No he said it while talking about the book, but I don't think it's in the book.

> If you ask me, the publishers want to move to a "rent model" like many software companies and even some Auto makers are moving towards.

Of course they do. From the image in the article:

"This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only."

Key word being licensed. You don't OWN it.

The wealthy don't want you to own anything. They want a nation of renters so that they can continue to see revenue off of everything in perpetuity.

> That means every time you read you electronic book, you pay them a small amount.

Why not just interleave ads inside the book and monetize via standard CPM/CPC/affiliate business models?

Imagine if you could tap a single button to sign up for horse-riding lessons after you've just read about the ride of the Rohirrim. Or maybe you could tap a button to get a tasty sandwich delivered to you — in the exact moment that you're reading about Frodo and the gang surviving off lembas bread.

Especially with the advent of LLMs, it seems like in-stream advertising for classic literature (especially books that are already out of copyright) is a massive opportunity just waiting for someone to pick it up. I'm genuinely surprised it's not already being done.

That sounds awful. Were you speaking sarcastically?

I will gladly support more of our tax money going to libraries so that anyone who cares to can read books uncluttered with advertisements.

Wasn't the deletion of 1984 because some third party had sold bootleg copies of the ebook?

Deleting it from the customers devices is the wrong way to handle it, but I can genuinely see how the mistake would happen as they remove the bootleg copy from the server and then the e-readers would update and see the book doesn't exist so delet it from the device.

A dumb event, but I'm not really seeing it as evidence of the publishers desire for licensed only books, something I agree is happening.

Technically, it wasn't a bootleg. Outside the USA, Orwell is in the public domain. A public domain copy was uploaded to Amazon with 'Global' rights. People in America bought it for 99 cents. The American rights holder complained. The rights listing was changed to "the rest of the world".

Then Amazon had a problem. What to do?

They couldn't give the 99 cents from the US customers to the American publishers because it (A) belonged to the publisher outside the US and (B) the American copies were $9.99 so it wouldn't have been enough.

They could have prompted the American customers to pay the difference, then compensate the American rights holders.

They could have done nothing.

But in the end they said 'we didn't have the right to sell you this in the first place so we are taking the book back'.

Gross but similar to what happens when you change the country code for your Apple ID and things you bought disappear.

This is the "you wouldn't download a car, would you?" hot take flipped on its head. If a dealership accidentally sells you a car for less than they can get it from the manufacturer, they eat the loss. They can't go out and repossess the car. But amazon? They totally turned around to repossess your electronic book because of their own pricing mistake.

Consumer rights are still stuck in the 90s. Digital purchases are treated like some kind of special case where the vendor can do whatever they want and get away with it instead of an exchange of goods for money.

Let's not pretend this was a large dilemma for Amazon to solve. They screwed up by offering this copy for sale so they should have eaten the cost.

Instead what happened was the digital equivalent of Amazon breaking into your house during the night, removing the book from your shelf, and leaving the refund on the kitchen table on the way out.

I don't think it's similar to the Apple situation since in that example you (in theory) know you're getting a region-locked product.

>Outside the USA, Orwell is in the public domain

This happened in 2009, Orwell hit the public domain in 2021.

As you said, it was the worst response from them.

But I remember it was due to something odd, but forgot what. But the point is, they sold you the book. So if they were scammed they should eat the cost, not delete it from your device.

At the time I was getting interested in these readers, that activity turned me off every getting/using an electronic reader.

Amazon have said that in the future if this happens again they will not remove the books from customer devices.

https://mashable.com/archive/amazon-remote-delete

> The statement, from Amazon's Drew Herdener, reads:

> These books were added to our catalog using our self-service platform by a third-party who did not have the rights to the books...When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers' devices, and refunded customers....We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers' devices in these circumstances.

My Kindle is jail broken because I prefere using KOReader over Amazons own reader software. But even before it was jail broken if I ever brought books from Amazon I would use the "Download book to your computer" function and then run it though the DeDRM plugin for Calibre. https://github.com/noDRM/DeDRM_tools

That way even if Amazon decide to no longer host the book (so you can't redownload them) or go back on their word about not remotely removing content I still have a DRM Free copy of the content I can put on the book. However it is a shame we as consumers have to go though these steps, our other option is to buy content from store that do not apply DRM to the books, but that as decision that is basically forced by the publishers.

> Amazon have said that in the future if this happens again they will not remove the books from customer devices.

This isn't exactly comforting since they've since done things just as abusive, like remoting into people's devices and replacing their purchased products with different products.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/23/03/04/0521244/roald-dahl-e...

I wouldn't word it as harshly as "remoting into customers devices" simply because we are used to auto updates, The publisher updated the title on the store, kindles then downloaded the updated title.

If an app dev did the same, completely rework their app into a completely new product and allow auto update replace the app installed on users devices, would you lay the blame on Google/Apple or on the publisher?

IMO its not a black and white case and I would say neither party are completely in the clear, more an assignment of blame, but I would put more blame on the publisher than on Amazon, but that doesn't mean Amazon are in the clear either. Amazon should have either a) required the publisher to issue the new book under a new ASIN b) give the owner of the book the ability to choose which revision they would like to read.

I think we are missing the forest the trees. The issue is not that they took action. The issue is that this action was even possible and an option to begin with.

If there was ever an argument for an analog library, this is it.

You and all the current replies are focusing on the wrong problem.

Amazon should not be able to retract a book from your device. Why they did it or whether or not it was a good response aren't relevant. It should be impossible.

Yes, Amazon, in 2009:

<https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106989...>

<https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...>

Hm. I paid 'rent' to my local library for books - a fee for the membership card. I know, Amazon likely will charge more. But it's not unprecedented.

How much does it cost you, and where are you located? It's free at our local libraries in Michigan. We have a property tax millage that provides most of the library budget.

Is it anywhere close to the cost of providing the services your library provides, or a nominal fee to print the card?

That sucks, public library memberships should be free.

> If you ask me, the publishers want to move to a "rent model" like many software companies and even some Auto makers are moving towards.

Everyone wants to move to a "rent" model. It's the easiest way to fleece the largest number of people.

It's especially sad because community libraries are one of the few public spaces left in America. Sure, you can hang out at a coffee shop or a bar, but those spaces require you to buy a product just to exist in them.

Just another example of capitalism destroying resources that make us a civilization (instead of just a bundle of subscriptions).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com