“Most notorious” illegal shadow library (LibGen) sued by textbook publishers | Hacker News Reader

“Most notorious” illegal shadow library (LibGen) sued by textbook publishers

arstechnica.com

166 pointsJellyBeanThief113 comments

> "The Libgen sites deprive plaintiffs and their authors of income from their creative works, devalue the textbook market and plaintiffs’ works, and may cause plaintiffs to cease publishing certain works."

This line was clearly not written for anyone who's ever been through college. I, for one, would love to see the textbook market devalued. The abusive practices employed by these publishers are thoroughly reprehensible.

When I was in college my physics professor had us use a Newtonian physics textbook published by Pearson (one of the plaintiffs) that was then in its 14th edition. He asked us to buy the 13th instead because it was affordable ($30 instead of $200), and he provided question mappings to the 12th edition, since the only thing that changed from the 12th to the 13th was the order of the questions.

If Pearson is really so worried about the textbook market becoming devalued, they should consider letting up on their abuse of college students. It's pretty much inevitable that faced with five $200 textbooks students are going to look for alternatives that don't involve paying Pearson what they think they are owed.

For decades, Pearson failed to invest and innovate in their market segment. Let them pay the market price -- It's only fair.

Their new trick is online assignments with automatic grading. The access code for the assignment system will be something like $230 alone, or $250 bundled with the textbook. Departments save a few bucks on grading and pass on the costs to the students. It's a pretty gross business model.

Departments need to be helped to account by the student body. If your pricing is correct, and we are talking about a major 1st year class with 250 people, that's $57,500 for the privilege of issuing and marking assignments per session. For it to be saleable to departments I bet most assignments are already in the system and you just check off which one to issue.

It's academic laziness at the expense of the students. The uni makes more money by saving on the cost of tutors to mark assignments in those bulk classes whilst the students are charged more. Its a gross financial abrogation of responsibility for the welfare of their students.

> For it to be saleable to departments I bet most assignments are already in the system and you just check off which one to issue.

Yeah, think of Khan Academy but paid.

The pricing I've seen so far in my classes (1 math textbook, 1 history textbook) is 100ish per semester for each textbook's accompanying service, 180ish for a yearly pass (eg. if you take 2+ math classes in consecutive semesters).

> and may cause plaintiffs to cease publishing certain works

Okay, go on, stop publishing these. If a book is such nobody would voluntarily buy for a reasonable price DRM-free e.g. on Gumroad, it probably isn't worth existing.

I doubt many people pirate content instead of buying it just because they can. People generally pirate what they can't afford easily enough and what they aren't excited about nearly enough to pay for (also whatever comes in ugly locked-in formats so a pirated version means better UX). In both cases they wouldn't be paying even if they couldn't pirate so there is no actual lost profit here. Except in cases when someone could unfairly force people to pay unreasonable prices which is the usual case with textbooks.

While I completely agree with what you said, you shouldn't be surprised that these incumbents project themselves as a savior doing the masses a favor or as being some sort of victims. It's a pattern seen across the board with predatory companies - be it publishers, journals, hardware manufacturers, automakers, telecom.... The only unfortunate part is that politicians and the judiciary often buy into these posturing.

Is there some way to donate money to LibGen? Anyone who is hurting Pearson is a friend of college students.

> Publishers suing include Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education.

There was a time when I would buy books without being able to review all of the content. That stopped several years ago after buying two textbooks (one from McGraw Hill, another Pearson) that were so awful I returned them. They were both full of absolutely horrid page layouts with huge margins full of irrelevant information, just absolute garbage. I don't think they are losing money because their content is being distributed for free, but rather it just has little to no value and is not worth investment.

The textbook is bigger, so it must be better, right?

Have to rejigger that white space so that schools can require a new version the next year rather than people using used text books.

Publishers work so hard to impose the limitations of paper on digital libraries.

I realize they're doing it to preserve their business model, but it shouldn't be at the expense of destroying a modern library of alexandria. The benefit to humanity of a global digital library is too great.

Sounds like the "Head First" series of books, which have such scattered layouts they make a Japanese newspaper look sane.

This, so much this.

And these have been the two main publishers I've had to deal with. And all the course content is structured around their organizational modality because the professors just dump their slide decks in lecture, except naturally much of the nuance is lost so, necessarily, one must have the book. However, I won't pay for it because I'm not going to support rent seeking that is totally degenerate, but I do get it free.

And even overlooking the dreadful formatting, the writing is often bad. This was especially true if the mathematics textbooks I've had to deal with.

> This was especially true if the mathematics textbooks I've had to deal with.

I shudder to think of how many people have struggled with math and written themselves off as mathematicians without ever thinking that maybe some of the blame didn't rest with them.

LibGen is amazing. Used it throughout college and saved so much money, I would use it again without question. My favorite part about it (aside from being free) is that the experience through LibGen is somehow superior to the legitimate $200-$300 alternative of purchasing the textbook and a DRM-riddled CD/PDF. You just download a lightweight 10MB PDF you can carry around on your USB drive, or view on your personal Dropbox!

There was a quote by Marcin Iwiński from CD Projekt, something to the effect of "if the guy who pirates your game gets a better experience than the guy who bought your game legally, there is something seriously wrong."

> Marcin Iwiński from CD Projekt

CDPR essentially started up as an English -> Polish localisation company before it first released The Witcher. A lot of that localisation and lack of support from official (Western) publishers meant that they had to resort to a bit of piracy here and there.

Ergo 'CD' Projekt.

The word "shadow library" was dropped quite a few times in this. I hate how terminology like this is used to frame discussions in favor of the publishers. At the end of the day, this is just a simple matter of exchanging information over the internet, which should be free.

It's like calling file-sharing "piracy".

A guy with a PhD in marketing made a pretty penny off that one.

Bullshit is so common now. We need to take a stand against it.

According to wikipedia, the usage dates back centuries.

Wikipedia refers to this 1736 dictionary page: https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_030pPyvwS9MC/page/n620/mo...

No marketing PhDs involved, but it probably had the same intention behind it: equating copyright infringement with horrific lawless violence and theft to try to turn people against it.

Since pirates were routinely hanged in the 18th century, presumably there was a desire to apply the same punishment for copyright infringement.

I assumed the same thing as you, but I recently was made aware that the term had already been in circulation for centuries to refer to copyright violation. 1668 is the earliest entry in my OED for this usage:

> 1668 J. Hancock Brooks String of Pearls (Notice at end), Some dishonest Booksellers, called Land-Pirats, who make it their practice to steal Impressions of other mens Copies...

Next up on HN:

Physical theft is simply movement of atoms from one position to another position.

In file sharing, the atoms largely stay put, though some electrons and photons might move a bit.

Therefore, not theft. ;-)

If you steal baryons, it’s “theft”. If you steal leptons, it’s “piracy”. Pretty simple, really.

The electrons barely move, so you're not stealing leptons. Also, generally filesharing involves someone freely giving you copies of files, so you're not stealing from them in any case.

It's more like the "I consent, I consent, I don't" meme.

Not only that, but my joke fails when it comes to stringing up a wire alongside a high-voltage power line. (Like that urban legend about the farmer who got "free" energy by stringing the wire along his fence)

Not only is our farmer not taking the actual leptons from the power line, but he's actually stealing something from the EM field. Our farmer only has claim to his wheat field, Edison owns the EM field.

I guess particle classification is completely irrelevant to property law.

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/3520/is-it-poss...

If you're just going to comment with a strawman, you probably shouldn't have commented at all.

That reminds me of words like 'piracy' and 'jaywalking' - words coined by industries with vested interests in delegitimizing, demonizing and eventually outlawing perfectly normal practices. There should be a catalog of such words with attribution to the companies that made it. Similarly, there should be similar sinister sounding names for exploitative practices that industries follow - say 'mugging' for price gouging by publishers.

Do you pay for computer hardware and accessories? Do you pay for ISP for an internet connection? Do you pay Microsoft for Windows? Do you pay for a dropbox account? Do you pay for movies and digital media? Do you pay for books?

Why are books (and probably movies) the only one you don't pay for?

Information is not free, information requires 24/7 elecricity to be pumped through thousands of internet connected computers, manned by thousands of engineers keeping the whole thing working. The information requires thousands of writers/coders to be created.

It is a peak luxury to sit back in a Herman Miller Aeron chair in a tech company, sipping lattes and say something like 'information should be free' while millions of people are working to keep the whole charade that 10101 (binary code rising out of electricity) actually means something legible to human eyeballs at all.

Writers are just another brick in the wall, another link in the chain. Pay them like we pay everything else, that fits.

My ISP isn't funded by my taxpayer dollars and does not use said money to squat materials that it had no hand in creating. Research publishers do exactly this, while paying researchers a pittance.

I am also not convinced that this is harmful to the field whatsoever, when it has done no damage to art, music, film or video games.

They're different because the MPAA and big book publishers are actively abusing the system and their customers to fatten their bottom lines.

I gladly pay authors and creators every chance I get, but it's getting to the point where it's ethically questionable to pay a big publisher, movie studio, or streaming provider.

The 21st century: the time of "notorious illegal shadow" libraries, full of copyrighted documentation of publicly funded research.

Textbooks aren't publicly funded research. And writing a brief summary of publcly funded research is actually new content.

It's a massive stretch trying to tie publicly funded research to this.

Sci-Hub is more like the library of publicly funded research.

And of course it is similarly pursued.

Sure, but at least the arguments there have more merit. Trying to use the same arguments for textbooks falls flat.

Researchers often write book chapters in the same day along side their research papers, so it's not like these arethat different. Effectively they're similar to review articles. Still mostly publicly funded.

If someone write about a topic and produces new content, that is not the same as publishing publicly funded research.

People wouldn't read review articles otherwise.

Look, I know what copyright law says and I know that LibGen is probably and actually illegal and that authors are entitled to payment and all that stuff. Heck I come from a family of authors so I get it.

But man, can you imagine being the guy quoted in that article calling an open library - whose only goal is to spread knowledge - a "thieves' den" of illegal books"? Talk about being on the wrong side of enlightenment.

I'm pretty sure authors would get a better deal if they cut off these middlemen. I always buy directly from the author if I can. Not only is it cheaper when that option is available, but the authors often take a pro-reader stance - like no DRM. There are a few small scale publishers like leanpub that do something similar. The exploitative practices in the publishing can stop if both authors and readers take a proactive stance in it.

A lot of the authors get close to nothing. I had a professor who wrote the text book used for the course. He said that he didn't care if people pirated it, because he got something like $1.5 per sale. We could just buy him a beer if we wanted.

Was thinking the same thing. If you ever start to doubt who's on the right side of this and who... isn't, meditate on the phrase "illegal library". For me, it's right up there with "illegal hospital".

It’s impossible to even get a sense of a textbook’s content from the so-called “previews” that you find on Amazon, Google Books, and the publisher’s’ websites. I prefer print, so I’ll happily pay if the content is good, but just letting me see the preface, contents, index and maybe a few pages of chapter 1 isn’t enough for me to discern that. Libgen at least lets me see what I might be getting.

Libgen is also great for books that are long out of print, and the authors long dead. It’s a crime against humanity that these works are locked up by our archaic copyright laws, for things that have long since ceased to be remotely profitable for the publisher.

No sympathy for textbook publishers at all.

Any sympathy for authors?

You're right, we need to think of the authors and destroy public libraries, those leeches

IIRC one CS/EE textbook author (Dave Patterson I think) said he made more money selling a $9.99 self-published Kindle textbook on Amazon (at 70% royalty for ebooks under $10) than he did from a full-priced hardcover (currently $77) through a traditional publisher (Morgan Kaufman presumably.)

Uh...

So? What does this information tell us about LibGen case? The author could've just released the book free online and "free the information"(like what LibGen does, according to HN comments). However he chose to self-publish on Amazon at $9.99.

There must be some reason, right? Perhaps the author actually desires monetary compensation more than he desires to set his information free? A very devilish idea, I know.

> So? What does this information tell us about LibGen case?

It's pretty clear: that publishers do not fairly compensate authors.

And uploading their works on LibGen do. Got it.

If you have to put words in my mouth, could you at least try to make them good?

The correct way to read your the parent comment of your original comment in this thread is: Pirating a self-published book hurts authors far more than pirating books sold by a publisher. Because publishers pay pittances to authors.

Tons. All they need to do is give me a way to pay them directly. Venmo or PayPal would be great.

Pretty much this. I'd happily pay the author $7 for a PDF rather than $70 for a DRM-encumbered Kindle ebook (or $31 to "rent" it for a term.)

It's frustrating to me that if this journalist was writing about what e.g. Donald Trump said, they would feel morally compelled to do a bunch of fact checking, so that they can also print that the stuff he said is wrong and bad. But when they write this, they just copy and paste all the shit the publishers write about how libgen is a "thieves' den" and "massively illegal" and that companies should do the "right thing" to shut down the "serious harm." Zero push back, zero interrogation.

It would be nice to at least have a sentence in there like, you know, "Conversely, Professor Joe Schmoe, who uses pirate libraries daily in the course of his work researching cures for sick puppies, says that it's good that people can download textbooks and read them, and hopes that the publishers are unable to destroy people's ability to do so."

This seems to be common in contemporary journalism, most notoriously in "crime reporting" that is often just rewritten press releases from the police. Trump is an interesting point of comparison; my recollection is that it took years for mainstream outlets to treat his statements with skepticism. There was a period where calling his bald-faced lies "lies" was a hotly-contested ethical issue.

Unfortunately, journalism is not free of bias towards the particular incentives that the writers, editors, and publishers are subject to.

What good do they think this will do? Literally thousands of people have backups of the whole database and content, there's an uncountable number of mirrors and torrents are widely available. And as the article says, LibGen operators are basically untraceable and don't exist outside of the Internet.

The age when criminals wear suits and are empowered by the law, while the few good guys left have to hide in the catacombs.

It's a bit of a doomer mentality but it's hard not to agree with you sometimes. Welcome to reality, deposit coins to retain your oxygen supply.

Do you want to keep living? Better get ready to pay pay pay. If you don't want to die now, you will soon.

Do you want to die? Ok, now that's perfect. The street is right there, just sit on it and beg and someone will give you your hotshot shortly. No need to pay, free to all, first come first served.

You're not exactly wrong since living requires air, air requires space, and space is rented.

Same for food, health care, etc.

I recently decided to go take some classes at the local college and I honestly can't fathom why the large publishers listed in the article even care anymore. The days where downloading the book mean you can skip the publisher seem to be largely disappearing with the subscription also including coursework that integrates into the lesson plans themselves.

I use LibGen to download all of my textbooks but not because the publishers get anything less, it just enables me to actually have a usable form of the book to read and search though. Even if they can manage to make it hard enough to stop that, there is still no actual gain for them out of it.

Calling it a notorious illegal shadow library makes it sound a hell of a lot cooler than how I put it though.

> the subscription also including coursework that integrates into the lesson plans themselves

Mandatory publisher-licensed courseware is the ultimate DRM, and it's an abusive scam.

Instructors, please do not yield to this temptation.

idk i was able to libgen my way through a college physics degree not so far in the past

Libgen has done more for learning, education, and research than these textbook publishers have ever done.

we must beg our vampire overlords for fairer living conditions

Congress needs to address the textbook oligopoly.

Seems to me like Libgen is "addressing" it better than Congress will, and at lower cost.

In the field I work there's the practice in Spanish language publishers of publishing a print run of a certain amount of copies, and then let it fall out of print with no reprints whatsoever. And no e-book formats. Want to purchase a copy? Sorry, no luck. Not even print-on-demand for ya.

Or, you want to read your ebook in Linux, but the publisher puts DRM on it with a stupid Digital Editions which forces you to install hostile software with a crappy UI on Windows for the privilege of reading what you have already purchased.

I'd say go libgen, go ahead!!

For such cases, libgen is a godsend.

Other than freemium/marketing tiers, are there examples of payment being decoupled from distribution?

One HN example was the Rails Tutorial. A successful programming book only earns low five figures. The early versions of Rails Tutorial, where most of the content was free to read online without registration, earned mid six figures in revenue from paid ebooks (same content as the public material) and bonus videos. Looks like the most recent version is subscription-only.

Hi all. I would like your help with an ethics problem.

I run a site called The Nose, a safe haven for AI training data. It operates overseas in a region out of reach of DMCAs. (Past info: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37512147)

This was necessary because I felt it was unacceptable for entire datasets to be forced offline by one lawyer.

The ethical problem is that I'm sympathetic with people who want to remove their content from AI training data.

I received an email from the Danish Rights Alliance about Books3: https://pastebin.com/6qw3yMWZ

They point out that this is illegal in Denmark and elsewhere, and threaten to ban thenose.cc from Denmark.

Obviously, the threats are meaningless. But I'm interested in your views on whether we should comply with the request by removing the specific titles they list.

I was thinking of saying "If you say 'please', I will remove the listed titles." There are 109 entries, so it wouldn't be too much hassle to just remove those from the tarball, and it would be amusing to force a lawyer to ask nicely.

For now, I asked for a complete list of the full filenames they want to be removed, along with proof that they represent the listed rightsholders.

I'm more interested in how you feel. It seems reasonable to let people opt out of training. We could formalize this process by setting up a way to do this. We could also just ignore takedown demands.

What do you think?

One other question: Is there legal basis in Denmark for asking for proof that they control the copyright for the listed works? DMCAs operate on "good-faith belief, under penalty of perjury" but in international situations it becomes trickier.

If anyone knows of a Danish lawyer I could consult with, or someone versed in international affairs, please let me know. (Or if you care to contribute funding. Hosting costs around $140/mo right now, which isn't free, but paying for consultation is costlier.)

If you're worried about DMCA, you should comply immediately. If you're not obligated to comply with DMCA, why do bother with such question? If there's no process set by law, set yours yourself.

By "overseas" and "outside the reach of DMCA", be careful how you draw the lines. Did you incorporate overseas? How are you separating you personally from your corporation? If you are based in a country that obligates you to follow DMCA and if your corporation is nothing but paper and you're the only person involved, a judge might disconsider the corporation as a mere way for you to escape your local jurisdictional obligations.

We're not worried. Our operation is anonymous, and as long as we don't slip up, we'll be fine. Though saying "don't slip up" is very "draw the rest of the owl"; it's most of the work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37346620

But we'd like to do the right thing ethically, which is hard to figure out.

Hypothetically, if you were going to set up a process for yourself outside of the law, what criteria would you use?

Disconsidering the law, I'd use the books to train AI. I could use it to train myself, right? What's wrong with training a machine

But if you're distributing the contents of these books, that's another story. You're pirating, not training AIs. It didn't end up well for the guys behind The Pirate Bay, unfortunately. They can find you. If they can't bust you for copyright infringement, they'll just make stuff up until they put you in jail. Especially if you offend their personalities.

Be careful!..

I don't think (read: about 99% sure) that DMCA safe harbor applies to someone serving a repository that they themselves have compiled so there's no sense in a rights holder using that process. They can ask with varying levels of niceness and/or sue.

What is the nature of the data in question?

Is it related to people, businesses, facts, creative works?

How was this data created and how did you have access to it?

As far as I can tell, Books3 seems to be training data for language models. I'm not sure how it was created, but it contains a lot of books. I got it by torrenting The Pile after it was forced offline by the Danes.

They're asking to remove 109 books from the dataset, which I can do. But I'm not sure whether to. Once you set aside the question of law, it becomes a matter of ethics, and these questions aren't so easy.

I wouldn't set the law aside. Do philosophy over the ethics if you want, but only after you are sure to have the legal side covered, because this one can ruin your finances and your life in general.

Unless you're based and incorporated in Iran, Iraq or North Korea, your country has signed the Berne Convention and has implemented in law some level of copyright protection that almost certainly makes the distribution of those books illegal.

If you're not taking very careful technical and legal measures to remain anonymous, you can get in serious legal trouble for breaking the law.

What is the upside for you? Companies like Uber, Google, etc break the law all the time. But they profit billions from that and then pay millions in fines and lawyers. What's your game? Are you profiting enough to make sense - financially-wise - to break the law?

Last but not least, I wouldn't play with lawyers' personalities trying to make them "please" you. Respect them, otherwise, they'll do whatever they can to make you regret it. And believe me, they can do a lot against you. These people are evil. Don't cross their paths.

> What's your game? Are you profiting enough to make sense - financially-wise - to break the law?

Not at all. Hosting costs $130/mo, and I feel the sting each month. I'm not sure we'll even get enough donations to cover that, let alone have some kind of profit motive. But we wouldn't want to profit off the works anyway, or else we'd be no better than the corporations.

My game is to help people like you be able to train your own models. If I don't help you, who will? Companies will have the final say in what you're allowed to do on your own hardware, because they control the data. No data, no training.

The hard part is to balance this with doing the right thing. I'd like to figure out the right thing from first principles and by asking thoughtful people like you, rather than from fear of consequences.

As for consequences, we're being careful enough that it seems worth the risk. (You can read more about our precautions at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37346620.) But I agree that staying out of jail is preferable to being in one.

Just do the right thing. Put yourself in the other party's shoes and consider how you'd feel about approaching this from their side.

Textbook publishers aren't improving their offerings with each iteration. They re-release the same shit with a different cover and charge schools (and taxpayers) a premium for this "service." In some cases, the content they republish was already paid for with taxpayer money. Their business model is exploitative on every level. Fuck them.

A fiction author puts effort into a work of art. They're not forcing sales or doing anything shady; they're just someone trying to make a living selling copies of their art. Respect that and don't play games with them, unless they can't be civil.

This is an excellent point. Thanks. Do you mind if I quote your comment in our official policies?

It's interesting because libgen also provides most fiction titles, but everyone is rooting for them.

For example, one of the books they want taken offline is from 1954, republished in 2008. So in this case they operate closer to the textbook model than the author model.

Thanks; go for it :)

I can't speak to libgen's current fiction policy. Just be cognizant of the human element.

Your last point is good; I meant to add something about dead authors too. Fuck estates for that very reason. Lazy-ass kids should write their own damn novel.

This is ridiculous take.

Textbooks aren't publishing what "was already paid for with taxpayer money". By that same logic if I write a book that summarizes all the scientific research in a certain area, then I don't deserve copyright. That makes no sense.

Writing a textbook is no different than writing a piece of fiction. It takes actual work to do, and it's original content.

And if you don't want to buy the latest edition for your class blame the professor. Most of them are too lazy to actually use older editions and save student hundreds of dollars.

> What do you think?

Suspect this will be unpopular, but..

Information wants (and deserves) to be free. People make sophisticated and convincing arguments for incentivizing creation, they resonate with me but ultimately I just do not agree with them.

I think projects like yours are on the right side of history, but it will take a long while before we collectively agree.

Your ethical dilemma hinges on whether or not you agree with the above.

Could you elaborate a little more on how you came to this belief? I'm interested in the process of deciding whether to agree or disagree. A good way to get better at that is to get perspectives from thoughtful people.

People naturally share useful information and this collaboration is the basis of all human achievement and the mechanism by which human society evolves.

Putting artificial obstacles in the way of sharing useful information is an act against progress and society itself.

For my part im not an absolutist in this (not all information) but i enthusiastically support zlib and libgen because keeping books and papers from those who cant afford it (half the people on the planet!) is, in my view, extremely antisocial.

My take: copyright as a general concept was and is vital to the well-being of a creative society. But:

(a) Copyright law is so badly thought-out that I don't feel bad about breaking it; and

(b) What's happening in ML is nothing less than the next stage in human intellectual evolution, after thousands of years of relative stasis. It will prove far more important than copyright in the long run, and if a choice is forced the path is clear.

I don't have much use for the Roko's Basilisk argument, but I'm loath to take any action that might either hold back progress in this field, or that might make it possible for the technology to be captured and owned by powerful commercial interests. It will be humans, and not machines, who curse us in the future for allowing archaic values and corrupt copyright laws to slow progress down... or for allowing Facebook and Microsoft to control it.

TL,DR: party on.

I offer some insight from Thomas Jefferson, as much of my own thinking on the topic over time has converged with him, and he is, in my opinion, the superior wordsmith of the two of us.

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/172970

>Jefferson’s cleanest expression of his views on patents came in a weighty letter to Isaac McPherson (13 Aug. 1813) about Oliver Evan’s proposed elevator patent—a string of buckets fixed on a leather strap, for drawing up water. Is Evans’ machine his own, “his invention,” or do others have right of usage? Jefferson wasc oncerned with the machine itself, not its usage. If one person, for instance, received a patent for a knife that points pens, another could not receive a patent for the same knife for pointing pencils.

>Jefferson begins by noting he has seen similar contraptions used by numerous others—“I have used this machine for sowing Benni seed also” and intends to have other bands of buckets in use for corn and wheat—and even notes that such an elevator was in use in Ancient Egypt. He sums, “There is nothing new in these elevators but being strung together on a strap of leather.” If Evans is to be credited with anything new, “it can only extend to the strap,” yet even the leather strap was used similarly by a certain Mr. Martin of Caroline County, Virginia. There is, Jefferson is clear, nothing original in Evans’ machine.

>Jefferson, however, had more to say: many believe that “inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions,” which is “inheritable to their heirs.” Yet it “would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors.”

>Why? “Whatever, fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it.” Yet when he relinquishes occupation, he relinquishes ownership. It would be strange to think that a person acquiring ownership of some property, thus, has a natural right to it. That would mean that no one has a right to the property after he perishes, and even more absurdly, that no one had a right to that property prior to him having acquired the land. “Stable ownership is the gift of social law,” and not of nature. The argument applies straightforwardly to ideas. Jefferson sums, “It would be curious then,” adds Jefferson, “if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property.” The argument for patenting ideas by appealing to nature is untenable.

>Jefferson still has more to say. The analogy has its flaws. Ideas are singular. If there is anything that nature has made “less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea.” Each person possesses exclusively any idea so long as it is unshared. Once shared, it belongs to everyone.

>Moreover, an idea shared is fully possessed by all who entertain it. “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” The same cannot be said for property shared. It is that power of an idea, to be shared without lessening its density, which makes it a special gift of nature for “the moral and mutual instruction of man.” He sums, “Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”

While I understand he is not looked upon quite as favorably by many nowadays, as to the sense previously quoted, I hold vehemently he has the incontrovertible right of it, and that that which we endure nowadays as being "Intellectual Property" and the framework of legalisms around it, is an aberrant perversion of the right order of things. As himan beings, we are finite, transient creatures. In our conducting of business wherein we have provided to men (or people if you prefer) the benefit of intellectual property, we have also created non-people (legal fictions) that are nevertheless granted the benefit of holding said Intellectual property. These fictions do not die as men do, and benefit greatly, and in ways that are detrimental to the transmission of hard won experience between generations, and furthermore, perpetuates the greatest inequality of all of our time; that in a period wherein the replication of information is free, we still bind others to be ignorant that some that, if not through the virtuous action of innovating, then through acts of business; lay claim to the fruits of the innovators virtue; holding it over a fire, or throwing it in a vault, and decreeing "Humanity, thou shalt not know til my tithe is satisfied.".

In the short time we all have; deep down, I believe it is the right of the thing that all should be spread as far and wide as cans be that the seeds of ideas may find fertile soil in the minds of others in which to bloom, to being about a richer harvest for all.

Apologize for the wall of text. You asked though.

This is exactly what I was hoping for. Thanks.

I wish there was some way for us to keep in touch. There are a few things I was hoping for some thoughts on, and most of the people here don't have emails in their profiles.

salaw4t@ 'at' gmail 'dot' com

'Least until I'm done fighting with my ISP over getting a static IP so my damned email server won't get ignored out of hand by everyone because I'm in a residential dynamic IP block.

Understand why they do it, but Gawd... so annoying.

Just an opinion: "I think this data set is valuable, and I want to keep it available for use in free countries. After some thought, I think the best solution is the one you propose: go ahead and ban me in Denmark."

Shorter version: "Your move, asshole."

But that's just me, and it's easy to talk big when it's not your neck on the line. So I reckon you should go with what you think; you're the one in the firing line if they figure out how to come after you.

Make those files torrents and I’ll make sure your data will transcend into the unenforceable infinities of the internet.

The sense of entitlement in some of this discussion is quite alarming.

If I'm a writer of fiction, you are not automatically entitled to my novel, into which I expended an enormous amount of effort and time. You're expected to pay a fair price for it. If you demand "free" entertainment, write it yourself!

If I'm a textbook author, "information" does not "want to be free". There's a huge distinction between knowledge and information. Knowledge is "out there"; you're free to collect it by yourself. Information is my interpretation of that knowledge, structured and packaged into a book. Information is not free. You are not entitled to the product of my labor - pay fairly for it, please!

Note this this post is not about publishers, but authors: the originators of creative thought and structured information. You do not have a right to that work without a fair exchange.

If LibGen only shares public-funded research papers maybe it deserves the praise (still illegal, obviously). But that's not how LibGen works. Not at all.

HN just really hates copyright.

There is a deep irony that most technology is built on achievements by Newton, Babbage, ect, ect. Many scientists and authors who depended on universities, authorship and royalties for their bread and butter.

And now that they've sowed the seed of computing, we want to turn around and destroy the very methods and media they used to create it.

Isaac Newton alive today, couldn't make a penny for his discovery of calculus through 15yrs of work. All the money and women would go to ChatGPT or Wikipedia or whatever research instituition technically owns his work.

It's obvious that there are few new ideas, real revolutions and conceptual improvements happening. It's because we killed off the incentive to work on a problem for a really long time. Piracy destroys, that's all it does.

The internet could have been a tool for emancipation, but it became a tool for mass thievery. And people have the gall to defend it, as if Google and Netfix or ChatGPT make up for the death of studying as a universal kind of progress.

Put me back to sleep. We wasted our computing revolution relacing the old media with faster, more ambigious versions of the old ones.

Information has been freely accessible and infinitely copiable for some decades now, and that has done far more social good than 'authors'. Authors should get with the times instead of shacking up with cartels who absurdly overprice books whilst paying them a pittance.

No, the ability for an author to self-publish is the greater social good.

You're belittling the work an author (without quote marks) must do to make knowledge accessible. You are not entitled to that effort, regardless of how easy it is to copy the end product.

This is the Tragedy of the Commons. The solution is simple: pay for it, or lose it.

I'm belittling it because it's obviously wrong. Every other field has survived digital piracy just fine, and the benefits of book piracy go weeeeeeeeeelll beyond short term entertainment. Like being able to educate yourself on any topic irrespective of your wealth.

Beyond that, thirty years of digital piracy have had a negligible effect on the industry as a whole, as with all other industries.

It is definitely not "small authors" pushing to close off what might be some of the greatest public sources of human knowledge in history, it's overwhelmingly the publishers, as they have catastrophized in every other field too.

Musicians have emphatically not survived digital piracy. But at least they have another avenue for possibly generating income: live performance.

Authors? Who goes to a live reading?

Lastly, you will not benefit from book piracy if you destroy an author's ability to survive by writing books. That's why I wrote: Tragedy of the Commons. I was careful to write about authors, not publishers. Pirating a self-published author is ethically wrong.

In a free market for books, the publisher sets a price and then the buyer compares that price with other options and makes a choice. They can choose to buy it new, buy it used, buy a substitute, or even not to buy any book at all. In this situation, piracy is absolutely unethical.

Textbooks are not a free market. The person making the decision in the textbook market is not the person whose finances are at stake. The student is often left with only two choices: buy it new or buy it used.

Knowing that they are very close to having a completely captive customer base, textbook publishers do everything they can to make "buy it used" no longer an option either. As soon the used price drops low enough that people stop buying it new, rather than lowering prices they shuffle the problems and trot out a new edition. No extra work was done by the author to merit this perpetual $200 price tag.

In this situation, I can hardly begrudge college students who try to find an affordable option to get out of this scam, even if it's illegal. The textbook industry broke the social contract, so our ethical obligations to them are nullified.

I agree!

I'm disgusted with authors who sign up to this.

There are alternatives (such as self-publishing) that would hugely benefit the creators.

But, even more important is integrity. New editions only when necessary. Fairly priced. The software industry introduced the concept of 'upgrades' - that's equally possible in publishing now; no excuses.

I see little difference between LibGen and a public library.

And as we all know, and have known for millennia, the public library benefits us hugely.

These publishers see public libraries the same way they see libgen. They would have called them illegal and shut them down if libraries weren't an established and reputed public institution. They will still try to delegitimize them over time. All the more a reason for us to not let them start with libgen.

for the same reason why outright banning 'under the table' parts of an economy would actually destroy that economy, there's a lot of good that having these free books accessible directly accounts for

the publishers who want to destroy this are essentially forcing a slowdown of information transfer and, ironically, would devalue these books in general

i wouldn't buy anything that i can't preview because i've seen too much garbage that i know isn't worth paying for, especially coming from elselvier

I can't help but wonder if unlicensed copies of Windows and Office helped cement Microsoft's dominance.

Maybe Linux/FOSS advocates should advocate for better and more restrictive DRM. ;-)

There are two things that helped cement Windows and Office. First was their dominance among OEMs. They were either bundled with the hardware, or the hardware had drivers only for Windows. The second was that the alternatives weren't as good at the time. It's much easier to get Linux working these days. It's more user friendly too. But that wasn't the case two decades ago.

On the other hand, the conveniences of non-DRM ebooks, open formats like epub and the whole free software ecosystem is way beyond anything that the proprietary DRM-encumbered solutions have to offer. At least for me, that's enough to not even consider buying ebooks with DRM. I don't know why anyone would prefer a stricter version of the dystopia we are in.

"Won't someone PLEASE think of the money?"

Do state universities have the right to create agreements with the big publishers, the faculty, and the university book stores to essentially lock the knowledge behind a private paywall?

Anything taught in a state university should be open-source, full stop.

yikes we got some pitchforks in this comment section

I prefer torches. Cleanse it with fire!

Anybody here without a pitchfork here is someone who hasn't gone to a university, a college or self-taught.

I guess US university? I barely needed LibGen during my undergrad. Either lecture notes, free resources only, or physical library were sufficient most of the time. Definitely no "we use edition X, you have to buy it" bullshit.

As a grad student I find that many relevant books (e.g., Springer) are available via uni subscription, or some pre-print version is available for free.

Libgen is useful and textbook publishers are nuts, but educational organizations are enabling them and they could do that less, surely for below-grad-level material

I graduated from an Indian university. This situation was better, but not significantly. The syllabus is mostly adapted from US universities and generally prescribes the same textbooks. These US books are exorbitantly costly in Indian currency (due to difference in purchase power parity), so many books have cheaper prints exclusive to the Indian subcontinent. They are still costly and there are books that don't have a cheap edition. It's often outside the budget of students. Libraries help - but there aren't enough copies for all students. This problem is somewhat mitigated by the fact that there are books by local authors designed around the syllabus with the semester exams in focus. Those books are more similar to lecture notes. My experience though, is that those books are mostly good only for rote learning. You need to refer the prescribed textbooks to get any reasonable insight. And then there are books not in syllabus that offer much deeper insight. So - the situation is better than in US, but not significantly.

On a tangent, the tendency of Indian universities adopting syllabus from its US counterparts leads to use of proprietary software like Matlab. Software companies in US supply student version of their software and often tie up with the university to get it into the syllabus. But its much harder for Indian students to access the same software. Some universities have identified this problem and have recently started prescribing open source software like Julia and KiCad.

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