Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Seems like that should be the lede a lot more.
You might not be entitled to all content produced, but you're also not entitled to exploit people and win endless profit.
Cut out the parasitical middlemen and use LibGen, SciHub, and all the myriad communities that have built up around curation and distribution of content. Pirate everything. Donate directly to authors and creators, actors, writers, and others.
It would be very nice if those huge copyright-holding publishing megahouses provided print-on-demand service but they generally don't, they are more focused on trying to make reselling of used books a punishable crime.
So the best anyone, even the publisher, could do would be to ask the Library of Congress for a photocopy.
However, I firmly agree that not providing it for sale at a reasonable rate (no higher than the original sale price of a generally-available hardback edition, adjusted for inflation) should end copyright. You made it, you released it, you wanted to profit from it: fine. You own those rights for a long time: don't like it, but not really what I want to argue. You're embarassed by it and don't want anyone to know you published it: hey, man, if you sold it to the public, ever, you put it out there, and if you later decide you don't want to any more, well, you should not have published and taken advantage of copyright protection.
Please. I'm sure if your livelihood was affected by piracy, you would feel differently.
The livelihood of many researchers is affected by piracy - in a positive way. If these shadow libraries wouldn't exist, they would have a much harder time doing their research (and thus - to bring in livelihood - staying in their research position and/or getting research grants).
The piracy debate often simplifies the issue as one of pirates vs authors. But pirates vs publishing and retailing businesses is closer to the truth, when you look at where the money goes.
The DMCA exists almost entirely to support a class of fiscal leeches and parasites who extract value from individuals and groups who produce media.
Copyright law in the US is fundamentally and irreparably broken; rights holders hoard massive collections of legal technicalities, then use the gotcha provisions to go after little people, artists, parents of kids who don't know to use a vpn, and an endless parade of people who don't even deserve to be hassled over a downloaded file, let alone have their lives and livelihoods wrecked.
99.999% of all sales, whether physical or digital, have been made within 5 years of media going to market. A vast majority of the profits from those sales go to publishers, platforms, lawyers in the middle, and people who bring virtually no value to the market whatsoever. They tell great stories about how they provide funding and advertisement, and guaranteed sales, and distribution, but the fact of the matter is, we live in a connected world where there is nothing cheaper than the things they purport to facilitate.
We need to disempower these centralized leeches and overhaul copyright law, limiting the scope and scale to which massive organizations can hoard rights, strictly limiting the time frame. Massive corporations like Sony profiting off of a technicality, not bringing any concurrent return on value to society, simply leeching off artists, and using the returns to get their tentacles on more - situations like this have to end. It's absurd, and it incentivizes abuses almost anywhere it touches.
Please. Pay attention to the world you live in - it's not about the "yOu WoUlDn'T dOwNlOaD a CaR!11!" argument, it's about the rules we purport to live by serving nobody except the lawyers who figured out gotchanomics exploits and spend a metric shitton of money on lobbying, bribes, campaigns, and aggressive lawsuits to defend their racket. That MAFIAA is a thing should be sufficient incentive to wipe the board and start from scratch.
Until the copyright system gets fixed and there's a fair system in play, pirating everything is the only moral and ethical choice. By continuing to participate and support the system as is, you kick the can down the road to some future generation to handle. You disenfranchise the artists who are exploited, suppressed, and otherwise abused. You put money in the pockets of lawyers who "earned" that profit on a technicality.
By pirating and donating directly, you do no harm and ever so slightly deprive a badly broken and abusive system of unearned profit.
But IMO the prize for greatest accumulation of copyrighted digital cultural artefacts goes to the original megaupload. (The vast majority of which was lost when their servers were raided and shut down.)
Maybe archive has it beat now though.
Actually, no, I think megaupload still beats it.
I know this is a snarky comment but the double standards are killing me.
Also this has been said a thousand times but I have to repeat it here. Abolish the paywalls for scientific research. Elsevier and the rest of the gang that produce nothing of value, gatekeepers of knowledge that did not produce. Seriously, what is their running cost nowadays? An FTP server with the PDFs? Semi-honest question.