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> Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. This is a common perspective on HN, but it's so jarring. Someone violates an open-source license

> Knowledge should be free. It was never created in a vacuum. This is a common perspective on HN, but it's so jarring. Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us. Good books are incredibly challenging to write, more so than good software. It's not like you grab Harry Potter and say "I'm just gonna change character names and rephrase some of the text". Most authors recognize that not everyone can afford books and then contend that some amount of sharing is healthy, no different from borrowing books from a local library. If you ask nicely, they will probably send you a PDF for free. But the scale of online book piracy is absolutely staggering and demoralizing, and most of it has nothing to do with taking any serious moral stance. It's just "lol, why pay when you can download for free".

nzeid 2mo ago
Taken out of context, you're right. But the parent comment couldn't buy these books even if they wanted to. I'd say there's a consensus that the primary motivation for piracy is hurdles to access having nothing to do with payment.
- bigiain 2mo ago
  I think iTunes Store and Netflix both showed 15 or so years back that if you give people and easy and convenient way to pay a reasonable price for music/movies - a huge number of people will willingly choose to pay and support the artists/creators, instead of hanging out on Bittorrent trackers and paying for seedboxes and sharing with friends. And the siloing of movies by Netflix nd all the other streaming services, and the introduction of advertising into the "reasonable price" tiers, shows that people can and do remember piracy in still an option, for when corporations and copyright holding groups enshittify things. Lately amongst a lot of my friends I've seen more usb stick with movies being shared that even in the heyday of Bittorrent.
  - rbanffy 2mo ago
    BitTorrent is one form of collective archive for things that either have restricted or no commercial availability. I wish more cultural artifacts were archived this way.
dghlsakjg 2mo ago
There’s also the argument that copyright has been extended to the point of absurdity. I respect copyright, but I can’t respect a lockup period that can push to 130 years or more. For example: if JK Rowling is alive in 4 years the first Harry Potter book will have a valid copyright extending from the 20th, 21st and into the 22nd century. Is it really defensible to say that your great, great (great?) grandchildren should benefit from a government mandated monopoly on your work?
- fragmede 2mo ago
  JK Rowling is the exception. The duration is one thing, but so are her proceeds. Most authors are never going to see that much money, if any, from writing. Maybe copyright would expire once the original author has made enough money to pay for lavish living expenses for themselves for the rest of their life, inflation adjusted. So their family wouldn't automatically be taken care of, but they are. Kind of weird too think about it that way, but food for thought.
  - drnick1 2mo ago
    If most authors don't make much money, if any, then what is the point of copyright? It only really seems to benefit publishers.
    - harshreality 2mo ago
      I'm not here to defend publishers or the insane current copyright terms. However, in the traditional model of publishing, publishers subsidize production of new books from unproven authors--through book advances, copyediting services, and printing and distribution costs--via the money they make on the few successful and very few ultra-successful books. If you take away copyright, you reduce the revenue of publishers, which reduces the number of unproven authors they can take chances on. (They're not very good at picking winners from the pool of new author manuscripts, not nearly as good as "agents" like to think they are, but that doesn't matter; they still wouldn't be able to take as many chances.)
  - dghlsakjg 2mo ago
TFNA 2mo ago
> Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. If you look back through the annals of Free Software, one often encounters the claim that the GPL was a way to use copyright against itself, and if there were no more copyright, there would be little need for these licenses.
- rbanffy 2mo ago
  > there would be little need for these licenses. The GPL ones explicitly disallow the removal of user rights from work derived from GPL software. That wouldn’t be possible without copyright.
paxys 2mo ago
The issue with copyright law is that it is all or nothing. Rights to a work are either tightly held by an author/publisher, and even downloading a small excerpt can get you in trouble, or it is fully public domain and open for any and all use. There needs to be a middle ground, such as: after 15 years of publication any private individual can access and read the work for free, but the rightsholder still controls commercial sales, merchandising, licensing, character rights, movie rights etc.
__rito__ 2mo ago
If this is not bad faith argument, then I don't what is. When someone is violating an OSS licence, they are doing it for commercial gains and monetary profit. Nobody is angry at someone using FOSS software for himself with no money getting involved. As opposed to that, books, movies are pirated for personal consumption. Not monetary gains. If someone bought a $30 book, and then ran a BaaS with millions of VC money in his pocket, people in HN would be angry at him, too.
- jmye 2mo ago
  [flagged]
- NeutralCrane 2mo ago
  If knowledge is to be free, that means there should be no restrictions on how it is used. Even an open source license misses the point, because the implication is still that one person can dictate how another person can make use of knowledge. It’s still premised on the same dystopian view that a person can own an idea.
  - MarsIronPI 2mo ago
    Not so. Stallman created copyleft licenses as a defense against the current implementation of copyright. Copyleft uses the existing system of copyright to protect authors of free software from people who want to use copyright to restrict distribution. It wouldn't be necessary if copyright didn't exist.
    - degamad 2mo ago
      Important nit-pick: Copyleft was created to protect users of free software from authors/distributors who tried to use copyright to control the software running on the users' computers.
    - jll29 2mo ago
      Stallman wanted to protect the right to fix bugs, he was not against paying for goods and services.
ritsource 2mo ago
Just because something is challenging, that doesn't mean you should get paid for it. Art and business are two distinct endeavors. All the copyright and IP issues come up because of this one confusion.
appreciatorBus 2mo ago
Copyright is not an unalloyed good. In small doses, and short terms, I might agree with your classification. But when copyright is 150 years It no longer has anything to do with reward for the author or encourage you creativity, it’s just a cartel.
gorgoiler 2mo ago
Capitalism works great for shoes. You pay the proletariat for their labor and they labor away in your shoe factory. The shoe economy ticks over on scarcity. The knowledge economy is different. It’s hard to see how the system works in a world where everyone has the equivalent of a shoe replicator in their pocket. Ironically the “free market” only survives by having arbitrary regulations on shoe duplication enforced in the interests of shoe-rights holders.
- otherme123 2mo ago
  The shoes would be free and not a market product, as is it currently air to breathe. Free market is just the best way we know of dealing with scarcity, every other alternative that was attempted seems to fail sooner or later. If you invent a way to get an infinite amount of something, that something goes out of the free market rationing. For the knowledge, a lot of free market more radical defenders don't believe at all in current state of "intelectual property", much less if et has to be enforced by the state. They are for "industial secrets" (if they leak, you lose them), NDAs (if they leak, you enforce the contract) and similar formulas.
alexwennerberg 2mo ago
> This is a common perspective on HN, but it's so jarring. Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us. If the books were released under an open source license, there would be no problem here?
NooneAtAll3 2mo ago
> Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks we grab pitchforks because you violate the licence by making knowledge NOT free? what exactly is the contradiction?
andai 2mo ago
> It's just "lol, why pay when you can download for free". Well for starters because the research shows that reading on a screen literally makes you retarded. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/691462 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/691462 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05605-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05605-0
- squibonpig 2mo ago
  More interested in a study on e-readers
psychoslave 2mo ago
>This is a common perspective on HN, but it's so jarring. Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us. This is only apparent contradiction. The underlying issue is of course the social concentration power. It's not the same when an author is deprived of virtual money the copyright system entice them to extract from readers regardless of whether they have money or not, and deprive authors from a negotiation mechanism against corporate that swim in money. In both case, with current legal systems the most obvious law enforceable mechanism is copyright. It doesn't mean the underlying issues at stake are the same. What's really staggering and demoralizing is that humans have all that it takes to feed all mouths, make equal incomes, live in peace in all kind of diversities that encompasses reciprocity of accepting differences, and yet we end up with people dying from war and starvation while other accumulate a toxic level of wealth in a system that tries to uniform everyone and harshly cuts anything that don't fit the standard box.
phatfish 2mo ago
It's almost as if we are in a comment section where most peoples jobs exist due to "content" either being stolen (AI most recently) or crowd sourced under EULAs that effectively steal it. Not that I think a back door to the shit Disney and other corporate content onwers pull is nessecarily a bad thing. But it is funny to see people here gaslight themselves into believing they have some moral right to just take what others have created.
- squibonpig 2mo ago
  I don't think the majority here work for ai companies and I also see a lot of people critical of AI and copyright violations by ai companies. They're also very clearly different things, one is done on a massive scale by a company for profit and another is done by one person to use the work in the way it was intended to be used.
mdp2021 2mo ago
> most of it has nothing to do with taking any serious moral stance If many people are immoral, curb the roots of immorality then, fight that one battle - do not shift it to others' sound behaviour exercised with proportion and judgement.
globular-toast 2mo ago
The pitchforks aren't being raised for licence violations, they are raised because software should be free and unencumbered and now somebody is distributing it in a way which doesn't afford the same freedoms to the users. Free/copyleft licences like the GPL are just the way we've been able to effectively make software free in a world in which copyright applies to software.
vishnugupta 2mo ago
And yet JK Rowling is a billionaire and movies make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits. So I guess we can have a world in which knowledge can be free without starving knowledge creators?
- defrost 2mo ago
  Not if you account for just how many authors never reach the pinnacle of breaking even. Rowling is a rare exception and very much not the norm.
unsungNovelty 2mo ago
> Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. Where do we do that? All LLMs are still doing it. I've not seen any MIT license or BSD license of all the repos LLMs have gone through. That's excluding copy-left licences. Zero pitch-forks in sight. > Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us. I agree here with you. And I'll give a better reason to not pirate for most people. In the seas of endless content, If you want to read/learn from a book - try paying for them. You won't read most books. You'll curate/research better before buying. The books you buy will be worth it in your own mind. You re-consume them more which is very important IMO. For most pirates, I think the issue is not unavailability of resources/content. But need to consume in a better way. Buying slows things down. You'll consume better. Quality over quantity. Even then I have a ton of humble bundle books that I've not touched at all.
squibonpig 2mo ago
I'm not gonna buy the book as an alternative you know. If I'm pirating a book it's usually because I can't really afford to go buying the books I'm interested in. Sometimes if I love a book I'll get a physical copy so I can finish it in a more comfortable format and so I'll have it for another read. I figure most people who pirate are pretty similar, so I wouldn't expect an outsized effect on book sales. Add to that the fact that books by people who are literally dead still have copyright. That has nothing to do with it being hard to write a book, cause I don't think their fucking estate wrote the book.

nzeid 2mo ago

Taken out of context, you're right. But the parent comment couldn't buy these books even if they wanted to. I'd say there's a consensus that the primary motivation for piracy is hurdles to access having nothing to do with payment.

bigiain 2mo ago
I think iTunes Store and Netflix both showed 15 or so years back that if you give people and easy and convenient way to pay a reasonable price for music/movies - a huge number of people will willingly choose to pay and support the artists/creators, instead of hanging out on Bittorrent trackers and paying for seedboxes and sharing with friends. And the siloing of movies by Netflix nd all the other streaming services, and the introduction of advertising into the "reasonable price" tiers, shows that people can and do remember piracy in still an option, for when corporations and copyright holding groups enshittify things. Lately amongst a lot of my friends I've seen more usb stick with movies being shared that even in the heyday of Bittorrent.
- rbanffy 2mo ago
  BitTorrent is one form of collective archive for things that either have restricted or no commercial availability. I wish more cultural artifacts were archived this way.

dghlsakjg 2mo ago

There’s also the argument that copyright has been extended to the point of absurdity. I respect copyright, but I can’t respect a lockup period that can push to 130 years or more. For example: if JK Rowling is alive in 4 years the first Harry Potter book will have a valid copyright extending from the 20th, 21st and into the 22nd century. Is it really defensible to say that your great, great (great?) grandchildren should benefit from a government mandated monopoly on your work?

fragmede 2mo ago
JK Rowling is the exception. The duration is one thing, but so are her proceeds. Most authors are never going to see that much money, if any, from writing. Maybe copyright would expire once the original author has made enough money to pay for lavish living expenses for themselves for the rest of their life, inflation adjusted. So their family wouldn't automatically be taken care of, but they are. Kind of weird too think about it that way, but food for thought.
- drnick1 2mo ago
  If most authors don't make much money, if any, then what is the point of copyright? It only really seems to benefit publishers.
  - harshreality 2mo ago
    I'm not here to defend publishers or the insane current copyright terms. However, in the traditional model of publishing, publishers subsidize production of new books from unproven authors--through book advances, copyediting services, and printing and distribution costs--via the money they make on the few successful and very few ultra-successful books. If you take away copyright, you reduce the revenue of publishers, which reduces the number of unproven authors they can take chances on. (They're not very good at picking winners from the pool of new author manuscripts, not nearly as good as "agents" like to think they are, but that doesn't matter; they still wouldn't be able to take as many chances.)
- dghlsakjg 2mo ago

TFNA 2mo ago

> Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. If you look back through the annals of Free Software, one often encounters the claim that the GPL was a way to use copyright against itself, and if there were no more copyright, there would be little need for these licenses.

rbanffy 2mo ago
> there would be little need for these licenses. The GPL ones explicitly disallow the removal of user rights from work derived from GPL software. That wouldn’t be possible without copyright.

paxys 2mo ago

The issue with copyright law is that it is all or nothing. Rights to a work are either tightly held by an author/publisher, and even downloading a small excerpt can get you in trouble, or it is fully public domain and open for any and all use. There needs to be a middle ground, such as: after 15 years of publication any private individual can access and read the work for free, but the rightsholder still controls commercial sales, merchandising, licensing, character rights, movie rights etc.

__rito__ 2mo ago

If this is not bad faith argument, then I don't what is. When someone is violating an OSS licence, they are doing it for commercial gains and monetary profit. Nobody is angry at someone using FOSS software for himself with no money getting involved. As opposed to that, books, movies are pirated for personal consumption. Not monetary gains. If someone bought a $30 book, and then ran a BaaS with millions of VC money in his pocket, people in HN would be angry at him, too.

jmye 2mo ago
[flagged]
NeutralCrane 2mo ago
If knowledge is to be free, that means there should be no restrictions on how it is used. Even an open source license misses the point, because the implication is still that one person can dictate how another person can make use of knowledge. It’s still premised on the same dystopian view that a person can own an idea.
- MarsIronPI 2mo ago
  Not so. Stallman created copyleft licenses as a defense against the current implementation of copyright. Copyleft uses the existing system of copyright to protect authors of free software from people who want to use copyright to restrict distribution. It wouldn't be necessary if copyright didn't exist.
  - degamad 2mo ago
    Important nit-pick: Copyleft was created to protect users of free software from authors/distributors who tried to use copyright to control the software running on the users' computers.
  - jll29 2mo ago
    Stallman wanted to protect the right to fix bugs, he was not against paying for goods and services.

ritsource 2mo ago

Just because something is challenging, that doesn't mean you should get paid for it. Art and business are two distinct endeavors. All the copyright and IP issues come up because of this one confusion.

appreciatorBus 2mo ago

Copyright is not an unalloyed good. In small doses, and short terms, I might agree with your classification. But when copyright is 150 years It no longer has anything to do with reward for the author or encourage you creativity, it’s just a cartel.

gorgoiler 2mo ago

Capitalism works great for shoes. You pay the proletariat for their labor and they labor away in your shoe factory. The shoe economy ticks over on scarcity. The knowledge economy is different. It’s hard to see how the system works in a world where everyone has the equivalent of a shoe replicator in their pocket. Ironically the “free market” only survives by having arbitrary regulations on shoe duplication enforced in the interests of shoe-rights holders.

otherme123 2mo ago
The shoes would be free and not a market product, as is it currently air to breathe. Free market is just the best way we know of dealing with scarcity, every other alternative that was attempted seems to fail sooner or later. If you invent a way to get an infinite amount of something, that something goes out of the free market rationing. For the knowledge, a lot of free market more radical defenders don't believe at all in current state of "intelectual property", much less if et has to be enforced by the state. They are for "industial secrets" (if they leak, you lose them), NDAs (if they leak, you enforce the contract) and similar formulas.

alexwennerberg 2mo ago

NooneAtAll3 2mo ago

> Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks we grab pitchforks because you violate the licence by making knowledge NOT free? what exactly is the contradiction?

andai 2mo ago

> It's just "lol, why pay when you can download for free". Well for starters because the research shows that reading on a screen literally makes you retarded. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36256-4 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/691462 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/691462 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05605-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-05605-0

squibonpig 2mo ago
More interested in a study on e-readers

psychoslave 2mo ago

>This is a common perspective on HN, but it's so jarring. Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us. This is only apparent contradiction. The underlying issue is of course the social concentration power. It's not the same when an author is deprived of virtual money the copyright system entice them to extract from readers regardless of whether they have money or not, and deprive authors from a negotiation mechanism against corporate that swim in money. In both case, with current legal systems the most obvious law enforceable mechanism is copyright. It doesn't mean the underlying issues at stake are the same. What's really staggering and demoralizing is that humans have all that it takes to feed all mouths, make equal incomes, live in peace in all kind of diversities that encompasses reciprocity of accepting differences, and yet we end up with people dying from war and starvation while other accumulate a toxic level of wealth in a system that tries to uniform everyone and harshly cuts anything that don't fit the standard box.

phatfish 2mo ago

It's almost as if we are in a comment section where most peoples jobs exist due to "content" either being stolen (AI most recently) or crowd sourced under EULAs that effectively steal it. Not that I think a back door to the shit Disney and other corporate content onwers pull is nessecarily a bad thing. But it is funny to see people here gaslight themselves into believing they have some moral right to just take what others have created.

squibonpig 2mo ago
I don't think the majority here work for ai companies and I also see a lot of people critical of AI and copyright violations by ai companies. They're also very clearly different things, one is done on a massive scale by a company for profit and another is done by one person to use the work in the way it was intended to be used.

mdp2021 2mo ago

> most of it has nothing to do with taking any serious moral stance If many people are immoral, curb the roots of immorality then, fight that one battle - do not shift it to others' sound behaviour exercised with proportion and judgement.

globular-toast 2mo ago

The pitchforks aren't being raised for licence violations, they are raised because software should be free and unencumbered and now somebody is distributing it in a way which doesn't afford the same freedoms to the users. Free/copyleft licences like the GPL are just the way we've been able to effectively make software free in a world in which copyright applies to software.

vishnugupta 2mo ago

And yet JK Rowling is a billionaire and movies make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits. So I guess we can have a world in which knowledge can be free without starving knowledge creators?

defrost 2mo ago
Not if you account for just how many authors never reach the pinnacle of breaking even. Rowling is a rare exception and very much not the norm.

unsungNovelty 2mo ago

> Someone violates an open-source license and we grab our pitchforks. Where do we do that? All LLMs are still doing it. I've not seen any MIT license or BSD license of all the repos LLMs have gone through. That's excluding copy-left licences. Zero pitch-forks in sight. > Someone pirates books and it's fine - really, the authors should be thanking us. I agree here with you. And I'll give a better reason to not pirate for most people. In the seas of endless content, If you want to read/learn from a book - try paying for them. You won't read most books. You'll curate/research better before buying. The books you buy will be worth it in your own mind. You re-consume them more which is very important IMO. For most pirates, I think the issue is not unavailability of resources/content. But need to consume in a better way. Buying slows things down. You'll consume better. Quality over quantity. Even then I have a ton of humble bundle books that I've not touched at all.

squibonpig 2mo ago

I'm not gonna buy the book as an alternative you know. If I'm pirating a book it's usually because I can't really afford to go buying the books I'm interested in. Sometimes if I love a book I'll get a physical copy so I can finish it in a more comfortable format and so I'll have it for another read. I figure most people who pirate are pretty similar, so I wouldn't expect an outsized effect on book sales. Add to that the fact that books by people who are literally dead still have copyright. That has nothing to do with it being hard to write a book, cause I don't think their fucking estate wrote the book.