Is web of trust still a thing?

That was intended to be kind of a distributed way to determine who didn’t suck.

For interaction? Pseudonyms with a ramp up into being able to interact fully is the middle ground. Your activity on that specific site will be monitored to kick you out if you behave inappropriately, but it shouldn’t carry across sites unless you voluntarily use a third party identity provider (which is a good option to have).

Massive scale is a big part of the issue. It raises the barrier to entry for competing platforms (because being able to scale to rapid growth is a huge up front investment, and can easily cripple your platform if you don’t do so), and brings the moderation responsibilities beyond anything actually manageable. Small to mid sized communities being the norm is much more manageable, much easier to develop for, and much healthier generally.

It doesn’t matter if the copy is all at once. Every bit of the file touching your computer involves multiple copies. It is fundamentally impossible to share any file without copies being made. The original digitization is already probably illegal because it’s for the purpose of distribution and not one of the fair use exceptions. Again, this is exactly identical to the claim that pirate sites providing streaming is legal.

Libraries do not make copies. Legally, it’s exactly that simple. There is no ambiguity in any way. It is copyright infringement under current law. It is not possible to defend this without throwing current law in the trash and starting over from scratch. If the judge did somehow rule in IA’s favor the Supreme Court could overrule him in about 30 seconds with basically no deliberation. Courts do not have the authority to change the law.

Use the library. Find stuff you like. In the US, Libby and Hoopla are great digital borrowing options a lot of libraries support. I tend to actually buy fiction when it’s an author/series I want day one. (Mostly audiobooks, some ebooks). For nonfiction, I do the best research I can to determine that it’s evidence backed and well respected by other authors in the field (generally psychology-ish).

In terms of the format, I mostly don’t do physical books. I can’t carry 1000 of those in my pocket. I mostly get a handful of favorites to have on a shelf and maybe talk someone else into reading, but I’ll still read on my ereader or audio. My preference is audiobook because I have a lot of time where I can listen while doing other stuff. I do get a fair number of ebooks as well, but a lot of those are programming books because audio doesn’t work for code and especially because there are a lot of awesome bundles through Humble Bundle for them.

There’s no possible way to apply the law where the Internet Archive is permitted to do their lending program. It very clearly is illegal copyright infringement that does not come anywhere close to fair use.

The judges do not have the authority to completely overrule both the text of the law and the massive body of precedent. The Supreme Court could, except the Constitution explicitly grants Congress the right to regulate IP how they see fit, and the law is super clear that you can’t do anything that resembles what IA is doing in any way.

https://fortelabs.co/blog/the-secret-power-of-read-it-later-apps

So this article was included with Omnivore, which is suggested elsewhere in this thread, but it does provide a bunch of well structured arguments for the utility of a dedicated app.

Thanks for this. I don’t usually dive into longer format article stuff because I find it on my phone and reading on my phone sucks. I tried pocket, but it didn’t function at all on my reader.

This solves that problem reasonably well.

(Edit: also an RSS reader? Maybe I should start using RSS again. I do wish it offered paged navigation controls to better work on an ereader, but it’s definitely an improvement still.)

I would much rather pay full price than still pay for a DRMed version that’s effectively guaranteed to be supporting some sort of organized crime group. Mass distribution at scale, with DRM, by definition means Russian organized crime, or a drug cartel, or some other global bad actor on that scale that’s doing shit like trafficking humans, arms dealing, drugs, etc, as well.

But ignoring that (and that I generally buy my content), I wouldn’t pay $.10 for an illegitimate copy that had an added layer of DRM on it. It’s fundamentally fucking repulsive for some subgroup whose whole business relies on bypassing someone else’s copy control to add their own.

Memorizing everything is impressive for a human.

It’s less impressive for a computer.

DRM on pirated games is fucking gross as shit.

Because the libraries have explicit licenses from the IP holders.

The encryption is literally entirely irrelevant.

The argument that a copy in your browser is legally defensible is the equivalent of claiming that sites can legally stream movies to you. It is a copy, both legally and in reality.

Then write new laws. Digitizing the book is already relying on fair use. Judges aren’t lawmakers, and this case doesn’t have the tiniest hint of the tiniest shred of a leg to stand on.

There is no first sale doctrine for digital. There is no such thing as ownership of a “digital copy” to begin with. The framework doesn’t exist. You have a license.

Yep. Libraries can’t just buy an ebook like they can buy a book. They have to negotiate a contract with the copyright holder to be able to lend them out.

I really don’t think anyone envisioned the way digital distribution would change when the DMCA was written.

But my point isn’t that there’s political will to make a change, but that the judiciary really doesn’t have the capacity to rule any other way than the obvious “you can’t do this”. It would be a completely wild precedent for this case to somehow result in a ruling that it’s fair use based on the actual law and the history of previous rulings.

I tried. It’s basically the only app I couldn’t get to work on my boox.

But there’s a very clear distinction in the law. Libraries are covered under first sale doctrine. You can do effectively what you want with a physical object that contains copyrighted material placed there by the owner.

Digital anything is not covered by the first sale doctrine. Every individual loan is a copy. Every time a “copy” moves between devices is a copy. There is no legal framework for ownership of anything digital. It’s always a license, no matter what permissions that license grants you.

You have to pass new laws to match the digital world. Under the current laws, it’s extremely clear that lending unauthorized digital copies of a physical book is copyright infringement. Wholesale copies of a work aren’t even in the neighborhood of fair use, especially when you’re distributing a bunch of them. DRMing those copies is completely irrelevant legally.

What’s the value of cheap clothes that aren’t even suitable for a single wear?

Seriously.

Yes, there’s an element of complexity that makes it hard to completely avoid bugs. But there’s way more arbitrary complexity that doesn’t serve a purpose and unnecessary dependencies that create more problems than they solve causing issues than there is just the inherent difficulty of what software actually needs to do.

Also, maybe just don’t copy paste code from 20 different tracking tools wherever they tell you to.

Edit: also cloud everything. The amount of overhead it takes to put 100 million users in the cloud when there’s nothing they need that can’t be done locally is stupid as hell.

I’m not into the subscription library thing (though I do have PS+ premium, because it was a reasonably cheap upgrade from the base package on Black Friday when I caved and bought a subscription), but I can see how some people find value in the subscription library that’s included.

That said, fuck Luna specifically, because I tried the “included with prime” version with one of the legends of heroes games, got moderately hooked, and it will only let you export the saves when they remove the game from the paid library. So even your saves are held hostage to a paid subscription.