this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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No. But running a library in an illegal way is. Legal libraries pay the publishers.
That's ass. People just wanna read. Words are free to copy.
That's why piracy is and always will be morally justified.
But surely there’s an argument to be made that the people whose work goes into creating the texts you want to read have a claim to be recompensed for their labour. Authors, translators, proofreaders, layouters, illlustrators, printers and binders have mortgages or rent to pay and families to feed, and the servers and warehouses that store the texts are not free either. Where do these costs factor in to your »words are free to copy«-hypothesis?
But all those people aren't publishers. The publishers are the ones owed money by Libgen, and the publishers can eat my shorts. The translators, editors, layouters, illustrators, printers and binders already got paid their wage/comission by the publishers. And besides, printers and binders aren't making digital books, so bringing them into the conversation is bad faith nonsense.
Okay, so where on your theory does the publisher of a book get the money to pay the workers who produce it? (And isn‘t a significant part of libgen scanned print books? My printers and binders have played a role in all of those.)
They can pay the workers using the gigantic piles of money they have lying around from decades of exploiting customers and workers. And in fact, they already did, because the books Libgen is pirating already exist. You think Pearson is leaving wages unpaid until they hit a sales quota? No way, those books already got made and the workers already got paid. Some of those books are decades old, and Libgen is the only place you can get them aside from rare booksellers and libraries, and the court still awarded damages to a company that no longer even sells the product. It's crooked.
I think our respective understanding of how publishing works is different, and perhaps you have more experience in this area than I do. My dealings with a publishing company have been limited to the one that has up to now published my own books. They are able to take on and finance new titles because they have have income from books they‘ve published in the past. I can‘t speak to Pearson‘s specific situation, but the principle is likely the same: sales from a backlist play a crucial part in allowing new works to be produced. I don‘t think there‘s anything crooked about it, at least not in principle. As for some of the books being out of print, that is, it seems to me, a separate issue relating to the way copyright works. In Europe, there are provisions in law for making out-of-commerce books digitally available, but perhaps you‘re writing from a different context.
Well being an author, you're entitled to royalties. It's different for wage and commission workers. You keep getting paid as long as the books keep selling, but they only get paid once. It's called capitalism, it's an economic system in which control of the economy lies with the owners of capital. Capital is the means of production, the stuff people need in order to produce works of value. At a farm, capital is the soil and tools. At a mine, it's the earth and machinery. At a factory, it's the shipping contracts and the lathes.
At a book publisher, capital is the printers and presses, yes, but that's not all. It's also the abstract idea of intellectual property, which doesn't actually exist on the physical plane. Intellectual property only exists in the law, it's not a real material thing. Humans invented it. There's no way a farm can produce more crops than the soil will grow. And no way a mine can produce more ore than what's in the veins. But a computer can produce a million copies of a book for pennies in electricity costs. And I'll prove that to you by pointing at social media, where a 10 megabyte video that lasts for twenty seconds is shared without a single thought, and the company makes up the cost of distribution on ads, which only cost pennies per view. A TXT of the entire works of Homer is less than 10 megabytes. And we use PDFs instead of TXTs, despite the massively increased size, because size just isn't a relevant issue. It's too cheap to bother worrying about, it doesn't matter.
We didn't have copyright before the invention of the printing press, because there was no point. Back then, if you wanted a thousand copies of a book, you sent a manuscript to a monastery and got the monks to copy it. And a thousand books would have cost a king's ransom to produce. But when it became possible to copy intellectual works at low cost, publishing houses pressured the government to invent artificial scarcity in order to maintain profits. So that it would still be expensive for consumers to buy books, and publishers could pocket the gains from the printing press. And with the digital age, that fact is dialed up to 11. They're laughing their way to the bank. The publishing industry isn't in danger, they're more profitable than ever. Technology made copying works easier, but e-books still cost the same amount as paperbacks. The profitability of publishing is at a record high. I want more people to use Libgen, so that their profitability goes back to what it was before the internet, and so that they have to get competitive again. When profitability is guaranteed by law, as in this case, companies start to ignore what's good for customers and for workers like you. They don't need to listen to anyone. You and I both want them in a weaker position, so that you can push them harder in negotiations and so that prices are better for us. Students are paying hundreds of dollars per semester for online copies of textbooks, it's ridiculous. Tools like Libgen give ordinary people the power to break the laws that enable this power imbalance. That's justice.
With GenAI maturing, it will be trivial to create movies, plays, books that never existed before. It’s like the digital printing press, in the hands of the masses. Hopefully it brings the deathknell to copyright, but it will probably usher in even more draconian copyright laws.
You can self-host an artificial neural network, just like you can self-publish a book, but that's not where the money is. The AIs that most people are using are owned by corporations, just like the distribution channels for selling books are owned by corporations. That means the efficiency gains won't be passed on to the consumer. They'll let you play with it as first, while they gain market share, but pretty soon it'll back to the capitalist norm. When you publish an epic poem using ChatGPT 7 and make a million dollars, OpenAI will just sue you, and say their AI made the work so they deserve the money. Something like that will happen, and it'll go back to normal, just with the corporations that own the capital making even more money.
Why do you think we're still working 40 hours a week, despite all the gains in efficiency from technology over the past century? Wait, scratch that. Women entered the workforce, so now the average household works 80 hours a week when they used to work 40. We're working twice as much, even though technology made us 10 times as productive. Why aren't we all doing 2 hour workweeks like in The Jetsons? Well, Karl Marx predicted that this would happen, because the owning class has the capital, and we live in a capitalist system. The gains in efficiency only benefit the capital holders. You work twice as much to produce 20 times the wealth, and all that wealth just goes to some rich guy sipping martinis on a megayacht. Even if you work for a small business, the big ones just use their market dominance to squeeze your boss and get the wealth you produced anyway. Technology won't save us. We need to fundamentally restructure our economic system, so ownership is no longer equivalent to control.