I'm actually....surprisingly optimistic about a Supreme Court ruling. Not very optimistic, but more optimistic than pessimistic which is pretty darn good for this court, putting it mildly. This...
I'm actually....surprisingly optimistic about a Supreme Court ruling. Not very optimistic, but more optimistic than pessimistic which is pretty darn good for this court, putting it mildly.
This doesn't smack the typical conservative-rage hotbuttons which causes all sorts of mental gymnastics to overrule precedent. There's a fairly long history of reasonably fair bi-partisan rulings on fair use and ownership. As much as publishers would like to see the death of libraries...they're surprisingly popular even among conservatives.
Don't get me wrong, the risk isn't insignificant...there are bad rulings...allowing life+70 years (and retroactively allowing 20 additional years for existing copyrights) to count as 'limited times' on the reasoning that the laws just need to have a defined end time is really, really, really stretching the bounds of reasonable interpretation. But there's a better chance of this surviving than Roe had.
Text is really, really small and compressible. That makes it pretty easy to port around and pop back up. So these shadow libraries are probably even harder to kill than ThePirateBay. Shutting down...
Text is really, really small and compressible. That makes it pretty easy to port around and pop back up. So these shadow libraries are probably even harder to kill than ThePirateBay.
Shutting down the piracy sites is also a somewhat futile effort which is unlikely to bring in additional revenue, as evidenced by the lack of revenue bumps from other big pirate sites being shutdown. I'd be surprised if copyright holding companies hadn't figured this out yet.
But striking a massive blow to format shifting and lending laws? That's a publisher's wet dream.
To emphasize this: the entire Anna's Archive torrent list, which is enormously redundant, and contains everything from many different pirate libraries, is around 940 TB. An individual could store...
Text is really, really small and compressible. That makes it pretty easy to port around and pop back up. So these shadow libraries are probably even harder to kill than ThePirateBay.
To emphasize this: the entire Anna's Archive torrent list, which is enormously redundant, and contains everything from many different pirate libraries, is around 940 TB. An individual could store the entire collection for ~$5k-$30k, depending on storage medium. AA actively encourages distributed storage and seeding of the collection.
TBP, by comparison, had 2,500 TB seeded in 2020, is likely not the largest pirate non-library site by any means, and is not an arguably close-to-complete collection of the entirety of all piracy of a type of work.
I'm actually....surprisingly optimistic about a Supreme Court ruling. Not very optimistic, but more optimistic than pessimistic which is pretty darn good for this court, putting it mildly.
This doesn't smack the typical conservative-rage hotbuttons which causes all sorts of mental gymnastics to overrule precedent. There's a fairly long history of reasonably fair bi-partisan rulings on fair use and ownership. As much as publishers would like to see the death of libraries...they're surprisingly popular even among conservatives.
Don't get me wrong, the risk isn't insignificant...there are bad rulings...allowing life+70 years (and retroactively allowing 20 additional years for existing copyrights) to count as 'limited times' on the reasoning that the laws just need to have a defined end time is really, really, really stretching the bounds of reasonable interpretation. But there's a better chance of this surviving than Roe had.
It's interesting to me that the publishing industry has been unable to effectively crack down on piracy sites such as Libgen, Anna's Archive, etc.
Text is really, really small and compressible. That makes it pretty easy to port around and pop back up. So these shadow libraries are probably even harder to kill than ThePirateBay.
Shutting down the piracy sites is also a somewhat futile effort which is unlikely to bring in additional revenue, as evidenced by the lack of revenue bumps from other big pirate sites being shutdown. I'd be surprised if copyright holding companies hadn't figured this out yet.
But striking a massive blow to format shifting and lending laws? That's a publisher's wet dream.
To emphasize this: the entire Anna's Archive torrent list, which is enormously redundant, and contains everything from many different pirate libraries, is around 940 TB. An individual could store the entire collection for ~$5k-$30k, depending on storage medium. AA actively encourages distributed storage and seeding of the collection.
TBP, by comparison, had 2,500 TB seeded in 2020, is likely not the largest pirate non-library site by any means, and is not an arguably close-to-complete collection of the entirety of all piracy of a type of work.