For a decade, Hollywood hasn’t aggressively fought piracy because it saw people would pay if they made them a good deal.
But as streaming has gotten worse and more expensive, consumers turned back to file sharing. Now the industry plans to get Congress to pass new legislation to stop them.
Btdubs, if you think book #piracy is awesome, you probably don’t want to be following me, an actual small press publisher. Our margins are so narrow that if our books get pirated consistently, it can be enough to put us out of business since we actually need book sales to pay our authors, artists and expenses. And yes, people do pirate the crap out of small press books. We do regular sales and our books are available from libraries, really. 😠
As someone who grew up poor and with very little access to global culture, I shake my head sadly with those people who talk about #AIArt with the same moralism people were making against #piracy.
This didn't work then, it won't work now. People without money or time can't and won't support artists. If their only option is to use ML tools to create and share what is in their brain, they will do that instead.
All the arguments against this are privileged "you wouldn't download a car" territory
If purchase doesn't mean ownership, #piracy doesn't mean stealing.
Facing malicious actors (basically any big tech company) piracy, hacking/cracking and involuntary open-sourcing are acts of digital self-defense.
If you don't want people to act against you, don't act against them. A system that perpetuates malicious, exploitative behavior doesn't deserve your loyalty or trust. It is as simple as that.
But the producing companies (AMPTP) would, and then would use that actor again and again without permission or payment.
Would it be worth me making a whole ad along these lines, like the old anti-piracy ones, and including that using actors and writers previous work to train AI without consent or compensation is essentially piracy/theft?
I have just donated to #AnnasArchive, and if you care about preserving our culture for the next generations you should probably consider donating too.
With 15M books and 86M papers stored so far, this may easily be one of the largest open libraries on the Internet as of now.
As I said several times, I don't encourage #piracy. I've regularly purchased most of my #books from the Kindle store or other digital bookstores for years. As an author myself, I know how much we struggle to make any profit out of our hard work.
It's just that I think that, once purchased, it's my right as an owner to transfer the book to my computer, use a Calibre plugin to break whatever shitty encryption Amazon has decided to put on it this time, and transfer it in epub format to whatever device I want to use to read it.
I won't put it on BitTorrent. I won't profit from it. I won't share my epub with others. I just want the ability to read a book the way I like it, anywhere I like it. And, one day, as a good father, I'd like to pass my whole collection of books to my son, even if I'm gone, my Amazon account is gone, or Amazon is gone.
Anything that comes in the way between me and this goal will only get a response from me: piracy.
So far I've managed to be a good citizen and still buy books from Amazon, since it was still possible for me to break the .azw3 DRM encryption layer through Calibre if I had the serial ID of a registered Kindle device.
With the latest changes to the Amazon's DRM layer, this is apparently no longer possible.
Sure, I can invest more time trying to find ways to break the new DRM, but this is not how I want to spend my time anymore. I've already played this cat-and-mouse game with Amazon's DRM three times, as they kept making it harder to break the DRM, and now I'm quite tired of it.
Digitizing book was never supposed to be about a single company owning everything on their servers, locking-in authors and throwing at them only a few breadcrumbs of their profits, and selling people licenses to read stuff from their servers, only using the hardware and software that they consider appropriate, and only using the account that made the initial purchase, without even devising a way to pass books to the next generations.
Until this changes, I will keep pirating and support those who put the effort to run the infrastructure. If you want an alternative, fairer market model, and you care about our knowledge being passed on even if these companies are gone one day, then you first have to fight the oligopoly that holds our collective knowledge behind ransom.
Taylor has lived her entire life as a boy. Hiding away as a serving boy at a local inn, but when a pirate comes stumbling into her life, he brings adventure and horror with him. Whether she wants it or not.
Somali pirates has released hijacked Bangladeshi cargo vessel MV Abdullah and all 23 crew members after keeping hostage for 32 days, an official of the owner company of this ship said....
I bought a refurbished steam deck finally and am thinking about what my ahem acquisition workflow will be. This is what I'm thinking from my past experience daily driving Linux (arch btw):...
I cheer for #piracy because I don't think the modern IP or patent laws were made to protect me.
I use art that might belong to a big company - I get suspended. OpenAI and others steal everyone's IP, and there's nothing done to them, besides maybe a slap on the wrist or a small fine they don't care for.
Someone patent an algorithm I published? There's not much I can do. I can't sue them in the US, not logically and not money-wise.
The Shadow Libraries - a Door to the Literary Darkweb (shadowlibraries.github.io)
Shadow libraries, sometimes called pirate libraries, consist of texts aggregated outside the legal framework of copyright....
Somali pirates release hijacked Bangladeshi ship (www.bssnews.net)
Somali pirates has released hijacked Bangladeshi cargo vessel MV Abdullah and all 23 crew members after keeping hostage for 32 days, an official of the owner company of this ship said....
Dear Steam deck pirates, what's your current setup?
I bought a refurbished steam deck finally and am thinking about what my ahem acquisition workflow will be. This is what I'm thinking from my past experience daily driving Linux (arch btw):...