this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
857 points (99.4% liked)
Technology
59472 readers
3532 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Just want to let you know why you're being downvoted. It's not because you're wrong. From a legal perspective you're right. This court case was decided this way because you're right.
But that last line about having no sympathy. There's a meme for this.
"You're not wrong. You're just an asshole."
It's an asshole perspective that the IA dearly needs to listen to. Don't poke a bear when you have so much to lose. Doesn't matter if you're "in the right". The history books are littered with the corpses of righteous people.
Let the EFF handle the quixotic battles, it's what they're best at.
"No one should stand up for new rights. Don't rock the boat bro."
Your mindset is the road to a dictatorship.
What does the Mafia do? Show up, "Wow you got a lot of valuable things here Be a shame if someone broke them. Best listen to us."
The Mafia leverages potential of damage to existing value to extract cooperation.
I see very little difference here between the Mafia and the plaintiff.
Yes, let's just completely misrepresent someone and pretend it's a quote! That's fun!
There are effective ways to challenge laws and to push for new rights. Loudly shouting "I don't care about your rules, just try and stop me!" was not an effective way for IA to try and do this.
Furthermore, IA constantly misrepresenting the problem and why they were sued in all their blog posts and press shit also does not help the cause.
It's a law in desperate need of abolishment, but this is not how you go about changing it.
This also was not an effective way for them to ensure these books would continue to be available digitally for the public. They could have quietly leaked batches of the content that only they had out to the ebook piracy groups in a staggered fashion to help obsfucate where it was coming from, then hosted a blog post telling people how to pirate ebooks and where, with a cover your ass disclaimer that everyone needs to abide by their local laws.
By any metric of success, the way they handled this set them up to lose from the start, and jeapordized one of the most important public resources in the current era. This would be understandable from some small operation of like 5 people trying to digitize shit, not from an organization as large and old as IA.
I'm not the person who said he had no sympathy, but that is why I have little sympathy about all this: They don't deserve this outcome, I wish they had won, and I hope the law gets overturned or revised... but they absolutely should have know better that to try and do this the way they did. They fucked around and found out. This coild have ended so much worse for them.