pull down to refresh

cool. yes, IP laws are nonsense, of course, but there's also the fact that the publishing industry is highly exploitative. I wrote a few books, but publishers know that academics have to do that for their CV, and they use that mercilessly. I get a notice every year that cumulative royalties or all my books combined come to about 10 Euro. Of course, academic books don't sell that much, but percentage-wise, it's still peanuts. If you're unknown, they TAKE money from you to sell your book and keep the money; if you're a bit better known, they do it for free and pay you 2-5% of revenue from the 401st or 801st book on; very rarely do you get paid from the get-go. So yeah, go search for your books wherever you like. The authors gain a lot more by exposure and virality of the book than they ever would from the sales price, unless you'r e George R.R. Martin or something (and even here, the virality of the book made him a lot more money through licensing than book royalties ever did).
reply
Oh yeah. I saw a midlist author years ago complain that he'd lost 10K book sales based on the torrent numbers he saw. As if all 10K folks who downloaded the book would ever have bought it. There were probably 20 folks like that, another 1000 who discovered his work from the torrent, and just under 9K who downloaded it and never read it at all because ebooks are tiny and it's easy to download a ton.
reply
oh, absolutely. There are tons of studies on this, that piracy in the end is free PR much more than it is a straight up loss. The "2 download 0 1 lost sale" fiction is lobbied for by the publishers in courts, so courts use that fiction to calculate losses for the publisher, which increases penalties for those unfortunate souls who got picked up for it. It's widely known that these calculations are legal fictions, and BS.
reply
60 sats \ 1 reply \ @oomahq 20 Mar
The Saifedean Doctrine. Based.
reply
yes, in fact I think Saifedean even shared the libgen link lol
reply
Piracy made game of thrones more popular
reply
True, though I'm pretty sure HBO still went hard after people who they could catch.
reply
No legal action unlike musicians and record labels
Musicians have the most nauseating complaints: you’re stealing from an artist!
reply
Yeah, I'm pretty sure an entire generation of fans can pinpoint exactly when they stopped giving a crap about Metallica because of this.
reply
If the message of Broken Money spreads far and wide that will be a boon for Bitcoin. Alden is ‘responsibly long’ on Bitcoin. Ergo, pirating Broken Money is good for Alden.
reply
21 sats \ 1 reply \ @Atreus 20 Mar
Understandable for fiat bros, but if you're a Bitcoiner... I mean damn, at least send 10 sats right?
reply
Based on how the Nostr post is getting zapped, I think folks get it.
reply
Legend. Understands economics, pragmatics, human action, and network effects. Will profit in the long run as a result.
reply
Can confirm. I also saw the post and thought it was cool.
Is she a full on ancap? Maybe she just thinks IP laws are nonsense.
reply
IP laws have been functionally killed by the Internet. Just as gun laws have been. Information wants to be free. Its not even a philosophical question. Its just a matter of acceptance. They were always bull shit logically. They are really just a pretext to persecute people when the state or corporations decide they want to do so. One need not be an ancap to realize this but ancaps should get it. Stephan Kinsella's book "Against Intellectual Property" was the last nail in the coffin for me. I was already skeptical of IP but his book really closed all the loops for me.
reply
That's fair. Even a minarchist could understand this. :)
reply
LOL, yeah for real. I was a minarchist for a few weeks once.
reply
I don't think she's full ancap, but given her position in various wealth management firms (and presumably association with people who make money off IP), I could also see her not talking about it if she were.
reply
I don't know if you can deduce much from someone's profession. The biggest IP opponent is Stephan Kinsella and he's a practicing patent attorney.
reply
For personal use or distribution? I think there's a difference.
reply