this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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[–] [email protected] 109 points 1 month ago (3 children)

These publishers' names are:

Hachette,

Penguin Random House,

Wiley,

and

HarperCollins

Time to never buy any book from them again. I'm moving on to pirating ebooks and audiobooks. Sorry JRR and Christopher Tolkien (may you rest in peace), but I'm not buying any more of your books because they were published by HarperCollins. And I'm also not buying a lot of other books too.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

I really appreciate the sentiment, but sadly: Individual boycots that aren't attached to a concertated campaign sadly don't work. Pirate away, but you can be certain that these publishers don't know that you exist.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I would argue this is actually one of the most effective ways to respond. If enough people do it then the company has to react somehow (by pivoting, etc.). Obviously an organized effort would be better, but the "vote with your money" method isn't anything to ridicule.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Name one instance where that worked when it wasn't connected to a massive public outcry. Do you remember the Call of Duty "boycott"? Ubisoft is still in business, too.

Also, the majority of book buyers don't know or care about this verdict.

Also also: The publishers won't even be able to correlate the "lost" revenue of individual people boycotting with their shitty behavior. It's not "Oh, we sold 1000 less copies of this book than expected, because we fought the archive." It's more: "Our predictions were off by 1000 copies. No idea if that's because of some tangible factor, or just 'noise'."

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Encapsulated in that "etc." in my first response is "going out of business". This type of response would be way too difficult to get actual numbers for, but it has worked countless times. Just look at all the businesses that are no longer in business at all, they went out of business because they were no longer earning enough to stay viable.

It doesn't matter if the company connects the loss to a specific action (although it would be nice) since the end result is the same, after enough time.

Lastly, I just don't like the idea of my dollars being used by a company to further an agenda that I don't want to support.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The market of publishing houses is waaaaay too monopolized for that to take an effect. It's like boycotting Amazon.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Ah yeah, that is sadly true. Too much lobbying and corruption for this to work the way it's supposed to.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Welcome to (late stage) capitalism.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

if enough people do it

And now will you make sure of that? As the other person mentioned, without a campaign, it's futile. Most people won't even hear of this

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That's why after you welcome yourself to the torrent world, you should introduce two others.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

It's like seeding but irl

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Maybe, but I am boycotting all capitalist entities the best I can. If I need something I try to buy used or from worker co-ops or to check it out from a library or pirate it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Unironically: That's really cool of you. :)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

you can be certain that these publishers don’t know that you exist

I think it's better this way.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 month ago

To be honest, I don't think the Tolkien Estate needs our patronage.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago

And the judge name are: steven menashi, beth robinson, maria araujo kahn.

Time to mail them bag of dick i guess?

[–] recursive_recursion 62 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

the best thing to do is download and torrent to preserve humanity's wealth in knowledge otherwise we risk losing immeasurable treasures to the sands of time

Personal recommendation:
qBittorrent

  • Repo
  • Licensed under: GPL-2.0 and GPL-3.0
[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 month ago (3 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

can someone ELI5 what this is, exactly? A program to run on your computer that helps out the Internet Archive? How exactly is it helpful for the Internet Archive?

[–] recursive_recursion 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

licenseless? 🤔
these sorts of things tend to sketch me out but giving a +1 as someone smarter than me will know if this is trustworthy

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I was about to say "of course you can trust it, it's from The Internet Archive", but the ArchiveTeam slogan is "We Are Going To Rescue Your Shit". Now I wonder if they're officially affiliated or not.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago

Archive Team often uses the Internet Archive to share the things they save and obviously they have a shared goal of saving a copy of everything ever made, but they aren't the same people. The Archive Team is a vigilante white hat hacker group (well, maybe a little bit grey), and running a Warrior basically means you're volunteering to be part of their botnet. When a website is going to be shut down, they'll whip together a script and push it out to the botnet to try to grab as much of the dying site as they can, and when there's more downtime they have some other projects, like trying to brute force all those awful link shorteners so that when they inevitably die, people can still figure out where it should've pointed to.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 month ago

On the other hand, authors have a right to be compensated in connection with the copying and distribution of their original creations.

No author lose any compensation, only publisher. Publisher not have that right.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 month ago

A sad day for pro-preservation advocates

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I would like to see these publishers take on OpenAI, Midjourney and others, who basically said that copyright laws should not apply to them because AI would be "impossible" without them having free access to everything.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

I wish people would stop comparing those uses of copyright to nonprofits like Internet Archive

While I understand AI training exemptions to copyright are controversial, and think most people here would side with IA on ebook lending.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

"Just" lost it? I could have sworn I saw this news days ago, but "just" makes me feel like this happened minutes ago

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

To be fair the post was 2 days old when you posted

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

Alls fair in love and posting on the internet

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

They should move out of US and keep doing it anyway.