I choose the books I buy, from Anna's Archive.
I choose the comics I buy from readComicsOnline.
I choose the [european] graphic novels I buy from #WONTTELL.
And I am one of the best customers of these 3 physical shops, in my town.
So sure, I don't buy the latest trends based on ads. I investigate a lot to buy GREAT stuff. Sometimes the shopkeeper has headaches to find the obscure stuff I discovered online that NOBODY knows it exists.
Am I an exception?
I don't know but those services are great to maintain a freedom of choice.
Many years ago, I was involved in a movie release group. Pretty much everybody in that group owned more VHSs/DVDs than the typical person. This is probably not surprising, since the time and effort one needs to put into that is rather large.
Those who only downloaded were more of a mixed bag; some of them were not in the US and might not be able to see a domestic release of the movies any time soon. Some proudly claimed that they never bought any media because paying for it when you could pirate was for losers.
I spent a small fortune on a record collection. Then the record format was abandoned and it was all CDs. I spent a small fortune re-buying that same record collection, insofar as the records were even available as CDs. Then we went all digital (yes, I know CDs were already digital) and it became MP3s. So I ripped my CD collection and assigned them to a box in my attic. I will not be spending money on spotify or whatever other service to listen to stuff that I already have.
Movies... I spent a small fortune on a movie collection. Then I moved countries and to my surprise found that my movies wouldn't play anymore. So I ripped the DVDs to digital media and played them using open source software. This saved a small fortune and was more convenient as well. I think I still have the DVDs.
I spent a large fortune on books. Thousands of them. Typically read once, a much smaller number read multiple times. So I gave away my books, except for a few hundred that I still keep. I support the authors that I like by buying their books but I read on screens not on paper because my eyesight sucks and on screens I can set the font to whatever I want rather than to what the publisher thought was optimal.
There is no way the media companies are going to guilt trip me over any of this, besides that I read both Janis Ian and Courtney Love's pieces on the recording industry.
Copyright is great, it has enabled lots of people to earn a living creating content. But it has also become a weapon in an ever more absurd war between consumers and middle men, the producers caught in some uncomfortable position in the background.
What's interesting is that the middlemen brought this all on themselves: they equated buying a physical copy of a production with licensing IP, but the general public didn't think that way at all: they bought a book, they bought a record, they bought a movie. And passing on what you've bought when you no longer need it was and still is such an ingrained part of our culture that it felt really weird to have restrictions placed on what you could do with stuff you bought and paid for. So when the format changed from physical to nothing (bits) plenty of people felt that this was not quite what we had agreed to, after all we were paying for the medium as much as we were paying for the content so how come we paid the same or even more as before? And now we paid and got something that we could no longer share with others. No way to easily pass that e-book to someone else (talk about malicious compliance), no way to send the song you just paid for through Spotify or iTunes to someone else to let them hear it after you are done with it. You don't own the medium any more so therefore you own nothing at all.
And those publishers and movie producers are all laughing to the bank whilst doing nothing at all except for playing bank.
The french comic pirate scene has an interesting rule where they keep a ~6 month time lag on what they release. The scene is small enough that the rule generally works.
It's a really good trade-off. I would never have gotten into these comics without piracy but now if something catches my eye, I don't mind buying on release (and stripping the DRM for personal use).
Most of my downloading is closer to collecting/hoarding/cataloguing behaviour but if I fully read something I enjoy, I'll support the author in some way.
I have heard that Marvel & DC, don't care about comic piracy at all. Comics are a cheap loss leading funnel for what actually makes money: movies, tv, video games, & especially merchandise.
However, smaller publishers like Titan Comics care about piracy a great deal and attack it somewhat successfully with gusto, because that's the only revenue.
Similar. Anna's Archive has become a more convenient alternative to the campus library. I can grab something while at home, get the info I need, and delete. If the title is worthwhile, I'll buy my own copy. I don't buy more books than I did before, but my satisfaction rate is higher, since I can check the contents before buying.
On the other hand, I buy way more movies than I used to, because upload sites have exposed me to many good films that I would never have heard of otherwise.
Years ago I was following development of an indie game. The developers wanted to provide a DRM-free experience.
The game had some online functionality (leaderboard or something). They were surprised when the number of accounts accessing the online functionality exceeded their sales by a dramatic number. The developer updates grew more and more sad as they switched from discussing new features to pleading with people to actually buy the game instead of copying it. Eventually they called it quits and gave up because the game, while very popular, was so widely pirated that few people actually paid.
Whenever the piracy topic comes up I hear people do mental gymnastics to justify it, like claiming they spend more than average and therefore their piracy is a net win. Yet when we get small peeks into numbers and statistics like with video game piracy, it’s not hard to see that the majority of people who pirate things are just doing it because they get what they want and don’t have to pay for it.
The difficult bit is working out what percentage of pirated copies are actually replacing a sale that would have happened if the content wasn't available to pirate. The more dramatic industry numbers like to claim it's 100%, which is ridiculous. It's certainly more than 0%, though.
I'd assume that for your indie game, there were a lot of people who wound up thinking "I would play this if it's free, but I wouldn't spend $X" on it. Adding successful DRM wouldn't have done anything to them but drive them away, and reduce the amount of buzz the game received. But then, particularly in the indie game space, maybe trading away a lot of buzz for a couple hundred more full-price game sales would have been completely worth it...
This is where the concept of services like Xbox Game Pass seem to be landing. Once someone has paid their fairly-small-amount each month, every game is now "free". Much like fairly-cheap streaming music basically stopped music piracy from being mainstream, cheap game-services might have the same impact on the game industry.
Though, much like streaming music, whether it turns out to be economically viable for the average game studio is certainly a question.
(For the sake of completeness: I don't pirate anything, so I have nothing to justify here.)
I think part of the question though is also, would they have been as popular as they were without piracy, which does provide some advertising benefits through audience exposure. It is easy to say a really popular game would still be popular without piracy, but some lesser known games might never have gained any attention at all if there weren't enough people spreading word about it. Of course trying to quantify the sales and word-of-mouth benefits from that sort of thing is extremely difficult.
Your story sounds like "World of Goo," which reported a 90% piracy rate from comparing unique IP addresses to number sold. Despite that, they didn't quit and recently released "World of Goo 2" still DRM free.
> The game had some online functionality (leaderboard or something). They were surprised when the number of accounts accessing the online functionality exceeded their sales by a dramatic number. The developer updates grew more and more sad as they switched from discussing new features to pleading with people to actually buy the game instead of copying it. Eventually they called it quits and gave up because the game, while very popular, was so widely pirated that few people actually paid.
Ok, but why? Whas the game actually unprofitable or did they just feel bad about some people getting it for free. You need to remember that a pirated copy does not equal a lost sale - in fact, sales may even be higher than they would be without piracy as popularity gained from pirated copies also translates to more legitimate buyers.
Small game, no online functionality, never had DRM.
It wasn't even big. It was shared all over the place because it was so expensive.
It's still there and it's thriving. Still expensive.
I'm exactly the same. I tend to get the first book of any series that interests me and read a third before I decide whether to buy it or not. I do buy about 3-4 books a month (mostly epub drm free preferred) plus about 10 european graphic novels (paper books only) a month so I'm a heavy consumer I think.
I follow the newsletter from Borderlands Books in San Francisco. I usually buy one book off their best seller list a month (sometimes I’ll stop in and buy three or four)
I’ve recently started using my local library’s mobile app and I love it. (I typically use this for re-reading or audiobooks for plane trips)
I’m tempted to donate my entire bookshelf to the library and let them store and maintain it for me :-p
No, I'm the same. A lot of stuff I read is hard-to-get philosophy or from obscure authors, so I first get them from Anna's Archive. Reading them on paper is much better so I try to find a physical copy later.
I don't think I follow. There's no recommendation engine in AA, right? Do you download a bunch of books from AA, read them, then if you happened to like one enough, you will buy it from a local bookstore?
Some Lovecraft letters were translated into french some weeks ago. Great reading! There, Lovecraft gives his opinion about the litterature and art of his time.
And he mentions Nicolas Roerich. No idea who this guy was, but hey pretty interesting painter (thank god Google Images!). Ok, let's check on AA if there is a definitive book about his art.
No luck, but that very same guy wrote many books about Hindouism and eastern asia. After a few downloads on AA, no big deal, I am not so fond of them. Except for one that I knew nothing about (the name is Altai Himalaya, and I have absolutely no clue why this one is picking my attention, but it does).
That's definitely what I call serendipity.
And that thing happens a lot when you have a full access to whatever content is available. [and you are curious by nature]
In the end, retrospectively, such widespread access permits serendipity at a level that is absurdly miraculous !
That’s exactly how I do it. I enjoy reading DRM-free epubs on my Kobo, and whenever I finished a book I enjoyed, I buy it from the local sci-fi bookshop. I buy about 90% of all books I read.
Also, I tend to look for obscure and old books (I love old travelogues) and once I find one that really gets me, you'll be sure to receive it as a gift, if I think you'd be someone (or in a place in life) who would enjoy it.
So, I might not but it for myself but I make my decision on the pirated version and then buy more than my share when it's truly a gem. If I don't end up recommending it or buying it for someone that usually means it was something which I'd be ok not to have consumed.
Studies show that the biggest pirates of content are also the biggest buyers of content. The theory is that piracy functions as a way to deepen paid fandom not to erase it.
We will never have real data on this. But simply on its face, I find it extremely hard to believe that most consumers have a strong enough moral compass to go out of their way to buy something they already have access to. Maybe they will for a tiny handful of special books that they want hard copies of, or authors they really like, but not for most media they consume.
This type of system also becomes a popularity contest for creators; you are supporting the people you like as opposed to whose work you want to read. If an author says something you disagree with, it's easy to just read their work without paying them. I'm not against consumer boycotts, but it should generally come with a sacrifice on both sides--for consumers, that means missing out on the product or service.
You are free to feel however you want about this. I can certainly see the immense societal value of making things accessible to more people. But I flat out don't believe the "piracy doesn't lead to lost sales" shtick, of course it does.
'The Dutch firm Ecory was commissioned to research the impact of piracy for several months, eventually submitting a 304-page report to the EU in May 2015. The report concluded that: “In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements. That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect.”
The report found that illegal downloads and streams can actually boost legal sales of games, according to the report. The only negative link the report found was with major blockbuster films: “The results show a displacement rate of 40 percent which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally.”'
> I find it extremely hard to believe that most consumers have a strong enough moral compass to go out of their way to buy something they already have access to.
This is zero-sum thinking. Do you oppose libraries on the same principle?
Sometimes making a thing accessible can increase the overall market for the good, because it trains the behavior. The market for books requires readers, and readers are created by people reading.
I would not buy a book after downloading it from Anna's archive. But that's the wrong question in my opinion. You should be asking why aren't most books available in a DRM free format?
The main reason to download "pirated" books is that they get rid of all annoying barriers that exist in "legitimate" copies. It's a better product.
You feel. You think.
Google up the studies of piracy and you’ll see that the biggest pirates are also the biggest buyers. Replace your private opinion with some science.
The reframing that will help you understand this is that these people are fans (I stole this framing from Korey Doctorow who releases his books online for free and encourages his fans to buy a copy if they like it). Fandom is a positive sum game. The more you do it, the deeper you go with it the more you’re happy to pay the people who create the content you love.
The easier it is for you to find new content the easier it is for you to become a fan of a new thing.
For example: I want to buy a copy of prince Pukler’s hints on landscape architecture. I can’t find a physical copy anywhere and I’m not sure if it’s worth $120 for a reprint or $500 for an older version. I could pirate it (I use that word loosely since this work is obviously in the public domain) and check it out, but I haven’t bothered so I haven’t bought a copy. This is a case of me NOT pirating and therefore NOT engaging with new content.
> I'm not against consumer boycotts, but it should generally come with a sacrifice on both sides--for consumers, that means missing out on the product or service.
I'm curious as to why you feel this way, genuinely. The decision to boycott means that there is no sale, full stop, so no money is being handed over. Why does anything after that matter? The important part, the money, is already decided from the start.
It's nothing to do with morals or conscience, pure self interest incites me to to take action and buy physical copies or official ebooks or collector's editions or CDs or lossless digital releases of works I first consume pirated. I want creators I like to make more stuff. I feel good looking at my bookshelf filled with things I enjoy. I don't like throwing out or donating tons of books every year because they're no good and I couldn't tell until I bought and read them.
Books seem somewhat unique to me in that the physical product is better or at least different from the digital one, so it kind of makes sense to buy it even if you already have a digital copy. This is unlike e.g. streaming services where the paid service is strictly worse than the pirated one (e.g. no offline, doesn't work at all with some monitors/setups, only low bitrates allowed).
In several countries customers are forced to pay a special tax on empty media (storage) with the intention of proceedings to be redistributed among the copyright owners.
Some of these countries are codified under the Roman law principle, ie whatever is not explicitly forbidden by law, is simply not forbidden (as opposed to common law).
In some countries downloading the published media (eg a film after the official release) is permitted.
And those who download, paid for it in the form of tax.
Directive 2001/29/EC for the EU only (Article 5).
Other countries rely in provisions of WCT, 1996 (Art 10) and WPPT, 1996 (Art 16)
Back when you couldn't buy most idSoftware games here I had to go out of my way to let an online buddy of mine with a non-German Steam account buy and gift the collection to me. So it does happen. And I even got quite some duplicates as I had managed to buy some, just not all of them.
> you are supporting the people you like as opposed to whose work you want to read
TBH personally I find that a much more convoluted reason. It might be an edge case of "I will watch this clip of horrible person to get the original source" but actively seeking out material for free just so that they get nothing, but I can consume it in whole? That sounds really rare to me.
You are probably right, I am not representative of the vast majority of people who consume products, whereas I collect [what I consider to be, for me] GREAT stuff.
But one of the point I also wanted to highlight is that I knew nothing about those stuff and would have had no opportunity to taste them and be convinced that they are GREAT stuff [for me].
And to come back to your comment regarding creators. The thing that I hate are creators [for example writers who are interviewed in radios] who sell their book with a marvelous speech, but the content is eventually very so/so. As a consumer I feel robbed.
> I find it extremely hard to believe that most consumers have a strong enough moral compass to go out of their way to buy something they already have access to
I like the idea that consumers only buy stuff out of moral obligation.
Like if you went to your ethical friend’s house and saw that he had empty book cases and no art on his walls because he hasn’t yet been imbued with the requisite moral fervor necessary to buy anything. It’s hard for him to be sure what he’s obligated to buy or that he’s obligated to buy anything since it would be wrong of him to know what’s inside any book without buying it first.
And then you went to your no-good, dirty, downright despicable friend’s house and it’s full of books and art because for every 20 books he pirates he buys one, and because he’s just so darn unethical he pirates a lot of books
> But I flat out don't believe the "piracy doesn't lead to lost sales" shtick, of course it does.
I'm not as certain as you are. Correlation does not imply causation, but media sales have trended upwards in the age of piracy which leads to some interesting hypotheses.
A few years ago Shirley Manson (lead singer of the 90s band Garbage) accused YouTube of making its fortune off the backs of content creators - basically charging the entire enterprise as being one big exercise in copyright infringement. And yet the music industry, as well as Hollywood, seem to be doing better and better each year in terms of dollars made. Some of the distribution models have changed - broadcast and cable television are pretty dead in the water, but the entertainment industries in general seem to be doing better than ever. And yeah lots of individual artists are still getting raw deals from Spotify and labels etc. as they always have. But industry-wise, in terms of dollar amounts, it seems there's more money to be made than ever before from creating and selling entertainment.
The statement you made that I absolutely agree with is that it's hard to get real world data on this. An individual who is able to get free access to something may be unlikely to ever pay for that same thing.But the answer to the question: "Does piracy hurt the industry's bottom line, or help it on the whole?" is a very difficult question to answer. And we have to consider the even harder stuff to measure. Things like: is a teenager who pirates recorded media more or less likely to buy merch and concert tickets? More or less likely to buy a special edition package with tangible collector items?
At the end of the day, I have no clue.
I also offer all of this being very pro-capitalism and pro-intellectual-property. I don't condone piracy. But if we're just looking at raw data and trying to form our hypothesis, we have to start with the fact that the raw data points to upwards trends on the whole.
Ok, there are not only obscure stuff. More blasts from the past, that really would deserve a better exposure. In term of non-Marvel/DC comics, things from Bernie Wrightson, P Craig Russel, George Besse, Alberto Breccia, Moebius, Druillet, Scuitten/Peeters, and others.
In term of letters, once again the almight Lovecraft letters are really jaw-dropping !
For movies, I discovered Vincent Price, Sam Peckimpah, John Ford, Wim Wenders.
So nothing really out of the "normality", but they are no longer marketed and are slowly fading to grey.
I was reading a book series from my local library and for reasons I don’t understand they were missing the third or fourth book in the series. Probably damaged or lost. I even thought I could check the local (especially used) bookstores, buy a copy and then gift it to the library, but there’s a new edition that has a completely different vibe and size, with 2024 prices so I thought better of it. So I’d heard of Anna’s Archive and I got it there. Then it turned out one of the last books was unavailable too, can’t recall if it was missing or someone else had it out and wasn’t going to return it any time soon.
I was just trying to finish this writer’s corpus on a reread of their later material. It’s not that I’m cheap. I own a paper and audiobook copy of several of my favorite books. Including this author, so I’ve paid her twice. I just avoided the trap some of my friends long ago were falling into of hoarding books, by only keeping books I intend to read again. So any completionist tendencies have always been resolved via library or electronic editions.
I’m getting older now, and my first real confrontation with my own mortality came up with books. I have several years worth of books even if I were retired and reading three or four a week. New things come out all the time, and new voices. I haven’t read some of these books in ten years or more. Am I really going to read them again before… So a couple years ago I reread Dune for what will likely be the last time and sold my ratty old yellow copies to a used bookstore. If I do it again it will likely be audiobook.
I was firmly in the anti-audiobook camp until I heard the Dune (don't remember whose adaptation). Amazing experience. I still much prefer books (ebooks, because I can carry thousand to choose from when I inevitably finish the one I read), but I have since listened to several audiobooks and I really like how different yet oddly familiar it is, compared to reading.
There are books I feel I should read but never could sit through, and that's where I got started. I'm terrible at picking meter out of poetry, so I tried several times to start Homer and got four pages in before I wanted to gouge my eyes out. Finally listened to it during my daily commute.
Did a lot more while landscaping and walking for distance. Now I have a few favorites I just go through repeatedly when doing errands.
I had a friend who just ripped the audio track off of her favorite movies for road trips.
What is the status on I2P these days? I used to run a lot of stuff on it. It was a lot of fun. It was like this cozy alternative development of internet, where things still felt like 1997.
The numbers are interesting and a bit surprising to me.
I remember a time when people would have seedboxes for private trackers, data hoarders brag about having TBs of storage and yet only a handful of people are seeding the complete collection(s). I understand not everyone has or can seed multiple TBs of data but I was expecting there to be a lot of seeders for torrents with few hundreds of GBs.
Interesting to see that sci-hub is about 90TB and libgen-non-fiction is 77.5TB. To me, these are the two archives that really need protecting because this is the bulk of scientific knowledge - papers and textbooks.
I keep about 16TB of personal storage space in a home server (spread over 4 spinning disks). The idea of expanding to ~200 TB however seems... intimidating. You're looking at ~qty 12 16TB disks (not counting any for redundancy). Going the refurbished enterprise SATA drive route that is still going to run you about $180/drive = $2200 in drives.
I'm not quite there as far as disposable income to throw, but, I know many people out there who are; doubling that cost for redundancy and throw in a bit for the server hardware - $5k, to keep a current cache of all our written scientific knowledge - seems reasonable.
The interesting thing is these storage sizes aren't really growing. Scihub stopped updating the papers in 2022? At honestly with the advent of slop publications since then, the importance of what is in that 170TB is likely to remain the most important portion of the contrib for a long time.
True but it matters a lot less in many fields because things have been moving to arXiv and other open access options, anyway. The main time I need sci-hub is for older articles. And that's a huge advantage of sci-hub--they have things like old foreign journal articles even the best academic libraries don't have.
As for mirroring it all, $2200 is beyond my budget too, but it would be nothing for a lot of academic departments, if the line item could be "characterized" the right way. To me it has been a bit of a nuisance working with libgen down the last couple months, like the post mentioned, and I would have loved for a local copy. I don't see it happening, but if libgen/sci-hub/annas archive goes the way of napster/scour, many academics would be in a serious fix.
It's 167.5, not ~200, and you can get disks much larger than 16 TB these days - a quick check shows 30 TB being sold in normal consumer stores although ~20 TB disks may still be more affordable per byte.
I am curious how they’re funded. How they are able to stay online. Surely there must be people, governments etc with deep pockets that would want to take them down?
Kudos to the team behind this project! It looks like they have improved UI in last year. The crucial problem right now is to remain accessible or to survive. I have no idea how much effort is being put into it. I wonder is it possible to remain afloat despite all efforts to take them down?
There was a pretty major UI update in the past 2-5 days-ish.
Apologies for the minor grumble, but on mobile I used to be able to browse search results much more effectively; the new design only fits ~4-5 results on a screen.
To be fair, the theory with the whole coin thing is solid, and I'd say it should count as something to be proud of even if in reality it gets tainted by speculative investments.
It is neither humorous nor strange because that formulation omits authors.
How many authors who write the books in Anna's archive are happy about it?
I personally am pro Anna's archive (and sci-hub, etc) because I believe it benefits society to have better-read citizens. That said, I have some misgivings, because under our current system, there are issues with law and remuneration.
IMO, Scihub and the ebook parts of AA should be considered differently and not conflated.
In particular, Scihub is in opposition to the parasitic international publishers who dominate and control scientific publishing for profit, mostly on the backs of science generated by academia and other not-in-it-for-the-profit folks.
In contrast, downloading ebooks may, in some cases, lead to individual authors being hit in the pocket, in a profession it’s already hard to make a living from.
(I wish we’d figured out a better way to organise book publishing without publishing companies getting in the way and taking their large slice, allowing authors to profit more directly.)
I know one popular author who doesn't care: Brandon Sanderson. In addition he makes it possible to buy DRM free ebooks from his website.
In his words: “My experience has been that readers want to support things they like … But if they are at a point in their lives where they can’t, then it’s better to let them read the stories they want … and let them support artists when they’re capable of it. So I am a big fan of giving away books for free.”
Depends. I've seen some in favor and some against. Academics who have their papers paywalled by publishing entities against their own wills are generally for it.
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And I am one of the best customers of these 3 physical shops, in my town.
So sure, I don't buy the latest trends based on ads. I investigate a lot to buy GREAT stuff. Sometimes the shopkeeper has headaches to find the obscure stuff I discovered online that NOBODY knows it exists.
Am I an exception?
I don't know but those services are great to maintain a freedom of choice.
Many years ago, I was involved in a movie release group. Pretty much everybody in that group owned more VHSs/DVDs than the typical person. This is probably not surprising, since the time and effort one needs to put into that is rather large.
Those who only downloaded were more of a mixed bag; some of them were not in the US and might not be able to see a domestic release of the movies any time soon. Some proudly claimed that they never bought any media because paying for it when you could pirate was for losers.
Movies... I spent a small fortune on a movie collection. Then I moved countries and to my surprise found that my movies wouldn't play anymore. So I ripped the DVDs to digital media and played them using open source software. This saved a small fortune and was more convenient as well. I think I still have the DVDs.
I spent a large fortune on books. Thousands of them. Typically read once, a much smaller number read multiple times. So I gave away my books, except for a few hundred that I still keep. I support the authors that I like by buying their books but I read on screens not on paper because my eyesight sucks and on screens I can set the font to whatever I want rather than to what the publisher thought was optimal.
There is no way the media companies are going to guilt trip me over any of this, besides that I read both Janis Ian and Courtney Love's pieces on the recording industry.
Copyright is great, it has enabled lots of people to earn a living creating content. But it has also become a weapon in an ever more absurd war between consumers and middle men, the producers caught in some uncomfortable position in the background.
What's interesting is that the middlemen brought this all on themselves: they equated buying a physical copy of a production with licensing IP, but the general public didn't think that way at all: they bought a book, they bought a record, they bought a movie. And passing on what you've bought when you no longer need it was and still is such an ingrained part of our culture that it felt really weird to have restrictions placed on what you could do with stuff you bought and paid for. So when the format changed from physical to nothing (bits) plenty of people felt that this was not quite what we had agreed to, after all we were paying for the medium as much as we were paying for the content so how come we paid the same or even more as before? And now we paid and got something that we could no longer share with others. No way to easily pass that e-book to someone else (talk about malicious compliance), no way to send the song you just paid for through Spotify or iTunes to someone else to let them hear it after you are done with it. You don't own the medium any more so therefore you own nothing at all.
And those publishers and movie producers are all laughing to the bank whilst doing nothing at all except for playing bank.
It's a really good trade-off. I would never have gotten into these comics without piracy but now if something catches my eye, I don't mind buying on release (and stripping the DRM for personal use).
Most of my downloading is closer to collecting/hoarding/cataloguing behaviour but if I fully read something I enjoy, I'll support the author in some way.
However, smaller publishers like Titan Comics care about piracy a great deal and attack it somewhat successfully with gusto, because that's the only revenue.
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On the other hand, I buy way more movies than I used to, because upload sites have exposed me to many good films that I would never have heard of otherwise.
Years ago I was following development of an indie game. The developers wanted to provide a DRM-free experience.
The game had some online functionality (leaderboard or something). They were surprised when the number of accounts accessing the online functionality exceeded their sales by a dramatic number. The developer updates grew more and more sad as they switched from discussing new features to pleading with people to actually buy the game instead of copying it. Eventually they called it quits and gave up because the game, while very popular, was so widely pirated that few people actually paid.
Whenever the piracy topic comes up I hear people do mental gymnastics to justify it, like claiming they spend more than average and therefore their piracy is a net win. Yet when we get small peeks into numbers and statistics like with video game piracy, it’s not hard to see that the majority of people who pirate things are just doing it because they get what they want and don’t have to pay for it.
I'd assume that for your indie game, there were a lot of people who wound up thinking "I would play this if it's free, but I wouldn't spend $X" on it. Adding successful DRM wouldn't have done anything to them but drive them away, and reduce the amount of buzz the game received. But then, particularly in the indie game space, maybe trading away a lot of buzz for a couple hundred more full-price game sales would have been completely worth it...
This is where the concept of services like Xbox Game Pass seem to be landing. Once someone has paid their fairly-small-amount each month, every game is now "free". Much like fairly-cheap streaming music basically stopped music piracy from being mainstream, cheap game-services might have the same impact on the game industry.
Though, much like streaming music, whether it turns out to be economically viable for the average game studio is certainly a question.
(For the sake of completeness: I don't pirate anything, so I have nothing to justify here.)
Ok, but why? Whas the game actually unprofitable or did they just feel bad about some people getting it for free. You need to remember that a pirated copy does not equal a lost sale - in fact, sales may even be higher than they would be without piracy as popularity gained from pirated copies also translates to more legitimate buyers.
out of 100 people doing that how many actually buy product in the end???? if net gain is positive then developer would not pay millions to license DRM
Check out RimWorld.
Small game, no online functionality, never had DRM. It wasn't even big. It was shared all over the place because it was so expensive. It's still there and it's thriving. Still expensive.
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I’ve recently started using my local library’s mobile app and I love it. (I typically use this for re-reading or audiobooks for plane trips) I’m tempted to donate my entire bookshelf to the library and let them store and maintain it for me :-p
Some Lovecraft letters were translated into french some weeks ago. Great reading! There, Lovecraft gives his opinion about the litterature and art of his time.
And he mentions Nicolas Roerich. No idea who this guy was, but hey pretty interesting painter (thank god Google Images!). Ok, let's check on AA if there is a definitive book about his art.
No luck, but that very same guy wrote many books about Hindouism and eastern asia. After a few downloads on AA, no big deal, I am not so fond of them. Except for one that I knew nothing about (the name is Altai Himalaya, and I have absolutely no clue why this one is picking my attention, but it does).
That's definitely what I call serendipity.
And that thing happens a lot when you have a full access to whatever content is available. [and you are curious by nature]
In the end, retrospectively, such widespread access permits serendipity at a level that is absurdly miraculous !
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Also, I tend to look for obscure and old books (I love old travelogues) and once I find one that really gets me, you'll be sure to receive it as a gift, if I think you'd be someone (or in a place in life) who would enjoy it.
So, I might not but it for myself but I make my decision on the pirated version and then buy more than my share when it's truly a gem. If I don't end up recommending it or buying it for someone that usually means it was something which I'd be ok not to have consumed.
I'll never get over piracy sites blocking VPNs...
Yes, I think you're an exception, sorry.
We will never have real data on this. But simply on its face, I find it extremely hard to believe that most consumers have a strong enough moral compass to go out of their way to buy something they already have access to. Maybe they will for a tiny handful of special books that they want hard copies of, or authors they really like, but not for most media they consume.
This type of system also becomes a popularity contest for creators; you are supporting the people you like as opposed to whose work you want to read. If an author says something you disagree with, it's easy to just read their work without paying them. I'm not against consumer boycotts, but it should generally come with a sacrifice on both sides--for consumers, that means missing out on the product or service.
You are free to feel however you want about this. I can certainly see the immense societal value of making things accessible to more people. But I flat out don't believe the "piracy doesn't lead to lost sales" shtick, of course it does.
From above:
'The Dutch firm Ecory was commissioned to research the impact of piracy for several months, eventually submitting a 304-page report to the EU in May 2015. The report concluded that: “In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements. That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect.”
The report found that illegal downloads and streams can actually boost legal sales of games, according to the report. The only negative link the report found was with major blockbuster films: “The results show a displacement rate of 40 percent which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally.”'
This is zero-sum thinking. Do you oppose libraries on the same principle?
Sometimes making a thing accessible can increase the overall market for the good, because it trains the behavior. The market for books requires readers, and readers are created by people reading.
The main reason to download "pirated" books is that they get rid of all annoying barriers that exist in "legitimate" copies. It's a better product.
The reframing that will help you understand this is that these people are fans (I stole this framing from Korey Doctorow who releases his books online for free and encourages his fans to buy a copy if they like it). Fandom is a positive sum game. The more you do it, the deeper you go with it the more you’re happy to pay the people who create the content you love.
The easier it is for you to find new content the easier it is for you to become a fan of a new thing.
For example: I want to buy a copy of prince Pukler’s hints on landscape architecture. I can’t find a physical copy anywhere and I’m not sure if it’s worth $120 for a reprint or $500 for an older version. I could pirate it (I use that word loosely since this work is obviously in the public domain) and check it out, but I haven’t bothered so I haven’t bought a copy. This is a case of me NOT pirating and therefore NOT engaging with new content.
> I'm not against consumer boycotts, but it should generally come with a sacrifice on both sides--for consumers, that means missing out on the product or service.
I'm curious as to why you feel this way, genuinely. The decision to boycott means that there is no sale, full stop, so no money is being handed over. Why does anything after that matter? The important part, the money, is already decided from the start.
Some of these countries are codified under the Roman law principle, ie whatever is not explicitly forbidden by law, is simply not forbidden (as opposed to common law).
In some countries downloading the published media (eg a film after the official release) is permitted.
And those who download, paid for it in the form of tax.
Directive 2001/29/EC for the EU only (Article 5).
Other countries rely in provisions of WCT, 1996 (Art 10) and WPPT, 1996 (Art 16)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy has several countries listed, with examples/extent of these laws
I hope you support downloading books/films/TV shows/music by the customers who paid for this privilege.
> you are supporting the people you like as opposed to whose work you want to read
TBH personally I find that a much more convoluted reason. It might be an edge case of "I will watch this clip of horrible person to get the original source" but actively seeking out material for free just so that they get nothing, but I can consume it in whole? That sounds really rare to me.
But one of the point I also wanted to highlight is that I knew nothing about those stuff and would have had no opportunity to taste them and be convinced that they are GREAT stuff [for me].
And to come back to your comment regarding creators. The thing that I hate are creators [for example writers who are interviewed in radios] who sell their book with a marvelous speech, but the content is eventually very so/so. As a consumer I feel robbed.
I like the idea that consumers only buy stuff out of moral obligation.
Like if you went to your ethical friend’s house and saw that he had empty book cases and no art on his walls because he hasn’t yet been imbued with the requisite moral fervor necessary to buy anything. It’s hard for him to be sure what he’s obligated to buy or that he’s obligated to buy anything since it would be wrong of him to know what’s inside any book without buying it first.
And then you went to your no-good, dirty, downright despicable friend’s house and it’s full of books and art because for every 20 books he pirates he buys one, and because he’s just so darn unethical he pirates a lot of books
I'm not as certain as you are. Correlation does not imply causation, but media sales have trended upwards in the age of piracy which leads to some interesting hypotheses.
A few years ago Shirley Manson (lead singer of the 90s band Garbage) accused YouTube of making its fortune off the backs of content creators - basically charging the entire enterprise as being one big exercise in copyright infringement. And yet the music industry, as well as Hollywood, seem to be doing better and better each year in terms of dollars made. Some of the distribution models have changed - broadcast and cable television are pretty dead in the water, but the entertainment industries in general seem to be doing better than ever. And yeah lots of individual artists are still getting raw deals from Spotify and labels etc. as they always have. But industry-wise, in terms of dollar amounts, it seems there's more money to be made than ever before from creating and selling entertainment.
The statement you made that I absolutely agree with is that it's hard to get real world data on this. An individual who is able to get free access to something may be unlikely to ever pay for that same thing.But the answer to the question: "Does piracy hurt the industry's bottom line, or help it on the whole?" is a very difficult question to answer. And we have to consider the even harder stuff to measure. Things like: is a teenager who pirates recorded media more or less likely to buy merch and concert tickets? More or less likely to buy a special edition package with tangible collector items?
At the end of the day, I have no clue.
I also offer all of this being very pro-capitalism and pro-intellectual-property. I don't condone piracy. But if we're just looking at raw data and trying to form our hypothesis, we have to start with the fact that the raw data points to upwards trends on the whole.
So nothing really out of the "normality", but they are no longer marketed and are slowly fading to grey.
I was just trying to finish this writer’s corpus on a reread of their later material. It’s not that I’m cheap. I own a paper and audiobook copy of several of my favorite books. Including this author, so I’ve paid her twice. I just avoided the trap some of my friends long ago were falling into of hoarding books, by only keeping books I intend to read again. So any completionist tendencies have always been resolved via library or electronic editions.
I’m getting older now, and my first real confrontation with my own mortality came up with books. I have several years worth of books even if I were retired and reading three or four a week. New things come out all the time, and new voices. I haven’t read some of these books in ten years or more. Am I really going to read them again before… So a couple years ago I reread Dune for what will likely be the last time and sold my ratty old yellow copies to a used bookstore. If I do it again it will likely be audiobook.
Did a lot more while landscaping and walking for distance. Now I have a few favorites I just go through repeatedly when doing errands.
I had a friend who just ripped the audio track off of her favorite movies for road trips.
https://annas-archive.org/torrents
I'd assume there are many people who don't help out purely because of legal fears, something i2p could help with.
I remember a time when people would have seedboxes for private trackers, data hoarders brag about having TBs of storage and yet only a handful of people are seeding the complete collection(s). I understand not everyone has or can seed multiple TBs of data but I was expecting there to be a lot of seeders for torrents with few hundreds of GBs.
I keep about 16TB of personal storage space in a home server (spread over 4 spinning disks). The idea of expanding to ~200 TB however seems... intimidating. You're looking at ~qty 12 16TB disks (not counting any for redundancy). Going the refurbished enterprise SATA drive route that is still going to run you about $180/drive = $2200 in drives.
I'm not quite there as far as disposable income to throw, but, I know many people out there who are; doubling that cost for redundancy and throw in a bit for the server hardware - $5k, to keep a current cache of all our written scientific knowledge - seems reasonable.
The interesting thing is these storage sizes aren't really growing. Scihub stopped updating the papers in 2022? At honestly with the advent of slop publications since then, the importance of what is in that 170TB is likely to remain the most important portion of the contrib for a long time.
True but it matters a lot less in many fields because things have been moving to arXiv and other open access options, anyway. The main time I need sci-hub is for older articles. And that's a huge advantage of sci-hub--they have things like old foreign journal articles even the best academic libraries don't have.
As for mirroring it all, $2200 is beyond my budget too, but it would be nothing for a lot of academic departments, if the line item could be "characterized" the right way. To me it has been a bit of a nuisance working with libgen down the last couple months, like the post mentioned, and I would have loved for a local copy. I don't see it happening, but if libgen/sci-hub/annas archive goes the way of napster/scour, many academics would be in a serious fix.
I wonder how much space it is as highly compressed, deduplicated, plain text files.
Does the sum of human scientific knowledge fit on a large hard drive?
https://annas-archive.org/donate
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Last but not least?
Apologies for the minor grumble, but on mobile I used to be able to browse search results much more effectively; the new design only fits ~4-5 results on a screen.
* ability to fund shadow libraries without fear of censorship
* lists with a single item still count as lists
Bitcoin is much worse than cash in that regard
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41449007
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https://open-slum.org/
https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma
How many authors who write the books in Anna's archive are happy about it?
I personally am pro Anna's archive (and sci-hub, etc) because I believe it benefits society to have better-read citizens. That said, I have some misgivings, because under our current system, there are issues with law and remuneration.
In particular, Scihub is in opposition to the parasitic international publishers who dominate and control scientific publishing for profit, mostly on the backs of science generated by academia and other not-in-it-for-the-profit folks.
In contrast, downloading ebooks may, in some cases, lead to individual authors being hit in the pocket, in a profession it’s already hard to make a living from.
(I wish we’d figured out a better way to organise book publishing without publishing companies getting in the way and taking their large slice, allowing authors to profit more directly.)
In his words: “My experience has been that readers want to support things they like … But if they are at a point in their lives where they can’t, then it’s better to let them read the stories they want … and let them support artists when they’re capable of it. So I am a big fan of giving away books for free.”
Source: https://www.jotdown.es/2016/12/brandon-sanderson-i-want-to-s...
For example, if you pirated an ebook and liked it, you'd likely buy a physical copy.