[nekusar]

What capitalism continues to show us: proof that public libraries, if created in the last 10 years, would be deemed illegal and sued out of existence.

It's only because the late 1800's billionaires wanted to leave legacies and made pay-to-enter and free libraries, and migrated them to free, or public libraries. Thats why so many of them are (John) Carnegie Libraries.

Only legal when billionaires do it.

[gdulli]

A lower stakes but still illustrative example I see is that the DVR is an invention that wouldn't be allowed to succeed today. All power is being wielded to its fullest in order to prevent skipping ads.

Cable to streaming took us from skippable to unskippable ads. Search results to LLM results will result in invisible/undisclosed ads. Each successive generation of technology will increase the power of advertising and strip rights we used to have. Another example, physical to digital media ownership, we lost resale rights.

We need to understand that we've passed a threshold after which innovation is hurting us more than helping us. That trumps everything else.

[birdman3131]

Modern DVR's are not the same as classic ones. As per this article from today shows that people have prerecorded are being pulled from their DVR's.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/youtube-tvs-disney-b...

[noir_lord]

> All power is being wielded to its fullest in order to prevent skipping ads.

And yet I can go to a site right now off the top of my head and watch any TV show or basically any movie made in the last 50 years for free in HD.

It might be shut down tomorrow and it'll be up against 30s later with a different TLD.

They aren't winning but they really are trying hard to.

[tptacek]

How do you figure libraries would be deemed illegal? They operate today. The Archive, on the other hand, attempted a fair use argument for whole copies of books (the copyrighted form most legible to copyright law) currently for sale as ebooks. I agree with the comment across the thread calling this a spectacularly boneheaded move and expressing gratitude that the entire Archive wasn't compromised over the stunt.

[pessimizer]

> How do you figure libraries would be deemed illegal? They operate today.

The history of public libraries is extremely messy, and the RIAA almost managed to get secondhand music made illegal in the 90s. Publishers did not ever support the idea of loaning a single copy of a work to dozens of people. While it's a huge stretch to say that every illegal download represents a lost sale (people download 100x more than they read), it's a lot less of a stretch to say that people who would sit down and read an entire book are fairly likely to have bought it.

Also, when books were relatively more expensive for people (19th century), a lot of income from publishers came from renting their books, rather than selling them. Public libraries involved a lot of positive propaganda and promises of societal uplift from wealthy benefactors, along the same lines and around the same time as the introduction of universal free public education. I remember hearing a lot about this history at the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore, which iirc was the first. Libraries were at that time normally private membership clubs.

edit: I also agree that the free book thing was stupid and have been very harsh about it. I don't know if it's possible to be too harsh about it, because it was obviously never going to get past a court. It felt almost like intentional sabotage.

[paulddraper]

The claim is that they operate today only via precedent.

> proof that public libraries, if created in the last 10 years

[Worksheet]

Would there be anything worth putting into the libraries if intellectual property rights are not respected?

[wongarsu]

There is a lot of writing on the internet that's done for free with no profit motive. Both fiction and nonfiction.

Paying the editors is the bigger issue than paying the authors

[ForHackernews]

...yes? The median book sells ~3,000 copies, ever. But people keep writing them!

[throwanem]

What I hear you say is that Brewster's time would be more wisely spent making friends of billionaires.

[nekusar]

Possibly, yeah. Make a "Deal" <spit> with AI companies to have back-end access to all the Archive org's content. Get 'permission' to copy EVERYTHING and have billionaires run interference.

The AI companies already got blank checks to do that. Anthropic is paying what, like $3000 per book? I remember when the fucks at the RIAA were suing 12 year olds for $10000 for Britney Spears albums.

Or better yet, if it's just $3k a book, can we license every book and have that added into Archive.org? Oh wait, deals for thee, not for me.