Right, but pirating Disney-owned IP is more moral than paying for it. Disney is the number 1 company in the world for lobbying for copyright over-reach. Every dollar that goes to Disney pays for lobbyists who will continue to push for life-of-author + 90+ years, because life-of-author plus 70 years just isn’t enough time to control our shared cultural heritage.
Similarly for Nintendo and software piracy.
Paying for Disney/Nintendo media is immoral.
Exactly my thought on reading the article.
In the US, even regulatory capture follows partisan divisions… Insanity.
The most interesting insight from this article, imho, is that abortion rights in Florida are on the ballot in 2024, abortion rights have passed in every referendum on the topic since the recent Supreme Court fuckery, and that women coming to the polls to vote for their reproductive rights might skew the numbers more in favour of Democrats, independent of polling.
So Democrat victories in Florida (including a senator seat) are looking like a real possibility.
Seriously… I’ve downloaded 2TB in a week before.
I get that it’s not about the bandwidth, though; it’s about needing to upgrade their security since they scraped the site without needing to log in, so obviously their site wasn’t secure. They’re claiming IT costs as damages.
Exactly this.
I’ll never vote Green (as a Canadian) since it’s strategically equivalent to not voting at all.
Sentencing hasn’t happened yet; 48 years is the maximum, according to the article.
Whatever the sentence is will be ridiculous since it’s just copyright infringement, but hopefully the sentencing goes to a small fraction of the maximum.
I dunno. I think there are enough things named after men.
Maybe a nice neutral woman’s name… Like, Anna?
And it’s more about preservation and archival, so I think it should be called an Archive, not a library.
Yeah, Anna’s Archive. Great name. Let’s go with that one.
I don’t follow. The Internet Archive only allows 1 copy of each physical book to be loaned at a time. If someone has the book you want already, then you need to wait until their loan expires. It’s not like shadow libraries that allow unrestricted DRM-free downloading.
And publishers’ profits are rising and don’t seem to be at all correlated to library access, so of course nobody is suggesting they should close.
What am I not understanding?
Yep. Z-Library loaded fine for me with their app, which leads the darknet site.
But Anna’s Archive is probably easier.
I’d just email the CEO, media relations, and legal (if you can get all their email addresses), inform them of their non-compliance with the GPL and ask them to resolve this swiftly before it needs to be escalated. Then if you don’t hear back in 2 business days, reply all again CCing someone they might care about: local media to their jurisdiction, the FSF, the EFF, etc.
In Canada, I’ve never bothered with a VPN. Nobody in Canada has ever been successfully sued for torrent downloading of media, and BC courts have thrown out mass John Doe cases as a waste of the legal system’s time.
Even if it does go to court, there’s a principal in Canadian law that damages can be at most three times the value of the good (for punitive damages). For BluRay that’s, what, $50? They don’t want to go all the way to a judgement to set the legal precedent of a $150 judgement.
Even if courts go beyond treble damages, there’s a maximum fine of $5000 for non-commercial infringement. Even that isn’t with their legal costs to pursue.
So non-commercial piracy is de facto legal in Canada.
(IANAL, this is not legal advice.)
I don’t know the terminology, but so long as the torrent is active, you’re uploading. If you selectively download files, then you can only upload the chunks you have downloaded, obviously. Is that “seeding” if you aren’t a “seed” with 1.00 availability? idk.
I’d still count that as “seeding” since you’re running the torrent for upload only, but idk if there’s a precise definition somewhere.
I don’t think that’s an issue. Downloading a partial is a problem on private trackers since there are so few users, but on a public tracker, someone downloading a partial is just making the swarm a bit more robust: they are sharing connections details to other users in the swarm and are able to partially seed part of the content.
Hit & run torrent users are the bigger problem; they add nothing to the ecosystem. But, for example, if there’s a “complete early roms for all systems nointro unzipped” torrent, and someone only downloads and seeds the SNES section, then the swarm gets the benefit of someone sharing that section of the content.
You could even get a situation where there are no “seeds” but 100% availability, with different people sharing different sections.
I’m not fully looped in to why Anna’s Archive did what they did, but their massive 1TB+ torrent zips are pretty useless for most purposes. I’d be happy to download a partial and seed books in, say, a particular genre, but I’m not going to seed a partial of a massive zip file that’s useless to me without the full archive.
As a Canadian, that sounds even worse to me, lol. Elected judges? That’s insanity. Judges should never be making decisions based on political expedience.
Judges should be chosen by people who are experts in the law based on their knowledge and experience.
In Canada, I suppose it’s loosely political, but it’s several steps removed from direct political appointment. The PM and cabinet appoint someone to be the head of the judiciary, confirmed by the Governor General, and Supreme Court judges can be held accountable by the Senate and House in cases of misconduct.
Electing judges would make it worse, not better, imho.
The best solution I’ve heard for the US wouldn’t require a constitutional amendment, it’s to make the Supreme Court position last 18 years before becoming a Justice Emeritus (or whatever) that’s mostly ceremonial. That takes away the incentive to stuff the judiciary with young judges, and adds stability that each presidential term is 2 justice appointments on a slowly rolling basis.
The top 10% own almost exactly ⅔ of all US wealth. (66.9%)
No need for hyperbole when 90% of the population controls ⅓ of the wealth and the bottom 50% only controls 2.5% of the country’s wealth. (Same source as above).
They get 30 days notice of the price increase. That’s pretty reasonable and in compliance with the law, I would assume.
I use Real Debrid with Stremio + Torrentio. I just need to figure out how to add the manual torrent search & download plugin for Real Debrid since I watch a lot of obscure British TV, not everything is hosted already.
For mainstream stuff, it just works. For obscure stuff, it’s about 50-50 if it’s on there.
Manually downloading torrents is just for stuff I’ll be transferring to a mobile device, like audiobooks. And cracked software, I suppose. I needed Adobe Acrobat for something and torrented it.
I sincerely hope you’re right, but Biden is polling a lot lower now than he was in 2020, and it was a shockingly close race.
Regardless, it shouldn’t be this close. Democrats need to shift to capture Gen Z and Millennial voters. Alienating young voters will be what loses them the next election, if they lose, and it’s causing increasingly bigger problems for them as Gen Z ages into voting and Millennials aren’t shifting right as they age. Democrats need to pivot to get young voters politically engaged.
Or, at least, that’s my take as a non-American watching this trainwreck happen.
Similar for me, recently. When I’m really into reading, I can read more than a book a day. $15+ for an audiobook that I’ll crush in a day just isn’t possible for me. That could easily balloon to $5000/year for me and another $3000/yr for my daughter, and $2000/year for my wife. (I’ve read a 6-book series, a 3-book series, and almost half a 4-book series in the last week… And didn’t sleep, lol!)
We can’t afford a used car in audiobook costs each year.
I actually mostly switched to text-to-speech with Kindle Unlimited so authors get paid for most of my reading, but audiobooks I still pirate when I read them. By my napkin math, authors get about 20-30 times what I pay in KU fees based on our voracious reading.
Meanwhile, Steam is raking it in by continuing to offer a better product than piracy. The Steam Deck is making that even more true; it’s so much more convenient to have games in the Steam library than try to keep a repack updated with new patches/content.