Comment by elashri

Comment by elashri 11 days ago

17 replies

Wikipedia, Sci-hub, Anna's archive and Library Genesis. This is the sites that contains a significant part of humanity knowledge that will be needed.

glimshe 11 days ago

Most of these sites being illegal says something about our laws. But I'd add GitHub to your list.

  • self_awareness 11 days ago

    > Most of these sites being illegal says something about our laws.

    The perspective on this changes if you stop being a consumer, and start being an author.

    • mitthrowaway2 11 days ago

      For authors of scholarly journal papers at least, I don't think piracy is remotely a concern, because they do not receive any compensation from subscriptions or purchases of their papers, whereas they do benefit from the increased readership of their works.

    • ffsm8 11 days ago

      If it does, then the author is sadly misguided and got convinced of someone that isn't true.

      The people that download the book from these sites would never have bought them. Having your book downloaded by 10k people doesn't mean you've lost 10k sales, what it does mean is that you've got up to 10k people that wouldn't have bought the book anyway talking about it, effectively becoming word of mouth advertisers.

      This isn't quiet as true for movies/tv series etc, because their value (entertainment time/price) is so much lower. Books on the other have usually cost $5-30 and will take 4-30 hours to read through. At that price point, very very few people will download the books to save what amounts to a single meal. Especially if you consider that so few people actually read several books per year (that's essentially $<30 per year "saved" via illegal downloads)

      It could become an issue if a for-profit company could serve them legally however, I agree with that. It's hard to really talk about that, though ... It's a pure what-if/speculation after all

      • grepfru_it 11 days ago

        Ah yes, the piracy never hurt anyone approach.

        How many of those 10k purchases didn’t buy it because it was available for free somewhere? The point is, as you said, you don’t know.. However we do know the opposite is true, once Napster went away people started paying for Pandora. Netflix password crackdown lead to increased subscriptions.

        When your desirable product isn’t available for free, people will trend towards buying it.

    • glimshe 10 days ago

      I am an author, and I don't think I'm entitled to have my work protected for 90+ years. Also, "piracy" is inevitable so the assumption is built-in my strategy.

    • marcosdumay 10 days ago

      You mean... all those people that got rich writing knowledge-heavy books disagree with the GP?

      What is the algebraic empty solution to "all" again? I can't remember if you are right.

    • scotty79 10 days ago

      If it ever changes for me it'll only mean that I've became a terrible person.

    • animuchan 10 days ago

      It honestly doesn't, not at all.

      Source: I'm an author.

    • elashri 11 days ago

      At least for one of the websites in this lis, no it does not as you don't gain anything from the money that the users pay. And frankly some people will email you asking you to send them your work for free and you will happily do that.