02-13-2023, 02:13 PM | #1 | |
o saeclum infacetum
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Z-Library is back, alas
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02-13-2023, 03:04 PM | #2 |
Wizard
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Based on your thread title, this bothers you. Why would you provide a link showing people a path to access this?
This seems really odd behavior, for a moderator especially, since it's almost a ban-able offense to even mention the word "piracy" here, in any context. |
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02-13-2023, 03:12 PM | #3 | ||||
o saeclum infacetum
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02-13-2023, 03:21 PM | #4 |
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Z-library is and was by no means the only pirate site. There will always be pirate sites. The only way for the pirate sites not to exist would be if there were no demand.
There is no pirate site for ebooks in Estonian language, and that's because most Estonians prefer paper books. There is little demand for Estonian ebooks, so no pirate sites, at least none I have stumbled upon. And of course the market is microscopical, compared to English, German, French and so on. |
02-13-2023, 04:04 PM | #5 | ||
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02-13-2023, 04:20 PM | #6 |
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I saw this article earlier, but the headline "Z-Library returns, aims to avoid seizures..." made me wonder wtf they were doing that induced epileptic seizures.
EDIT: Someone in the comments had the same mistake, lol. |
02-13-2023, 04:25 PM | #7 | |
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02-13-2023, 04:30 PM | #8 |
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I wonder how much they're paying for all those domains...
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02-13-2023, 04:34 PM | #9 |
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02-13-2023, 04:39 PM | #10 |
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It is good to see them to move to login-only stage. The next one is donation-only, which we know from the example of other such libraries.
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02-13-2023, 05:15 PM | #11 | |
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Going to a donation-only model, generally known as a paid model, would be even better for authors and legitimate distributors. A move like this would give pause to even more pirates. And initially may look appealing to Z-Lib. They would be getting money directly from their users, not indirectly from advertisers or whatever supports them currently. However, their user base would go down if things required payment. And an unwanted side effect for Z-Lib would be that their uploaders - the source of their content - would also go down with the user base size. Making a move to donation-only would probably depend on if Z-Lib considers itself a for profit business, or a piracy for the fun of piracy entity. Even if they are for profit, they would have to consider if the decrease in their size - number of users, downloaders mostly - plus the decrease in their uploaders - smaller amount of content - would be worth forcing direct payment from their user base. Piracy is a difficult thing to contain. Domains can be shut down on the clear web, but there is still the dark web out there. I would guess that Z-Lib's current move to provide a common login page with user-specific "secret" access domains is an attempt to maintain and increase their user base. Because then they have a presence on the clear web. None of this would be needed on the dark web. But there are fewer users there. It appears that a large user base - both downloaders and uploaders - may be of more importance to Z-Lib than the direct income that would come from a donation-only model. But that's only my guess, based on the move they just made. |
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02-13-2023, 08:30 PM | #12 |
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02-14-2023, 08:38 AM | #13 |
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With reference to piracy of fiction, do away with geo-restrictions, DRM and vendor walled gardens, and I think a lot of reasons for piracy disappear. More will disappear if ebook versions are available as standard when the book is 'in print', and all such ebooks are freely convertible between formats (necessary when you need to use accessibility tools). Also, the price of the ebook should reflect that you are not paying for printing or physical storage and transport costs.
I also think that the price of keeping copyright 'alive' on an edition or work should include offering an ebook version at all times at a reasonable price (so no charging at £25 for mass-market fiction that currently sells at an average of £10). If there is no accessible (i.e. not some obscure language in a remote territory) version available, then the book should revert to worldwide public domain. This might need to be qualified for non-English authors writing in their native language for sale only in their native country, but if you are distributing something worldwide, then there must be an accessible version available worldwide. (Yeah, yeah I know - the dominance of English as a default lingua franca and the colonial legacy thereof.) I buy books if I want to read them; and I want to read them on a device of my choice regardless of where I purchased them. In some cases I buy an ebook to replace a disintegrating much-loved paperback, or when a book has updated content, or I physically can't hold the paper copy anymore. I'm not going to get into the arguments pro and con piracy around academic publishing. |
02-14-2023, 08:44 AM | #14 |
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Copyright should end with the author's death. Why should the author's heirs benefit? They can earn their own wages, just like anyone else's heirs.
Not that it would necessarily lessen piracy, of course. |
02-14-2023, 09:01 AM | #15 | |||
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