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> At this point I'm inclined to ask-- what would a cypherpunk not do? I.e., let's remove crypto and magically-dev'ing-ourselves-out-of-holes from the equation.

One reasonable thing I can suggest that everyone can do at the local level is to support your local library and any funding millages for them. As someone said, "If libraries were proposed afresh today, the copyright lobby would immediately shut them down and sue them". So it seems like a reasonable way to encourage archival of materials on a local level.

Going beyond that, I guess you could ask to talk to librarians at your local library about promoting open-access materials? I feel like they are much more likely to know about fair-use cases and methods and their intersection with copyright compared to the average reader here.

> As someone said, "If libraries were proposed afresh today, the copyright lobby would immediately shut them down and sue them"

This sounded somewhat reasonable so I did a quick search for history of libraries and copyrights laws in US. Apparently Ben Franklin started one of the first in the "egalitarian colonies" while a bit later the Continental Congress resolved that "nothing is more properly a man's own than the fruit of his study, and that the protection and security of literary property would greatly tend to encourage genius and to promote useful discoveries."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law_of_th...

And somehow we have both the laws and the libraries. And this site [below] is claiming that there are "unique provisions" to protect all sorts of knowledge repositories, ranging from "libraries, archives and museums under copyright acts in the U.S. and around the world".

https://www.copyrightlaws.com/copyright-provisions-for-libra...

So that "someone"'s statement turns out to be merely a device to cast shade on the idea of copyright laws.

If you look at the history around this - I think you're fairly confused.

You've picked some random quotes - but modern copyright law essentially started in England in 1710 with the Statute of Anne.

Some background context - Prior to 1710, there was a legal monopoly over publishing held by the Stationers Company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worshipful_Company_of_Statione...). They were the only entity that could publish manuscripts and newspapers in England legally.

Authors themselves had no such rights - Instead they would be forced to sell their manuscripts and maps to members of the Stationers Company for a one time fee, and the Stationers Company then retained a perpetual copyright on them.

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So when you see the quote "Nothing is more properly a man's own than the fruit of his study"... you need to understand that in this context they mean very clearly that author's work should be theirs - and that the copyright shouldn't go to a company who profits because of a monopoly agreement with the crown.

They weren't really saying "Copyright laws are a good thing" they were saying "Copyright should remain in the hands of the author - not be forcibly removed by the crown".

Further - and this is IMPORTANT - they decided that 14 years was plenty of time for a copyright. There should be no "perpetual copyright" like what was granted to the Stationers.

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And yet.... here we are in 2022, with a situation that actually looks fairly similar to the 1500s. Large publishing companies control nearly all successful commercial publications. They've lobbied the government to increase the duration of those copyrights and trademarks to be nearly "perpetual" for all meaningful purposes, and they usually pay authors a one time fee for those perpetual copyrights.

If anything - I'd argue that modern copyright laws as they exist and are enforced today are a complete sabotage of the intent of those men you're quoting.

That is a pure straw man retort.

I was clearly using US (not European) jurisdiction. Also I didn’t parse that statement, merely showed that both topics were in development and discussion in tandem, in US. Finally, the existence of special provisions for libraries, etc. All of which shows that the two have somehow coexisted, and that quote of yours is hyperbole.

The US law is almost entirely based on the same set of laws that originated in 1710 with the Statute of Anne (down to literally the same 14 period).

The scope has been modified and changed (mostly in favor of extending the rights of copyright holders, and the duration of the copyright).

The two aren't co-existing. Modern copyright law doesn't actually say jack shit about libraries except for a minor footnote that allows libraries limited ability to "preserve" works that are no longer available for sale, even if they are within their period of copyright. Libraries operate almost entirely under the doctrine of first sale... which is also under attack in the US right now.

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Have a good one, I don't think you have enough context on the subject to be worth discussing it with further.

Consider using IPFS and ENS instead of DNS…

https://acypherpunksmanifesto.eth.limo

The link about using the eth.limo gateway so it is resolvable on browsers like chrome/safari but .limo is not required on most web3 browsers. In either case the content in hosted on IPFS making it free and censorship resistant.

ipfs and other per to per systems sound like cool idea but 1 it isn't what he/she/them ask (ask for legislation and policies) 2 sound like something that faster than later will be heavily monitored, in the same way that bitcoin is now. 3 the web3 part which at least for ME now feel like mess of bad ideas, that doesn't solve real problems, and pyramid schemes financed by vc who can't care less about privacy.

Any reason you chose to use per to per vs. peer to peer? Just wondering if I'm missing a fun reference

no,erratum

>but 1 it isn't what he/she/them ask (ask for legislation and policies)

Exactly, the problem is asking for law/policy/regulation to solve the problem when it is the problem.

In the words of Cypherpunk and EFF Founder John Gilmore:

“I want a guarantee -- with physics and mathematics, not with laws -- that we can give ourselves real privacy of personal communications."

>Exactly, the problem is asking for law/policy/regulation to solve the problem when it is the problem

One thing is privacy, another is copyright. You already have laws protecting your privacy, cryptography is a way of enforcing them. But if copyright law is a mess, it would be a good idea to reflect about how to improve it.

Finding a legal method is impossible as long as DMCA is king.

As far as a better replacement goes, we just need a good decentralized forum tool with moderation, and we will be set.

So like non-alt hierarchies on Usenet?

I personally solve it by abusing Google cloud storage. If you have a domain name you can get their enterprise account for $20 a month with unlimited storage. I have close to 100TB of stuff on there. Rclone crypt makes sure they have no clue what it is. Rclone mount shows it as a mounted drive.

I thought they did away with unlimited? Is that not the case? I have a google domain but stopped paying two years ago for other reasons, and recently when I looked into getting workspace again it sounded like you can’t get unlimited storage for $20 anymore?

Grandfathered in maybe?

Possibly, but for some reason I had the impression they were doing away with grandfathered plans too. Because my old google apps (free) account was force upgraded to workspaces maybe.

I think I had read you can request additional storage when you exceed the standard limit now. Maybe that’s what he means by unlimited and if you already had the data in googled cloud, well you don’t have to request from anyone (yet).

They changed course on that and you were able to opt-out of the upgrade and continue using the free version.

You had to do something by a certain date which has since passed so it's not much help now.

I think you're right. After doing some sleuthing, I found this:

G Suite Business is not available for new sign ups. If you have G Suite Business, your subscription and all related services will continue to function as they do today, until it’s time to transition to a new offering. We’ll be in touch over the coming months to identify your transition path.

This was a $12/month unlimited storage plan.

https://support.google.com/a/answer/6034782?hl=en

Yeah! I had it on a personal domain for $12 for a year or two, then I went and joined the Army on a whim and cut all my subscriptions, but now I'm in a place where I want cloud storage again and can't find any good options.

I think it's possible you can get "unlimited" storage by signing up for one of their enterprise plans, but nowadays they make you request additional storage when you run out. I'm sure they don't throw a fit over 5-10TB, but I can imagine flags being raised when users on 1 user plans start requesting storage and they already have 100TB assigned.

> joined the Army on a whim

How’d that go?

https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html

Enterprise is $20

Can you post a link regarding the unlimited storage? I have a google registered domain and would love some extra storage.

Can’t rely on that long term.

I personally solved the creation of an online encyclopedia by copying Encyclopedia Britannica to my... shit, it's gone. Oh well.

C'mon, LARP a policy discussion: what are the chess moves toward public policy to keeparchives like sci-hub from being so easily burninated? Any policy discussion will do.

I'll go rewrite the relevant Acts of Congress in Rust if I have to.

> I'll go rewrite the relevant Acts of Congress in Rust if I have to.

Maybe start there - don't stick with a US jurisdiction. What was that country that was taken to the WTO and won against US copyright, and are now allowed to host any copyrighted material without penalty?

When I wrote this [1] my principle dig was at the universities, who I have long considered derelict in their duties to curate and maintain the civic cannon.

Not a single academic had the courage to reply me (or the ability to read the blatant, unsubtle sub-text). I cannot find a single institution that still counts "the global public" amongst its stakeholders. They are fully in bed with the likes of Elsevier and the project to privatise knowledge.

https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-informatio...

No registration: https://web.archive.org/web/20220131212257/https://www.times...

> how do we sustainably grow a crowd-sourcable archive for copyrighted digital artifacts?

You don't. Copyright is necessary for most people like developers to make a living. If some one like github can just rip off your code there is no market for developers, if there are no developers theres nothing for github to rip off.

The real issue with copyright law is the lifelong copyright destroys our ability to archive. Microsoft isn't making money off windows 98 there is no market for it, if I have an old game that only runs on windows 98 I am kinda shit out of luck. If some one releases a pirate copy of windows 98 because there is no legitimate market Microsoft legally has to sue them or risk losing their copyright not just for 98 but all windows.

We need to limit copy right to a reasonable length of time. Which then brings up the issue of what is a reasonable time? 10 years 20 years 2000 years? Businesses with the legal capabilities of Disney will always argue for the life of the author plus a million years and the rest of us don't really have the funds to compete.

Google tried it and they failed and they have more money than god. We need more money than god and the way to do it in this market is to make something we can copyright and then exploit that and after a life time of doing this we will have our money to start the legal battle, or at least our kids do. Will they act in the publics best interests and blow their wealth or will they act in their best interest?

> What are some good starting points to look for a more robust way out of the problem-- how do we sustainably grow a crowd-sourcable archive for copyrighted digital artifacts?

We need to provide funding for film makers, authors, artists, and other creatives who in return release their work under Creative Commons licenses. And we need to stop paying attention to movies and music that is not released under an acceptable license.

It's unlikely to ever happen as it would require a lot of political wrangling, but I think a system where you only gain copyright protection or the ability to sue for damages by submitting your work to a repository/archive would be beneficial (either for free or very low cost). Then when copyright has expired the archive can make the work available to the public

> The cycle of building, burning, and rebuilding the Great Digital Libraries of Alexandria (e.g., Napster, Pirate Bay, Demonoid, what.cd, redacted, etc.) has gotten old.

That is the very cycle of Nature and the rise and fall of Civilizations upon which Human progress hinges on; I think its more apt to say that YOU got old, and keeping up got hard (it has for me too) because this is how it's always been in Nature.

I question if you are even familiar with the very core values of the Manifesto, let alone the works of all other Cypherpunks as this is at the crux of it's existence:

> We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.

Just so it's clear these are the people who ushered in the exciting tech era in Silicon Valley in the 90s--especially for those of us who grew up here and saw it emerge and consider it part of our very culture rather than merely an interesting/lucrative career path--that eventually decayed into what it is now; the sense of enjoying and relishing these values were the norm when I first got into tech as a kid, now it's the exception and fringe for and it's cause is very the reasons that most have come to hate tech: it's become a dystopic land of Corpo barons (VC) tech lords (FAANG) who rely on IP and a crooked legal system to maintain it's supremacy.

Gene Kahn (RIP) said it best at the Senate meeting [0] and people would be wise to adapt and have Humanity flourish from the advance in Human knowlege and culture, instead brilliant men like him and Arron Schwartz killed themselves because of a few business moguls rather than being on the cover of Wired Magazine or on Forbes 30 under 30 for their efforts.

0: http://www.xcflabs.com/

> I think its more apt to say that YOU got old, and keeping up got hard (it has for me too) because this is how it's always been in Nature.

Modern digital libraries of Alexandria have only ever been burned because of the imposition of artificial scarcity. In contrast, in nature DNA is being copied all over the place. Imperfectly, but at least the parts that matter are being shared widely.

> Just so it's clear these are the people who ushered in the exciting tech era in Silicon Valley in the 90s

Bullshit. Cypherpunks don’t just exist in SV. Any cypherpunk who still cares about their principles would recoil in horror at SV that was there since circa 2015 ( and that’s being generous), let alone now.

> Bullshit. Cypherpunks don’t just exist in SV. Any cypherpunk who still cares about their principles would recoil in horror at SV that was there since circa 2015 ( and that’s being generous), let alone now.

I never said they did and I agree: what I did say is that is where it began and it's origins was in SV in the 90s [0] which is when I was a kid in CA and feel it's part of my culture as I grew up on the internet back then (hence my interest in tech).

I'd say at the end of the first crypto war things started to get dire so by the dotcom era in the 2000s the Corpo take over of the internet was in full swing--which is when Neal Stepenson released the seminal piece Cryptonomicon and outlined the vital nature of having a currency free from the control of nation-states, which is at the crux of the cypherpunk movement and one can argue really goes back to Alan Turing himself.

I'd argue it happened not in 2015, but by the time 'web2' was created that SV became the cesspool it is now, domain squatting made useless people into overnight millionaires rather that then invested in ever-more intrusive business models; though room 614A at ATT's facility in SF was a thing so...

If you want a real history lesson check this out [1].

> Gene Kan:

Correct, stupid auto insert... I still remember how crazy that was back then, especially during the whole Napster v Metallica feud. Aside from his interest in open source tech he was also an avid auto-crosser, too; I think he was super into Miatas.

The internet was/felt much smaller back then.

0: https://youtu.be/9vM0oIEhMag?t=99

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdmpAy1hI8g

> Gene Kahn (RIP) said it best at the Senate meeting

Gene Kan:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_Kan

Extend the concept of copyright deposit libraries to all copyrightable content? If you want copyright protection, you have to deposit your thing with the LoC who will look after it.

Copyright owners to pay the LoC a fee for upkeep of course!

The problem is that governments (and others) can interfere with the internet. That's a technological problem that can only have technological solutions. Policy work is just asking our adversaries to please slow down while we build better defences. That can be useful, but it's not sustainable as a long-term solution.

If you’re looking at policy/government solutions. Isn’t the library of congress already perusing this goal? Nudging it to expand its collection of digital works seems like a natural next step

> If you’re looking at policy/government solutions. Isn’t the library of congress already perusing this goal?

Link, please!

> Nudging it to expand its collection of digital works seems like a natural next step

Does the Google Books settlement with out-of-print publishers limit what can be done in this space?

Make Law Mathematical

What would that solve?

Then you can put it in a computer and give the law even fewer tolerances for human compassion or interpretation.

Of course, this problem has an obvious solution: Make HUMAN mathematical.

Whenever when you have to fight the government, the open ocean is your friend. (Think seasteading.)

In this case, where what we want is bulletproof hosting, we host the servers undersea. Microsoft's Project Natick has shown the way.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/analysis/project-natic...

Yet another reason why proof of work is unconquerable.

Proof of work is an environmental disaster and a waste of energy.

To do it right we have to dispense with old ideas about why we’re doing it to whittle down what to preserve.

We don’t need to preserve every cat picture and vacation moment, just enough geometric and color data to replicate them. Same with text.

Deduplicate to an essential data model of knowledge and algorithms to boot strap that into a useful state.

Stable Diffusion runs in a browser on a phone. I have no doubt we can get a “bigger model” out of a tiny model and a few algorithms that will hydrate it and update its state based upon a context. But IT is too literal to serve “business” so we end up with the janky mess you called out.

So in summary; a rethink of our economic approach to keeping people busy, and compressed, deduplicated model that fits on a phone, with hardware and software that know to get what the user asks for out of this small hash.

That’s what all the ML is leading to. It’s just like I said; IT is a boring industry to serve business traditions. Intentionally: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/Bobby-Kotick-Wants-to-Take-...

I’m not that smart and figured this out. Asked a colleague with a PhD in math working at MS who was all wink and nudge at me. The “smarter people” know what’s up and want to be the first one there. Then under politically correct traditions it’s “their property.”

It’s not that hard to conceive; all information displayed on a machine is 2D geometry and games simulate 3D through well understood perspective and color theory. We just need a model that captures all the coordinates of our text and those perspective shifts and color compositions.

But to get there you need social change to avoid the loop you say you’re tired of but no one else does. Good luck.

Piracy cannot be tolerated by any self-respecting regime.

Property rights are the cornerstone of Western democracies.

You either keep liberal democracy (and the market economy for culture and information), or embrace a free commons of information and demarketize culture/info.

The problem is not with copyright and patents per se. They were invented for a good reason: to promote creation of intellectual works, and to help keep them open, not perish in secrecy as in medieval times.

The problem is in the prolongation of copyright well beyond reason, to allow entities barely related to the original creators keep profiting. Not that profiting is bad per se! But the limitations stymie both other creators and the consumers of the art and other intellectual property.

Let's say land ownership gave you complete ownership of the infinite wedge of space extending down from your plot of land to the center of the earth and extending up from your plot of land out to infinity. We might give this imaginary system a fancy latin name: the ad coelum doctrine.

In this world air travel would be next to impossible because you would need to find routes where you could negotiate passage with every land owner between point A and point B. That is obviously undesirable, cheap air travel is incredibly socially beneficial.

This was the way common law worked for centuries. But once we invented air travel we quickly realized it was absurd and sharply restricted property rights and this does not seem to have been a particularly big blow to "liberal democracy". when you have a bad law it is perfectly fine to realize you have made a mistake and then change the law.

Our current system is absurd, "we've got a scientific database duct-taped together by a fucking grad student in hiding, and AFAICT nearly every researcher uses it", let's change the law and take ourselves to a somewhere less absurd timeline.

The problem with this is that "intellectual property" rights are fundamentally unlike physical property rights to the extent that they directly conflict. I'm not even making the argument that all IP is evil or whatever, just that weakening IP doesn't have to harm property rights as an overall category due to the tradeoffs between different forms of property right.

Consider the interaction of the doctrine of first sale with copyright in [1]. This is a spot where that conflict exists; if I've bought a thing, preventing me from re-selling that thing (without copying, etc being in the picture at all) abrogates my physical-property rights. That SCOTUS decision didn't undermine property rights as a general concept so much as buttress it: the pro-IP formulation benefits a handful of rights-holders, while the pro-physical-property formulation directly benefits everyone who owns real objects. A kind of utilitarian calculus of property rights, I guess?

Similarly, consider DRM. If I can't break DRM on a DVD I bought, to play it on a computing device that I own (without copying, etc being in the picture at all) then I don't actually own my computer or the DVD. That's an absurd dilution of the common understanding of a right that you're correct is the cornerstone of Western societies.

It's kinda like zoning law, really: the current beneficiaries can scream about "muh property rights" until they're blue in the face, but the regime they're defending is the greater violation of those rights.

So, overall, no: if anything, current corporatized formulations of "intellectual property" rights are a direct threat to actual property rights, which are indeed important.

edit: forgot to add that if it's a civilization's-gonna-collapse argument, there's a case to be made that environments with robust physical property protections but weak/no IP protections are the ideal environment for societal development: https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright-...

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirtsaeng_v._John_Wiley_%26_So....

It should be fine to pirate 40-50 years old games, such as the Atari 2600 ones, at least for non-commercial usage. No one losts money.

For instance, the World of Spectrum and lots of C64/Amiga sites offered lots of its games legally.

Copyright should last at most 25 years. Enough to exploit it commercially in a lifetime.

I quite like the idea of a ratcheting mechanism, something like copyright for a few years is free, then the creator must pay an increasing amount of money to extend it every X years up to a maximum of the creators lifetime

That would be hell for small companies and heaven for Disney. They could buy everything.

Let us assume for a moment that I agree with the following premise:

<<Property rights are the cornerstone of Western democracies

Right now that cornerstone is rather heavily tilted towards IP rights and puts Western democracies at an angle where they could easily slide into the ocean ushering the era ant self-respecting regime is trying prevent.

<<You either keep liberal democracy (and the market economy for culture and information), or embrace a free commons of information and demarketize culture/in

It is not an either or. It is a spectrum with multitude of options in between. That you seek to put it as a simple binary choice is a failing rhetorical style and will not get you far in terms of arguments on HN.

edit: corrected first sentence

Either I haven’t taken the time to comprehend each individual response to your comment or people are disagreeing with you solely for the sake of disagreement in defense of liberal democracy.