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Comment by isykt | Hacker News Reader

If IA is dismantled, and doesn’t manage to survive on its Canadian or other outposts, historians will look back on its destruction with disdain. Cultural heritage destroyed so corporate stooges can afford another yacht or whatever.

The only way to fight this is to pirate the fuck out of everything. Seriously. Fuck DRM, fuck gatekeepers, free information NOW and ALWAYS.

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Enforcers of copywrite on materials that currently isn't being sold are Book Burners

Agreed. There should be an active sale clause for all copyrighted material, including video games. If you want to make money from the work you “own,” then fucking do it. Emulators exists for most systems. For books, the marginal cost of epub distribution is essentially zero and any high school kid can make one for you on a Sunday afternoon.

You need to also require the the work is offered in previous versions, with monotonically decreasing real price (and maybe a meaningful discount on prior versions).

Goodbye Calculus 47th Edition. Students can now buy Calculus 40th edition both used and new at a reasonable price in perpetuity. The publisher can charge more for Calculus 50th edition when there's actually new calculus or better teaching methods.

Don't US textbooks already scramble exercises so you can't just buy (use copies of) older textbook versions - effectively making making old versions obsolete without having to do any real work improving the content.

Making students buy their own copies of required textbooks always seemed insane to me. Glad that that's not how things work here and any required excercises (already uncommon) were just provided by the professors/assitants as part of the course.

Piracy is preservation. Always has been. Always will be.

Or run IA like SciHub.

That's not how things work anymore. They'll just destroy all references to it, the search engines will eventually blackhole the years that people were discussing IAs shutdown in favor of more current results about comic book movies and Trump, and the fact that it ever existed or was ever useful will become another Russian conspiracy theory.

Eventually, Amazon will open a site called "Internet Archive" where you can stream 50s and 60s television commercial free, and the circle will be complete.

Historians are very, very used to siloed and proprietary knowledge.

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