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Comment by nekusar | Hacker News Reader

Same exact thing applies to physical libraries. If they were attempted in the last 50 years, they too would be illegal. And all books could be confiscated, building be sold at police auction, and the people who run it would be in prison.

It was only because libraries were made 120 years ago BY billionaires of their time (Carnegie, etc), and was a a way for those billionaires to sanitize their history of abuse by philanthropy.

On the reverse, we have Annas Archive, Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, Archive.org and others. Made by average non-billionaire humans sharing knowledge in the largest free libraries. Except they're demonized and criminalized.

There really isnt a difference at all with physical in person library, and an online free library. And using a phone camera, is also trivial to copy a book within a span of 10 minutes. You dont even need to borrow it - just sit in a carousel and scan scan scan.

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There are a number of significant differences. For one thing, physical libraries have to purchase the books that they own.

> For one thing, physical libraries have to purchase the books that they own.

The books in Anna's Archive (and torrent etc) are from people who purchased them and uploaded it.

Not originally.

Sure, they were initially bought BY the billionaire philanthropists, or were from their private collections. Books were bought on the open or used markets to initially fill these libraries.

And some libraries weren't free. They charged for a library card as a subscription. This was before they were bought into city/state governments. So technically they were making money on loaning books, but it was fed back in to sustain (without tax dollars). Carnegie came in and offered to build and populate books in a library IF the local govt would staff and maintain.

Now, copyright owners have also completely lost the narrative. A book can survive years in a library with only moderate use. But that single book can cost the government-funded library 10x the cost of the real book. And if you want to see a real scam, look at the DRM infested online libraries. Cost the same 10x but they then turn around and say "this internet book can ONLY be rented out 26 times (2 week rental over a year) before you have to buy another virtual copy".

Fuck. That.

> There really isnt a difference at all with physical in person library, and an online free library.

You know, aside from the blindingly obvious issues of scale and reach (a library might have two copies of a book and you might have to wait weeks for your turn). So tired of thoughtless nonsense to justify people who want free shit but don't want to, like, feel bad about it. Look, you even "cleverly" worked in a swipe at "billionaires", as if that has any fucking relevance at all! Brilliant.

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