rdmond

> That only works if all the libraries coordinate to determine which one will hold the last copy, and if the expense of moving such books around on request does not exceed that of storage.

Yale, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and NYPL coordinate on exactly this https://recap.princeton.edu/

In fact, in the US, around half the population goes to a library at least once a year

https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/09/09/libraries-20... https://www.ala.org/news/2019/12/new-ala-report-gen-z-millen...

This already sort of happened in 2008 when Chuck Close forced someone to stop distributing a Photoshop plug-in that imitated his style.

https://hyperallergic.com/54104/my-chuck-close-problem/

Weiss (unsurprisingly) gives a really bad-faith mischaracterization of this. What the prosecutor noted was the defendant's frame of mind because they had to in order to calculate what sentence to ask for. It's not political, it's a formula and you can read it for yourself https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/17441998/67/united-stat...

> "The law against breaking DRM isn't wrong but only because it is actually useless."

No. Your right to distribute a copy doesn't imply your right to get one in the easiest way that you can imagine.

> That's the problem. The tools don't discriminate, so banning them goes too far and prohibits more than it is reasonable to.

Reasonable to whom? Someone else might say it's reasonable to protect the DRM on this PD book because it protects lots of in-copyright books without harming you because there are other ways of getting a copy of this one work without breaking the DRM on all of them. You might disagree but that's what courts are for.

The bigger problem with DRM exist because of concentration in the publishing industry. Licensing books sucks and that's what harms the public domain (and libraries), but there's not enough competition for many publishers to survive by offering to sell you the ebook rather than licensing it to you. Copyright isn't the enemy. It's the monopolies that abuse it.

> Suppose Bob was the copyright owner, last year, before the work entered the public domain. He never distributed any copy without DRM, so no DRM-free copies exist. This is fine? Section 1201 of the DMCA was created to eliminate the public domain?

No law compels Bob to provide people with new copies once the work enters public domain (and remember, Bob's publication might contain separate works with their own copyrights like cover art or an introduction). Once it does, Bob can't stop you from distributing a version you created by buying a print copy and scanning it or taking screenshots of his DRM version and running them through OCR (as long as you don't include the cover art or introduction). If Bob's DRM was unique to this one book, there might be an argument that breaking it was the same (as long as there's no cover art and no introduction). Since Bob's DRM is likely used for other works not in the public domain, it's going to be hard to distinguish your breaking it for this PD work from the fact that you've broken it for lots of other in-copyright things.

Spartans spoke a different dialect of Greek (Doric) than the Athenians (Attic) and it used to be fairly common to translate bits of Doric as if they had been spoken by a Scottish Highlander.

Cars are prevalent because they take up a lot of space, but car ownership is not. Not even 25% of people in Manhattan own car. Even in Staten Island 17% of people don't have a car.

https://blog.tstc.org/2017/04/21/car-free-new-york-city/

Sure, but every time NYC "car culture" questions come up, people start wringing their hands about people who need to drive to work. If we're talking NYC that's a low percentage of people who do drive to work (whether they need to is another question) and for the Upper West Side (say, zipcodes 10023, 10024, 10025) very low, 6%-7%.

http://zipatlas.com/us/ny/zip-code-comparison/percentage-pop...

It is less compelling to say that people need free curbside parking so they can go to the Catskills, whether they have a house there or not.

Nobody who lives on the Upper West Side is driving to work. They circle looking for spots when they have to move their cars for street cleaning and when the get back Sunday night from their country houses.

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/07/05/new-york-is-really-aw...