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sebastiennight 1 days ago [-]
For those who (like me) missed the essential key word in the OP's title:
This ruling is about copyright, and seems mostly unrelated to recent conversations about escaping censorship and surveilance, and the overall final throes of the open web.
It's still pretty important since the lawsuit filed by the Anne Frank Fonds could be caricatured as "if this content is illegal in our country, it should not be on the Internet in other countries, because our citizens can still circumvent the publisher's geofence and access it" which would have wild consequences if that line of thought was applied.
But, still:
> At its core, the case forced Europe's top judges to answer a highly technical question: if a publisher actively tries to block visitors from a specific country, are they still breaking the law if a user sneaks past the digital border using circumvention software?
> According to the CJEU, the answer is no.
Could be conceived to have a tenuous link to the current debate on censorship, surveilance, etc.
petcat 1 days ago [-]
Somewhat related to this same debate on censorship:
French regulators order block of Polymarket's website [0]
> The French gambling regulator said the site's continued availability constituted advertising. A ban on financial transactions to the site was already in place.
After failing to compel Polymarket to geoblock France, it's crazy that French "regulators" can just order ISPs to block a website without any judicial review just because the mere existence of it on the internet constitutes "advertising" to French people.
It seems like the EU in general is struggling badly with how to control internet access. Whether it's blocking VPNs, requiring access to private chats, or just blocking websites completely.
Are you aware it’s the case in the US too? I don’t see what is supposed to be bad or terrifying here. French regulators (why the scare quotes?) entire reason d‘être is what you frame as suspicious, but it’s pretty standard, the state governs the infrastructure in its territory
petcat 23 hours ago [-]
US regulators don't order ISPs to block websites.
The FBI will occasionally seize a domain, but only after a court order.
AnthonyMouse 21 hours ago [-]
Also notice that the FBI has no jurisdiction over foreign domains. It happens that the .com (in addition to .us) registry is in the US, but e.g. the .ru registry is in Russia and not under the jurisdiction of US courts.
inigyou 11 hours ago [-]
Unless it's .tv or .to or .me or many others that are administered by organisations under the control of the US. The US seized Telegram's domain t.me by using an "OFAC sanction" whatever that is.
stackghost 19 hours ago [-]
>US regulators don't order ISPs to block websites.
Of course they do, mostly for intellectual property reasons.
foota 18 hours ago [-]
Through the courts though, right?
coldtea 14 hours ago [-]
If the courts are almost always sympathetic, does it matter?
one33seven 14 hours ago [-]
In germany it's an organization of the biggest copyright holders that make ISPs block sites, without any court order.
crest 10 hours ago [-]
What make it even dumber is that following their block lists is voluntary for ISPs. The CUII is just a cabal of ISPs and intellectual "property" holders.
pembrook 21 hours ago [-]
This is a red herring.
We're not arguing about whether it is standard for governments to attempt to exercise maximal control.
We're arguing about whether governments executing censorship regimes via ISPs (like the Chinese Communist Party) without any balanced legal proceedings is a good thing.
And no, it does not happen like that in the US.
inigyou 11 hours ago [-]
Is it the norm in France for the regulator to block gambling sites without a court process? Polymarket is obviously a gambling site, so if so, this is no surprise. Polymarket can probably challenge the decision in a court process.
Hacker_Yogi 18 hours ago [-]
Sorry if I come across as being pedantic but it's actually the Communist Party of China - the CPC, even though many, esp. in the US, use the wrong abbreviation - CCP.
Antibabelic 12 hours ago [-]
It is pedantic. Saying that people should say CPC instead of CCP adds nothing to the conversation. If it grinds your gears then maybe starting with organizations like the Encyclopedia Britannica[0] rather than random Hacker News commenters might prove more effective.
Chinese Communist Party or Communist Party of China makes little difference. There is a clear convention and no clear reason to change it.
coldtea 14 hours ago [-]
>It seems like the EU in general is struggling badly with how to control internet access.
It struggles badly with how to control everything more and more. What was an economic union of markets has become an uber-government that gives more and more power to itself.
Not that the US or the rest is far behind, but in this case it's accompanied with even more incompetence and disconnected to the real problems.
vrganj 14 hours ago [-]
The EU was never just an economic union of markets. Hell, the Schuman declaration from 1950, the closest thing it has to a founding document, calls for an ever closer union.
coldtea 12 hours ago [-]
That how it was sold, whatever Schuman had in mind, and increasingly encroached scope that Europeans voted again and again against.
The original actual scope was even more limited than a unified market: coal and steel control.
vrganj 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Sleaker 23 hours ago [-]
Devils advocate question: Isn't registering an ip to name essentially advertising? You're paying a registrar to return your Internet address location when searched for.
AnthonyMouse 21 hours ago [-]
This is like saying that having a trademark in the US is advertising in France because you're paying the USPTO to publish your trademark registration.
If your scenario makes it impossible for someone to do ordinary business in country A but not in country B then it's fundamentally unworkable.
ButlerianJihad 22 hours ago [-]
Not merely DNS names, but in IP routing, announcing a route is known as "advertising" it. You and your ISP are literally advertising a path for others to find your site via TCP/IP.
AnthonyMouse 21 hours ago [-]
The two obvious problems being that a) you're advertising that so that people in the countries you actually intend to do business in can find it, and b) the same IP address may be hosting thousands of independent sites any subset of which could be intended to be accessed by people in the other jurisdiction, and publishing the route is done for them.
redeeman 23 hours ago [-]
no, that is a ridiculous line of reasoning
sophacles 22 hours ago [-]
Not really.
Why would people pay so much for the $brand_name.com, etc if there wasn't a marketing component to it?
anamexis 22 hours ago [-]
Having a marketable address is not advertising.
stackghost 19 hours ago [-]
Marketing and advertising are two related but distinct functions.
nightski 20 hours ago [-]
I mean I pay for a domain for my homelab. No one else uses it.
____mr____ 11 hours ago [-]
> it's crazy that French "regulators" can just order ISPs to block a website without any judicial review just because the mere existence of it on the internet constitutes "advertising" to French people.
This is entirely normal if you subscribe to any form of current/past neoliberal ideology surrounding trade, borders and embargos.
If you believe that an embargo towards a certain country or business is valid because you believe they are a threat to national/public security, I see little difference between that and ISPs being forbidden from working with certain companies/websites/ip ranges
spiderfarmer 1 days ago [-]
I don’t think it’s crazy to enforce laws, especially given the leeway the government gave that predatory website.
VWWHFSfQ 1 days ago [-]
> given the leeway the government gave that predatory website.
They are only blocking it because the French gambling mafia/authority is not getting their cut. They do not care in any way at all about a "predatory" gambling website.
They just want their share.
lokar 1 days ago [-]
They want them to follow legally enacted laws in an open democracy.
irishcoffee 1 days ago [-]
If you’re aware of the organization called “FIFA” you can’t believe this is true.
I responded to the wrong comment, I ment to respond to the GP.
Since Fifa is Swiss, it has nothing to do with this court ruling. So indeed, why bring it up?
spiderfarmer 14 hours ago [-]
So why bring it up.
irishcoffee 10 hours ago [-]
FIFA is the most corrupt organization in sports.
sam_lowry_ 1 days ago [-]
It's all about nuance. The gambling mafia comment is pure gold.
LunaSea 24 hours ago [-]
So why are all 50 US states not allowing sports betting?
petcat 24 hours ago [-]
I don't care about sports betting. I care about government blocking websites just because it exists on the internet. It was already illegal for Polymarket to accept bets from French people.
FanDuel cannot operate in France but their website isn't blocked. So how do we explain this?
France, EU, Italy, Spain, La Liga are just consistently making fools out of themselves trying to block everything on the internet when they don't like it.
Maybe it's just because regulatory censorship is inconsistent and doesn't make any sense. It's like the China firewall but even dumber and less effective.
inigyou 11 hours ago [-]
So if something is illegal you don't think it's moral to enforce that people don't do it because just being illegal should be enough?
Note there's no liability on the ISPs, they do not have to pay a fine for not having blocked it, they do not have to ban alternative DNS. In Europe there is apparently a legal mindset that you can recruit a third party to conduct an action that is not onerous to enforce a blockade. A court can point to someone who has a DNS server and order them to block certain lookups.
spiderfarmer 14 hours ago [-]
Your entire argument is based on the fact that France cannot fight all websites at once? Will you change your opinion if Fanduel and others are blocked in 6 months as well?
Bayart 23 hours ago [-]
The decision was made in the context of foreign interference with elections.
kps 1 days ago [-]
Without robust copyright protection, what will incentivize Anne Frank to write more diary entries?
Retric 1 days ago [-]
People do care about income streams for their descendants or charitable organizations etc. So it’s not completely ineffective.
What’s broken is extending copyright after a work was already created. But that’s true even if the creator was still alive.
AnthonyMouse 21 hours ago [-]
> People do care about income streams for their descendants or charitable organizations etc. So it’s not completely ineffective.
It is once you make it to the other side of the marginal utility of a dollar.
Suppose you write a popular work in your 20s. You make plenty from it, and then people keep buying it. As long as they do, why spend your time creating new works when you can drink whiskey or play video games or live in a cabana on a beach? As long as the copyright doesn't expire, you have all the money you need and thereby value having more time over having more money. When it doesn't expire for 70 years after your death, so do your kids.
Whereas if it would expire after 14 years and you want to provide for your kids (never mind that they should maybe make a contribution of their own) then to do it you would have to keep making new works.
ralferoo 9 hours ago [-]
Reworking that a bit, suppose you work hard in your 20s and have a skill that many others don't have and can command a good wage for your work. You can make plenty from it, so why spend your time in your 40s and 50s doing more work when you can drink whiskey or play video games or live in a cabana on a beach?
Why can e.g. programmers profit from their specialism and then have early retirement, but e.g. popular singers or authors not do the same if they wanted? Why shouldn't they be allowed to continue to make money from the original work they've created that nobody else could / did? Why should a programmer be allowed to leave a huge legacy to their children in the form of vested stocks, but artists not be allowed to in the form of continuing royalties?
Creating works of art that people want is as much of a specialised skill as e.g. programming, but the payoff doesn't come as a large monthly paycheque, but as a small amount on each copy sold that you hope to recoup by selling more volume over time.
Retric 16 hours ago [-]
Shorter copyright terms don’t prevent someone from retiring after making it big. To do that you’d need to cap how much they could make in total not the number of years their work was protected. Instead you’re essentially talking about hypothetical people rather than anything approaching a meaningful number of artists.
Further lotteries attract suckers based on potential payouts. Just as the NFL or NBA convinces young kids to work hard, successful artists are a major part of pipeline of young kids practicing their craft.
ralferoo 12 hours ago [-]
Limiting by total income disincentivises companies to spend heavily to produce e.g. films, plays, video games, whatever. At that point, you're effectively saying copyright is only sensible for things produced by a single unaided person.
Sadly, copyright term is the only sensible (and easily enforceable) metric, although whilst I'd agree that the term is currently too long, reducing it to shorter than the creator's lifetime can lead to other weird situations.
For instance, if copyright was just 20 years after something was created, a painting might have been created 20 years ago but never made public until later in their life, and so copyright has expired before they've ever tried to sell it. Maybe there was only public interest in their work later on in their career and suddenly their early work was now considered valuable.
Or if it's 20 years from the date something was made available to the public, then you could reset the clock by creating a slightly different work (e.g. a book where page 200 contained a spelling correction), etc. How would you decide the copyright term then? Would pages 1-199 and 201-end be out of copyright and only page 200 copyrighted?
And assuming we think lifetime of the creator makes sense, then we would need a different rule for companies, because companies can last forever. What we have right now, seems approximately the optimal solution in most cases.
About the only thing I'd change is when nobody knows who the copyright holder is, which is particularly an issue with old software. There really should be some way of legally distributing abandonware if nobody can prove that they own the copyright.
basilikum 9 hours ago [-]
> For instance, if copyright was just 20 years after something was created, a painting might have been created 20 years ago but never made public until later in their life, and so copyright has expired before they've ever tried to sell it.
Copyright should last ten years, at the very maximum 15 years, after publication. This is an entirely solved problem. The solution is just not implemented because in reality copyright is not about incentivizing authors at all.
> Maybe there was only public interest in their work later on in their career and suddenly their early work was now considered valuable.
Sucks for them. No reason to grant indefinite copyright.
> Or if it's 20 years from the date something was made available to the public, then you could reset the clock by creating a slightly different work
No, you couldn't. Why would a derivative work prolong the copyright term of the original? The derivative work would have copyright on its own if it had significant additional creative input (so not just spelling corrections). The original is entirely unaffected by this. Derivative works are already a settled concept in copyright. Nothing about them is new or special.
pydry 10 hours ago [-]
>Limiting by total income disincentivises companies to spend heavily to produce e.g. films, plays, video games, whatever.
I'm not sure we'd be any worse off as a society if, say, Disney wasnt incentivized to make 34 marvel movies.
There are things where we desperately need large scale investment (e.g. manufacturing, green energy) but big budget artistic productions is probably one area of the economy where we could easily live without it.
ralferoo 9 hours ago [-]
Would be be worse off as a society without Snow White, Pinocchio, Bambi, Jungle Book, Mary Poppins, the Herbie series, and any of the many more recent films?
If anything these films are a great example of why copyright terms should be long, because those films are still culturally relevant today, 60-80 years after they're made, and that people are still willing to pay for them over newer films shows that the creators and their families still deserve to continue to get royalties from them.
Sure, film companies often make a quick buck from sequels, but it's interesting that copyright on characters is distinct from copyright on works.
If anything it's surprising that you're arguing something other than the usual issue that's brought up around Disney, which is that their older works frequently took stories that were specifically out of copyright, and then they vigourously pursued copyright on the films they made from those stories.
basilikum 9 hours ago [-]
> If anything these films are a great example of why copyright terms should be long, because those films are still culturally relevant today, 60-80 years after they're made, and that people are still willing to pay for them over newer films shows that the creators and their families still deserve to continue to get royalties from them.
The people who get most of the money from these movies are the shareholders of huge media conglomerates, which is the only reason why these works still have copyright. Authors and their families are purely a pretense for this.
The point of people deserving a monopoly over aspects of culture long after they created a work and deserving to censor the works of others who do not pay royalties to their monopoly – this is what copyright means – is weird. It sounds good as long as you read it as a feel good story without thinking about it, but it is ultimately moot. No, they do not. The argument is bizarre. We do not grant this privilege to anyone else. Everyone else gets paid for their work when they do it. They can even invest the money like everyone else. When you've hit it big with a creative work you are set for life. But when I build a house for you, I get paid once. I cannot get back to you 20 years later and demand payment once again because you are still living in it and benefiting from my work. It would be absurd. Obviously in creative works there is usually uncertainty. Most works are not created in exchange to a previously agreed commission by one party, but are created as an advance investment and then offered to the general public. We have to grant copyright to these works for a limited time so the author has the chance of making money from their work. There is no reason to extent this copyright beyond this limited time period and to grant authors such a special privilege. On the contrary there is all the reason not to do this as copyright is ultimately censorship and must be limited to the utmost minimal necessity.
> Disney, which is that their older works frequently took stories that were specifically out of copyright, and then they vigourously pursued copyright on the films they made from those stories.
That is perfectly fine. No one in their right mind would argue against that. The evil of disney is not creating derivative works of works in the public domain, but after the fact lobbying to retroactively extend copyright forever so that no work will ever fall into the public domain again; so that no one will be able to do the same as them – creating derivatives to decades old works that ought to be in the public domain; so that they can effectively own culture.
ralferoo 8 hours ago [-]
> Everyone else gets paid for their work when they do it. They can even invest the money like everyone else. When you've hit it big with a creative work you are set for life. But when I build a house for you, I get paid once.
This is fine for transactional work, where it's very clear - you do/make something and sell it, perhaps a carpenter selling a table or whatever.
It completely fails if, for example, an author spends 4 years unpaid writing their latest book, and after the first copy is sold anybody is free to duplicate the words from that book without giving the author a penny for that work. One of the specific reasons for copyright is to ensure that the author is granted exclusivity over sale of the works, such that they can earn a fair wage to compensate for the 4 years of their life without any income at all. How us it unfair that if that author lives another 50 years and people are happy paying for the book for the next 50 years, the author should continue receiving money for it, rather than just some unrelated party whose only skill is being able to scan and reprint the book for basically the cost of the paper?
It's also fair to allow copyright after the author's death, because their children also should be allowed to benefit from their parent's work too. In most families, the parents want to pass on a legacy to their children. Why should an author be any different? Or are you saying if someone owned property that provided a monthly rental income, on their death the children shouldn't be allowed to inherit that property or the income stream?
If you say that the parent needs to earn all the income from the novel themselves and only that can be passed to the children, what if someone has spent 4 years writing a novel, and is killed in a traffic accident a day after launch day? Should their children not be allowed to profit from their parent's work just because they died before the income stream was realised? What about the 4 years of hardship the entire family endured?
Corporations just extend this thinking, because legally a corporation is considered to be a legal person. If you're making a film that requires lots of capital and many participants, there's a lot of investment in that production. In this case, it makes sense that the individual artists sign over their rights to the work they do for a salary to the company (if they don't like a paid job, they can always go and create their own works or set up their own company, etc) and equally, the investors need some time to recoup the investment they made. If we didn't permit this, then simply put, the vast majority of films would never have existed. Society would be far worse off.
basilikum 7 hours ago [-]
> It completely fails if, for example, an author spends 4 years unpaid writing their latest book, and after the first copy is sold anybody is free to duplicate the words from that book without giving the author a penny for that work. One of the specific reasons for copyright is to ensure that the author is granted exclusivity over sale of the works, such that they can earn a fair wage to compensate for the 4 years of their life without any income at all.
I completely agree with you. Authors should have a monopoly over the distribution of their work "for a limited time so the author has the chance of making money from their work".
> How us it unfair that if that author lives another 50 years and people are happy paying for the book for the next 50 years, the author should continue receiving money for it, rather than just some unrelated party whose only skill is being able to scan and reprint the book for basically the cost of the paper?
You are framing this in an emotional, artificially limited scenario under the category of fairness. The reality is that copyright has been extended multiple times for works that had already been written for the benefit of huge corporations that lobbied for it. The revenue of an accomplished author for their family is a feel good pretense for this. They did not play any role in the political decision process for this. The authors of these works created them without the expectancy of lifelong copyright protection and even copyright protection for their descendants. That did not stop them from creating these works and had they expected lifelong copyright I am certain we now would not have significantly more works from this time frame.
You are portraying only the author in this and postulating copyright like a natural right that is only fair. It is not. Copyright is censorship. It is not fair to censor the derivative works of others or to demand payment from people for obtaining copies of decades old works; to use your category of the subjective feeling of fairness. Much more importantly than the feeling of it being fair: It is unjust. Copyright is censorship. It restricts access to information and culture. We initially imposed this censorship as a societal contract between the public and an author to incentivize the creation of more works. We restrict people from sharing a work and even from creating their own derivative creative work of it, because only through this censorship the work being censored even came to be. Therefore the result of that censorship is more expression, art and information, not less. This is why the censorship of copyright is justifiable. Any copyright term beyond this is unjust.
You speak of copying as an unskilled, dishonorable act. Copying is what our civilization including all the great works you want to monopolize are built on. All significant works are derivative works to some degree. We now live in a world where through the monopolization of creative works under few huge media conglomerates these conglomerates effectively own large parts of our culture. The lengthy copyright terms give these corporations exclusive controls over many aspects of our cultural heritage. We still make adaptions to ancient mythology to this day, but the cultural canon of our society has greatly expanded since them. Mythology and fairy tales only grew to what they are because there was no copyright on them. What we are doing today to our modern cultural heritage is like the ancient Greeks putting copyright on mythologies. Had they done that our literature would be much poorer today. Would we limit copyright terms our literature would be much richer today by allowing people to write their own derivative works to the cultural goods of our age.
semiquaver 9 hours ago [-]
> People do care about income streams for their descendants or charitable organizations
Society created the concept of copyright and intellectual property for a reason and it is emphatically not the protection of income streams after you are dead. Whether a person exists who cares about a thing is not a reason to preserve it.
Retric 1 hours ago [-]
Before the conception of copyright artists would create physical works to be sold after they died to support their families in part because such works would be more valuable after they died.
Indirect effects matter both for society and as a legal question. To this day many elderly / sick artists are working not for their own personal interests but for other people.
Thus copyright after people die is promoting the creation of artistic works both in truth and as legal cover for other copyright holders. 70 years after an artist dies vs 20 years is a different question, but ending copyright with artist death would absolutely cost society creative works.
gs17 1 days ago [-]
> But that’s true even if the creator was still alive.
The foundation even tried to double dip on this by claiming Otto Frank as a co-author right before copyright expiration, three decades after his passing.
gblargg 1 days ago [-]
That ballpoint pen wasn't going to write itself.
eikenberry 1 days ago [-]
I think the OP was pointing out that writers will write even without monetary recompense.
bryanrasmussen 1 days ago [-]
Really, all of them? In the history of the world there has never existed a writer who thought, hey I think I can do that pretty well, I suppose I will give a try and see if I can make money.
There has never been a writer who, writing for love, also thought, hey that is a great idea for a science fiction story, and that magazine is paying for science fiction, I will, in entrepreneurial fashion try to write a story so I can earn money. If it works out really well I could even have a best seller and move out of this garret! Or did this presumed writer just say, nah, screw that, another volume of poetry about dark haired ladies for me!
And of those who write even without monetary recompense, will they publish?
Will they send off to someone their writing and then sit through the editorial process for months, and agree to changes in order to get published?
Will they go through all the various parts of having to sell since they will not be getting paid for what they wrote?
Rhetorically speaking, Anne Frank is a writer who wrote without caring about any of that stuff, but unless the argument is that we should be rounding up people to send to death camps in order to promote better literature I don't really see the point of the argument.
Sure, after Anne Frank died and the war ended and her father had her diary published he went through the whole editing process and doing whatever was needed to spur sales of the book without much interest in benefiting from the copyright, but I sort of feel that he and his daughter may have been something of an outlier in most publication histories, and their story, engaging as it is, may not actually demonstrate so obviously that "writers will write even without monetary recompense"
on edit: The idea that people are "compelled to write" is essentially an idea that writers have some sort of psychological problem, at least a form of neuroticism, the argument that as they will write without compensation and thus there is no reason to compensate them is at its best an argument to take advantage of people with a psychological condition, although, for all the reasons outlined above I think we can see that the argument is completely senseless and flies in the face of logic.
There has been recent discussion of who was America's Homer, and I suggested Mark Twain https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48927260 who was a guy who so blindingly obviously wrote for money in almost all cases that it would just be absolutely ludicrous to argue otherwise.
Also, I see I got my downvote, oh noes!
tolciho 18 hours ago [-]
The profit urge was already made fun of in a recent novel.
“And what does the author mean to do?” said Don Quixote.
“What?” replied Samson; “why, as soon as he has found the history which
he is now searching for with extraordinary diligence, he will at once
give it to the press, moved more by the profit that may accrue to him
from doing so than by any thought of praise.”
Whereat Sancho observed, “The author looks for money and profit, does he?
It will be a wonder if he succeeds, for it will be only hurry, hurry,
with him, like the tailor on Easter Eve; and works done in a hurry are
never finished as perfectly as they ought to be.
bryanrasmussen 16 hours ago [-]
Definitely a sterling example of the benefits of not paying people, given that he died in poverty and spent his life working odd jobs despite writing what was a best seller in debtor's prison.
But as you found quotes from someone arguing that writing to be paid is somehow bad
"I agree with Balzac and 19th-century writers, black and white, who say, 'I write for money'"
-- Maya Angelou
"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money"
-- Samuel Johnson.
But hey, I gotta admit, the first guy had one example of someone who wrote despite not having hopes of getting anything for their effort and now you come with one, so obviously my idea that not everyone has in the age of the world written without hope of compensation was wrong.
But let's go back to your quote, which for some reason you think is a good one against my assertion that there are people have written for money and to retain copyright.
Sancho makes the final point "It will be a wonder if he succeeds, for it will be only hurry, hurry, with him, like the tailor on Easter Eve; and works done in a hurry are never finished as perfectly as they ought to be."
Which is a really good point for someone writing in a time when copyright did not exist and the only way to ever make money from your writing was to write quickly and to get the work into someone's hands after which they paid you, maybe, once.
I'm of course in agreement, somewhat, that works done too quickly are not done well enough, but some people can write at a speed that to others may seem in a hurry but to them are rather slow.
But I will give an example, Mark Twain, who I've already pointed out is the perfect example of someone who definitely wrote for money, except for a couple things he wrote towards the end of his life when he was old and bitter and also pretty darn rich by the standards of his time.
He took 7 years to write Huck Finn. If he wrote for money how did he afford this? Well he shelved it for a bit when he had writer's block and wrote other things for money, but also because he was in a much more financially secure situation than Cervantes expected the writer for money to be, due to his success, part of that success based on copyrighting Tom Sawyer before its publication.
But he also did do a bunch of crap, including the sequels to Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and of course writing The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson too quickly to keep from bankruptcy from bad investments. I am not against the assertion that writing for money will produce things that are bad, but I do not believe that, quotes aside, it can be shown definitely that it will produce bad things.
At any rate if you read things written the last few hundred years and find them worthwhile, unless you are very particular in how you choose what you read, you probably have read lots of things that were written either partially or wholly for money.
Finally I notice neither you or other people who responded had anything to say to this part of what I wrote
"And of those who write even without monetary recompense, will they publish?
Will they send off to someone their writing and then sit through the editorial process for months, and agree to changes in order to get published?
Will they go through all the various parts of having to sell since they will not be getting paid for what they wrote?"
I look forward to the quotes from great works of literature detailing how the non-writing parts of the publishing process are required for the writer to produce something great and how they should not consider money when laboring on that either.
spudlyo 19 hours ago [-]
"Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject." -- Arthur Schopenhauer
If you find this quote interesting, you should check out this video[0] by
Christopher Anadale who is a teacher who does long form deep dive analysis & commentary on classic works of philosophy. As an aside, one of the things I love about YouTube is when teachers record and share their lectures, and I was pleased to learn about the feisty Schopenhauer (and his thoughts on authorship) by listening to this lecture.
This attitude reminds me a lot of Stallman, and honestly, I fundamentally disagree with his absolutism about the ethics of being paid to write closed-source software.
Sure, there are many people who are happy to write software in their spare time, and are sufficiently well off from another income stream that they can afford to not profit from the software they produce (although I suspect that the vast majority of open-source programmers also derive their primary income from closed-source software).
But a simple fact of life is that people need to eat, find shelter, etc, and it's reasonable to expect that if you have a particular skill that others don't that you should be able to exchange the products of that skill for money from the people who recognise that skill and want the products of it (whether it be software, books, artworks, music, whatever).
Sure, there are some people who would continue producing the art/writings/music anyway in their free time because that's what motivates them in life. But what a shame it is when someone can only do that for a few hours per week because they need to work a full time job which doesn't utilise their talent just to put food on the table. Perhaps they'll choose to live a meagre life, and work for the "sake of subject" and die in poverty, but most won't. That doesn't reflect on the quality of the work, just how much hardship the creator is prepared to endure.
I'd never heard of Arthur Schopenhauer before, but reading his Wikipedia suggests that he came from a wealthy family and he never had to worry about money. Perhaps his argument just boils down to class at the end of the day, and that only authors from a well off background should be given a voice. But like I say, I don't know anything about him and he sounds like a well regarded philosopher, so I'm probably well off base.
Do we have exactly the correct number of authors right now and any change to copyright risks tipping us from some balance point into darkness?
Or maybe we could do without Steven Kings and JK Rowlings sorts and get along fine.
dgellow 23 hours ago [-]
Don’t mix Kings and Rowlings, he’s at a whole other level
protocolture 21 hours ago [-]
They are both filthy rich and combined represent a large % of book sales. They also both spend their time making idiots of themselves on tweeter. Kings the better writer but they are both in the correct category here.
24 hours ago [-]
ekianjo 1 days ago [-]
> People do care about income streams for their descendants
Maybe worth reading more about Anne Frank. She did not write to make a buck
dzonga 24 hours ago [-]
Age verification + plus some states trying to ban VPNs - what states miss - yeah they will destroy the so called big social networks or media providers like porn aggregation sites.
what will simply happen - due to the following - HDDs are cheap, Torrents, Open source / cheap community software like Discord
- communities will move to be mostly private and small. era of large social media is done.
for media - download content via torrent - store in cheap HDDs. you can probably get an 8TB spinning metal for $250. cheap enough and good enough.
payments - these already moved to crypto. for criminals monero.
the internet as gated by bureaucrats will be left to the dweebs.
throw7 21 hours ago [-]
Utah was the one I remember... have more states passed laws?
This is hard to read, but I think you're saying the Internet will see a shift to "Sneaker Net" like tactics where people torrent stuff, store it on HDDs, and just move those HDDs around? Like they do in Cuba: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTTno8D-b2E
For the most part, I agree.
inigyou 11 hours ago [-]
Usenet and email were also designed to work like this. The underlying transport layer was called UUCP.
miki123211 14 hours ago [-]
> The case centered on the copyright battle involving Anne Frank's diary
If there's a copyright dispute somewhere, you can bet it's either Anne Frank's estate, Tolkien's estate, or the Beatles's old record label.
It's never the authors who actually made the work. It's always their heirs.
inigyou 11 hours ago [-]
For more like this, see the list of banned authors on MAM. I believe JK Rowling is one.
saidnooneever 13 hours ago [-]
how do u expect Anne to claim copyright -_-. this is how it works, copyright. people have it and then make claims...
rubysprite 22 hours ago [-]
If they can target us by IP for surveillance pricing etc. then we need VPN as a basic survival tool.
You can’t shop around someone changing prices around you knowing your income etc.
Similarly you cannot meaningfully use social media, Reddit or even HN if your IP is on their lists.
Unfortunately many online organizations have gone to war with their users so we need VPN and other tools to mitigate the abuse.
jen_h 12 hours ago [-]
This--and also, if you're a US resident traveling abroad, you can't access most health data without a US-based VPN.
Everything's "in the portal" -- you're effectively helpless without a VPN if, for example, a loved one is hospitalized or you need to access to your own data/records. (You can try phone calls, but expect the old, "Well, I can't help you, that's in the portal.")
jeroenhd 12 hours ago [-]
> However, in the Netherlands, parts of the text remain protected by copyright until 2037.
I'm not for complete copyright abolishment but this is absolutely insane. In this case, the copyright term is so long because the original copyright lasted 50 years after publication (rather than the author's death), but a change in copyright law changed that to 70 years and moved the counting date.
Regardless of legalities, taking action against distribution of Anne Frank's diary seems like the exact logical opposite of what this fund should be doing.
EmbarrassedHelp 1 days ago [-]
Hopefully this ruling adds to some precedent in favour of VPNs to future court battles attacking VPNs for circumventing age verification.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
There isn't precedent in the civil-law system in Europe. Every case is decided individually. However, this will probably influence whether someone decides to attack VPNs.
shevy-java 1 days ago [-]
Well, the EU courts will just follow suit the moment the legislation is changed. Today France did so - young people are disallowed from accessing antisocial media. The next step will be verification. Any parent not sniffing on their children will be put in jail. King Macron decreed this today. (He is such a small man though - all the small french, such as Napoleon, have a compensation-problem with regards to their rather insignificant height.)
Here is a copy/pasteable snippet for lazy lobbyists so someone pass this
to the lobby-judges at the EU courts:
"In light of recent changes to legislation and the deadly effect of social
media on babies and unborn ones, VPNs are agents of terrorism, attempting
to circumvent healthy restrictions pertaining to protecting such young folk
from the vile dangers of antisocial media consumption. Anyone attempting to
browse the web for information without presenting a valid unique ID including
biometric data is guilty of terrorism, facing a minimum penalty of 25 years
and 1.000.000€ fine."
This fight is, by the way, not just against VPNs. Age sniffing has never ever
only been about children or VPNs. Some people still think it is about "protecting
children". It's interesting.
hdgvhicv 1 days ago [-]
> Well, the EU courts will just follow suit the moment the legislation is changed.
That’s the whole point. The courts uphold the law. Change the law, and the courts change what they do.
EmbarrassedHelp 24 hours ago [-]
One of the core functions of Court of Justice of the European Union (CEJU) is to perform judicial review, which means they can strike down laws. So it would not be legal to pass legislation attempting to make legal what they struck down.
arlort 12 hours ago [-]
That's only partially true
In this case my understanding is that they determined vpn-s as a tool to fall outside the scope of the law and so they struck down an attempt to enforce the law
If the law got changed so that vpn-s are now within the scope of the new law then you'd expect them to not apply the same reasoning anymore in examining a similar case
Judicial review would come into play if the challenge was about the updated law being inconsistent with some more important law such as the treaties or charter
jcarrano 9 hours ago [-]
You could jump on a train from NL and be in Belgium in 15 minutes, get a "bootleg" physical copy of the diary and head back to NL. No one is suing for that.
SahAssar 8 hours ago [-]
In Baarle-Nassau you can walk a few hundred meters and cross the border multiple times https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baarle-Nassau. Or even walk within a house and cross the border.
ryandrake 1 days ago [-]
The irony of trying to block content/visitors based on country, while publishing on a platform called the "World Wide" web. IP address blocks that roughly correspond with geographic regions is kind of a design flaw.
embedding-shape 1 days ago [-]
That's what happens when you have idealistic nerds implementing a vision of what they want , rather than the typical software that is designed and built almost like an representation of the organization that built it, i.e Conway's Law.
lostmsu 20 hours ago [-]
This comment sounds differently when you remember the Internet is from DARPA.
embedding-shape 14 hours ago [-]
But then hopefully people also remember that WWW != The Internet and that WWW didn't come from DARPA at all but from CERN.
red-iron-pine 9 hours ago [-]
TCP/IP is ARPA -- wasn't DARPA then; is why it was called "ARPANET"
the internet was, as everyone knows, invented Al Gore
layer8 12 hours ago [-]
“Web” implies a structure. And the internet traffic travels physically from country to country. Not being bound to geographical regions is an illusion.
skinfaxi 1 days ago [-]
Is it a design or implementation flaw?
ragall 1 days ago [-]
There's no irony. A given name does not constitute a mandate to use it any particular way.
moezd 21 hours ago [-]
VPN is a legit technology with real applications, not a toy you spin when lawmakers hurt you. And it's for Anne Frank's diaries out of all disputes?
EU lawmakers follow tech trends by a lag of at least a decade and lay waste as they move along. Imagine what they will require once they understand how tech people no longer use chatbots and how much we can control AI agents.
coldtea 14 hours ago [-]
Just means they'll likely target the VPNs to give them data directly instead of forcing users not to use them.
moomin 9 hours ago [-]
It is wild that, 80 years after a girl was murdered, she’s relevant to a court case involving technology it would have taken over an hour to explain in 1945.
rsynnott 9 hours ago [-]
Explaining the ECJ, the venue of the court case, would also likely have been, ah, a challenge.
cougarbytes 22 hours ago [-]
If they ever make VPNs illegal first they need to add ivanti to the list. For amount of crimes it has committed against IT Security personnel.
cloudie78 13 hours ago [-]
Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem.
The way to fight piracy is to offer a better service than the pirates. Simple as.
kleiba2 12 hours ago [-]
High prices might be an incentive for piracy but it cannot be a justification.
It's a bit like saying it's okay to sneak into a movie theater because the prices for movie tickets are too high.
To me, I feel it's an integral part of a democracy that if there is a law you don't like, you have means to get it changed, but it always involves convincing others that your viewpoint is the one everyone should adhere to. Likewise, it is a part of this system that you accept and adhere to the laws as they are until they have been changed. I don't system a society can work where everybody takes laws and regulations as mere suggestions and picks the ones they like to follow.
When a providers offer something at a certain price and you don't like the price, but you would still really like the thing they're offering, you have two options: you either suck it up and pay the price they're asking or you simply move on and do without that thing. I find the idea of "these prices are outrageous, so I'm entitled to getting this thing without paying at all!" not ethically justifiable.
> It's a bit like saying it's okay to sneak into a movie theater because the prices for movie tickets are too high.
It is not just the price, though. In some regions, for some media, the movie theater doesn't exist or the movies are not localized (no subtitles / dubbing).
Nowadays you need several subscriptions to watch all of the content you would normally watch. There are also different tiers now for video quality.
Essentially it is a lot more attractive to go to your local tracker and download the movie / anime / tv-show which will be of better quality and will be localized.
On the other hand, I haven't pirated a single game for over 10 years.
People will continue to consume content. But they aren't going to pay for what feels like a complete ripoff and manage 10+ subscriptions just to do it. If that is the way the industry is going then piracy will simply continue to thrive.
meta_gunslinger 11 hours ago [-]
The law does not state "you have to pay for this, unless it's inconvenient".
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
Is your position that legality == morality?
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
Convincing others to get a law changed from scratch has never really worked. What has to happen is that people have to be fed up with working around the law.
merb 1 days ago [-]
Btw this also could come with negative consequences, like that they want to force id checks to access copyrighted material
ChrisArchitect 1 days ago [-]
EU posts about it:
Copyright in the European Union and geo-blocking: a work that is in the public domain can be published online free of charge in a Member State even if it remains protected in another Member State [pdf]
> Now, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands must determine whether the geo-blocking used by the website was state of the art and effective in practice. If so, the intended audience would not have included Dutch users, and no communication would have been made to the public in the Netherlands.
This seems extremely problematic, depending on what "state of the art and effective" means. It seems like blocking VPN users is unfortunately still on the table, as are other invasive enforcement methods.
jeroenhd 12 hours ago [-]
> depending on what "state of the art and effective" means
This isn't codified into law for good reasons. Technology shifts and you don't want to have to update laws every time someone invents a new cipher or protocol.
The website is defending itself from having to pay a fine because they're blocking VPN users. They require blocking VPN users to skirt around the extreme terms in Dutch copyright law. If they didn't block VPNs, they would've lost already.
This boils down to "did they try hard enough not to violate copyright in the place(s) where copyright was still applicable".
I find these are often very readable and interesting.
yorwba 24 hours ago [-]
It seems like the article title was inspired by this sentence "By contrast, the provider of a VPN or similar services that are used in order to circumvent an ineffective geo-blocking measure and are lawful technical tools which users may legitimately use cannot be regarded as also having communicated the work to the public." I.e. if a VPN is a lawful technical tool, then the VPN provider isn't liable as the publisher of works accessible through it. That leaves open the possibility for VPNs that are not lawful or not mere technical tools to be liable.
yodsanklai 23 hours ago [-]
So much energy to prevent resourceful teenagers from watching porn?
rglover 23 hours ago [-]
This is about porn's cousin, money.
hahahaa 1 days ago [-]
Yeah silly if ruled otherwise. It would mean copyright defaults to the laggiest country since someone could throw a paper plane with the material over a border.
wickedsight 15 hours ago [-]
It feels weird/wrong that the Anne Frank Foundation of all things would fight against a free internet and battle companies that allow people to fight oppressive regimes.
jeroenhd 12 hours ago [-]
They didn't like that the Dutch copyright law didn't apply outside of the Netherlands and tried to take back the documents with the "anyone visiting this page can be Dutch and therefore Dutch law still applies" argument.
It's not about a free internet, it's plain old copyright and control.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
This is very typical. An organisation will always name itself something that sounds good, especially if it plans to do bad things.
phendrenad2 1 days ago [-]
Yes, they may say that NOW, because the case is related to a silly copyright duration dispute between Belgium and the Netherlands. I wouldn't be surprised if they go against this in future cases where a VPN is used to download FIFA matches in 8k or something.
mherdelight 12 hours ago [-]
I figured that was common sense, but it's quite strange that the EU agrees with it.
Havoc 1 days ago [-]
Now watch the octogenarian UK lawmakers outlaw them anyway...right after they print the proposed law out because they don't do so well with computer stuff
gbuk2013 24 hours ago [-]
Leaving aside the fact that there are not enough octogenarians in the Commons to pass any legislation, there’s no need to for ageist statements like that.
bbg2401 1 days ago [-]
> The UK government has officially scrapped the idea of restricting virtual private networks (VPNs) to enforce its impending social media bans, delivering a massive victory for digital privacy advocates.
> Speaking on BBC Breakfast today, the government confirmed a major U-turn on the subject, with Online Safety Minister Kanishka Narayan stating: "We decided not to limit VPNs."
> This was further cemented in a written parliamentary statement by Technology Secretary Liz Kendall, who clarified that the government will not age-gate or ban the best VPN software because "VPNs have legitimate privacy and security uses."
British Parliament only has to be lucky once. VPNs have to be lucky every time.
shevy-java 1 days ago [-]
That's good, but the lobbyists in the EU will continue to try
to destroy VPN. The "we must protect children" is the ruse they
are using right now. Everyone will have a unique ID in the future,
otherwise you will be unable to browse (at the least for commercial
systems such as Microsoft-based computer systems; I can not yet
predict how it will work for Linux but systemd already has that
field for your age: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40954 -
Poettering forbid further discussion about that issue too)
uhhhhwhaaaa 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
hdgvhicv 24 hours ago [-]
It’s big businesses that want to steal your data and use it against you that put the messages up.
tjwebbnorfolk 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
lorreyfum 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
theodric 1 days ago [-]
[flagged]
tomhow 1 days ago [-]
Please don't post tasteless comments like this on HN.
Please don't act like a jerk. Everyone knows it's possible for a statement to be correct and vile at the same time.
tjwebbnorfolk 23 hours ago [-]
> Everyone knows it's possible for a statement to be correct and vile at the same time
I really need to spend some time thinking about this one. If something is correct, I don't tend to continue analyzing it further to look for reasons to be angry.
one33seven 14 hours ago [-]
Imagine your mum died. It's not nice to say "hey tjwebbnorfolk your mum is dead" is it? It's true, but vile.
This ruling is about copyright, and seems mostly unrelated to recent conversations about escaping censorship and surveilance, and the overall final throes of the open web.
It's still pretty important since the lawsuit filed by the Anne Frank Fonds could be caricatured as "if this content is illegal in our country, it should not be on the Internet in other countries, because our citizens can still circumvent the publisher's geofence and access it" which would have wild consequences if that line of thought was applied.
But, still:
> At its core, the case forced Europe's top judges to answer a highly technical question: if a publisher actively tries to block visitors from a specific country, are they still breaking the law if a user sneaks past the digital border using circumvention software?
> According to the CJEU, the answer is no.
Could be conceived to have a tenuous link to the current debate on censorship, surveilance, etc.
French regulators order block of Polymarket's website [0]
> The French gambling regulator said the site's continued availability constituted advertising. A ban on financial transactions to the site was already in place.
After failing to compel Polymarket to geoblock France, it's crazy that French "regulators" can just order ISPs to block a website without any judicial review just because the mere existence of it on the internet constitutes "advertising" to French people.
It seems like the EU in general is struggling badly with how to control internet access. Whether it's blocking VPNs, requiring access to private chats, or just blocking websites completely.
[0] https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2026/07/17/france-b...
The FBI will occasionally seize a domain, but only after a court order.
Of course they do, mostly for intellectual property reasons.
We're not arguing about whether it is standard for governments to attempt to exercise maximal control.
We're arguing about whether governments executing censorship regimes via ISPs (like the Chinese Communist Party) without any balanced legal proceedings is a good thing.
And no, it does not happen like that in the US.
[0] https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chinese-Communist-Party
It struggles badly with how to control everything more and more. What was an economic union of markets has become an uber-government that gives more and more power to itself.
Not that the US or the rest is far behind, but in this case it's accompanied with even more incompetence and disconnected to the real problems.
The original actual scope was even more limited than a unified market: coal and steel control.
If your scenario makes it impossible for someone to do ordinary business in country A but not in country B then it's fundamentally unworkable.
Why would people pay so much for the $brand_name.com, etc if there wasn't a marketing component to it?
This is entirely normal if you subscribe to any form of current/past neoliberal ideology surrounding trade, borders and embargos. If you believe that an embargo towards a certain country or business is valid because you believe they are a threat to national/public security, I see little difference between that and ISPs being forbidden from working with certain companies/websites/ip ranges
They are only blocking it because the French gambling mafia/authority is not getting their cut. They do not care in any way at all about a "predatory" gambling website.
They just want their share.
I responded to the wrong comment, I ment to respond to the GP.
Since Fifa is Swiss, it has nothing to do with this court ruling. So indeed, why bring it up?
FanDuel cannot operate in France but their website isn't blocked. So how do we explain this?
France, EU, Italy, Spain, La Liga are just consistently making fools out of themselves trying to block everything on the internet when they don't like it.
Maybe it's just because regulatory censorship is inconsistent and doesn't make any sense. It's like the China firewall but even dumber and less effective.
Note there's no liability on the ISPs, they do not have to pay a fine for not having blocked it, they do not have to ban alternative DNS. In Europe there is apparently a legal mindset that you can recruit a third party to conduct an action that is not onerous to enforce a blockade. A court can point to someone who has a DNS server and order them to block certain lookups.
What’s broken is extending copyright after a work was already created. But that’s true even if the creator was still alive.
It is once you make it to the other side of the marginal utility of a dollar.
Suppose you write a popular work in your 20s. You make plenty from it, and then people keep buying it. As long as they do, why spend your time creating new works when you can drink whiskey or play video games or live in a cabana on a beach? As long as the copyright doesn't expire, you have all the money you need and thereby value having more time over having more money. When it doesn't expire for 70 years after your death, so do your kids.
Whereas if it would expire after 14 years and you want to provide for your kids (never mind that they should maybe make a contribution of their own) then to do it you would have to keep making new works.
Why can e.g. programmers profit from their specialism and then have early retirement, but e.g. popular singers or authors not do the same if they wanted? Why shouldn't they be allowed to continue to make money from the original work they've created that nobody else could / did? Why should a programmer be allowed to leave a huge legacy to their children in the form of vested stocks, but artists not be allowed to in the form of continuing royalties?
Creating works of art that people want is as much of a specialised skill as e.g. programming, but the payoff doesn't come as a large monthly paycheque, but as a small amount on each copy sold that you hope to recoup by selling more volume over time.
Further lotteries attract suckers based on potential payouts. Just as the NFL or NBA convinces young kids to work hard, successful artists are a major part of pipeline of young kids practicing their craft.
Sadly, copyright term is the only sensible (and easily enforceable) metric, although whilst I'd agree that the term is currently too long, reducing it to shorter than the creator's lifetime can lead to other weird situations.
For instance, if copyright was just 20 years after something was created, a painting might have been created 20 years ago but never made public until later in their life, and so copyright has expired before they've ever tried to sell it. Maybe there was only public interest in their work later on in their career and suddenly their early work was now considered valuable.
Or if it's 20 years from the date something was made available to the public, then you could reset the clock by creating a slightly different work (e.g. a book where page 200 contained a spelling correction), etc. How would you decide the copyright term then? Would pages 1-199 and 201-end be out of copyright and only page 200 copyrighted?
And assuming we think lifetime of the creator makes sense, then we would need a different rule for companies, because companies can last forever. What we have right now, seems approximately the optimal solution in most cases.
About the only thing I'd change is when nobody knows who the copyright holder is, which is particularly an issue with old software. There really should be some way of legally distributing abandonware if nobody can prove that they own the copyright.
Copyright should last ten years, at the very maximum 15 years, after publication. This is an entirely solved problem. The solution is just not implemented because in reality copyright is not about incentivizing authors at all.
> Maybe there was only public interest in their work later on in their career and suddenly their early work was now considered valuable.
Sucks for them. No reason to grant indefinite copyright.
> Or if it's 20 years from the date something was made available to the public, then you could reset the clock by creating a slightly different work
No, you couldn't. Why would a derivative work prolong the copyright term of the original? The derivative work would have copyright on its own if it had significant additional creative input (so not just spelling corrections). The original is entirely unaffected by this. Derivative works are already a settled concept in copyright. Nothing about them is new or special.
I'm not sure we'd be any worse off as a society if, say, Disney wasnt incentivized to make 34 marvel movies.
There are things where we desperately need large scale investment (e.g. manufacturing, green energy) but big budget artistic productions is probably one area of the economy where we could easily live without it.
If anything these films are a great example of why copyright terms should be long, because those films are still culturally relevant today, 60-80 years after they're made, and that people are still willing to pay for them over newer films shows that the creators and their families still deserve to continue to get royalties from them.
Sure, film companies often make a quick buck from sequels, but it's interesting that copyright on characters is distinct from copyright on works.
If anything it's surprising that you're arguing something other than the usual issue that's brought up around Disney, which is that their older works frequently took stories that were specifically out of copyright, and then they vigourously pursued copyright on the films they made from those stories.
The people who get most of the money from these movies are the shareholders of huge media conglomerates, which is the only reason why these works still have copyright. Authors and their families are purely a pretense for this.
The point of people deserving a monopoly over aspects of culture long after they created a work and deserving to censor the works of others who do not pay royalties to their monopoly – this is what copyright means – is weird. It sounds good as long as you read it as a feel good story without thinking about it, but it is ultimately moot. No, they do not. The argument is bizarre. We do not grant this privilege to anyone else. Everyone else gets paid for their work when they do it. They can even invest the money like everyone else. When you've hit it big with a creative work you are set for life. But when I build a house for you, I get paid once. I cannot get back to you 20 years later and demand payment once again because you are still living in it and benefiting from my work. It would be absurd. Obviously in creative works there is usually uncertainty. Most works are not created in exchange to a previously agreed commission by one party, but are created as an advance investment and then offered to the general public. We have to grant copyright to these works for a limited time so the author has the chance of making money from their work. There is no reason to extent this copyright beyond this limited time period and to grant authors such a special privilege. On the contrary there is all the reason not to do this as copyright is ultimately censorship and must be limited to the utmost minimal necessity.
> Disney, which is that their older works frequently took stories that were specifically out of copyright, and then they vigourously pursued copyright on the films they made from those stories.
That is perfectly fine. No one in their right mind would argue against that. The evil of disney is not creating derivative works of works in the public domain, but after the fact lobbying to retroactively extend copyright forever so that no work will ever fall into the public domain again; so that no one will be able to do the same as them – creating derivatives to decades old works that ought to be in the public domain; so that they can effectively own culture.
This is fine for transactional work, where it's very clear - you do/make something and sell it, perhaps a carpenter selling a table or whatever.
It completely fails if, for example, an author spends 4 years unpaid writing their latest book, and after the first copy is sold anybody is free to duplicate the words from that book without giving the author a penny for that work. One of the specific reasons for copyright is to ensure that the author is granted exclusivity over sale of the works, such that they can earn a fair wage to compensate for the 4 years of their life without any income at all. How us it unfair that if that author lives another 50 years and people are happy paying for the book for the next 50 years, the author should continue receiving money for it, rather than just some unrelated party whose only skill is being able to scan and reprint the book for basically the cost of the paper?
It's also fair to allow copyright after the author's death, because their children also should be allowed to benefit from their parent's work too. In most families, the parents want to pass on a legacy to their children. Why should an author be any different? Or are you saying if someone owned property that provided a monthly rental income, on their death the children shouldn't be allowed to inherit that property or the income stream?
If you say that the parent needs to earn all the income from the novel themselves and only that can be passed to the children, what if someone has spent 4 years writing a novel, and is killed in a traffic accident a day after launch day? Should their children not be allowed to profit from their parent's work just because they died before the income stream was realised? What about the 4 years of hardship the entire family endured?
Corporations just extend this thinking, because legally a corporation is considered to be a legal person. If you're making a film that requires lots of capital and many participants, there's a lot of investment in that production. In this case, it makes sense that the individual artists sign over their rights to the work they do for a salary to the company (if they don't like a paid job, they can always go and create their own works or set up their own company, etc) and equally, the investors need some time to recoup the investment they made. If we didn't permit this, then simply put, the vast majority of films would never have existed. Society would be far worse off.
I completely agree with you. Authors should have a monopoly over the distribution of their work "for a limited time so the author has the chance of making money from their work".
> How us it unfair that if that author lives another 50 years and people are happy paying for the book for the next 50 years, the author should continue receiving money for it, rather than just some unrelated party whose only skill is being able to scan and reprint the book for basically the cost of the paper?
You are framing this in an emotional, artificially limited scenario under the category of fairness. The reality is that copyright has been extended multiple times for works that had already been written for the benefit of huge corporations that lobbied for it. The revenue of an accomplished author for their family is a feel good pretense for this. They did not play any role in the political decision process for this. The authors of these works created them without the expectancy of lifelong copyright protection and even copyright protection for their descendants. That did not stop them from creating these works and had they expected lifelong copyright I am certain we now would not have significantly more works from this time frame.
You are portraying only the author in this and postulating copyright like a natural right that is only fair. It is not. Copyright is censorship. It is not fair to censor the derivative works of others or to demand payment from people for obtaining copies of decades old works; to use your category of the subjective feeling of fairness. Much more importantly than the feeling of it being fair: It is unjust. Copyright is censorship. It restricts access to information and culture. We initially imposed this censorship as a societal contract between the public and an author to incentivize the creation of more works. We restrict people from sharing a work and even from creating their own derivative creative work of it, because only through this censorship the work being censored even came to be. Therefore the result of that censorship is more expression, art and information, not less. This is why the censorship of copyright is justifiable. Any copyright term beyond this is unjust.
You speak of copying as an unskilled, dishonorable act. Copying is what our civilization including all the great works you want to monopolize are built on. All significant works are derivative works to some degree. We now live in a world where through the monopolization of creative works under few huge media conglomerates these conglomerates effectively own large parts of our culture. The lengthy copyright terms give these corporations exclusive controls over many aspects of our cultural heritage. We still make adaptions to ancient mythology to this day, but the cultural canon of our society has greatly expanded since them. Mythology and fairy tales only grew to what they are because there was no copyright on them. What we are doing today to our modern cultural heritage is like the ancient Greeks putting copyright on mythologies. Had they done that our literature would be much poorer today. Would we limit copyright terms our literature would be much richer today by allowing people to write their own derivative works to the cultural goods of our age.
Indirect effects matter both for society and as a legal question. To this day many elderly / sick artists are working not for their own personal interests but for other people.
Thus copyright after people die is promoting the creation of artistic works both in truth and as legal cover for other copyright holders. 70 years after an artist dies vs 20 years is a different question, but ending copyright with artist death would absolutely cost society creative works.
The foundation even tried to double dip on this by claiming Otto Frank as a co-author right before copyright expiration, three decades after his passing.
There has never been a writer who, writing for love, also thought, hey that is a great idea for a science fiction story, and that magazine is paying for science fiction, I will, in entrepreneurial fashion try to write a story so I can earn money. If it works out really well I could even have a best seller and move out of this garret! Or did this presumed writer just say, nah, screw that, another volume of poetry about dark haired ladies for me!
And of those who write even without monetary recompense, will they publish?
Will they send off to someone their writing and then sit through the editorial process for months, and agree to changes in order to get published?
Will they go through all the various parts of having to sell since they will not be getting paid for what they wrote?
Rhetorically speaking, Anne Frank is a writer who wrote without caring about any of that stuff, but unless the argument is that we should be rounding up people to send to death camps in order to promote better literature I don't really see the point of the argument.
Sure, after Anne Frank died and the war ended and her father had her diary published he went through the whole editing process and doing whatever was needed to spur sales of the book without much interest in benefiting from the copyright, but I sort of feel that he and his daughter may have been something of an outlier in most publication histories, and their story, engaging as it is, may not actually demonstrate so obviously that "writers will write even without monetary recompense"
on edit: The idea that people are "compelled to write" is essentially an idea that writers have some sort of psychological problem, at least a form of neuroticism, the argument that as they will write without compensation and thus there is no reason to compensate them is at its best an argument to take advantage of people with a psychological condition, although, for all the reasons outlined above I think we can see that the argument is completely senseless and flies in the face of logic.
There has been recent discussion of who was America's Homer, and I suggested Mark Twain https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48927260 who was a guy who so blindingly obviously wrote for money in almost all cases that it would just be absolutely ludicrous to argue otherwise.
Also, I see I got my downvote, oh noes!
But as you found quotes from someone arguing that writing to be paid is somehow bad
"I agree with Balzac and 19th-century writers, black and white, who say, 'I write for money'" -- Maya Angelou
"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money" -- Samuel Johnson.
But hey, I gotta admit, the first guy had one example of someone who wrote despite not having hopes of getting anything for their effort and now you come with one, so obviously my idea that not everyone has in the age of the world written without hope of compensation was wrong.
But let's go back to your quote, which for some reason you think is a good one against my assertion that there are people have written for money and to retain copyright.
Sancho makes the final point "It will be a wonder if he succeeds, for it will be only hurry, hurry, with him, like the tailor on Easter Eve; and works done in a hurry are never finished as perfectly as they ought to be."
Which is a really good point for someone writing in a time when copyright did not exist and the only way to ever make money from your writing was to write quickly and to get the work into someone's hands after which they paid you, maybe, once.
I'm of course in agreement, somewhat, that works done too quickly are not done well enough, but some people can write at a speed that to others may seem in a hurry but to them are rather slow.
But I will give an example, Mark Twain, who I've already pointed out is the perfect example of someone who definitely wrote for money, except for a couple things he wrote towards the end of his life when he was old and bitter and also pretty darn rich by the standards of his time.
He took 7 years to write Huck Finn. If he wrote for money how did he afford this? Well he shelved it for a bit when he had writer's block and wrote other things for money, but also because he was in a much more financially secure situation than Cervantes expected the writer for money to be, due to his success, part of that success based on copyrighting Tom Sawyer before its publication.
But he also did do a bunch of crap, including the sequels to Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and of course writing The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson too quickly to keep from bankruptcy from bad investments. I am not against the assertion that writing for money will produce things that are bad, but I do not believe that, quotes aside, it can be shown definitely that it will produce bad things.
At any rate if you read things written the last few hundred years and find them worthwhile, unless you are very particular in how you choose what you read, you probably have read lots of things that were written either partially or wholly for money.
Finally I notice neither you or other people who responded had anything to say to this part of what I wrote
"And of those who write even without monetary recompense, will they publish?
Will they send off to someone their writing and then sit through the editorial process for months, and agree to changes in order to get published?
Will they go through all the various parts of having to sell since they will not be getting paid for what they wrote?"
I look forward to the quotes from great works of literature detailing how the non-writing parts of the publishing process are required for the writer to produce something great and how they should not consider money when laboring on that either.
If you find this quote interesting, you should check out this video[0] by Christopher Anadale who is a teacher who does long form deep dive analysis & commentary on classic works of philosophy. As an aside, one of the things I love about YouTube is when teachers record and share their lectures, and I was pleased to learn about the feisty Schopenhauer (and his thoughts on authorship) by listening to this lecture.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F99UsizxMZQ
Sure, there are many people who are happy to write software in their spare time, and are sufficiently well off from another income stream that they can afford to not profit from the software they produce (although I suspect that the vast majority of open-source programmers also derive their primary income from closed-source software).
But a simple fact of life is that people need to eat, find shelter, etc, and it's reasonable to expect that if you have a particular skill that others don't that you should be able to exchange the products of that skill for money from the people who recognise that skill and want the products of it (whether it be software, books, artworks, music, whatever).
Sure, there are some people who would continue producing the art/writings/music anyway in their free time because that's what motivates them in life. But what a shame it is when someone can only do that for a few hours per week because they need to work a full time job which doesn't utilise their talent just to put food on the table. Perhaps they'll choose to live a meagre life, and work for the "sake of subject" and die in poverty, but most won't. That doesn't reflect on the quality of the work, just how much hardship the creator is prepared to endure.
I'd never heard of Arthur Schopenhauer before, but reading his Wikipedia suggests that he came from a wealthy family and he never had to worry about money. Perhaps his argument just boils down to class at the end of the day, and that only authors from a well off background should be given a voice. But like I say, I don't know anything about him and he sounds like a well regarded philosopher, so I'm probably well off base.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49002363
that pertains here to some extent.
Do we have exactly the correct number of authors right now and any change to copyright risks tipping us from some balance point into darkness?
Or maybe we could do without Steven Kings and JK Rowlings sorts and get along fine.
Maybe worth reading more about Anne Frank. She did not write to make a buck
what will simply happen - due to the following - HDDs are cheap, Torrents, Open source / cheap community software like Discord
- communities will move to be mostly private and small. era of large social media is done.
for media - download content via torrent - store in cheap HDDs. you can probably get an 8TB spinning metal for $250. cheap enough and good enough.
payments - these already moved to crypto. for criminals monero.
the internet as gated by bureaucrats will be left to the dweebs.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/utahs-new-law-regulati...
For the most part, I agree.
If there's a copyright dispute somewhere, you can bet it's either Anne Frank's estate, Tolkien's estate, or the Beatles's old record label.
It's never the authors who actually made the work. It's always their heirs.
You can’t shop around someone changing prices around you knowing your income etc.
Similarly you cannot meaningfully use social media, Reddit or even HN if your IP is on their lists.
Unfortunately many online organizations have gone to war with their users so we need VPN and other tools to mitigate the abuse.
Everything's "in the portal" -- you're effectively helpless without a VPN if, for example, a loved one is hospitalized or you need to access to your own data/records. (You can try phone calls, but expect the old, "Well, I can't help you, that's in the portal.")
I'm not for complete copyright abolishment but this is absolutely insane. In this case, the copyright term is so long because the original copyright lasted 50 years after publication (rather than the author's death), but a change in copyright law changed that to 70 years and moved the counting date.
Regardless of legalities, taking action against distribution of Anne Frank's diary seems like the exact logical opposite of what this fund should be doing.
Here is a copy/pasteable snippet for lazy lobbyists so someone pass this to the lobby-judges at the EU courts:
"In light of recent changes to legislation and the deadly effect of social media on babies and unborn ones, VPNs are agents of terrorism, attempting to circumvent healthy restrictions pertaining to protecting such young folk from the vile dangers of antisocial media consumption. Anyone attempting to browse the web for information without presenting a valid unique ID including biometric data is guilty of terrorism, facing a minimum penalty of 25 years and 1.000.000€ fine."
This fight is, by the way, not just against VPNs. Age sniffing has never ever only been about children or VPNs. Some people still think it is about "protecting children". It's interesting.
That’s the whole point. The courts uphold the law. Change the law, and the courts change what they do.
In this case my understanding is that they determined vpn-s as a tool to fall outside the scope of the law and so they struck down an attempt to enforce the law
If the law got changed so that vpn-s are now within the scope of the new law then you'd expect them to not apply the same reasoning anymore in examining a similar case
Judicial review would come into play if the challenge was about the updated law being inconsistent with some more important law such as the treaties or charter
the internet was, as everyone knows, invented Al Gore
EU lawmakers follow tech trends by a lag of at least a decade and lay waste as they move along. Imagine what they will require once they understand how tech people no longer use chatbots and how much we can control AI agents.
The way to fight piracy is to offer a better service than the pirates. Simple as.
It's a bit like saying it's okay to sneak into a movie theater because the prices for movie tickets are too high.
To me, I feel it's an integral part of a democracy that if there is a law you don't like, you have means to get it changed, but it always involves convincing others that your viewpoint is the one everyone should adhere to. Likewise, it is a part of this system that you accept and adhere to the laws as they are until they have been changed. I don't system a society can work where everybody takes laws and regulations as mere suggestions and picks the ones they like to follow.
When a providers offer something at a certain price and you don't like the price, but you would still really like the thing they're offering, you have two options: you either suck it up and pay the price they're asking or you simply move on and do without that thing. I find the idea of "these prices are outrageous, so I'm entitled to getting this thing without paying at all!" not ethically justifiable.
> It's a bit like saying it's okay to sneak into a movie theater because the prices for movie tickets are too high.
It is not just the price, though. In some regions, for some media, the movie theater doesn't exist or the movies are not localized (no subtitles / dubbing).
Nowadays you need several subscriptions to watch all of the content you would normally watch. There are also different tiers now for video quality.
Essentially it is a lot more attractive to go to your local tracker and download the movie / anime / tv-show which will be of better quality and will be localized.
On the other hand, I haven't pirated a single game for over 10 years.
People will continue to consume content. But they aren't going to pay for what feels like a complete ripoff and manage 10+ subscriptions just to do it. If that is the way the industry is going then piracy will simply continue to thrive.
Copyright in the European Union and geo-blocking: a work that is in the public domain can be published online free of charge in a Member State even if it remains protected in another Member State [pdf]
https://curia.europa.eu/site/upload/docs/application/pdf/202...
Other blog post:
CJEU clarifies when geo-blocking limits online copyright liability
https://intellectual-property-helpdesk.ec.europa.eu/news-eve...
This seems extremely problematic, depending on what "state of the art and effective" means. It seems like blocking VPN users is unfortunately still on the table, as are other invasive enforcement methods.
This isn't codified into law for good reasons. Technology shifts and you don't want to have to update laws every time someone invents a new cipher or protocol.
The website is defending itself from having to pay a fine because they're blocking VPN users. They require blocking VPN users to skirt around the extreme terms in Dutch copyright law. If they didn't block VPNs, they would've lost already.
This boils down to "did they try hard enough not to violate copyright in the place(s) where copyright was still applicable".
I find these are often very readable and interesting.
It's not about a free internet, it's plain old copyright and control.
> Speaking on BBC Breakfast today, the government confirmed a major U-turn on the subject, with Online Safety Minister Kanishka Narayan stating: "We decided not to limit VPNs."
> This was further cemented in a written parliamentary statement by Technology Secretary Liz Kendall, who clarified that the government will not age-gate or ban the best VPN software because "VPNs have legitimate privacy and security uses."
https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/we-decide...
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48998094 and marked it off topic.
I really need to spend some time thinking about this one. If something is correct, I don't tend to continue analyzing it further to look for reasons to be angry.