On Thursday, some links to the notorious shadow library Library Genesis (Libgen) couldn’t be reached after a US district court judge, Colleen McMahon, ordered what TorrentFreak called “one of the broadest anti-piracy injunctions” ever issued by a US court.
In her order, McMahon sided with textbook publishers who accused Libgen of willful copyright infringement after Libgen completely ignored their complaint.
To compensate rightsholders, McMahon ordered Libgen to pay $30 million, but because nobody knows who runs the shadow library, it seems unlikely that publishers will be paid any time soon, if ever.
I don’t think you grasped the danger in a subscription based publishing model.
you don’t get to read the book unless you pay the monthly fee. you stop paying, you stop reading.
you don’t lend the book, you don’t borrow the book, you don’t copy the book…because there is no book.
so how do the disenfranchised or poor gain access to knowledge outside their means? today, there are libraries. what happens if all those physical books are replaced with digital? worse yet, what happens when publishers con libraries with digital media? (you can’t fool the librarians, but any dumbass politician will eat a shit pie for optics).
point is, there is permanence in physical media that makes ownership crystal clear. our society is not ready for a digital era, and if we prematurely enter it without appropriate laws and guidance in place, we will only be encouraging a plutocracy to form, one of which we can already clearly see forming today.
Except literally nobody keeps their old textbooks they are by nature disposable, and not printing them is a massive win for the environment.