I wouldn’t say that there was NO money in it. It was a notable source of funds for monasteries, but that fact that they were using near-free labor kept price low enough, (although VERY high compared to printed works) that copying them wasn’t a commercially viable business.
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Ok, I’m not going to continue to pick nits here, but if you want to keep doing that, knock yourself out. To be crystal clear, my ONLY point was that the costs of copying written works has gone from extremely high to practically zero with technological advancements, and I think that’s hard to argue with. And that that’s a big part of what’s driving this problem. Not all of it. Please don’t everyone jump in to tell me about 50 other factors. I get it, and I agree.
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No idea how that happened, I thought I was replying to other folks. Sorry for any confusion.
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sorry, didn’t mean to nitpick. because the central point is certainly valid; the law has not really caught up to the fact that that there are no longer the high set-up costs to reproduction at volume that made the printing presses a logical place to set up ‘toll booths,’ and the fact the reproduction is an inherent part of the distribution of digital works.
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i hear that you are angry, and you’ve probably had this discussion a million times irl already. if it helps, i own a lot of books by authors i first tried out by borrowing from the library and that’s where my perspective comes from
on high book costs, my point was not that people are forced to buy 30 dollar books but rather that 30 dollar books are a barrier to entry that limit the reach of an author. ( could be a goal of publishers, to keep a clear line around celebrity authors, but just guessing )
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Fair use doctrine purportedly protects educational over non educational use. In academic settings, books are most often read in parallel, not in serial. If a paper has 50 references, most of those references will have been strewn across the authors desk simultaneously…
-ish. Fair use as it is implemented today is one of the things I think is horribly broken about our copyright system. First of all, it’s not something you can claim or declare definitively ahead of time. It’s an affirmative defense to a copyright infringement claim. In other words, the only way to have a use declared to be fair use definitively is to be sued for infringement, assert a defense of fair use in court, and have the judge or jury rule in your favor. That’s not something most people are going to be able to do. This might work, though, if fair use had well defined boundaries. It does not. It involves a case-by-case analysis of four factors. Being used for educational purposes as opposed to commercial purposes is just one aspect of one of those four factors, and is not, on its own, dispositive. An educational use might not be fair use, and a commercial use might be. The upshot of all this is that it’s really easy for large corporate rights holders to simply file a claim or a DMCA takedown request, insist it really is infringement if the person appeals, leaving legal action as the only option, and most people are just not in a position to afford a defense of their use in court against a large, multinational corporate entity that can drag it out for years. Some music rights holders are notorious for not allowing even short clips of their music to be used on YouTube, even for what is clearly an educational, non-commercial purpose. I’m kind of rambling now, but fair use is next to useless in practice, is my point. It shouldn’t be, but it is.
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Maybe. The copyright lobby can swing a mighty big club through the Office of the US Trade Representative.
https://apnews.com/article/f3219da7e5b9ee74e7002746255dc9a6
Also, they could move the servers, but they’d also have to cut any use of Internet resources that were under US control, like the archive.org domain, name servers, hosting, etc.
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Those are all solvable problems though. I referenced Pirate Bay as an example there because they are proof that you can keep a data business out of reach of US bullies if you need to. Same for all the online sports betting, real money poker, and online casino companies. Not to say it’s easy, but it can be done and the Archive (many of whom I am friends with) have the resources to do it.
That said, they pick their battles. They’re not going to squander those resources dying on a hill for the right to pirate every published book, for example. Or when Nintendo told them to take down some video games, they did. A vastly larger pool of stuff that is up there, however, is there because they knew when to fight and they did.
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Boing Boing had/has a lot of server infrastructure in Canuckistan based on 1) Ken formerly being there and 2) we thought off shoring it in Canada offered some protection it didn’t. As long as you are a USian and like using US money in the US you can put your server in any old place and the government will hold you accountable.
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Yah, if the people involved are US citizens, that’s tougher, it’s true. The US has hooks in its citizens that are immune to borders. When I left and went back to Canada, I declined US citizenship for exactly the kinds of things you describe (and I didn’t want to file US taxes for the rest of my life despite never living there again).
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Just curious: if you have US citizenship by birth, but never earned any money in the US (so never filed taxes there) - you wouldn’t need to do that, would you?
I know some people who were born there, and TTBOMK do hold US citizenship. I doubt they are filing taxes, though; hence my question.
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They’re supposed to, if they have income anywhere
U.S. citizenship is like the old British “subject” system—it’s a set of obligations we would have to affirmatively buy our way out of 
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That sounds… fun.
/s
But then, some people told me how their second passport was very helpful when being abroad, since the US embassy would be ever so helpful. YMMV, I guess.
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Most Americans don’t have passports and never leave the country … and the ones who live overseas and make a significant amount of money there are such a tiny minority they’re not in a position to drive any kind of tax reform 
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Yes, and the first $130,000 or thereabouts of income earned outside the US is not subject to income tax (doesn’t apply to US Government employees working abroad).
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only if you pay taxes to the country you earned it in. you are going to pay someone taxes. taxes are obligatory.
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https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/lcp/vol66/iss1/10/
Fairest of them all and other fairy tales of fair use.
you still have to file to prove that i believe, and pay social security and medicare in some cases ( though the rules for that seem a little complicated )
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Yup, you sure do. The US taxes all citizens on income they earn anywhere in the world. It’s the only country that does this AFAIK.
If you currently live in a country with a bilateral tax treaty with the US (like Canada) you won’t get double-taxed on that income, but you still have to file all the paperwork every year, which typically costs a couple thousand bucks. If you live somewhere without a US tax treaty (most countries in the world) you will get double taxed on all income. It’s insanity. If you don’t file, they won’t come get you, but you better not try to enter the US with that debt outstanding.
Fun fact, the US also separates tax citizenship and political citizenship. So if you owe money to the IRS, for example (or they think you do) you still owe it if you renounce American citizenship. Another fun fact, getting rid of US citizenship costs thousands of dollars and requires them to approve it (if they feel like it). US citizenship is a protection racket, basically.
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