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https://warpcast.com/~/channel/alexandria
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@amelie
Today, February 26, Amazon takes away the right for people to download offline copies of their Kindle books. Today, we at /alexandria are debuting ebook download. Readers can download their copies of the @jakonrath Dark Thriller Collective, because they own them. Onchain means owning your ebooks.
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@cloaked-bloke
this is cool and ironic. Just yesterday, I had wrote up the parallels from the book marketplace to free software (fsf). I cant let it go to waste, and I have a question… so here we are. With physical books, there exists the ‘first sale doctrine’, where- when one buys a copy, they are free to redistribute it. Ex. Libraries can lend it, Used book sales The problem with this, is the author does not get a cut in either case. The library does not have to pay the author, the individual selling second hand will not give a percentage to the author. With the internet, however, creating copies is extremely easy.. Therefore, redistribution puts the author at risk even moreso—to losing revenue due to second hand sales. The licensing model amazon uses—where customers do not technically own the books they buy— seems to somewhat protect authors on the internet. i.e Limiting second hand sales increases revenue for authors, and a byproduct ofc is helping amazon stockholders… lol
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@cloaked-bloke
the question i have @amelie when someone buys a book, do you believe they ‘own it’ completely? it’s like, when someone takes a photo, does the photographer own it? Or the person in the shot? Or is it fractionalized between all parties involved? Software - Do I get complete market share because I forked amazon’s code and somehow made it more popular than amazon itself? Or do I owe all the FOSS external libraries i used? ex. React, tailwind, etc. If I use a book to source a new one, should I get 100% revenue even though this person significantly helped in writing the new one? Or is the “advertisement” enough? I don’t really know what end game we’re headed towards, because ownership is sooooo complicated to me… And all these mini corps fighting for semblance of success, hurts my brain.
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@amelie
You're bringing up major questions about the nature of intellectual property itself, and I definitely agree it's complicated! Copyright law and existing publishing contracts have decided certain answers to this question. Perpetual digital ownership enabled by web3 brings up new questions that copyright lawyers and artists alike will have to answer. With the book example, you bring up another important complication: is the value of intellectual property about protecting access to that property directly? Or is the benefit of proliferating a brand, as long as it's attributed to the original creator, good enough as payment? (continued below)
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@amelie
All forms of art are in conversation with their predecessors, so provenance is really a spectrum. At one extreme, if I was inspired by the writing style of Charles Dickens, I think we can all agree that I wouldn't owe him royalties, even if his work wasn't in the public domain. So then where do we decide to draw the line? For some authors I've spoken to, they just want people to read and enjoy their books, and so for them, getting the word out is the most important part. Many authors give away free ebooks without DRM as a marketing strategy. For many authors, on the other hand, they want to protect their IP and they don't want to encourage it to get shared everywhere without copyright protection. I think both views are valid. Artists deserve to be compensated for their work. Web3 and smart contracts give us opportunities to explore more frameworks along that spectrum of how much do we paywall IP, how much do we track attribution and compensation to contributors.
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@cloaked-bloke
lot of knowledge here had no idea how it actually works nor the perspectives of authors. need to digest. just in case this help, this convo made me think: - if it is clear to a reader that they never own the book, what if users pay on a per access/page/time - I could use a book club or recommendation thing on here Wish all the best with Alexandria books
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