Here's another little-known fact: Every American is entitled to a library card from the Library of Congress (you have to go there in person to get one).
The Library of Congress is a Hathi Trust partner! So if you go get that card, you can download all of the out-of-print books that Google scanned on your own computer. No copyright holders are getting paid (and no one is being harmed), so why all these barriers in-between?
I can confirm that the Library of Congress Reader card is all it takes to login. And you don’t have to be a US Citizen to get one, but you do need a passport or other US-recognized identification to present and validate in-person in D.C. And you have to do a bit of research on how and where to get it, they don’t just hand them out at the front desk as other libraries might. The Library of Congress uses the card to distinguish researchers from one-off tourists and so while the card is easy to get, they have just enough process in place that it’s clear it’s not a souvenir and you have to traverse a maze of hallways to get it. (Or you had to when I did, at least...) But once you have it, just login online and you’ll have access to Hathi Trust here.
It's too bad you can't just plug-in a license, passport number or something online and get a virtual card. Seems like such as wasted opportunity to expand access to resources for pretty much free.
Yep. I’m a Canadian, got one while visiting family in the US. I did at the time work for the Toronto Public Library, but that wasn’t a consideration for them. :)
Thanks for pointing this out. I'm graduating relatively soon and was disappointed that I couldn't download books after that. Just tried my Library of Congress login and everything worked great.
Note that a Library of Congress card expires every 2 years as I recall.
Incredible as it may seem, I've actually seen that asserted. Years ago when I was a kid, before we had internet, my family would get a lot of magazines. Whoever picked up the mail, usually whoever came home most recently after it was delivered, would flip through every magazine and tear out all the advertisements and throw them in the trash before putting the magazine on the counter for the family to read. I wonder, was that 'theft'? We also used to change the channel or mute the television/radio whenever advertisements came on. Was that 'theft'?
Usually people who call adblocking theft start squirming when these pre-digital examples of ad avoidance are put to them.
Unless that author, musician, or artist operated in a vacuum, their work is a direct derivative of the work of other authors, musicians, and artists.
Every dollar a musician earns I'd, therefore, a dollar they take out of the hand of the musicians, whose work they based theirs off of.
This is why the public domain exists. You can make derivative works without paying anyone... But your work will fall into the public domain, so that you pass this benefit on to the next generation.
But you don't take money out of their hand, because there is no money to take out to begin with. Or did you mean imaginary money? If you did, well, I could come up with many different ways as to how you are doing the exact same thing to virtually anyone. :P
Anyways, you can't physically remove and deprive an owner of an idea. It doesn't fit the definition of theft at all.
If the public library system weren't grandfathered in it would never exist today. Too many people want their cut and nobody is willing to make a stand for the public good.
I think maybe that's his point. There are some crazy people in this world, so no matter how reasonable anything is there will always be somebody who gets frothing mad over it for no rational reason.
The Library of Congress is a Hathi Trust partner! So if you go get that card, you can download all of the out-of-print books that Google scanned on your own computer. No copyright holders are getting paid (and no one is being harmed), so why all these barriers in-between?