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this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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I kind of assume this with any digital media. Games, music, ebooks, stock videos, whatever - embedding a tiny unique ID is very easy and can allow publishers to track down leakers/pirates.
Honestly, even though as a consumer I don't like it, I don't mind it that much. Doesn't seem right to take the extreme position of "publishers should not be allowed to have ANY way of finding out who is leaking things". There needs to be a balance.
Online phone-home DRM is a huge fuck no, but a benign little piece of metadata that doesn't interact with anything and can't be used to spy on me? Whatever, I can accept it.
I object because my public funds were used to pay for most of these papers. Publishers shouldn’t behave as if they own it.
That's true. I was actually thinking/talking about this practice in general, not specifically with regards to Elsevier.
I definitely agree that scientific journals as they are today are unacceptable.
It can be used to spy on any decent scientist who will send papers his/hers/theirs institution has access to, but their friend doesn't. Much fun. As a reminder, publishers don't pay reviewers, don't pay for additional research, editing is typically minimal, and research is funded publicly, so what they own is social capital of owning big journal
By "spy" I mean things like: know how many times I've read the PDF, when I've opened it, which parts of it I've read most, what program I used to open the PDF, how many copies of the PDF I've made, how many people I've emailed it to, etc. etc. etc.
This technique can do none of that. The only thing it can do is: if someone uploads the PDF to a mass sharing network, and an employee of the publisher downloads it from that mass sharing network and compares this metadata with the internal database, then they can see which of their users originally downloaded it and when they originally downloaded the PDF. It tells them nothing about how it got there. Maybe the original user shared it with 20 of their colleagues (a legitimate use of a downloaded PDF), and one of those colleagues uploaded that file to the mass sharing site without telling the original downloader. It doesn't prove one way or the other. It's an extremely small amount of information that's only useful for catching systemic uploaders, e.g. a single user who has uploaded hundreds or thousands of PDFs that they downloaded from the publisher using the same account.
And a savvy user can always strip that metadata out.
All true, and fucked up, but it's not related to what I was talking about. I was talking about the general use of this technique.
Nah, fuck that; that's both the opposite of an extreme position and is exactly the one we should take!
Copyright itself is a privilege and only exists in the first place "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts." Any entity that doesn't respect that purpose doesn't deserve to benefit from it at all.
You are arguing that Elsevier shouldn't exist at all, or needs to be forcibly changed into something more fair and more free. I 100% agree with this.
But my point was in general, not about Elsevier but about all digital publications of any kind. This includes indie publications and indie games. If an indie developer makes a game, and it gets bought maybe 20 copies but pirated thousands of times, do you still say "fuck that" to figuring out which "customer" shared the game?
I agree with "fuck that" to huge publishers, and by all means pirate all their shit, but smaller guys need some way to safeguard themselves, and there's no way to decide that small guys can use a certain tool and big guys cannot.
That's a fun opinion but have you considered that property is theft and intellectual property is bullshit
Without IP your favourite books, movies, TV shows, music and video games would not exist.
the artists still exist and would continue to make art even if we abolished the systems of exploitation we apply to that art.
frankly, art would instantly become far better without capitalism weighing it down
For your average art, I can see that. But movies and TV shows take a lot more than just someone with a passion. You'd need some system to decide whose movie idea is worth pursuing, and you'd need a robust mechanism to get them a team to make it with. Capatalism has a lot of flaws, yes, but at least if you write a role for a specific actor, you can pay them to do it instead of just hoping they'll like it enough to sign on.
And yeah, we can have those systems under communism, but they don't come automatically, so it's not going to be instantly far better.
It's not the artists, creators, researchers etc. who profit off ip laws. It's always capitalists
Plus, if you have two people with legit access, you can pretty easily figure out what's going on and defeat it.
It would be pretty trivial for a script to automatically detect and delete tags like this, I would think. Diff two versions of the file and swap all diff characters to any non-display character.
Definitely better than some of the DRM-riddled proprietary eBook formats.
Enlightened centrist