Hey Mateys, I have project at my university regarding business proposals, and I have an idea of Free knowledge at your hand that is free books and scientific research papers at no cost. Now, how to tackle the copyright issue and propose my idea?
I kindly request your assistance. New proposals, improvements, and suggestions are welcome.
Business proposal: destroy capitalism
News break: capitalism is on its way out. Now we have tech feudalism (enshittification as a business model). Rejoice!
That’s not a separate thing, it’s just capitalism in crisis because of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall
I can see why you would think that. I think this video explains it well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDPPig9JR5Y.
TL;DW: Capitalism in it’s true form was “I give you this, you give me that”. Exchange of goods. And from that perspective, it has worked. But now that nobody sells stuff anymore but holds you or the goods you want hostage, it has devolved back to the old system of feudalism where you live somewhere and the king asks for your work and money so you can live there.
I’m not saying thats the only way to look at it but I find the explanation pretty good. It would explain why so many people who are actually very good at trading things struggle in this climate now while others now thrive who have no clue how to produce viable products.
Capitalism is a system where the means of production are privately owned and operated with the goal of generating profit for the owners. It has nothing to do with that other stuff you said.
Absolute baby brained understanding of capitalism
I find your comment highly condescending. Care to elaborate?
there is “Passiv income class” and there is “Active income class”
Passiv income class lifes by/ off the Active Income of OTHERS , it is inherently parasitic and it will always intent to increas its parasitic Income…
thereby it will allways immiserate the active Income class . it is an eternal war …
and you will instantly understand that war because YOU PErsonally would ver much like to NOT WORK but to let OTHERS WORK …
The Passiv income class has ONE SINGLE OBJECTIV , it will increas e its PASSIV income , it will Increas the Exploitation of the ACtive income classes …
this is the Class war . It is eternal as Communist (its describtion) … Obviously the “PASSIV INCOME CLASS” will not be interested in explaining to the moronic people that they “Life of THEIR LABOUR” and are a Parasite … so they gonna try to convince you that THEY DESERVE IT , they gonna use Ideology for that Task , they gonna tell you a story of "higgher " and “lower” humans and Determination and Indivdual Guilt of the non Privledged Active income classes …
TLDR:
You are Active income (you will be by 99,9% chance) , YOU ARE AT WAR with the Passiv Income Class , that BY DEFINITION lives PARASITIC off the Masses and Will Allways seek to increase its “Passive Income” …
as you do when you dream of riches …
no
well, then go troll someone else. blocked.
Trading goods isn’t capitalism. Trading goods has existed for thousands upon thousands of years. Capitalism has only existed for a few hundred years.
I know you mean well, but this speaks to a deep educational misunderstanding about what capitalism is. If you are interested in learning about what it is, how it functions and how it relates to and differs from previous systems I am up for helping out with a short 101 and making recommendations for further reading.
Sure! Feel free. I mean, I can read wikipedia and it basically says „private ownership of the means of production used for profit.“ as well as „competitive markets“ which are not what we are seeing nowadays.
I‘m used to being misunderstood due to my differently wired brain but I‘m always eager to learn. So hit me. :)
The correct one is „private ownership of the means of production used for profit.“ Capitalism is about having capital, that is, some thing that makes other people give you money, but you don’t lose it when they give you money, like a factory, brand loyalty or IP rights. Competitive markets stifle this, so capitalists try to eliminate the competition and they’ve been succeeding. It’s not like trading. In trading you give me money for my coal, but I don’t have the coal any more so I have to dig more coal from the ground to get more money.
Capitalism in it’s true form was “I give you this, you give me that”
So you believe capitalism existed all the way back during the neolithic and beyond, were cavemen “true capitalists”? Capital isn’t a set of goods simply traded between people, it’s circulating money tied to productive property or alienated assets
Primitive exchange of goods requires the goods becoming the means and the ends even if money is an intermediary, under capitalism it’s capital (i.e. money) that becomes the end, while goods may or may not be the means of generation, and since money is the sole metric of success there must a set of people who work for capitalists to create that money and reproduce themselves, since goods are hidden behind said money
What are you referring to when you say “capitalism”?
Are you talking about the dominant economic paradigm of the Enlightenment through to the present day, characterized by companies with private and fully transferrable ownership, named after the concept of “capital gains”, embodying the distinction between land and labor and capital and entrepreneurship, and originally pioneered by the Dutch East India Company (and also the British one)?
Or are you talking about a more vague pattern of human relations that merely involves exchange between two private parties that is mediated by some sort of ruleset?
a gift economy is also an exchange of goods but it’s decidedly not capitalism - no one earns any profit and there’s no flow converting money into capital and capital back into money.
TL;DW: Capitalism in it’s true form was “I give you this, you give me that”. Exchange of goods.
Amazing
Capitalism and free markets are different things. You’re thinking of free markets.
I graduated in business management and my dissertation was on business ethics and how corporations never fuckin use it in the US but somehow the subject is studied academically for business students.
Business ethics is an oxymoron
True and the only good examples of business ethics are ones outside the US
The most ethical thing a business owner can do is suicide bomb a shareholder meeting
Business proposal : destroy my money
Sorry to say, but if that’s your business proposal, then you’re getting your MBA courses wrong 😫 not due to your proposal being clearly illegal, but because it has no monetization (and actually it’s not business proposal per se, but charity proposal).
And regarding your question, while copyright infrigement is illegal worldwide, there’s already a working solution which is used by major pirate resourses. And this solution is hosting copyrighed material on servers which are located on jurisdictions which are hostile towards countries where content owners and you personally live. This means if you need to host popular US/EU content, here’s ISPs from China, Russia, Iran, Belarus and so on for your help. For sure, none of them would anyhow care of your privacy, freedom of speech and so on, but what’s more important, none of them would also care about any EU/US issued copyright infrigement complaint about your server if it’s not backed by local authorities. Needless to say, both your server and ISP HQ should both be placed in such country (server in Moscow won’t save you from anything if you rent it from firm with main office in London).
Now, how to tackle the copyright issue and propose my idea?
Not sure this is the right place to ask, not dealing with copyright issues is kind of our thing here.
Not dealing with **the effects of **copyright is the thing here.
And in that sense he can gain some insights ;)
If I had to implement this business model, I would go to a country that don’t give a f* about dcma & stuff, and implement it in a similar way as Mega did.
With just the adjunction that if you upload a new book, you get free subscription for one week/month/year (depending if you share a small article, or the whole Encyclopedia Universalis)
Why does piracy need a business model? Sci-hub etc already exists.
- Copyright is a HUGE pain in the arse, especially with books. Do you realise how hard some libraries have had to fight, just for trying to do, your business idea. On that note.
- What’s your USP, especially compared to a library? They already have tons of physical and digital books, and other media. You can even request scientific papers, from some of them. Remember digital libraries are also a thing.
- A lot of scientific papers are already available for free, online. They can be hard to find, but they are available.
- How are you making money? What are the expected net/gross income? How are you going to convince them to pay?
Do you have lots of cash to support the copyright and maintenance fees? The Web archive (I think, or another similar website) got sued for having knowledge and book contents on their website. You can’t just publish hacked books.
Most likely you would need a way to generate money for a “business”.
There would be some ways like advertising (can be OK, but not always the best, it depends on how many adds, how scummy ads, and how much tracking/data selling).
Donations? = pretty much no expected revenue. The amount of revenue you can get is very low.
Paid features, but what features could be paid while keeping free access?
There’s no easy way to make this into an actual business proposal… probably to the point that it isn’t possible at all.
The tactic I could think of, if I were to NEED to do this… would be to try to find some way to argue on the grounds of some of the Ethical Altrusim stuff (I’m not a proponent of this stuff but… devil’s advocate time).
You’d get a bunch of rich EA’s to invest a shit ton of money on the regular, you take this money to pay the licensing fees or fees for use on other copyrighted research and technical manuals and then charge as close to zero as you can get away with for the individual users accessing the licensed/copyrighted work. The argument being, “more people having access to quality research and technical documentation will be a net positive for humanity and the return on investment will be measured in thousands of years in the future.”
this is your brain on an MBA (fake degree)
I think the best thing I gained from it, was knowing very well how the capitalist see things in terms of commodities
Yeah, I agree with other comments. You’ve just reinvented the library, but made it illegal. Libraries are not businesses (honestly thank god) and have no monetization model. A for profit library would be awful. Best come up with a different idea. Could stick with the theme and do like a data aggregation/search/sharing software, but even those I prefer to be foss which makes them not really “business model” friendly.
TL;DR you’ve discovered the library, now go donate to your local one
You might as well be selling drugs… the only somewhat viable way you could do that is locally and offline in a country that just doesn’t care (so russia or NK.)
As for proposing it, get a different idea. Your uni teacher will 100% reject this one.
Literally the best you could do is pound a few Red Bulls take your most expensive text books to your nearest library during the later hours and use their book scanner to make some PDFs.
Copyright is designed to funnel money into the hands of big business. If you want to spread free knowledge, you have to HIDE.
What? I don’t even get your pitch or call for contributions.
You have an idea but don’t share it? Or is free access your idea?
I graduated in Business management in 2021, it’s really hard to propose your idea as a business model because your proposal is already a commodity in academic spaces.
Now again this is just a school project, I guess the way I would frame the pitch is to find a way to have access to this information (JSTOR for example) and available to the public at no cost but would require some sort of ad revenue service to maintain itself.
In our mostly capitalistic society where the goal is only money that intern leads to prosperity (in theory)… There is no possible monetary value to piracy that could counter the endless legal disputes. Maybe the business proposal should be “end ownership”
