That's crazy, I just use Open Library as a free and open alternative to Goodreads for reading lists, reviews, and book indexing, but apparently even that wouldn't be possible in Belgium anymore.
Well, apparently Western Europe is not only buying Russian oil and gas, but they decided to buy some ideas from Wowa Putin. Who cares... until European Union will try to make that their regulation.
yeah putin man bad. king pooh man bad. as an EU citizen, china or russia is not even 1% the enemy that EU countries and EU itself is to the people of EU.
EU and the member states are nothing but thugs and terrorists. Very powerful ones, but terrorists nonetheless. Putin or russia has not once threatened me, stolen from me under the threat of throwing me in jail, yet EU does. Russia has never tried to steal money from other citizens to try bribe me, yet an EU state has.
EU and its member states are an enemy of the people.
Humanity just doesn't ever learn. Europe will end up having draconian oversight and censorship that will be abused beyond belief by fascists. When some central entity--subject to the whims of political temperature--controls what you can access, there can be no trust in the durability and integrity of information. Same as in the US really, except there being executed to support the nascent regime without any liberal auspices.
As a Belgian, sad to see this. I rarely follow any news from Belgium (not living there anymore) so I'm somewhat unaware of what's happening in the tech landscape, but this does surprise me.
Curiously - I tried to find any news on this from Belgian sources, but couldn't find it (in my quick search).
Hot take: it's the right decision. Why? I'm scoping my opinion on copyrighted material only. A state that is a lawful state follows its own laws. That includes copyright laws most of us don't like. So yes, I think that was the right decision for this court (as it's not the constitutional court of Belgium afaict) as it holds up the laws of Belgium and defends the rights of copyright holders (which can be individuals as well, not only evil corporation extortionists).
I know that there is a slippery slope here, but we need to change laws and make systems that are resilient against censorship. That's the only long term solution imho.
Let's be honest: it's piracy. They are not banning books. They're fighting illegal distribution. Just use a VPN and pirate the books. We gotta be honest to ourselves here.
Right so who wants to work on this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44746016 it is time to finish this as govs won't learn. And even china hasn't managed to block that traffic: the eu/us probably wont go that far. But if they do, it wont probably work.
We must have p2p , decentralized application frameworks with strong encryption. A framework I can write my next saas on and no, not blockchain.
Once a book is sold publishers would do anything to limit its use. No scanning, no online lending, no training LLMs on it, no reusing of protected style or abstractions for fan fiction. If the author is not to be found, the book itself becomes "orphaned", attempting preservation is infringement.
I personally find little attraction installing in my brain furniture I can't sit on. If I can't freely reuse the ideas in the book to create anything, it is a net loss to read it.
The article is a little wide-eyed about how new this kind of censorship is.
Belgium broadly has a duopoly, with the first two ISPs listed having the vast majority of the market. Both of them have been doing blocking of pirate sites for decades, with at least one of them actually resolving + blocking by IP address, not just DNS blocking.
Needless to say, both have video on demand services to protect.
I always wonder if we didn’t get democracy totally backwards. As a Belgian, how could I have let my voice be heard that this is:
- a waste of time and resources
- not what I want
It sure is galling that government appears to be mostly an ever-growing and ever-more-costing pile of legacy rules, regulations and institutions, which through sheer complexity can be navigated only by big corporations or the mega-rich, who can lobby the monstrosity into doing whatever they want.
And meanwhile I’m paying upwards of 60% effective tax to support it all.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 40.3 ms ] threadEU and the member states are nothing but thugs and terrorists. Very powerful ones, but terrorists nonetheless. Putin or russia has not once threatened me, stolen from me under the threat of throwing me in jail, yet EU does. Russia has never tried to steal money from other citizens to try bribe me, yet an EU state has.
EU and its member states are an enemy of the people.
Curiously - I tried to find any news on this from Belgian sources, but couldn't find it (in my quick search).
If you deny civilians access to content but grant AI the access, what are you trying to accomplish?
I know that there is a slippery slope here, but we need to change laws and make systems that are resilient against censorship. That's the only long term solution imho.
Let's be honest: it's piracy. They are not banning books. They're fighting illegal distribution. Just use a VPN and pirate the books. We gotta be honest to ourselves here.
I need to import many of my books from America by resellers and pay many duties..
Sometimes a book at $20 is sold >$200..
We must have p2p , decentralized application frameworks with strong encryption. A framework I can write my next saas on and no, not blockchain.
If you want a serverless network, there's at least this: https://zeronet.io/docs/site_development/getting_started/
I personally find little attraction installing in my brain furniture I can't sit on. If I can't freely reuse the ideas in the book to create anything, it is a net loss to read it.
Belgium broadly has a duopoly, with the first two ISPs listed having the vast majority of the market. Both of them have been doing blocking of pirate sites for decades, with at least one of them actually resolving + blocking by IP address, not just DNS blocking.
Needless to say, both have video on demand services to protect.
- a waste of time and resources
- not what I want
It sure is galling that government appears to be mostly an ever-growing and ever-more-costing pile of legacy rules, regulations and institutions, which through sheer complexity can be navigated only by big corporations or the mega-rich, who can lobby the monstrosity into doing whatever they want.
And meanwhile I’m paying upwards of 60% effective tax to support it all.