Question: where can I upload jailbroken PDFs that is public & Google-visible?
For a job, I compiled ~100MB of lipreading research, some of them extremely obscure & hard to find (I also have some Japanese literature PDFs in a similar situation); while I have no personal interest in the topic and do not want to host indefinitely the PDFs on gwern.net, I feel it would be a massive waste to simply delete them.
I cannot simply put them in a Dropbox public folder because they wouldn't show up in Google, and Scribd is an abomination I despise.
For a job, I compiled ~100MB of lipreading research, some of them extremely obscure & hard to find (I also have some Japanese literature PDFs in a similar situation); while I have no personal interest in the topic and do not want to host indefinitely the PDFs on gwern.net, I feel it would be a massive waste to simply delete them.
I cannot simply put them in a Dropbox public folder because they wouldn't show up in Google, and Scribd is an abomination I despise.
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> Or you could describe your plight to your congresscritter and use this as an argument for copyright reform
Come on Ed, be serious for a moment.Aug 3, 2013
+gwern branwen The more people who do just that, particularly where the appeal is also made publicly, the less they can deny that there is a real harm caused by existing statute.
It's hardly as impossible as, say, gay people being allowed to get married.Aug 3, 2013
I'd say it's more impossible: gay marriage was 'merely' cultural prejudices, copyright reform hits big monied interests right in the wallets. You will notice that going back to the 1900s, we see marriage progressively loosen up with the spread of divorce, no-fault divorce, allowing sodomy, interracial marriage, and finally gay marriage; yet for copyright and IP, the ratchet has turned pretty much monotonically the opposite way in favor of ever longer terms & more exorbitant privileges. What more evidence could one ask for about the relative impossibilities?Aug 3, 2013
+gwern branwen And to continue your argument: copyright law is set and enforced at the national level (modulo civil actions which may occur at the state level, I'd have to check on that). Unlike either, say, marriage or, lately, drugs laws, in which states may express their prerogative.
Which makes the copyright and patent racket all that much more difficult to take on.
That said: the very argument you make does suggest an end-run: an increasing number of interests with a commercial stake in weaker (or at least shorter) terms of copyright could make a commercial argument for same. That's a bit of an uphill battle, but as the old guard for copyright, and in particular, Hollywood, are weakened, there's a chance.
I'd still encourage the congresscritter contact for the reasons stated.
As for hosting: check around at local libraries (city, state, university) to see if anyone might be interested.Aug 3, 2013
Update: I've uploaded a folder of PDFs to Google Docs and set them to be visible to the Internet. I'll check back in a month and see if any of them are popping up in logged-out searches; if they are, then this seems like a workable approach for now.Aug 3, 2013
So far: the PDFs don't seem to be showing up.Aug 16, 2013