Zero

20.10.2020

[wassieloyer @wassielawyer]

In the finance casino, the VC guys are at the roulette table and the PE guys are playing poker. The quants are card counting at blackjack. The banks are giving everyone credit and the special sits guys are in the back room waiting to break peoples legs and take their chips.

[Zero @noughtnot]

@CallMeKJOS Why do you think so?

[Chains @FrankieChains]

Putting my first MPRE score on my dating profile so the ladies know I’m a bad boy

[Arthur Spirling @arthur_spirling]

I think you learn a lot about the UK, and about UK politics—both good and bad—that a hotel costing $260 a night is considered both an extraordinary luxury and a scandal.

[Nina Turner @ninaturner]

Imagine working for @TheOnion and having to compete with this.

[Zero @noughtnot]

@elnathan_john In support of his damages claim

[Zero @noughtnot]

@uncletypewriter non-existent. That babe is a clown

[Groovy @avogroovy]

My hometown in Ilaje, Ondo state practiced communism in the 70's. A young man who had studied engineering in West Germany came back home, became the king and started communism. The community owned the means of production and there was no private property.

In the community there was a dockyard for making boat. Technical college, Carpentry workshop, textile and shoemaking plant. The community owned fishing trawlers and outboard vessels for ferrying goods and passengers to Lagos (Epe), Delta, Gabon and Cameroon.

As the human population of our small little town on the edge of the Atlantic ocean increased, the community was unable to provide for the people as production could not match the birth rate and new entrants into the town.

The king eventually reversed his decision and ended communism. A Canadian researcher, Stanley Barrett who visited during the time wrote a book called, The Rise and Fall of an African Utopia.

[Ikhide R. Ikheloa @ikhide]

I have enjoyed the commentaries on whether or not folks should be sharing soft copies of books and in essence denying the authors and/or their estates financial royalties. Clearly there have been long-simmering tensions around this issue. The conclusion is that it is complicated.

I would like to thank @foxypiano for unwittingly starting the debate by offering pdfs of old novels of the Heinemann African Writers' Series. It's an amazing collection. BTW. I love their thoughtful tweets on any and everything literature and I thank them for their service. Follow them, lol.

I thank @sauvamemte for putting them up in a Google collection here: https://t.co/zzHYFPBB0t

These writers were great warriors; rescuing their works from benign neglect and anonymity and putting them up for the world to see honors the memory of their sacrifice. This action is not what I would use as an example of piracy. It's more complicated than that.

The AWS series of books mean a lot to my generation, we were raised by them and I am incredibly grateful to these two for keeping them in digital form, hopefully for posterity. Most of them are currently out of print and many of the writers dead or unaccounted for.

As an aside, Kansas University has a rich archive of Onitsha Market literature that can be accessed and read electronically for free at, https://t.co/UBgRSY1XJO

They have justified the "piracy" by stating in fine print that most if not all the authors and their estate cannot be traced.

Well, whatever, go over there and enjoy what was basically the beginning of the democratization of narrative. It may have failed then, but social media has done it.

Nigerians want to read good content, they are held back by the prohibitive cost of books. What are the options outside of "piracy"? As I have stated ad nauseam, centering the debate about the book is not helpful, it should be about reading. The medium is not as important as the culture of reading good content.

Globally, publishing companies are re-tooling their industrial age mindset and moving to the internet and social media. The print newspaper of old is gone and the book is dying a long slow death. Publishers are working very hard to meet readers where they are - online.

The book will die first in black Africa where the publishing industry is inchoate. We have neither the money nor the infrastructure to sustain what is essentially the past tense. It is madness to invest in a business that produces music in cassettes. Why?

The cassette as past tense: That's what you are thinking of each time you moan the absence of a physical publishing industry in Nigeria. That ship has sailed away. There is an opportunity here to offer great content to readers online.

Create an online publishing company with subscriptions. Advocate to the government the idea that reading should be an expense. Books may be dying a long slow death but Nigeria can and should subsidize its production. Provide incentives for reading. Provide incentives for packaging reading the way youngsters like to read.

Orthodoxy and risk-averse behavior plus self-serving attitudes of older powerful writers who gate-keep are challenges. Let's hold ourselves accountable. We could use the over $20 million that the NLNG has lavished on book prizes to support the literary ecosystem. Similarly the Pan African Writers Association (PAWA) could open its books and you'll find that there are many opportunities to truly support and model the behavior we desire of others. The PAWA once got one million dollars in Buhari's budget about 10 years ago.

Using the term "piracy" to describe what just happened oversimplifies the issue and keeps the debate focused on the symptoms rather than on the root cause. We have a crisis on our hands: Folks are self-medicating on the wrong content online because that's all they can afford. It's a national security crisis.

[Zero @noughtnot]

Good to see some proper arguments expressed on this

[Adéṣẹ̀tọ́ @Illusionist_126]

This is a rhetorical argument at best. Piracy is Piracy. When you steal a car, the owner no longer has a car. When you copy a book, the author still has the book. Copyright law itself acknowledges this by treating it separately from theft.

And if you say "you are taking food from the author's mouth," you are making an assumption that the individual who has pirated possessed the means to purchase in the first place. So where does that leave us?

You will probably invoke intellectual property rights, which I will find particularly rich, because the very reason you can freely read Dickens, Shakespeare, and Thackeray today is that 19th-century American publishers reproduced English works with zero copyright obligation to their authors. The foundational texts of Western literary culture were, by your definition, stolen. Systematically. Industrially. Meanwhile, that theft is precisely what democratised literature across a continent.

If you apply the theft label with any consistency, it implicates nearly every foundational moment of cultural and technological development in the modern world. The printing press itself was an IP nightmare.

Now, authors absolutely deserve compensation. That is not in dispute. But there is remarkably little evidence that piracy is the primary driver of inadequate compensation. What demonstrably does harm authors is predatory publishing contracts, platform monopolies, bad pricing architecture e.t.c.

Copyright and patents do not protect creators. They protect whoever owns the rights. Those are, more often than not, corporations. What IP law actually does, in practice, is manufacture an intellectual monopoly over ideas and then launder it as ethics.

[Adéṣẹ̀tọ́ @Illusionist_126]

This is a rhetorical argument at best. Piracy is Piracy. When you steal a car, the owner no longer has a car. When you copy a book, the author still has the book. Copyright law itself acknowledges this by treating it separately from theft.

And if you say "you are taking food from the author's mouth," you are making an assumption that the individual who has pirated possessed the means to purchase in the first place. So where does that leave us?

You will probably invoke intellectual property rights, which I will find particularly rich, because the very reason you can freely read Dickens, Shakespeare, and Thackeray today is that 19th-century American publishers reproduced English works with zero copyright obligation to their authors. The foundational texts of Western literary culture were, by your definition, stolen. Systematically. Industrially. Meanwhile, that theft is precisely what democratised literature across a continent.

If you apply the theft label with any consistency, it implicates nearly every foundational moment of cultural and technological development in the modern world. The printing press itself was an IP nightmare.

Now, authors absolutely deserve compensation. That is not in dispute. But there is remarkably little evidence that piracy is the primary driver of inadequate compensation. What demonstrably does harm authors is predatory publishing contracts, platform monopolies, bad pricing architecture e.t.c.

Copyright and patents do not protect creators. They protect whoever owns the rights. Those are, more often than not, corporations. What IP law actually does, in practice, is manufacture an intellectual monopoly over ideas and then launder it as ethics.

[jini @ohjinika]

I know this app loves discourse so much that it builds made up scenarios to harp over but this conversation centred the Heinemann African Writers Series, a series which has been discontinued for 23 years now and can only be found in rare and select (mostly foreign bookstores)

[Malusi @sneezy_ladybug]

is piracy bad, yes.
but would people buy them if they were in print, yes.

but most of the archived copies in that archive have been out of print for >30+ years, it's almost impossible to get reprint rights, no publisher is republishing, libraries aren't stocked. so now what?

[cez @cezthesocialist]

It wouldn’t. Most people own a very small amount of land, if any at all. Owners of flats typically own nothing. And renters obviously also own nothing, but would likely be paying indirectly still tbf. CT is very regressive and massively disproportionately affects poorer people. Most working class people would be paying much less with an LVT because there would now be a huge amount of income coming from other land that wealthy people own, often just to land bank and not even use, that they currently don’t pay an annual tax on, and none at all to local authorities.

[Tantric Turanist 🇫🇮🇺🇦 @cornu__copia]

The German Reddit, Finnish reddit etc. is full of foreign students, young foreign adults who've been lured in by the universities, govt propaganda claiming there is a "worker shortage", desperately trying to find any employment in very difficult personal situations.

[Zero @noughtnot]

@MallamSawyerr @Deenike @_TheRealAMB Also did her platform include broadening BP’s operations/juris to the internal US; defocussing from targets with criminal records, invoking the national guard?

[Elnathan John @elnathan_john]

https://t.co/Bv6hgN8Ttd

[joanie @laracroftbarbie]

"it's out of focus but you can tell there's a lot going on" takes me out every fucking time lol

[Sheni Coker @sheni_coker]

The gap in quality and taste between pounded yam and poundo yam is too wide.