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.
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)
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).
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?
- 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?
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
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?
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.
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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.
If you’re acting as a middleman for end users receiving free product, and copyright holders demanding payment for their product, you have to run ads. This is not piracy.
Copyright is designed to funnel money into the hands of big business. If you want to spread free knowledge, you have to HIDE.
