I, ChatGPT
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@Atazhaia yes but they also don’t assume the work will go into “legally free to share” in 10 years. There will always be hope for media sales as well.
That’s the kicker here.
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@Arantor Well, but if the movie bombed there's also less incentive to do media sales for it. The 2-year number is the cinema run and first year of media sales, which is where the money is made. There is a small amount of works that ends up cult classics 10 years after release and spikes in sales then, but the vast majority doesn't.
If something bombed, there is no reason to spend millions of dollars in marketing to try and then gain a profit through media sales. Because it wont happen. The most likely course of event is that the unsold retail copies made for the first run just ends up in bargain bins after a year.
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@Atazhaia sure, but that’s still not the point I’m making.
If they plan on recouping costs in 2 years, cool.
Will they still plan on that knowing they lose ownership of it in 10?
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@Arantor said in I, ChatGPT:
@topspin that’s a valid question. I think for the majority of big name titles, the answer is no, but you can still buy GTA V if you want, it’s still on Steam and they’re still doing active promotion for it there.
That’s not really the part I’m getting at though. GTA V apparently took 3 years and $265 million to make. If they know that after 10 years from release that it will sink entirely into the “everyone can share it for free” camp, they’ll not spend 3 years and $265 million. It’s a risk factor for them to do so.
What that might mean is instead of multi-year dev cycles for massive games, we’d see smaller dev cycles for smaller, less ambitious (=less risky) games.
Already we’re seeing the dev cycle train do weirder things - TLOU II cost something north of $200 million to produce over several years, and already we’re talking about remastering. I think we’d see that a lot more in a shorter copyright term.
Let me be clear: I am all for shortening the copyright term because it is frankly absurd. But I think pulling it too short runs the risk of discouraging larger projects from being attempted because the makers won’t do the risk/reward calculations in such a way that they (rather than us) would think it viable.
Companies in general want to recoup their investments in 3-5 years. Only consumers buying things like solar panels are expected to be happy with a 25 year payback period.
EDIT: Politics is even worse. Any investment which may yield dividend more than 3 years from now is actively a bad thing because that means the next guy to get elected will end up getting the credit.
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Back on topic (
)Microsoft staff should be using Copilot too, memo says
It's all part of a push to get more devs using AI tools
The little outfit from Redmond is about to radically improve… something from this, I feel.
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@Arantor Will increased Copilot usage be a noticable difference from the current output from Redmond? Because conmsidering the current output...
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@Arantor said in I, ChatGPT:
Back on topic (
)
It's all part of a push to get more devs using AI tools
The little outfit from Redmond is about to radically improve… something from this, I feel.
I was reading over corporate's guidance for using AI. One of the examples for refactoring was converting a five-line method with logging into an incomprehensible one-liner that imported a new library with no logging.
The contractor part of my brain immediately went ka-ching! Never a good sign.
I was listening to a podcast and so far after their billions of investment into AI for bing they've managed to wrestle a whopping 1% of market share from Google.
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@Arantor said in I, ChatGPT:
Will they still plan on that knowing they lose ownership of it in 10?
A pretty big question would what 'losing ownership' exactly means. Clearly companies wouldn't want to do that at all, but there would still be a large difference between "losing ownership" to a certain title vs. "losing ownership" to the entire IP.
Few games make a ton of money after 10 years. There are many IPs that still bring in the cash after more than 10 years (even if they should be long dead).
Basically: I'm not sure I buy the LOTR example. I don't think they were planning on making money on that 10 years later at the time. (And they eventually made the second trilogy, which can't be raking in the cash now still.)
For GTA. Eh. I don't see why they wouldn't make a GTA VI just because GTA V isn't making sales money anymore. Seems like the opposite should be the case. However, losing the entire GTA IP/brand would be a different situation.
That said ... it seems there's the shitty trend of "forever games", where companies want to sell you on a game and then keep you in that ecosystem for as long as possible. But, then again, with all the online components and hoping to make the $$$ from continuous sales/µtransactions, it's also questionable how much it'd matter that the base game goes "out of copyright" (whatever that exactly means).
How successful would you think somebody making a boot-leg "Fortnite 2" or whatever would be? It'd be hard enough for Epic to get their players to move over to a new title...
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Sam Altman's OpenAI seeks up to $7 trillion in investment from investors for chips and AI
OpenAI's founder Sam Altman is working on a new AI initiative that would require investments of up to $7 trillion. Altman is in talks with investors including the UAE government and SoftBank.
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@DogsB said in I, ChatGPT:
Sam Altman's OpenAI seeks up to $7 trillion in investment from investors for chips and AI
OpenAI's founder Sam Altman is working on a new AI initiative that would require investments of up to $7 trillion. Altman is in talks with investors including the UAE government and SoftBank.
Well, he would have had enough on his own but then FTX happened…
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@cvi the hypothetical argument was “copyright is 10 years” - the trademarks etc would be theirs still (maybe?) but I can’t imagine any company with an IP portfolio is going to think the same way as they do today about the risk /reward calculations when today it’s “we own this for the rest of our lives and then some” vs “after 10 years people can legally share it and remix it and do all sorts of things to it”
Because even if the trademarks stand, everything else presumably becomes fair game. Basically every asset, including the code, becomes public domain. That’s how it works.
Tell me again that companies are going to invest mega bucks for big projects whehn they go public domain after 10 years, even if trademarks wouldn’t (and there’s nothing to suggest we wouldn’t also revamp trademark law if we revamped copyright law)
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@Arantor said in I, ChatGPT:
That’s not really the part I’m getting at though. GTA V apparently took 3 years and $265 million to make. If they know that after 10 years from release that it will sink entirely into the “everyone can share it for free” camp, they’ll not spend 3 years and $265 million. It’s a risk factor for them to do so.
But all of that risk was there anyway. The risk analysis surely didn't include "we'll recoup a relevant fraction after 10+ years", they assumed they'd do well enough in the first years to make it worth the effort. Everything else is a bonus.
I'd be fine with 20 years, as long as we get rid of the ridiculous status quo, but I'm not convinced by this risk argument.
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@topspin no, of course not. But the risk of “we’re just giving it away in 10 years” is surely not in their calculations.
Especially for the big works that take 5 years to make in the first place.
Here’s the other thing: if they’re going to invest that sort of money into something, not only are they going to want to exploit it down the line for remasters, they’re also going to want to sequelise it. If the first one is public domain by that point, the distinctiveness value of a sequel is inherently diminished.
It’s seriously much more than “we just have 10 years to get our money back”, these things are investments and have to be thought of as such. An investment that is worth a negligible dollar amount after 10 years is bad for business.
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@DogsB said in I, ChatGPT:
Sam Altman's OpenAI seeks up to $7 trillion in investment from investors for chips and AI
OpenAI's founder Sam Altman is working on a new AI initiative that would require investments of up to $7 trillion. Altman is in talks with investors including the UAE government and SoftBank.
Chips for $7 trillion would be a lot of potatoes!
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@Arantor said in I, ChatGPT:
@topspin no, of course not. But the risk of “we’re just giving it away in 10 years” is surely not in their calculations.
That's a contradiction. If you don't care to recoup any significant amount of money after 10 years (say, less than 5% of what you did in the first 10 years), then what difference does "giving it away" make?
Especially for the big works that take 5 years to make in the first place.
Here’s the other thing: if they’re going to invest that sort of money into something, not only are they going to want to exploit it down the line for remasters, they’re also going to want to sequelise it. If the first one is public domain by that point, the distinctiveness value of a sequel is inherently diminished.
I'm not buying that. You can still create a sequel just fine, it's a new investment and gets new copyright either way. Someone else making a shitty (or maybe better) clone of it in the meantime doesn't change that. Also, trademarks aside, you can make clones already.
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@Arantor said in I, ChatGPT:
@Atazhaia sure, but that’s still not the point I’m making.
If they plan on recouping costs in 2 years, cool.
Will they still plan on that knowing they lose ownership of it in 10?
Why wouldn't they? I really don't understand what you're asking. The 2 years is based on when people are willing to spend money on it. I don't see why you'd expect that to change due to copyright being shorter. The money making horizon is already much shorter.
The exception are long tailed operations like Disney who make money on other things like merchandise or theme parks. Of course, the kid demographic is always new so they can roll out old stuff every so often and there will be people buying, but they are very much the exception here.
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@cvi said in I, ChatGPT:
For GTA. Eh. I don't see why they wouldn't make a GTA VI just because GTA V isn't making sales money anymore. Seems like the opposite should be the case. However, losing the entire GTA IP/brand would be a different situation.
But then, trademarks are a very different beast. So long as they kept making the games, they should still own that. People could make ripoffs, but they could do that now, too. The only difference would be that you could "pirate" old games without any problems.
So, yeah, if anything, an incentive to make new things that you can make money off of.
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@topspin because companies are jealous. They hoard their IP, and it is an asset for them currently.
Naughty Dog didn’t spend $200 million on TLOU II to recoup it in 2 years and go “well we can just give it away now, we made our money back”.
Why don’t they give away their old titles? They’re not making profit on them. One assumes they could generate good will by giving things away.
It’s because they know full well they’ll do remastered versions of things. Big games get their 10th anniversary special editions, remasters, etc etc.
Nintendo is just the most obvious but Sega milks the shit out of its IP library too, in fact so does anyone who has IP that far back.
They also remember back in the 1990s when magazines got year-old complete titles as cover disks (and these were not PD, these were commercial titles fully licensed by the magazines, and given on the cover as part of the package) and the magazines were asked not-so-kindly by the games publishers to not do that because it was apparently impacting their sales of other new games.
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@Arantor of course they like more money better than less money. They’d never willingly “give it away” ever. Surely they’d also prefer if LOTR Return of the King didn’t enter public domain in 2093 (or whenever) if they could make a single cent out of it a hundred years from now. They still made it, even though copyright isn’t 500 years (yet). It doesn’t mean it’s not profitable or a risk not worth taking if copyright terms were shorter.
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@PleegWat said in I, ChatGPT:
Companies in general want to recoup their investments in 3-5 years. Only consumers buying things like solar panels are expected to be happy with a 25 year payback period.
Depends on the depreciation strategy they're using for accounting purposes with that asset. Buildings can have their construction cost spread over longer, for example. OTOH, that also depends on the actual terms of any loans/bonds involved; crudely, the more expensive money is, the faster you want to pay off what you borrowed.
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@Arantor said in I, ChatGPT:
Especially for the big works that take 5 years to make in the first place.
Irrelevant. The timer starts when the work is published, not when you start to make it. It would be ridiculous to have no copyright on a thing you've made just because you happened to scribble down some notes on what you wanted to do 25 years ago.
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@dkf said in I, ChatGPT:
@Arantor said in I, ChatGPT:
Especially for the big works that take 5 years to make in the first place.
Irrelevant. The timer starts when the work is published, not when you start to make it. It would be ridiculous to have no copyright on a thing you've made just because you happened to scribble down some notes on what you wanted to do 25 years ago.
Yeah. He might have been thinking about pharmaceuticals, where the patent is granted and the clock starts ticking prior to approval.
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No, I really wasn’t.
No business I’ve ever worked with decided to do a multi-million pound investment over 5 years that was a product, expecting to cede ownership of it 10 years after launch.
But since we threw out GTA V as an example, let’s go get some numbers.
For a game that hit Steam in 2015, it struck me as odd that 2020 was one of its best years…
Grand Theft Auto V total unit sales 2024 | Statista
GTA 5 sales are close to 200 million copies, making Grand Theft Auto 5 one of the single most popular video games of all time.
This suggests the timeline of returns isn’t quite so much the first couple of years, but that the lifetime sales curve works a bit longer than assumed. But if you’re hitting that curve now, you might legitimately go “eh, another couple of years and it’d be free” in this hypothetical world.
Did it make its money back in 2 years? Sure, but the long tail on copyrighted material is longer than it used to be.
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@DogsB said in I, ChatGPT:
Sam Altman's OpenAI seeks up to $7 trillion in investment from investors for chips and AI
OpenAI's founder Sam Altman is working on a new AI initiative that would require investments of up to $7 trillion. Altman is in talks with investors including the UAE government and SoftBank.
Sure, 7% of world GDP shouldn't be too much to ask!!!11
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@Arantor said in I, ChatGPT:
Basically every asset, including the code, becomes public domain.
How much does that matter, though? The code and the source models won't have been released. Things may be leaked - and I guess if the copyright expired, that's essentially OK. Either way, whoever picks things up won't get any support with it, probably won't have expertise with any of it, won't have any of the internal tooling, and so on. Just all the technical debt.
The reason there's no "Mass Effect - Tadpole Galaxy" isn't because replicating the assets and code is impossible. (Costly, maybe, but you wouldn't have to use the Frostbite engine either
.) It's because you'd get sued into the ground for doing so. And in this case, it had a good chance to be profitable because there's actually a demand for a competent new Mass Effect and it's not like EA seems to be doing anything about that.Earlier in this thread, I was thinking that 10 years might be too short. I'm now reconsidering that. The order of 10 (maybe 15) years might be just right.
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@cvi the code and the source models won’t be released, no. But everything becomes fair game for reverse disassembly and we all know the collective power of the modding community.
They’ll figure that shit out, source released or not.
Lack of tech support will be no bother to these people, any game worth having with get its own support community that will do cool things.
It just discourages new investment.
Y’all seeing it from the consumer POV. Companies think about this shit waaaay differently.
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@Arantor said in I, ChatGPT:
and there’s nothing to suggest we wouldn’t also revamp trademark law if we revamped copyright law
We might, but there's a fundamental difference between them. Copyright exists to allow a creator to profit from the creative effort. Trademarks exist to protect consumers from knockoff products and secondarily to protect the reputation of producers from damage by low quality knockoffs.
Prior to copyright, if an author had a book published, another publisher could reprint it and sell it cheaper because they weren't paying the author, and that was legal. Copyright prohibits that by giving the author the right (usually assigned to the publisher) to say who can and can't reproduce the work, and to demand payment for doing so. It is both a civil (monetary damages) and (under some circumstances) criminal offense (jail) to violate that. That right, under the US Constitution, lasts long enough for the author to benefit from the work.
Trademarks identity the producer of a product. They protect both the producer and consumer from deceptive knockoffs. They intentionally last as long as the producer is using the mark to identify their products. The name Ford identifies a car as being a genuine product of the Ford Motor Company (whether that's good or bad is a different question
). If 100000 years from now there is still a Ford Motor Company and they are still making vehicles of some sort, the Ford name will still be protected to identify their products. Nobody else can use the name Ford to identify vehicles or related products, nor can they use any name confusingly similar. If you make a car and call it a Ferd, you can expect to be sued and to lose.And that protection should, IMHO, continue without any time limitation. However, the trademark owner must continue to actively use it in trade, and it must actively defend it against infringers. If it falls into disuse, or if the owner allows infringing uses to continue, it may lose the exclusive use of the mark. Aspirin is a classic example; it was originally a trademark of Bayer AG for their brand of acetylsalicylic acid, but they didn't adequately defend it, so now it's universally used as a generic term for, well, aspirin from any producer.
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@topspin said in I, ChatGPT:
GTA made its money back when it was released.
Actually, they made most of the money after the release, with GTA Online microtransactions. But that's the thing. They are the only GTA Online in existence, even if they never held any copyright over any part of any GTA they'd still be the only GTA Online in existence as they hold the trademark and have the servers. They'd make just as much money. The only thing the copyright does for them is give them power to cripple their own community by C&Ding mods they don't like. Like they did with every graphics improvement mod released over the last 20 years for the older games in the series just before they announced the "Definitive Edition".
Non-online games, yes, almost all of them make 95% of the money in the first month, so what happens 5 years down the line is of little concern.
CC @Arantor, also I'd like to hear what you think about the split original/derivative limits. Because it's just the derivative copyright that people have a problem with, copyright on unmodified original is fine as is even with the ridiculous 95 years lifetime.
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@Gustav GTA is online? I thought it’s a single player game.
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@topspin okay, this might be a long talk... Can you tell me what year it is?
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@topspin said in I, ChatGPT:
I thought it’s a single player game.
Hence why it’s online, to make sure they serve a single player appropriate quantity of ads
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@Gustav said in I, ChatGPT:
copyright on unmodified original is fine as is even with the ridiculous 95 years lifetime.
I disagree. I happen to have an interest in some old, long out of print niche books. They'll never be reprinted, because they probably sold about 3 copies when they were first printed. But the information in them is useful to some researchers. I have extensive photocopies for my personal use, and if they're public domain, I'd like to scan them, OCR them, and put them online.
Are they still under copyright?
When they were published, copyright was 24 years, renewable. If they weren't renewed, they've been in the public domain for decades. If they were, the renewed copyright lasted (just barely) long enough to be Disneyfied. Were they renewed?
That would cost me $$$ to have the Copyright Office research.If they're not public domain, who owns the copyright?
The authors are certainly long dead (so the extended copyright utterly fails at copyright's ostensible purpose of encouraging authors to produce new works), so the copyrights are presumably owned by one or more of their heirs. Who are they? How many people would I have to contact to get permission? I'd bet most or all of them don't even know they inherited the copyright to books their great-grandfathers wrote.Since the copyright on Steamboat Willy has finally expired, it's very likely that the copyright on these books has, too. It's even more likely that nobody would complain if I put them online, even if they're still protected. But being lawful good, I don't want to do that, so the thick stack of photocopies continues to sit on the desk next to me.
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@HardwareGeek If the work's under copyright, and you do not own a legitimate copy, your photocopies are a copyright violation too. Just less severe and less likely to be caught than publishing the scans.
If you were truly lawful good (lawful stupid?) you'd feed those photocopies through the shredder ASAP.
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@Gustav said in I, ChatGPT:
@topspin okay, this might be a long talk... Can you tell me what year it is?
Is it multiplayer-online, stupid-microtransactions-online, or DRM-bullshit-online?
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@HardwareGeek okay, maybe not fine, but it's a minuscule problem compared to derivative copyright. We could argue if it should be 20 years or 40 years but the difference it makes is marginal. Whereas for derivative works, every extra year directly translates to tens of thousands of works of art that would've been created but won't be solely because the law won't allow them.
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@topspin said in I, ChatGPT:
@Gustav said in I, ChatGPT:
@topspin okay, this might be a long talk... Can you tell me what year it is?
Is it multiplayer-online, stupid-microtransactions-online, or DRM-bullshit-online?
All three at the same time. And the last one stopped making them any money somewhere around 2015, hence why it didn't receive any DLCs. They eventually started giving out the game for free.
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@izzion said in I, ChatGPT:
Hence why it’s online, to make sure they serve a single player appropriate quantity of ads
In a game which happens in a city, where there are billboards, I find this completely acceptable.
Especially if they are destructible.
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@Gustav said in I, ChatGPT:
@topspin said in I, ChatGPT:
GTA made its money back when it was released.
Actually, they made most of the money after the release, with GTA Online microtransactions. But that's the thing. They are the only GTA Online in existence, even if they never held any copyright over any part of any GTA they'd still be the only GTA Online in existence as they hold the trademark and have the servers. They'd make just as much money. The only thing the copyright does for them is give them power to cripple their own community by C&Ding mods they don't like. Like they did with every graphics improvement mod released over the last 20 years for the older games in the series just before they announced the "Definitive Edition".
Non-online games, yes, almost all of them make 95% of the money in the first month, so what happens 5 years down the line is of little concern.
CC @Arantor, also I'd like to hear what you think about the split original/derivative limits. Because it's just the derivative copyright that people have a problem with, copyright on unmodified original is fine as is even with the ridiculous 95 years lifetime.
That's not the argument though.
The whole argument up to this point was 'but but but making their money back' - which they did, provably, within the first couple of years. Also see the graph I posted along with its source that showed GTA V's best year for sales, other than its release year, was five years later. And that's not microtransactions or post-release revenue, that's sales on Steam of the game itself.
Which almost certainly wouldn't have panned out that way if the lifespan of copyright were 10 years.
And here's the other argument that I think people are missing. Let's say copyright is 10 years, GTA Online still, somehow, gets made. The ten year mark happens, now you can have any number of unofficial GTA Online servers. They don't even have to stop using the GTA Online name because the software is still GTA Online. As long as you don't claim to have own the trademark, there would be nothing to stop you running your own server assuming you can get your hands on it. Or if you reverse engineer the protocol - totally legal now - there would be nothing to stop you releasing "GTA Online compatible" servers and running your own because the trademark doesn't prevent that (at least it wouldn't here, I can't speak to the specifics of US trademark law)
As for the derivative split, no, not sure I agree with that either.
Firstly, how derivative is derivative? How far do you have to go to create a fully new IP in that situation? Assume companies will do the bare minimum to maximise the value of their investments, i.e. least effort for creating not-a-derivative.
Secondly, I'm really not sure it is the derivative part people actually have a problem with. Clearly, the absurd number of years on original copyright is the problem, since it prevents derivatives in the first place, at least derivatives that are too close (putting aside other IP legislation), and trademark rules prevent a certain amount of passing-off but as we've seen you can't copyright the mechanics of a game so a certain amount of derivative is always going to happen.
My thesis this whole time is simply 'if you make the copyright term too short, companies will be unwilling to invest in projects of the scale they currently do out of fear for not seeing the returns they currently can expect' - and creating a derivative may still fall foul of this.
I think the obvious candidate is the HD remaster - game comes out in 2024, good for 25 years. 2034, tech has moved on, the publisher thinks it'd be swell to do a 10th anniversary remaster for newer tech. Since that's a derivative, presumably it'd only get 10 years, meaning that the HD version would be in copyright for less time than the original.
Then we have the question of sequels. Are they fully original products that get their own 25 year term, or do they only get 10 years because derivative? If the latter, where's the incentive to make a sequel instead of a new product? I mean, I think this is an interesting question in general: it would directly encourage creation of new IPs rather than endless sequels but it would likely produce new IPs that are just legally distinct enough rather than actually new. I'm imagining a world where instead of Solid Snake being the protagonist of a series, he got one game, and the publisher went on to make Alloy Cog Liquid, starring Liquid Lake. The 'sequel in all but name' phenomenon.
I dunno. The current situation is a shitshow and I think there's plenty of reasons to shorten it, but I think there's too much belief here that companies won't act like companies to not freak the fuck out about the term being unduly short.
Hell, with the proposed 10 years, Windows 10 would soon enough be up for being free for all. Which would imply Microsoft would stop doing 10 years support by default and shortening that to a period where they could still incentivise people moving to the next one.
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@dkf said in I, ChatGPT:
@Atazhaia said in I, ChatGPT:
I heard that the movie industry itself just looks at 2 years for any movie to make a profit. If it doesn't make a profit within 2 years, it is counted as a failure that will never make back its money. If we're purely looking at a profit argument based off that, copyright would only need to be 2 years. So 5 or 10 years of copyright is more than enough for the purpose of making the investment.
Most games have a pretty severe drop-off in earning rate too. At least until you consider alternate monetization strategies.
I have a feeling they're already preparing for this with everything going to a subscription model.
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@HardwareGeek said in I, ChatGPT:
When they were published, copyright was 24 years, renewable. If they weren't renewed, they've been in the public domain for decades. If they were, the renewed copyright lasted (just barely) long enough to be Disneyfied. Were they renewed?
That would cost me $$$ to have the Copyright Office research.That's a
all by its own. It's fair not to expect people to tell the Copyright Office of each and every thing they publish, but once they extend the copyright, there should be a record in the CO's database that has absolutely no reason not to be open to everybody. I'd say fuck that shit and publish it on libgen.is and/or the Imperial Library.But being lawful good, I don't want to do that, so the thick stack of photocopies continues to sit on the desk next to me.
Oh. OK then. Still, fuck that shit.
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@LaoC the fun thing is that the AI people would have no such qualms "learning" from it, even if they knew it was brand-new and definitely copyrighted, as he has preserving something most likely in the public domain.
But then, the
is a pretty good excuseargument.
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@Arantor said in I, ChatGPT:
No business I’ve ever worked with decided to do a multi-million pound investment over 5 years that was a product, expecting to cede ownership of it 10 years after launch.
you guys are just repeating the same arguments, you just have a different opinion
I don't care. If it was up to me copyright would be 5 years, and it's worth whatever happens
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@HardwareGeek you just need a better ocr
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@sockpuppet7 now do that again with books printed decades ago whose pages have been photocopied at least once, and then scanned. My experience of such suggests OCR will struggle far more than when fed perfectly intelligible pixels.
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@Arantor I would be interested to see how far it goes, but I don't have any of these around
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The image shows a page with a text that appears to be the preface of an old book discussing the English language. The text is in English, and the font and style suggest it is from a publication that could be several centuries old. Due to the quality of the image, it is challenging to read every word clearly, but here is a transcription of the visible text:
P R E F A C E.
muſt needs be frequently making Soleciſms, falſe
Concord, and betraying his Ignorance upon the moſt
trivial Occaſions; alſo, by being unacquainted with
Grammar, or unable to expreſs himſelf properly, he
muſt of Courſe be a Stranger to the Beauties of Lan-
guage, the Eaſe, Elegance of Style, &c.That the Engliſh Language is as copious, ſenſi-
ble, and harmonious as any other in the World,
none pretend to diſpute: Therefore to argue, or even
to imagine, it contains not ſo much intrinſic value,
Excellence, &c. as to admit of Order, Uniformity,
and Concord, to which Rules may be adapted, would
be highly abſurd and ridiculous; ſince without theſe
Properties, no Language can be perfect and intelli-
gible.If therefore the Method be allowed to be clear,
the Plan well laid, and duly executed, this Book can
need no other Recommendation than its own general
and extenſive Uſe.How far I have followed theſe neceſſary Princi-
ples, is left to the Deciſion of all candid and judici-
ous Readers; for I ſhall not run into that ungene-
rous, though common Faſhion, of raiſing the Reputa-
tion of my own Book at the Expence of my Bre-
thren on the Subject, or ſtart Objections to others for
my own Advantage.—But, on the contrary, am rea-
dy to allow, that, by how much more ſevere we are
indebted to the ingenious Contriver of any new Scheme
for the public Advantage, than to him who only im-
proves upon it: by ſo much ought I to be content
with the leaſt Share of public Thanks, and poſſeſs the
ſpirit of the Blame, if this Grammar, as the laſt, ſhould
equal or preferable to the beſt yet publiſhed. On the
Please note that the text uses the long s ("ſ"), which was common in typography until the early 19th century, and can easily be mistaken for an 'f'. Additionally, the text uses the word "Expence," which is an archaic spelling of the modern word "expense."
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Google's glorious preservation of the knowledge of the world
Yeah, it's a difficult text to OCR. 180 years old, with decorative type, gothic, dirty pages, library stamps and all. But you know it's not going well when the text starts wlth dg cribimg høw lt w4s carcfully scannod:
This is a digital copy of a book that was prcscrvod for gcncrations on library shclvcs bcforc it was carcfully scannod by Google as pari of a projcct
That's the easy part, the part that was obviously written by Google, then printed out, put on a wooden table and photographed back in to be 0CRd.
So behold the text:
9cro«tt«ii tm fiatmßvAt tin^ <^dl)ett. * VAA;1C.'-..n ! t i i V TM i t IT "^ 1 ö V^To be fair, it doesn't go on quite as bad. Most of the book is recognizable as something vaguely resembling German if not comprehensible text:
3n biefcm ^tinji)) ip bie 5(u§fü^ning jebct gto§ättigen 3bee moglid^. 3)le 9lu8tottung i^ert^eetenbet «Jltanf^eiten , fd&ablic^et 3nfeften, bie 5SetebIung, ittaftigung unb Setfc^onetung beö menf(f)fid^en Äor^jerS. ®ie 23eri5;fitung öon 3Äange!, UeBetfd^ttjem* mung unb einet SRenge anbetet Uebel ijl nut allein in bet @e* meiufd^aft mpglic^. 6d^on batum, tt?eit alle befannte S^Jtad^en gtofe lln\)oUfommen^eiten an ftd^ ^aUn, ifl eS' not^injenbig, tint ganj mm, fd^one, too^lfUngenbe, öoUfommcne ©^tad^e gu etjtn* ben. Unb U>enn bie ßtfinbung betfelben mSglid^ ift, h?arum follte bie 5lnu>enbung betfelben nic^t mogfid^ fei^n; JD^ne baö $tinjip bet ©emeinfd^aft ifl biefe freilid^ nid&t moglid^. HfUinl bie ©egtiffe. ©^tad^en, (^tenjen unb QSatetlanb finb bet ' ?Kenfd[;^eit fo ttjejiig not^h?enbig, al3 alle befte^enben teligtefen JDogmen. 9ltle biefe Segtiffe finb ^etjäi;tte Uebetll^fmingen, beten SWad^ti^eil immet fü^Ibatet n>itb je länget fle Befielen.There are 288 pages of this shit. Obviously Google has completely cut out any humans from the library-to-internet pipeline
