Reminds me of an extremely awkward conversation between Martin and Stephen King:

King can write a full manuscript in 2 months. Martin is happy if he gets a chapter done in that time.

From what I've gleaned Martin just has a terrible process. It sounds like he's trying to get it perfect right from the first draft, and everything I've ever learned about writing says that is a fools errand. Most people say that it's best to get the rough draft out of the way as soon as possible so you can start making revisions. It's in the revisions where you perfect the delivery of the story, but you have to have the story there first before you can revise it.

I love how you speak with such confidence, yet your statement makes it clear you know absolutely nothing at all about the law or about property rights.

If they acquired the books by any means other than naked theft from a bookstore shelf, their use is completely legal. And it's the bookstore they stole from that would need to provide proof of the theft, not the other way around. OpenAI would be presumed innocent. AND it's the individual who stole the books that would be liable, NOT OpenAI.

Finally, even if you were correct, the most they would owe is about $50. To the bookstore, not the author.

This lawsuit is nonsense.

The C-suite has been dumping the stock on a regular basis for years, so the sale prior to this news likely has nothing to do with any expected stock price crash.

If stock options are part of their compensation (and for a public company it would be crazy not to use them) there are sale/purchase windows, which would reasonably explain why they're regularly selling stock all on its own.

The best theory I've seen suggests they're actually targeting competing mobile ad companies. IronSource is mobile development and monetization company that merged with Unity Technologies in 2022.

If this is true, then the absurd imbalance against low cost and free to play games wasn't an accidental side effect they didn't consider, it was the entire point of the move.

Upper Echelon Gaming is the one I saw put forward this theory, and they have an excellent analysis of it on their YouTube channel.

It's kind of scummy behavior, but why should it be illegal?

All they're really doing is eliminating the second-hand market. If there were no second hand market there would be no difference between releasing a new version every year and using the same version every year.

The reason they would want to target the second hand market, where non-textbook publishers don't, is because the tiny pool of readers for textbooks means the second hand market is disproportionately large compared to the normal book market, and would have a massive impact on sales.

None of this is to excuse the behavior, obviously flipping a few page numbers around so you can force new students to buy the current version is ridiculous, but making it illegal is way too extreme, IMO.

What I really think should happen is Universities should be rolling book prices into the tuition costs. That incentivizes the University seek a fairer deal per-student rather than be willing accomplices in book publishers fleecing students for required materials for their class.

I was sort of with you until the end of Step 2, here:

That's not what "published author" means in academia at all. Not at all. Having authored a textbook may enhance your resume, I'm sure it does, but being a "published author" refers publishing studies in scientific journals - which professors absolutely do and want to do as much as they can, and has a far greater impact on your success as a professor than publishing a textbook will. This is why they mentor grad students, so they can "lead" studies and get their grad students to do all the grunt work for them.

Then you lost me at Step 3: that's just not at all how copyright works. They don't need to sell to a library to get copyright. The professor of the textbook owns the copyright, and he owns it the moment he puts pen to paper (to sue for infringement he must register the copyright, but registration is not necessary for acquisition of copyright). As part of the publishing deal the publisher may acquire those rights (I have no idea about the structure of said deals, I just know how copyright works reasonably well). I think it's more likely that publishers are incentivized to re-publish every year specifically because they might only sell 200-300 copies of that book total in a given year, and if there is a used market for a book it will have a disproportionate impact on sales compared to the non-textbook market.

Libraries have nothing at all to do with it. I have no idea why you brought them into it. Libraries don't copy books, so copyright literally does not apply to libraries. They generally don't buy books either, because the books are almost exclusively supplied by donation.

If it's strictly revenue sharing it probably isn't.

If it's direct payments to include their product, it also probably isn't.

If it's direct payments to keep their competitors off the platforms, it probably IS illegal.

If it's threats to rescind revenue if platforms use another product, it's DEFINITELY illegal.

To suss out which exactly is going on you're going to need the full details of the pricing structure and communications about the pricing structure.

This is how Microsoft lost their anti-trust case in the early 2000's: they were doing the second two, rather than the first two.

Tell me you know nothing about Constitutional Law and how the SCOTUS adjudicates it without telling me.

You win the internet for the day for most ignorant legal theory.

Replying to my own comment to add:

I just saw an interesting analysis by Upper Echelon Gaming that suggest the entire fee per install model might be an attempt to bury an ad company that competes with IronSource, a mobile development and monetization company that merged with Unity Technologies in 2022.

In this analysis, consistent stock sales by Unity insiders over the last year suggest they are willingly tanking Unity in order to secure a stronger hold on the mobile ad market over a company called AppLovin, who actually made a bid to buy Unity prior to the IronSource merger.

Note what kind of games are hit hardest by the per-install price model: free to play games that rely on massive install bases to make money with ads and micro-transactions. Exactly the kind of games AppLovin is partnered with (and IronSource - which is why you get a discount for using LevelPlay ads).

That would neatly explain the insanity of a per-install pricing: they didn't care about making money at all, they cared about killing a competitor.

So if this is true, then every issue you can't believe they didn't think about, like piracy or demos or free to play or whatever, they actually DID think about, and in fact were intentionally targeting those. They just weren't doing so to make money with Unity, per say, but to enhance another aspect of their company.

The biggest thing that makes me skeptical of this is if it's true it's a blatant violation of their fiduciary duty of care toward the Unity shareholders, which if proven would result in their being fined for damages incurred (aka the value of the stock losses) as well as punitive damages, since this clearly involves malice.

This is pretty baseless. Godot could switch to a paid service model tomorrow. Any business can make a retarded business decision at any time. What you need to look at is "how successful is their current model, and how likely are they to change it?"

Unreal has been EXTREMELY successful with their model. They get to skim 5% off most of the most successful games in the industry, making money hand over fist, and their model has barely changed in a decade.

Godot uses the FOSS model, which is ideologically based, so they're more likely to burnout and stop development (at which point someone else will probably pick it up) than start charging a fee, as that's usually how FOSS projects die. It's very unlikely that they're going to try to shift to some weird fee based model unless there's a drastic shift somewhere.

Unity, on the other hand, has always struggled to monetize their engine. They currently charge a flat monthly/yearly subscription fee that bumps in price based on revenue tiers, but never goes above $2500 per dev (and the lowest tier is free). That's basically a "just enough to cover Unity dev salaries" revenue model, which was fine when Unity was a company made up of 5 devs and maybe an accountant. That doesn't work at all for a company with hundreds of employees and thousands of shareholders that want to make a lot of money.

So clearly, in hindsight, Unity was always the one most likely to do a weird flip like this. It's just nobody realized this became a real possibility when the company went public.

I'd say it's pretty obvious that in most cases, any regulation will reduce competition to some degree. What's also obvious is there are better regulations and worse regulations. There are regulations that achieve a stated goal with a little impact as possible, and those that don't even achieve their goal while massively impacting competition. We would prefer more of the former and less of the latter regulations.

The key is whether the purpose of the regulation is valuable, and whether the regulation is reasonably achieving that goal with minimal disruption to the industry.

Take healthcare for example: complete deregulation of the healthcare industry would surely produce a massive boom of new clinics, doctors, hospitals, etc. all at significantly lower prices than we currently pay. Of course, you'll have no idea if the doctor operating on you even went to medical school, and you can forget about suing for medical malpractice any more. Your only recourse will be some sort of failure to fulfill a contract, and we all know how good lawyers are at writing contracts that hold their clients virtually blameless in any situation.

I don't think anybody wants that world, no matter how much more competition the healthcare industry would experience.

On the other hand, it also seems clear that the current US regulations of the healthcare industry, while perhaps reasonably successfully achieving their intended goals, are not doing so in the most efficient manner. It would be worth revising the existing regulations to improve the functioning of the industry, but it would certainly not be worth completely dismantling those regulations.

If you know anything about Chinese culture, you'd know this is actually a REALLY big deal, and could reasonably explain the entire incident. Regular Chinese parents demand their failing students pass to the next grade, despite the damage it would do to the child's continuing education, to save face in front of other parents. A whole town revolted when the local school system started cracking down on cheating, because the parents cared more about their children getting the correct grade than they did about the children actually learning anything.

Chinese culture heavily stresses "face" - a superficial sort of respect where it's more important that people go through the motions of respect than actually having a deep respect for you. It's entirely possible the Chinese government would stick their nose in the air and pretend nothing happened rather than admit they'd made any kind of mistake, especially making such an admission someone of similar importance to them. Hell you saw this during COVID - on the one hand refusing to admit that there was a problem while on the other hand implementing possibly the strictest COVID protocols in the world to prevent its spread.

Much of China's strange behavior can be easily explained when looking at things through the lens of "face".

I think they re-evaluated in time to prevent any major harm. It still depends on the structure Unity ultimately decides on, obviously, but they should have avoided most of the harm.

Current devs will have to balance weigh the cost of switching platforms against whatever the new pricing structure will be. Switching platforms is usually VERY expensive, so the sunk cost of their existing development work will strongly encourage existing devs to stay.

Bear in mind that Unreal's structure, while more reasonable IMO, started collecting royalties MUCH sooner than the Unity plan. If Unity can hold on to the edge with a more sane structure than per-install, I think they'll be able to hold the same niche they currently hold.

I do think this affair will cause a drop in confidence in Unity for a while, which should result in an uptick for FOSS engines, at least for a while.

The counterpoint is this:

Do you really want lawyers who know nothing of engineering or safety writing engineering safety standards?

NO, you definitely do NOT.

The current system isn't flawless by any means, but it's better than the alternative.

Only if you intend to follow current industry standard, not if you simply want to follow the law. If the law mentions the 2023 copy, then it's fair game for publication.

If you simply want to follow the law, you need to find the specific standard incorporated by reference (IBR), which is basically never the current standard unless the IBR was made in the current year.