"WeLib describes itself as an “endless library” founded on the principle that “education and literature belong to everyone.” The publishers, however, clearly don’t agree with the library framing, noting libraries can be trusted; pirate sites not.

“Libraries are trusted institutions that serve the communities that fund them by lending books and other publications they have lawfully acquired. Using this label for WeLib explicitly misleads the public and allows WeLib to hijack the goodwill that libraries enjoy and have legitimately earned.”

“WeLib is no more than a pirate website that reproduces and distributes works of authorship owned by others to users for a profit, without authorization from or compensation to the copyright owners,” the complaint adds.

The complaint notes that WeLib’s operators made efforts to keep their identities hidden. However, the site itself quickly became a go-to portal for many book pirates.

The complaint notes that, by WeLib’s own account, its collection includes 43 million books and 98 million articles. The site reportedly has over 80,000 active monthly users who accessed more than 51.7 million books and downloaded 14.5 million files last month."

https://torrentfreak.com/major-publishers-sue-welib-a-pirate-site-built-on-annas-archive-code/

#AnnasArchive #Copyright #IP #Piracy #Monopolies #Rentism #Feudalism

"The French economy is underperforming. Over the last twenty years, its level of growth has been consistently below the EU average. In cumulative terms, the EU grew by 27 percent between 2005 and 2024, whereas France stood at 23 percent. Only Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Finland fared worse.

These figures stand in sharp contrast with the expectations raised by the election of Emmanuel Macron in 2017. The Economist marked this event by claiming that “corporate Europe is giddy with optimism.” The magazine’s cover depicted the newly elected French president, who had held the position of finance minister from 2014 to 2016, as a man walking on water who was carrying the hopes of “France, Europe and centrists everywhere” on his shoulders.

While his neoliberal program was hardly original, Macron’s victory still represented a powerful signal: The supposedly French anti-business exception would come to a definitive end and provide momentum to centrist policies that had come under strain elsewhere since the global financial crisis. This narrative could not be further from the truth: Under Macron’s presidency, French corporate welfare reached new heights while the country became increasingly authoritarian.

With the rise of neoliberalism, French state capitalism has experienced a far-reaching transformation. While postwar dirigisme, based on nationalized firms, state-controlled credit, and expansive regulatory policies, has been thoroughly dismantled, the French state did not retreat from the economy. Rather, its interventions evolved toward forms of corporate welfare. This phenomenon clearly stands out from delving into the country’s public finances."

https://jacobin.com/2026/06/macron-france-corporate-welfare-state

#France #Macron #Rentism #CorporateWelfare #Oligopolies

"In recent weeks, Amazon has changed how it pays out seller earnings and collects payments for its advertising services. The company then announced it would start charging merchants a 3.5% fuel surcharge to offset surging oil prices from the Iran war.

To some sellers, the moves represent another example of Amazon putting the squeeze on them.

“We’re running out of f---ing margin,” said Michael Patrón, who runs an eight-figure Amazon business and frequently criticizes the company’s policies on his X account. “I think that’s why it keeps getting more and more frustrating.”

Patrón and hundreds of large Amazon sellers are boycotting its advertising platform on Wednesday to protest the recent policy changes that are strangling their already stretched bottom lines.

The 24-hour advertising boycott is being organized by Million Dollar Sellers, a community of more than 700 members that collectively generate about $14 billion in revenue.

“Sellers have complained for years, but this feels different,” MDS co-founder Eugene Khayman said in a post on X about the boycott. “The reason is simple: this is no longer just about irritation. It is about cash extraction.”"

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/15/amazon-sellers-boycott-ads-payment-changes.html

#Amazon #USA #BigTech #Monopolies #Rentism

"In 2023, the city of Evanston, Illinois raised its ambulance fee from $1500 to $2000, with a $15 mileage charge tacked on. Like many municipalities, city officials and taxpayers have gotten used to ever-increasing prices for basic services, all bucketed under the “cost of living” crisis we’re dealing with. In fact, yesterday the Michigan University consumer sentiment indicator hit the worst reading it has ever recorded, going all the way back to 1961. The endless increases in prices for all sorts of random necessities is a key reason.

But these cost hikes don’t just ‘happen,’ as if it’s some sort of natural event. Markets are a function of law. There are companies and dealers and financiers behind every industry, so we can actually try to understand why they are happening. In this case, Evanston chalked up the hike to, among other things, the increasing of “cost of equipment and vehicles used for emergency responses.” The ambulance market, once a decentralized set of family owned firms, has been rolled up into a consolidated industry run by private equity. And the price hikes followed.

This story isn’t unusual. In early 2025, BIG traced a roll-up of fire trucks and fire apparatus, leading to a crisis in that sector. It turns out that something similar seems to have happened here, with some of the same players."

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/code-red-why-your-city-cant-affordor?r=3pbdu&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=split&triedRedirect=true

#USA #Emergency #Ambluances #Monopolies #Rentism #PrivateEquities

So-called "artists" in favor of monopoly rights and endless rent extraction. What else is new?

"Every invention has brought predictions of copyright’s demise: the daguerreotype, the phonograph, radio, cassettes, home video and the internet. All those predictions were premature, and Britain’s soft power flourished as a result.

A belief has taken hold that progress can’t happen without the abolition of some of our oldest rights. That it’s only theft when individuals steal. That corporations don’t steal, they innovate. If you believe all this, you might as well stock your bookshelves with fantasy."

https://www.ft.com/content/48532284-9244-4ee6-be46-f3bde22b7232

#AI #GenerativeAI #AITraining #Copyrght #Monopolies #Rentism #RentExtraction

"Big Tech’s greatest achievement is the success of its machines and AI-algorithms in recruiting billions of us to work for free — posting videos, writing reviews, submitting texts — thus increasing its capacity to extract cloud rents. But what happens as the ratio of AI-driven cloud rents to Big Tech’s wage bill increases? Society’s aggregate spending power falls, the trajectory of the capitalist enterprises’ profit rate dips and, eventually, Big Tech’s cloud rents also decline. The volatility and secular stagnation that was always endemic to capitalism will, in this manner, graduate to a doom loop of collapsing cloud rents and capitalist profits.

That’s the story of AI’s second face and how a stupendous technology with Promethean capabilities will end up, in all probability, Daedalian (...) So too today with AI. Promethean engineers invented and developed it only for AI’s second, uglier, face to imprison them — as well as the rest of us — inside a hyper-complex, enveloping, labyrinthine technological system.

And so when friends ask me why I bother with electoral politics, which they know I dislike intensely, I reply that there is only one route from the Daedalian prison to the Promethean ideal: radical democratic politics. “Which means what?”, they ask. It means starting with small regulatory steps, like legislating interoperability or rescinding legislation that heightens Big Tech’s exorbitant power, before moving on to the grander tasks of building a digital monetary commons and re-thinking property rights over data and cloud capital. Only then will we have a shot at turning AI into humanity’s benign enabler."

https://unherd.com/2026/02/how-to-escape-ai-slavery/

#AI #Capitalism #AIBubble #TechnoFeudalism #BigTech #Rentism #Enshittification

"Prices have been rising across the economy in ways that are both visible and opaque. There are short-term drivers of inflation due to President Trump’s mismanagement of the economy. But the deeper drivers result from the degradation of capitalism.

For example, the lethal combination of digital technology and tech monopolies picks your pocket in countless ways. Instead of technical advances leading to greater convenience and lower cost, as they logically should, they create strategies for opportunistic price hikes.

When Amazon uses its deep knowledge of consumer preferences to rig markets and undermine competitors, higher prices are passed along. When HP makes it illegal or impossible for consumers to use cheaper non-HP cartridges in their printers, it can charge exorbitant prices. If you are prohibited from repairing your own car or your own iPhone, or as a farmer, prohibited from saving seed for next year’s planting, that invites monopoly profits built on higher prices. Costs rise because the rules are rigged.

It isn’t just the increasing cost of health insurance, but the tax on your time when a health system of byzantine complexity requires you to waste hours to get a simple referral or get a claim paid. Middlemen and algorithms, both in the business of denying claims, are a direct cost to the system and a source of rising out-of-pocket prices to patients. If insurance doesn’t pay, you do. These middlemen also function as a drain on doctor time and thus a tax on doctors’ incomes, as well as a debasement of medical services

In this special issue of the Prospect, we take stock of several hidden drivers of rising costs. David Dayen explores all the ways that technology allows sellers of any product that uses the internet to take advantage of surveillance capitalism to personalize prices and charge more than the market price..."

https://prospect.org/2025/12/01/sources-of-americas-hidden-inflation/

#USA #Rentism #Inflation #Economy #PoliticalEconomy #Monopolies #Antitrust #Oligopolies #IP #Competition

"Why do these solutions fall so short? Because many of these copyright lawsuits, licensing solutions and digital replica rights are Trojan horses, inside of which sits big content. The Copyright Alliance, an influential non-profit advocating for the interests of the “copyright community”, argues for strong copyright solutions to generative AI. While it claims to “advocate for individual creators”, its board of directors is stacked with industry executives from media giants such as Paramount, NBC Universal, Disney and Warner Bros.

But why all the fanfare of coalition-building when the entertainment industry could just quietly pocket billions in deals with tech companies? Because big content needs artists. Its media empires need artists’ labour to profit, its lobbying needs artist support to seem legitimate and its new AI business partners need artists’ art.

This fact points to a strategy that entertainment executives fear far more than AI, one that would empower artists to challenge the status quo across big content and big tech: organised labour. Unionised creative workers, such as those in the Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, have secured meaningful protections against AI through strikes and collective bargaining. Copyright is a tool too antiquated, too static and too indelicate to bear the task of deciding the future of an already precarious creative labour force. If big content truly cared about protecting artists from AI, it would stop trying to sell their voices as training data and start listening to them."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/nov/15/big-content-ai-entertainment-media-conglomerates-tech

#AI #GenerativeAI #BigContent #BigTech #Monopolies #Copyright #IP #IntellectualMonopolies #Rentism

That's the difference between the fair deal and fair use approaches to copyright exemptions. Fair deal means that copyright holders can steal from the commons of public knowledge and culture to extract rents for decades. "The public? Who cares about it? WE WANT FREE MONEY FOR DECADES"

"The Albanese government has explicitly ruled out handing tech companies free rein to mine creative content to train their artificial intelligence models, after a fierce backlash from authors and from arts and media groups.

The attorney general, Michelle Rowland, will confirm the decision on Monday, shutting the door on a contentious proposal floated by the Productivity Commission and backed by tech companies.

“Australian creatives are not only world class, but they are also the lifeblood of Australian culture, and we must ensure the right legal protections are in place,” Rowland said.

The commission sparked outrage in August after its interim report on “harnessing data and the digital economy” suggested granting an exemption to copyright laws that would effectively allow technology companies free access to content to train their AI models.

Weeks earlier, Scott Farquhar, the co-founder of software giant Atlassian and the chair of the Tech Council of Australia, told the National Press Club that “fixing” the existing restrictions could “unlock billions of dollars of foreign investment into Australia”."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/27/labor-rules-out-giving-tech-giants-free-rein-to-mine-copyright-content-to-train-ai

#AI #GenerativeAI #Australia #Copyright #FairDeal #IP #Rentism #Rents #IP

"I was never sold on Starmer’s Labour delivering sunlit uplands. He doesn’t have a theory of change, or policies commensurate with the challenges he often acknowledges. But even I was shocked when it was revealed that Rushanara Ali, the now former Minister for Homelessness, had evicted four tenants from her East London property only to re-list it for an additional £700 a month. Besides that, the agents acting on her behalf initially tried to charge the evictees nearly £2,000 to redecorate, and an additional sum for professional cleaning. Under the Tenant Fees Act, passed under the May government, neither was permissible.

Ali resigned shortly after the i newspaper broke the story. That was inevitable given the Renters Rights’ Bill, which Ali herself claimed would “tackle the root cause of homelessness”, included the minor detail of prohibiting what she had done. Ali could, of course, have put the property on the market with the tenants remaining in situ. That is, after all, what normally happens.

The house in question is presently listed at £894,000, and is one of three Ali owns across the capital (one is jointly held with a family member). Other Labour MPs who are also landlords include Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, who lets her former South London home for £6,000 a month, and David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary. Two ideological stalwarts of the party’s Labour First faction, Jas Atwhal and Gurinder Josan, allegedly own more than 20 properties between them. As of the last election, three of the leading five landlords in parliament are Labour MPs.

All this stands in contrast to most of Labour party history."

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/economy/2025/08/labour-has-become-the-party-of-landlordism

#UK #Labour #LabourParty #Housing #Rentism #Rents #LandLordism #Starmer #RadicalCentrism