Comment by num42
6 hours ago
Long live Anna’s Archive. I stand on the shoulders of the Internet, Wikipedia, Anna’s Archive, Z-Library, LibGen, YouTube, Hacker News, Reddit, and Sci-Hub.
I deeply admire the people who are obsessed with their passions and strive to build things that will lay the foundations for others.
Why don't Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Facebook & Co defend Anna's Archive publicly?
Coming out would be a bold move for them.
Anthropic paying $1.5 billion in fines for downloading Anna's Archive established a moat. They want it to be illegal to pirate books: they can afford the penalties and continue doing it. Just like they want it to be illegal to run local ML inference.
>Anthropic paying $1.5 billion in fines for downloading Anna's Archive established a moat. They want it to be illegal to pirate books: they can afford the penalties and continue doing it.
This seems like a "heads I win, tails you lose" type of argument. If Anthropic was pro-piracy I can imagine everyone getting mad that they're flouting law and want to "steal from artists" or whatever.
>and continue doing it
Source? AFAIK they were caught and stopped. That's why there was the recent story about how they were destroying old books to scan them.
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> they can afford the penalties and continue doing it.
I thought they could've bought just a single copy of each book and use the content to train their models. In that case, it falls into the fair use doctrine and they wouldn't need to pay the fine. And that will be way less expensive than the $1.5B price tag.
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> Just like they want it to be illegal to run local ML inference.
Citation?
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In theory none of them actually got the right to train on illegally downloaded books. Anthropic was simply punished for doing it once.
One wonders if they're still doing it.
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Those are all law-abiding organizations, which AA is not.
INB4: "Here is one time one of those organizations broke the law". Don't go there, absolute lowest level of conversation.
No gain, all liability. Easier to cut them a check for access to training data and say nothing. Unless legal discovery was performed, the outside world would never know, and the payment records would roll off corporate records through a record retention schedule eventually. Could obfuscate it as a contractor consulting fee ("knowledge management subject matter expert") if you wanted to get tricky, depending on the risk appetite of whomever would receive the funds.
(not legal advice!)
There’s zero liability in a company stating publicly that they support Anna’s Archive. Zero. Free speech protections cover much more egregious statements than that.
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I'm pretty sure[0] they're all using shadow libraries, and saying things in favor of them would increase their liability.
Furthermore, every pirate wants to be an admiral. None of the big tech companies are actually in favor of any amount of copyright reform. They never have been. There is a huge gulf between "personally benefitting from copyright theft" and "actually wants to legalize the theft". Anthropic still believes they deserve to be paid for their models, they just have this delusion in their head that doing a bunch of computation on stolen data is equivalent to actual human creativity.
[0] OpenAI, Anthropic and Facebook have been shown in court to be using shadow libraries, I don't know about Google.
You missed Gigapedia (library.nu [1]) , which preceded most of the others.
Although I partially applaud what Anna's Archive is doing, I like their model the least (they want to CHARGE to download while doing Copyright infringement?).
In any case, I strongly believe that Anna's Archive is the wrong approach, as it has a single point of failure. We have been doing massive P2P sharing for more than 26 years; we have the algorithms for fully distributed file sharing and databases. Why are we still depending on HTTP/DNS based interfaces that are easily taken down by people wanting to limit knowledge?
I'm glad and thankful that the people behind Anna's Archive dedicate their time maintaining the huge base of human knowledge (Encyclopedia Galactica Asimov would say), but we (the people) should make it really distributed, really infallible and accessible (no, downloading 10TB torrent files doesn't make sense, except for archiving purposes).
We should have something like Popcorn Time but for knowledge.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library.nu
> Although I partially applaud what Anna's Archive is doing, I like their model the least (they want to CHARGE to download while doing Copyright infringement?).
This is bollocks. AA gives users a means of paying to enjoy faster speeds as a means of contributing to costs, but the downloads are free to anyone who doesn't want to pay, and very often quick enough.
Whilst it pays for the service (and, in that respect, may be a necessary evil), it's morally questionable (at minimum) to charge for things that, by law, aren't yours in the first place.
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> Why are we still depending on HTTP/DNS based interfaces that are easily taken down by people wanting to limit knowledge?
Those are arguably the hardest protocols to block on the open Internet without causing major issues for all other sites, forcing those trying to take them down to play "whack-a-mole". If they were to create a new "AATP" for distributing data, it would make it trivial to block on every ISPs firewalls.
BBSes were the first, of course. In particular, Libgen, Sci-Hub and others can be traced back through several generations of libraries to the SU.BOOKS FidoNet echo conference created in the early 90's.
I wouldn’t include YouTube given how only Google is allowed to index it