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.<p>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?<p>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 <i>want</i> 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.<p>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.<p>>and continue doing it<p>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.
> Just like they want it to be illegal to run local ML inference.<p>Citation?
In theory none of them <i>actually</i> got the right to train on illegally downloaded books. Anthropic was simply punished for doing it once.<p>One wonders if they're still doing it.
OpenAI plainly admitted that it is impossible not to do so in a House of Lords inquiry. So, presumably there is no way around it to train models.
There is just not enough non-copyrighted data out there.
You mean this one <a href="https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/126981/pdf/" rel="nofollow">https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/126981/pdf/</a> where they write "it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models
without using copyrighted materials"? That doesn't mean they have to download those materials illegally. For a billion dollars, you can easily buy one legal copy of each book in Anna's Archive and still have some cash left over to run a whole-of-internet scraping operation.
I'm pretty sure we would know if they did that. And we don't.<p>Plus this is not legal in the EU (and Canada, and ... let's just say the entire rest of the world, and accept that I'll be wrong for one or two smaller countries). Doesn't that matter? Or is only Mistral disallowed from training on copyrighted materials? Je veux ma chaton fat, goddamit!
What tosh. It's copywrited material, they pay to access it like everyone else.
Of course they are. They have just put on their Swiss Banker suit now and have all sorts of deflection techniques in place such that, of course, "the money has the stamps that says its clean" (when it it really blood money hidden behind a pretty wall).
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.<p>(not legal advice!)
You missed Gigapedia (library.nu [1]) , which preceded most of the others.<p>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?).<p>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?<p>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).<p>We should have something like Popcorn Time but for knowledge.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library.nu" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library.nu</a>
> 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?).<p>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.
Incredible website. Really one of the dreams of the internet realised, the ability to access all knowledge at your fingertips.
I was blown away when I paid to get an API key for it. The process is intricate and state of the art.
Probably the greatest achievement of modern society, a rebirth of the Library of Alexandria. Of course, only private for-business corporations are allowed to steal the world's knowledge, apparently, and only to be able to monetise it. There's something deeply wrong with our civilization that Anna's Archive is punished while companies like OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Anthropic, etc are just ... ignored when they do things like destructively digitise books or pirate things.
Didn’t they have a default judgment against them because they didn’t show up to court? Do they even know who runs it?<p>They railroaded Aaron Swartz (which eventually lead to his suicide) for much, much less.<p>One side wants to freely share knowledge with all of humanity, the other wants to restrict it to make a buck. I know who I support.
Anna's Archive is a gift to humanity
Exactly. All libraries are worthy of being supported and grown. I make no distinction between a physical dead-tree library and a digital library.<p>The only reason we even have dead-tree libraries at all is because 100 years ago, that was what John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie put forth to whitewash their horrible capitalist behaviors across the USA. And because it was done by those generations' billionaires, public libraries because acceptable.<p>If public libraries were created in the last 20 years, they would have been banned and felony copyright charges would have been levied. In fact, thats exactly what happened WHEN people tried to create free digital libraries.
> If public libraries were created in the last 20 years, they would have been banned and felony copyright charges would have been levied. In fact, thats exactly what happened WHEN people tried to create free digital libraries.<p>I wonder why nobody created a Netflix-like subscription for digital books
Amazon maybe? Kindle Unlimited. In some ways Audible with audiobooks. Which actually has lot of entrants though they tend to limit listening time on large part of their portfolio.
I believe you can get access to a lot of digital books with a library card online. Not something I have personally done, so can't really give details.
Libby very much exists, you just need to sign up through your local library.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyster_(company)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyster_(company)</a><p>There was already one that existed in the web 2.0 era. Founded in 2012, raised a $3M seed from Founders Fund and a $14M A. Completely failed though and was acquihired by Google to have the founders lead Google Play Books.<p>Amazon now has Kindle Unlimited but I think it's mostly romance slop and self-published books. Seems like publishing rightsholders were just too inflexible to let the business model take off.
Because you have to pay a ton more for a lot of digital copies of books if you're doing any kind of lending and you're competing with existing libraries. So you both have higher costs (e.g. you have to pay more for a digital file that may have DRM, be required to self destruct after a certain number of uses, doesn't allow multiple lends at a time, etc.) and your prospective consumers have a free option so convincing them to pay is going to be difficult.<p>The economics aren't there.
I consider libraries, public schools and maybe even public fire departments in the list of things that could never be proposed today if they didn't already exist.
Public libraries pay for their books
I only wish they allowed browsing journals by year and volume. Libgen allowed that but war in Ukraine broken libgen. It lives but as a much shadier alter egos that does not support all that original libgen supported.
And Google owes 20 decillion dollars to the Russian government. Who cares either way.
So when are Nvidia, Facebook, and everyone else going to chip in and pay up?
"owes" seems like a wrong word here
Unfortunately it’s blocked in Germany
Anna's Archive is what TV told me in the 2000s that the future was. An online database with all published books one click away. Far from the dystopian reality than the corporate internet has become.
Just wished they didn't sell bulk access for LLM training.
"If you own someone $340, that's your problem. If you owe someone $340,000,000, that's there problem."<p>Might as well be a trillion dollars as it's never getting paid.
"when you're $100,000 in debt, it's your problem. But when you're $1 million in debt, it's the bank's" - Rosalie Goes Shopping (1989)
An old variation:<p>Fred and Wilhelmina are in bed together. Fred tosses and turns, unable to sleep. "Fred, what's troubling you?"<p>"You know Bjarne from the bank? Well, a balloon payment is due tomorrow on my loan, and I don't have the cash flow to pay it."<p>Wilhelmina thinks for a bit, then reaches for her phone. "Betty? Yes, this is Wilhelmina. Sorry to call so late. Would you tell Bjarne that Fred can't make the loan payment tomorrow? Yes, that's all. Good night."<p>Fred states at Wilhelmina, aghast. "What did you do THAT for?" She smiles. "Now it's Bjarne's problem. Let him toss and turn, you can go to sleep."
the flintstones?
I chose the names from The Flintstones, although the joke is not from the show.<p>Ridiculously unimportant trivia: The Flintstones borrows heavily from The Honeymooners, was the first animated sitcom, and was also the first animated show aired in prime-time.
Reminder for me to make another donation.<p>Piracy is morally justified at this point.
I wonder by if the US considers this “supporting a terrorist organization”.
Donate a significant amount of money, and you can get a free trip to the new gulag in El Salvador. Or maybe gitmo.
Don't give the government any ideas
I wonder if the EU or UK does.<p>Maybe if they use encryption, which would make them all pedophiles according to those governments. Hope you have your VPNs ready if visiting countries without a free internet, like North Korea, China, UK, or EU.
Maybe.<p>Thankfully I don't live in the US, and likely won't set foot there ever again.
US probably considers anything impairing profits, stock prices, or enterprise value terrorist activity at this point.
Yeah, truthfully. This type of article is generally a nice nudge to donate.
Might as well say "Annas Archive OWES ELEVENTY HUNDRED BILLIONTY-TRILLIONTY INFINITY DOLLARS!!!!!111" ala elementary school playground make-believe.<p>I remember when RIAA was shaking down 15 year olds for $7000 for a single Metallica download from Napster. Or how Aaron Schwartz was executed by proxy by JSTOR and the feds, for what should have been free to access for all.<p>But hey, Anthropic, OpenAI, X, and others can pirate to their hearts content with for-profit piracy, but "we" (royal) are OK with that. We just cant have the poors have access to the sum of human knowledge.
> elementary school playground make-believe<p>Oh yeah? Well, my dad works at Anna's Archive.
> Or how Aaron Schwartz was executed by proxy by JSTOR and the feds, for what should have been free to access for all.<p>What happened to Aaron Schwartz was tragic, but "executed by proxy by JSTOR?" That's ridiculous, overheated rhetoric. He committed suicide.
People can be predisposed towards something, and then have a tipping point brought by periods of great stress<p>Jason Arday recently committed suicide due to media pressure, and even when the media was told that he was not mentally well and should please back off, they didn't.<p>The man was accused of plagiarism, and there was no final verdict on if he did. The institutions that hired him clearly had no issues in vetting him. And yet he committed suicide.<p>There are absolutely horrible people out there right now who's entire careers are shams, and don't even come close to thinking about it. People are built different, and have different triggers
> The man was accused of plagiarism, and there was no final verdict on if he did.<p>Bullshit. It wasn't the first round of plagiarism, or redactions. His whole supposed life story was a fraud. He passed off other researchers' patient interviews as his own.
> accused of plagiarism<p>Weird way to spell "lied about nearly every facet of his life and anyone who questioned it was aggressively accused of being racist."
Sure. That he was facing 35 years in prison for his “crimes“ had nothing to with his suicide.
Please educate yourself about how the US criminal justice system actually works, especially around plea deals. Also especially around sentencing for white collar crimes in terms of what white collar criminals are actually sentenced to, and what is typically taken into consideration by judges during sentencing phases (like, say, mental health issues.)<p>Please also educate yourself about how federal prosecutors treated Schwartz after he scraped PACER.<p>Please also educate yourself about how long prosecutors attempted to negotiate a plea deal with Schwartz, what their final offer was, what his family, friends, his girlfriend, and his <i>team</i> of top-shelf, famous lawyers advised him to do, and what he actually did.
If only you were able to take your perspective one step farther. Why did he commit suicide?
Because something was wrong in his brain and he couldn't handle the stress of his situation.<p>Many people have faced similar or worse charges, and did not commit suicide, so we'll have to point at something else.<p>Fuck them for what they did to him, but we should be rallying to get him set free. We can't start pointing fingers at other people for suicides. We have agency.
Why did he commit suicide?
"We are going to jail you for half or more of your life, restrict any medicines you might be on, treat you in deplorable conditions, constitute you as a slave of the state if we decide so". And there is no parole in federal prisons.<p>Feds did NOT have to choose to go the route they did. Their pursuance of a victimless "crime" lead to Aaron's only path was 'Exit'.<p>Sure, he committed suicide. Why? Because his life was already significantly threatened with what amounts to torture by prison.
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I really don't understand why HackerNews gets hard for Anna's Archive but you never see other illegal download websites praised here.<p>They're not more or less virtuous than any others, they're in it for the money and you're a fool if you think otherwise.<p>I'm not against piracy, it's great, but to claim they are moral saints is a joke.<p>Anyway, bring in the downvotes as I know will happen.
how's Anna make money? I know they offered to share the database for ai training (which I would criticize, that's very shady) but do they have donations or something<p>it doesn't seem like it would be high revenue at least
Can't talk for all of HN, but I for one hereby praise most/all piracy websites. Anna's Archive is great, and Rutracker is also great.<p>It's not a competition, and being a moral saint isn't a good KPI; being a net positive for society is.
As a hacker News viewer I'm for other illegal download sites as well.<p>If you just Google 'free media heck yeah' you'll see a great deal of them!