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Anna's Archive hit with $19.5M default judgment and global domain takedown order
(torrentfreak.com)
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by iamnothere
by iamnothere
It’s crazy to me that two decades after the iTunes Store the trade and resale of digital goods isn’t protected by law.
The "library" is dying for the same reason the newspaper (and the book!) is dying. Literacy was only interesting for most people as a means to pass the time until they could get their hands on AI slop Tiktok feeds.
I don't need a carveout. Some large fraction of my internet bandwidth is downloading books and whatnot off of Libgen and Anna's.
Physical vs. digital is a red herring. It’s about access to copyrighted works. The benefit to authors/publishers comes with a benefit to the public. We’ve lost the latter.
The point that the person you're replying to is making is that this totally breaks the way libraries have always worked, and that it takes a lot of power away from the buyers (whether that's you or your local library) and puts way more in the hand of the publishers.
Something like content addressed storage spread across many shards running locally that are linked together over Tor.
You aren't buying a digital good, you're buying a limited license to use that digital good.
Is it because the law doesn't apply to you when you have 1B USD ?
[1] https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv...
(I understand this case is about their books, but I feel it got a lot more heat due to the Spotify action.)
Please, dear Anna, don't disappear on us. We need you for the books! Plenty of sources for music around.
> The Member acknowledges and agrees that the registration of Internet Number Resources does not constitute property and the registration of Internet Number Resources in the name of the Member or a third party does not confer upon the Member or the third party any rights of ownership. The Member acknowledges that any Internet Number Resources deregistered by the RIPE NCC may be re-registered to another party according to the RIPE Policies.
If whatever service provider in Russia won't shut off their site, I imagine that the next step would be getting a court order in the Netherlands to revoke that provider's IP range.
This is the finest resouce I've found yet: https://open-slum.org/
Tracks the uptime and other pirate libraries...
> The publishers argued that, in addition to sharing pirated books with the public, the shadow library is serving as a primary training data hub for AI companies like Meta and NVIDIA.
The ‘creative goods’ would be made available to the entire countries population via a zero-information key given to each citizen, and their preservation would be ensured by the central library.
Like an ordinary library, anyone would be able to request works for accession.
The number of downloads of a certain piece of media would be tracked, and the fund would pay out accordingly. Because it would be the easiest way of getting any media and the system well-designed, piracy would be negligible (a la Steam).
You’d have to consider trans-national sharing though.
So when are we seizing Meta and Nvidia's domains?
If there was an online e-book store where you could buy most books as DRM-free epub files, and you could read the first X pages for free, I guarantee you that nobody here would care about the OP article. It would have maybe 4 or 5 upvotes.
They'll find new domains.
Until copyright terms are fair, ~5 years not ~95 years, Pirate On !
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It has never been so obvious as now, that justice is not blind. Without justice there is anarchy.
And at this point, to be honest, I say bring it on- let's have the day of retribution before the billionaires have their AI robot armies.
Libraries are a general facility for the public, they offer the standard books and other rental type arrangements although they are so much more than that!
- Access to computers
- Access to internet
- Access to printing
- Access to 3D Printing
- Access to Meeting rooms
- Access to Mental Health Services
- Access to Archive Rooms (newspapers, seed archives, etc).
They serve as a repository for everything physical. Most libraries have archive rooms with various artifacts from the region, including newspapers, publications, recordings, etc. Most of this stuff isn't available online.
Visit a library near a University or School and it becomes packed full of students researching and studying, even if most aren't accessing the books, the rooms, desk and facilities themselves are important.
Not everyone is willing to pirate books, willing to setup Synology devices, etc. A library grants an official place to access things in a legal way, easily (and for free!) among many other things.
Practically no one is willing to do it. They'd have to be interested in books first. And no one is. Not only is "books" not the first thing in your list, it's not even the last thing. Books might have once been seen as luxuries, and the idea of a lending library allowed those in poverty to get a taste of wealth, so to speak... but they get dumped into landfills by the truckload today and can be had for pennies (or fractions of pennies, actually). So you don't want them anymore.
It's bizarre that it hurts you so much to tell a truth about you which couldn't be more plainly obvious. You don't like books. The book publishing industry is literally dying, that's how little you like books.
>A library grants an official place to access things in a legal way, e
But none of you want to access them. You just like the idea that, if somehow you suddenly did want a book, that you'd be able to go get one for free, effortlessly. Because even if you did want a book, you sure as hell wouldn't want one badly enough to expend an iota of effort to obtain one.
Well those ones might be, but the ones I want sure aren't. I have to moderate my book-purchasing to avoid over-spending. The library is pretty helpful (reservation fees are more than I'd like, but a lot less than buying); some years I draw a couple of hundred books. But a lot of them I end up buying. Got one in my hand that was just delivered minutes ago (the new partial biography of Jobs about his years outside Apple).
I guess where this train of thought is going is to point out that people like me do exist. I do spent a lot on books. I borrow a lot from the library. Your assertions come across very strongly suggesting that people like me are a rounding error. But I assure you, when I'm in the bookstore I'm definitely not the only person there. Between us we appear to be propping up entire publishing industries. Almost 80% of the sales are physical rather than digital (1); if we weren't here there would be nothing for you to pirate!
[1] According to https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/books-ma... "Print remains dominant, accounting for 78% of consumer market revenue"
This is also generally a selfish attitude where you personally benefit while structures that used to benefit society at large are eroded.
Absolutely. To get 1/8 PB = 125 TB home library "easily":
We'll use 8 disks in the 125TB library. Between RAID 5 (1 disk lost OK to recover) vs RAID 6 (2 disks lost OK to recover), choose RAID 6 (our disks could fail at same time if of similar production or unlucky). RAID6 means 25% of space used for parity overhead, and 2-5% used for metadata/filesystem.
So looking for about 163TB. 163TB / 8 rounds to 21 TB. This pushes us above 16TB disks. Between 20TB and 22TB, choose 22Tb to feel safe.
Napkin math:
Synology 8-bay DS: $1150 (Amazon price)
8x 22TB Seagate 22TB external 3.5" = 8 x $390 = $3120 (also the #1 least expensive disk per TB for 3.5" external at https://diskprices.co currently)
But something cvan happen to that. Fall, fire, water, theft, party. We could lose everything.
So following 3-2-1 we'll have 3 copies, on 2 media, with one offsite.
Copy 2 can be same as first (RAID is for disk redundancy not backup -- we still have one copy only).
By now, 2x Synology 8-bays, plus 16x 22TB disks, puts us at $8540 for what we can keep at home.
But disks only really last about 5 years. They're getting kinda better, but in reality those disks can fail and should be replaced about every 5 years, some people get 10.
So every 5 years, we can want to shell ou;t about $8540. But wait, disks about doubled in the past year. Maybe it'll be $16,000 next time? Hard to say.
We still need a 3rd, off-site copy for 3-2-1. Recent reports indicated Backblaze silently lost data, some people exodused I believe. To where? IDK, but let's pick Amazon Glacier deep storage. At 125TB (just useful data), at $0.00099/GB/mo, that puts it at, over the same 5 years: $0.00099/GB/mo * 125000 GB * 12mo * 5yr = $7,425/5yr
(For the remote copy: can your ISP actually handle uploading 125TB? How long does that take to do once, even half? Is ISP transfer capped? Will 3rd party storage provider change prices or lose data? That's why we have 3 copies, maybe change providers when needed.
In any case, add it on 3-2-1 for 125TB would cost, at the easiest/cheapest: $4270 * 2 + $7,425 = 4270+7425 = $15,965, good for about 5 years.
So, every 5 years, spending $15,965.
At these volumes, are do even have ECC RAM? Are we scanning for and correcting errors with correct data when they occur? We don't want a hobby, we want an appliance, for this library, often especially if we work 99% of the time in tech and have life to live, quite likely.
Let's try another formula: on a shoestring and a hope, one could do it "cheap on RAID 5 (only 12.5% lost to parity and metadata/filesystem) and under-storage without 3-2-1" by going Synology 8-bay ($1150, Amazon) + 8 * 16TB (8 * $410 per https://diskprices.co = $3280) = $1150 + $3280 = $4430
---
In grand summary, roughly every 5 years:
Done "right": $15,965
Done "cheap": $4,430 and only 112TB usable.
Averaged over 5 years (though it's not) these are:
- Right: $15,965 / 5yr = about $3,200/yr (plus tax) for 125TB usable library
- Cheap: $4,430 / 5yr = $886/yr (plus tax) for 112TB usable library
Maybe doable. But it's like owning another car in more ways than one (cost, maintenance/ongoing-care). Some individuals can swing it without even thinking. Most can't.
IMO, if the AI industry or any players would like us to become more computer centric, and make use of all the data that tech now lets us have, its constituents should do something (anything) to drive the cost of disks DOWN, not UP.
> Literacy was only interesting for most people as a means to pass the time until they could get their hands on AI slop Tiktok feeds.
Its funny to me how the people who so readily declare certainty about the future constantly demonstrate their utter ignorance of the human spirit. Whats the whole basis for this country again?
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And, of course you know this to be objectively true and hence can produce a valid source for your claim?
Why not?
This may or may not apply to university libraries, but many of the public libraries around here are morphing into indoor playgrounds.
If this is said as a negative thing, maybe we could mitigate it by having more free, publicly accessible third spaces. Or accept that libraries can also serve that purpose: as a place for community members to gather as well as the other services they provide.
I’d rather see their money go to robust inter-library loan setups and children’s sections than spending it all on overpriced e-loan junk.
Any digital asset that's on a hard drive I own, in my own home, is more owned than any most other kinds of properties that there are. The government may not protect my ownership of it, but the government doesn't even know about it... nor does anyone else.
People who are truly worried about this issue shouldn't sit around whining that they don't own their digital purchases, they should instead go out and own everything, whether they purchase it or not.
What made libraries not work is that you stopped wanting to own things. With no one wanting to own things, people and the governments stopped worrying about whether anyone could. And once they stopped doing that, libraries too found out they couldn't own anything either. Without meaning to, maybe, you all did this.
A purely assumptive example, but if a library pays for a 2 year license to lend a digital book, and the average shelf-life of a physical book is ~2 years, what's the difference?
> To illustrate the economics of e-book lending, the N.Y.P.L. sent me its January, 2021, figures for “A Promised Land,” the memoir by Barack Obama that had been published a few months earlier by Penguin Random House. At that point, the library system had purchased three hundred and ten perpetual audiobook licenses at ninety-five dollars each, for a total of $29,450, and had bought six hundred and thirty-nine one- and two-year licenses for the e-book, for a total of $22,512. Taken together, these digital rights cost about as much as three thousand copies of the consumer e-book, which sells for about eighteen dollars per copy. As of August, 2021, the library has spent less than ten thousand dollars on two hundred and twenty-six copies of the hardcover edition, which has a list price of forty-five dollars but sells for $23.23 on Amazon. A few thousand people had checked out digital copies in the book’s first three months, and thousands more were on the waiting list. (Several librarians told me that they monitor hold requests, including for books that have not yet been released, to decide how many licenses to acquire.)
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So other options exist, it's just that most people (and authors) don't give a flying fuck and give their money to bloodsuckers
As well as their domestic and national security apperatus, actually. Their own citizens are being used to propagate brain-computer interfaces amongst their own people.
The operators of Anna's know they will go to prison.
Surely you have to make the copy to feed it into the llm for training, so
https://g.co/gemini/share/20843b4609d9
Now, you could argue quotes are fair use - but can you argue the material isn't part of the LLM?
Very strange how people under indictment by the United States of America keep dying in custody.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_legal_assistance_treaty
Since September 30, 1998, when ICANN was founded in the US.
I wonder whether we wventually see some other power establish their own root servers which mirror only the parts of ICANNs DNS that are politically convenient to whoever does this.
These judgments aren’t always pointless. Many Internet companies and services intersect with the US in some way, so there could be an angle where this impacts them.
Businesses operating strictly in other countries don’t need to comply with foreign laws except in cases where they need to do business with those countries, at which point it becomes complicated and they may choose to comply to avoid problems or sanctions.
Crazy judgments happen because they give the impression of impartiality. An accused murderer with $10 to his name gets held on a $1 million bond. What's the point, why not just hold them without bail? Because the rules say you do it this way and shrugging and saying "it doesn't actually matter so who cares?" doesn't make people feel like the system has the proper attitude.
> However, most of the intermediaries are foreign entities. Whether they voluntarily comply with a U.S. court order remains to be seen. While some foreign companies have taken action following U.S. injunctions, others have historically ignored them, citing a lack of local jurisdiction.
It's called international law, trade agreements, treaties etc.
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Some people may say that Anna's has great OPSEC because she hasn't been identified following this release, but part of OPSEC is reliability, which they clearly failed at with the Spotify release. They let ego come in front of their OPSEC.
http://opbible7nans45sg33cbyeiwqmlp5fu7lklu6jd6f3mivrjeqadco...
Could 5% of humanity be a psycho-path-subspecies?
These psychopaths are basically leeches on the rest of us, maybe even a cancer. Not only do they feel no guilt for enslaving other (wage-slavery), but they are also fine with poisoning the body and the mind (too many to list).
Perhaps they can even identify others with the same causal DNA segments. Sight? Smell? Micro-movements? Perhaps they really do see all non psycho-path-bearing-DNA-offspring as worms. Perhaps they intentionally breed with each other to avoid spreading the gene to vasts numbers of people.
Could this explain the vast majority of suffering?
and that probably explains a lot about the world.
however, i wouldnt call people affected by psychopathy a "subspecies", and i strongly doubt they have any extra psychopathy-sensing special abilities like sight or smell. that is crossing over into wild conspiracy territory.
(its also important to note that there are lots of people who have all the typical traits of psychopathy, but dont act like what people would call "psycho". there is way more nuance to psychopathy than usually portrayed in media or whatever)
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You get censorship resistance and it also doesn't leave a trail that leads to your location or requires payment methods. All of which leads to deanonymization.
The main way that an adversary would identify the location of an onion site would be to shut off the power/internet in various locations. That would be an unlikely step against some book piracy, imo.
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That said, I also support Anna's Archive. We need access to books.
You will have a hard time adapting to the AI era.
>This is enterprise-level access that we can provide for donations in the range of tens of thousands USD. We’re also willing to trade this for high-quality collections that we don’t have yet.
[0] - https://torrentfreak.com/nvidia-contacted-annas-archive-to-s...
"They" aren't a single group. Broadly speaking, publishers are the ones suing anna's archive, and they're involved in suits against AI companies as well. I'm not aware of any efforts by AI companies to take down anna's archive.
However, just because you receive a fine does not mean that you "can't" do it. You've already done it, got caught, now a fine. It does not mean that the LLM model has to be tossed out and destroyed with a new version trained up without that data. It just means can't is a very stupid word to imply here.
Some places not in tech actually have ways of dealing with "disruptors"
What was the judgment? Seems that their domains are still active. Why is there a difference in judgment here?
For one, they actually bothered to sent lawyers rather than getting hit with a default judgement.
Some examples, there are probably hundreds more:
1) Its okay for pharma companies to provide addictive drugs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family
2) Coke can use cocaine, or coca leaves, but no one else: https://blog.oup.com/2014/03/coke-cocaine-coca-cola-capitali...
3) This one is hilarious and an ingenious innovation by current administration -- Ban on CBDC, locking out Fed Govt from providing crypto alternatives
Yes, with FDA approval. You can dispute whether the approval should be granted in the first place, but that's not at all comparable to some drug dealer slinging fentanyl on some street corner. Not to mention this happened decades ago, before the current wave of corruption in the whitehouse. Finally, isn't the whole point of laws and regulations is that there's vaguely some review? I'd far rather have prospective drug dealers having to go through FDA approval before they can sell their drugs, than have them sell whatever they want, without giving safety or efficacy lip service.
>2) Coke can use cocaine, or coca leaves, but no one else: https://blog.oup.com/2014/03/coke-cocaine-coca-cola-capitali...
Again, with the proper licenses. Believe it or not, you too can buy methamphetamine legally if you have a prescription! It even has a snazzy brand name, desoxyn.
>3) This one is hilarious and an ingenious innovation by current administration -- Ban on CBDC, locking out Fed Govt from providing crypto alternatives
What does this have to do with corporations?
Nice username, GRUez.
>Again, with the proper licenses. Believe it or not, you too can buy methamphetamine legally if you have a prescription! It even has a snazzy brand name, desoxyn.
What a headache. Too bad it's not provided in a formulation suitable for vaporization. Big pharma needs to get on this immediately.
Mark Cuban switched to the dark side overnight. No doubt his online pharma and Trump pharma reached $ome under$tanding.
Grift, grift, glorious grift.
Because that's what OpenAI is doing with the books they-- again-- illegally acquired. Huge AI companies are the ones pirating media at scale and literally everyone except the AI companies have to bear the consequences of that.
They lose one domain, so they just register a new nearly-identical one
Gotta appeal to advertising.
It's interesting that Anna's could have kept the data to themselves and had a major advantage in training LLMs, either creating their own or charging possibly billions to large LLM companies.
The style of the comment suggests that they have far more sinister motives than mere online discussion, and reminds me of off-brand, leaky adult incontinence wear.
I sympathize, but do it smarter. I downloaded 500 or so last week, and it was a slow week. Mostly I mine Hacker News and /pol/ (it's actually only half as bad as reddit once you ignore Mein Kampf) for recommendations... but ran a little short on those. Coming up with new titles to procure is tough.
>I guess where this train of thought is going is to point out that people like me do exist.
I know! There are half-dozens of you out there! And I know I struck a nerve, because HN hates "my anecdote counters your intended generalization" except when you have to examine hard truths about yourselves.
>very strongly suggesting that people like me are a rounding error.
A rounding error on a rounding error.
>Almost 80% of the sales are physical rather than digital
Physical sales are dead. If you listen to anyone who writes and has written for the last 20 years or more, you'll hear all sorts of heartache stories about what sales are like now compared to back before it all fell apart. It's dead. And it's never coming back. Your grandchildren, if you have any, won't even know how to open a book.
Digital books/content requires little to no cost to replicate, unlike printing new books. But we have seen that the price of that content follows the "physical goods" model. Why should a 30-40 year old movie cost you $20 to steam?
The main difference I see is the centralisation of censorship vectors. Pulling physical books off library shelves is visible and rightfully prompts a shitshow. Bullying a publisher into not renewing lending licenses strikes me as way easier to pull off.
I don't see a good way to do that for digital copies, and of course the expiry would be wholly artificial scarcity for them even if it was only a little bit more expensive than physical.
Digital content is a great example of why we should fight back for old IP timelines.
Without it, we stagnate as a society. Our stories don't evolve, they just rot on the vine.
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Essentially: have funny amounts of money and the law ceases to matter. Or don't, and be squashed by the right holders
Whenever you have control over somebody else's organism, suicide isn't something which makes sense definitionally, even if his own body was used to kill him.
You're welcome to look into what those around him said regarding his detention and death.
He is just a well-publicized example.
Many of you here have probably used darknet markets, if so, your vendors are likely neurocompromised as well.
> your vendors are likely neurocompromised as well.
What in the world are you talking about.
Often even people envolved aren't even aware these technologies are being utilized, to those who are, their position is often simple: you do what we say or we torture you, even in protective custody, as surgery isn't really practical.
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Let's say there were a sub-species of psychopaths.
Let's say, for you to be "evil-beyond-reason" it takes M chromosomes having N genes.
As a psychopath, you probably want to associate yourself with other psychopaths, but maybe not live/work among them, except to breed.
Why would you want to associate yourself? Because if you work in tandem, you can exploit the rest of us with less friction, i.e. make laws. Each psychopath draws their own little kingdom, for them to rule.
Hmm, I guess, if the psychopaths could "feel" that another was "one of them" they may indeed work with one another.
--
It is hard for me to think, that given the huge advantage of knowing "your kind" that you wouldn't somehow sense it.
This is crazy talk isn't it. But look at the world. It looks just like this.
Yes, because most courts have ruled that training is legal as long as the source material was acquired legally. The AI companies were made to pay for the wrongs they did when acquiring the books, but it makes little sense to destroy all works that were built off the infringement, when they would be in the clear if they paid $15 (or whatever) for each book. It'd be like you torrenting college textbooks and getting caught, and then the book publisher demanding that you start over your college degree from scratch.
$$$$$$$
Go to your Verizon account -> Safe Browsing -> Uncheck all the content filters you don't want.
That claim falls apart as soon as it touches reality: there are a _lot_ of people who are involved in the drug trade, now and in the past. At some point, one of those people would definitely have had a CT or an MRI on their skull (e.g. my dentist does a whole head CT every 5 years as part of the normal process and insurance pays for it). Surely _one_ of those people would have noticed a brain implant.
This sounds extremely made up.
The tech is adversarially designed, you're assuming the medical supply chains are not compromised, and are dramatically underestimating the sophistication involved here generally.
You can't even assume the people interpreting the results are uncompromised, are trained to interpret results in the context of adversarial technology, or are even physiologically able to accurately interpret what they are looking at. This has it's roots in military intelligence, it's not a trivial compromise.
Do you have literally any proof? Otherwise, this is all just a silly made up story as far as I’m concerned.
Unless you have proper clearance or are involved with one of the parties propagating them, anyway.
Then how do you know about it? This sounds extremely made up.
It's not just the drug trade, and torture isn't even the primary focus of the technology.
What does that even mean? Are you an InfoWars fan? lol