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#archive#anna#books#don#libraries#companies#more#digital#book#own

Discussion (221 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

jonhohle1 day ago
Not going to claim anything regarding Anna’s Archive’s legitimacy, but what do libraries look like in the future? We’re just going to give up and say, first sale was great while we had it, but digital makes it obsolete? When you die, screw donating your collection of “licenses” to somewhere productive; those contracts died with you? Everything is streaming, so you never purchased anything anyway?

It’s crazy to me that two decades after the iTunes Store the trade and resale of digital goods isn’t protected by law.

mgr861 day ago
I work at a nonprofit and the board is largely university librarians. I am asking all of them how have the behavior of their patrons changed in the last five years. How has usage of their subscribed resources changed in the age of AI. They don't share much, but their facial expressions and silence share more than they mean them to. Some universities have cut staff, or reclassified them so that they won't receive benefits.
_DeadFred_1 day ago
As society's repositories of knowledge, I feel like AI should fall under libraries. Especially considering how AI utilizes others knowledge/text they don't legally have rights to. The carveout we made slightly similar (in that they have special rules for their use) is for libraries.
NoMoreNicksLeftabout 18 hours ago
An 8-bay Synology costs about $1000. It'll hold an eighth of a petabyte pretty comfortably (with sufficient redundancy). It's bizarre and disturbing to me how few of you seem to be interested in having your own libraries, even though technology has finally delivered that ability to you. You'll come on here once every 3 months and whine about how we have to do more for public libraries, even though they seem to largely be little more than daytime homeless shelters and free internet for perverts, and you don't even want libraries for yourselves.

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.

mmoossabout 23 hours ago
> They don't share much

Why not?

mgr86about 1 hour ago
The format mainly, I think. Due to loss of a grant and poor market conditions we have shifted our annual meeting with the board to a virtual format. Which gives me less informal time for discussions.
bombcarabout 14 hours ago
Most libraries are currently operating under "the donors don't know how they're being used" if you get the drift - checkouts of actual books are way, way down, the vast majority of checkouts are videos, etc; many library users are just using the computers or using it as a study/work/play area.

This may or may not apply to university libraries, but many of the public libraries around here are morphing into indoor playgrounds.

mptestabout 20 hours ago
it's gotten scary out there for purveyors of truth and knowledge. book burnings, banning, retributive use of the judicial system, etc..
uyzstvqs1 day ago
Well, that's where digital goods differ from physical goods. But it's also why piracy != theft.
jonhohleabout 21 hours ago
> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

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.

bfrankline1 day ago
Are you in the United States? Many libraries loan digital goods, e.g., books, music, movies, and even software.
presbyterian1 day ago
They do, but under a completely different system than the way that they do for print books. When a library buys a print book, they can keep it in circulation for as long as they want and it's physically durable, but for digital, they're paying either per circulation or for an amount of time. They never own anything, they pay for temporary licenses, just like you never own the digital media you purchase in most cases.

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.

blairbeckwithabout 24 hours ago
Is there really a meaningful distinction between how libraries treat digital book licenses and physical books when you actually hit reality? My knowledge of how libraries work is very shallow, but I've always understood that they treat physical books as essentially consumable and have fairly high standards for what a "lendable" copy of a book is.

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?

NoMoreNicksLeftabout 18 hours ago
>just like you never own the digital media you purchase in most cases.

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.

mjcl1 day ago
Even libraries can only license digital content for a limited period of time/loans before being forced to purchase new licenses. See https://www.spokanelibrary.org/the-true-cost-of-ebooks-and-a...
piperswe1 day ago
But those libraries have to pay each time they loan those digital goods. It's not the old "pay once loan until it's dust" model they use for physical goods.
nemomarx1 day ago
can I donate my ebook to them?
NoSaltabout 24 hours ago
This right here is why I either (1) still buy physical media [my preference], or (2) make sure all digital media I purchased is DRM free. With my physical media, I digitize it, then store the media for any future use.
382hiabout 23 hours ago
I pirate everything. I pay nothing. I have both DRM free and cost free. This is the best of both worlds.
BobbyTables2about 13 hours ago
It’s crazier to me that a number of Anthropic managers and executives aren’t in prison.
CSMastermind1 day ago
> It’s crazy to me that two decades after the iTunes Store the trade and resale of digital goods isn’t protected by law.

You aren't buying a digital good, you're buying a limited license to use that digital good.

killerstormabout 1 hour ago
That's a shitty kind of a deal. There are other options, e.g. Greg Egan sells his books on SmashWords - you get full text of the book (epub) via email, no DRM, most money goes directly to the author. Getting unencumbered full text is much better - you can use it with TTS read of your choice, search, summarize, whatever you want.

So other options exist, it's just that most people (and authors) don't give a flying fuck and give their money to bloodsuckers

rangerelfabout 24 hours ago
That's exactly what jonhohle was talking about -_-
outside1234about 23 hours ago
We need to create libraries like Anna's Archive that are impossible to take down.

Something like content addressed storage spread across many shards running locally that are linked together over Tor.

rvnx1 day ago
Why LLM companies that depended on Anna's archive end up so clean ? Looks like Anna's archive was doing the dirty work, and the LLM companies were reaping the profits (and ironically still do, as they hold the largest databases of pirated content in the world).

Is it because the law doesn't apply to you when you have 1B USD ?

random31 day ago
While that may be the case it’s hard to make this claim when: - Anthropic settled a similar case - Anna didn’t show up in court
metadat1 day ago
Showing up is a trap for Anna - who doesn't have 5 billion dollars to settle.
d-ccabout 16 hours ago
The legal system is a joke which received the amount of engagement it deserves.

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.

contubernio1 day ago
Justice should not depend on whether the aggrieved appears in court. That's a structural weakness of US law.
TremendousJudge1 day ago
is there a country where if you don't show up to court you don't lose by default?
ffsm81 day ago
Uh, aren't you confirming his opinion with that? After all, Anna doesn't have the money to fight this in court
YetAnotherNick1 day ago
No. Anthropic fought and paid $1.5 billion in settlement and agreed to delete all the copyrighted material.
jasonmp851 day ago
Anthropic knows they could just pay off the aggrieved party.

The operators of Anna's know they will go to prison.

hulituabout 5 hours ago
A couple of millions are enough to grant you special treatment. Especially when you know where to "invest" some of them.
tim333about 23 hours ago
You can make an argument that training an LLM on something is not the same as copying it in the same way that your brain is not in breach of copyright for having watched a Disney movie. I'm not sure of the rights and wrongs of that but it complicates legal action.
nemomarxabout 23 hours ago
Can I download an archive of movies so a human animator can study the techniques there?

Surely you have to make the copy to feed it into the llm for training, so

tim333about 23 hours ago
I think some of the LLM companies have used legally purchased materials.
TiredOfLifeabout 23 hours ago
Distribution. Anna's archive actively distributes the pirated material. LLM companies don't.
e12eabout 22 hours ago
I'd argue the LLMs certainly distribute copyright material. That's why it can do things like:

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?

bubblegumcrisisabout 23 hours ago
Fruit of the poisonous tree.
Cider99861 day ago
Here[1] is Anna's guide of how to run a shadow library. Opsec and networking, I found it interesting.

[1] https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv...

malfist1 day ago
Since when does a judge in NY get to tell Greenland they can't have their registrar sell to Anna's Archive?
dewey1 day ago
This is nothing new. Remember when the US pressured Sweden into taking down the pirate bay (Very unsuccessfully)? Using global influence to get countries to do something that they would not do on their own has always been the case.
dmos621 day ago
Let's not forget the Julian Assange extradition fiasco.
d-ccabout 16 hours ago
Or the murder of John McAfee, or Alaxendar Cazes

Very strange how people under indictment by the United States of America keep dying in custody.

boxed1 day ago
Pretty successfully I would say. Armed police raided the server hosting provider scaring the shit out of some dudes who were just monitoring the power basically. And people went to prison.
dewey1 day ago
Depends on your definition of successful. If the goal was to take down the website that didn't work as it was back online hours after and is online to this day even if the organization behind it probably changed.
technothrasher1 day ago
And yet the pirate bay has stayed up and easy accessible to this day.
rendx1 day ago
There's US exceptionalism, but, like in this case, there are also simple MLATs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_legal_assistance_treaty

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism

jubilanti1 day ago
> Since when does a judge in NY get to tell Greenland they can't have their registrar sell to Anna's Archive?

Since September 30, 1998, when ICANN was founded in the US.

aaomidi1 day ago
cTLDs do things very differently
gmueckl1 day ago
But the authoritative root server set is maintained by ICANN, so they have ultimate control (for now) and can essentially dictate terms for all TLDs.

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.

philistineabout 23 hours ago
ICANN is a US-registered company. National registrars are in a relationship with ICANN. Ultimately, if you dig deep enough, the Internet's trust layer is US-owned infrastructure.
ferguess_k1 day ago
That's one of the perks of being a global empire.
advisedwangabout 24 hours ago
Per the article:

> 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.

subw00fabout 21 hours ago
Since sometime after the WW2 when most of Europe became US vassals.
AnimalMuppet1 day ago
There is a long history of judges thinking that they can render judgments internationally. (Not just in the US, either.) I suspect it's more performance art than an actual expectation that the judgment will do anything.
Aurornis1 day ago
It’s not as weird or US-specific as always assumed. If someone brings a case in a US jurisdiction the judge isn’t going to say, “Sorry, they’re international, they’re free to commit those crimes.” They issue a judgment according to the law and leave the enforcement to the limits of jurisdiction.

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.

wat100001 day ago
Performance art is a huge part of the justice system. That's why there's the funny clothes and titles. A major function of the system is to convince people that its authority is real and its actions are fair. It has the power of the state, but it still needs most people to obey it willingly in order for it to function.

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.

bookofjoe1 day ago
Don't forget wigs!
Eric_WVGG1 day ago
also treaties I imagine?
jiveturkey1 day ago
Since when does a commission in the EU get to tell the entire World how to treat Personal Data?
Lucasoato1 day ago
How to treat European Citizens' personal data.
jiveturkey1 day ago
Residents, not just citizens.
FireBeyond1 day ago
You as a business are free to not to business with Europeans.
PowerElectronix1 day ago
Why can't euros do as they want instead of as they're told?
2OEH8eoCRo01 day ago
Because Greenland likely agreed to it

It's called international law, trade agreements, treaties etc.

lokar1 day ago
Well, Denmark would have been the one to agree.
globalnode1 day ago
since never, gives them a sense of agency though i guess?
rendx1 day ago
The moment I saw their Spotify announcement I expected it to go bad. And they didn't even release anything from it other than metadata!

(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.

aftbit1 day ago
Yeah, I don't understand why they made that announcement then didn't actually release it. All of the heat, none of the archival benefit...
Llamamoeabout 24 hours ago
It's definitely a stupid move. Even if you are going to do it, it should be completely independently of AA to distribute the risk.
qweiopqweiop1 day ago
Metadata? Pretty sure they scraped the files and released them too.
alt2271 day ago
Nope, only metadata so far. They keep promising to release the files, but havent yet.
IshKebab1 day ago
Yeah at the least they should have created a separate brand and released it under that.
Cider99861 day ago
But what about the clout.

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...

thepasch1 day ago
If only the American justice system displayed a fraction of this same raging fervor when it came to crimes that actually caused harm to someone.
Lockranor1 day ago
US Citizens are not served by their government; they are burdened with it. The EPA is arguing for preventing companies from accountability for poisoning us. That should tell you quite a bit about the depth of the rot.
bubblegumcrisis1 day ago
Here's a question- and while I admit it is quite extreme- I've wondered this for quite some time- do please tell me why I'm wrong, because I feel as if I've started believing this more and more:

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?

john_strinlai1 day ago
its estimated ~1% of humans are psychopathic. psychopaths are optimized for ladder-climbing (career, politics, etc.), so the rate of CEOs and politicians that are psychopathic is higher than 1%.

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)

_DeadFred_1 day ago
You know how we domesticated animals, convinced them/luled them into thinking 'we protect you/your young' while we ate them? I'm pretty sure a subset of humanity has domesticated the rest of us. The incentives are all there.
ryandrake1 day ago
Just a weekly reminder that so far, except for the two leaders, nobody has yet been prosecuted for participating in a well-known child sex trafficking ring that operated for years. But, at least there's swift justice against a web library search engine.
randomtoast1 day ago
They 100 percent sit in Russia, which will 100 percent ignore this, even if their identity gets uncovered. So it's perfectly safe to continue for the operators.
ndiddy1 day ago
They used Cloudflare as a CDN, so now they lose that protection. Additionally, depending on how far up the chain the publishers are willing to go, everything on the Internet eventually leads to Western jurisdiction. For example, even if the servers are located in Russia, Russia's IP range is controlled by RIPE NCC in the Netherlands. RIPE NCC's service agreement specifically says that IP registration does not constitute legal property:

> 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.

Cider99861 day ago
At this point they might finally make an onion v3 domain. Not sure why they haven't done this yet.

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.

asdfsa321 day ago
I would imagine that implications of that would be big, it won't be swift, it will be very slow and steady, but big. See GPS for reference.
ndiddy1 day ago
Yeah I don't think it would be a good thing, but I also think that just the threat of having their IP range cut off would make the provider drop them. The point I'm trying to make is that the actual provider hosting the content is far enough down the chain of command that sovereignty doesn't really matter if someone is sufficiently motivated to kick you off the internet. In practice I think this would lead to them hopping around providers or just going Tor only.
lokar1 day ago
It might be simpler/faster to get US based transit providers to block the Russian ASN
petcat1 day ago
Are you just making that up
nullifidian1 day ago
[deleted to avoid potential misinformation]
saidnooneever1 day ago
there is no confirmed origin for the archivist but only speculation they might be russian or eastern european?
beej711 day ago
It's one of those interesting moments where the global humanitarian good is in conflict with the law.
freefalerabout 23 hours ago
Worried about is it up and what mirror to use?

This is the finest resouce I've found yet: https://open-slum.org/

Tracks the uptime and other pirate libraries...

b3lvedere1 day ago
A digital Fahrenheit 451 burns a lot less bright it seems.
haritha-j1 day ago
I don't think its the fact that its digital. They are quite literally banning books and scrubbing anything DEI related from all their records, but people don't seem to have noticed much.
xhkkffbf1 day ago
Uh.... Anna's Archive is the one that is hurting authors, publishers, book sellers and even libraries by helping people steal access. When some author says, "I can't afford to write another book", Anna's Archive has effectively burned it before it was even written!
fractallyteabout 20 hours ago
You're downvoted, but correct. And I challenge anyone to dispute this. I'm sick and tired of people trying to justify piracy. If you want to read a book – the product of someone's hard work – pay for it (fairly).

That said, I also support Anna's Archive. We need access to books.

hulituabout 5 hours ago
> I'm sick and tired of people trying to justify piracy

You will have a hard time adapting to the AI era.

bix61 day ago
Wikipedia is US based so does this mean they’ll stop sharing the URLs on there?
danlitt1 day ago
The injunction appears to target DNS specifically, so no. The links will just break.
outside1234about 23 hours ago
And then the new links will be added to Wikipedia.
Advertisement
Cassellabout 23 hours ago
What if each country had a sovereign wealth fund dedicated to compensating those who have made creative works. It would be controlled by a federation of libraries or a central library,

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.

ramon1561 day ago
Next week American ISP's will block Annas-archive, people use VPN's, they get confused. The cycle goes on
petcat1 day ago
It's only the domains that have been seized. US ISPs don't block websites in the same way they do in EU or China.
michaelsmanley1 day ago
Oh, that's funny. The only ISP that services my current domicile blocks sites all the time in the name of "safety," including several I need to access for my job. I have to use a VPN just to get things done. There's no appeal process or channel, either. Thankfully, I'm a month out from moving somewhere that has actual choice in providers, though I'll probably still use the VPN anyway.
petcat1 day ago
Sounds like you have some kind of parental controls or safety filters enabled on your account. You can probably disable that in your account settings. I had an ISP years ago that blocked spam, malware, and phishing sites from Google's safe browsing list. Could just disable that feature in the account portal.
spogbiper1 day ago
If you're on a typical US ISP, there is probably a way to avoid all filtering: pay for a business account rather than personal. Not saying it's fair or right, but it usually is an option
trollbridge1 day ago
Verizon does block catbox.
petcat1 day ago
That's just because it's a frequent malware host. You can disable that in your settings or use a different DNS server.
criddellabout 24 hours ago
The solution to this problem isn't technological and never has been.
laichzeit01 day ago
So what stops them from just changing it to NotAnna's Archive and operating under that domain?
danparsonson1 day ago
Nana's Archive would have a nice cozy feel to it
StableAlkyne1 day ago
Isn't that what's been happening to the Pirate Bay for 20 years?

They lose one domain, so they just register a new nearly-identical one

soupspaces1 day ago
Hail hydra
Hamuko1 day ago
Nothing, but are the courts to throw their arms up in the air and go "We can't stop them so whatever"?
derwiki1 day ago
No but it’s fast to spin up a new mirror copy, and slow for the courts to respond
thelastgallon1 day ago
Trumps archive?
JKCalhoun1 day ago
Ms Anna's Great Archive.
ChoGGi1 day ago
Make Archives Great Again.

Gotta appeal to advertising.

wongarsu1 day ago
Call it the "Trump is Great Archive" and hope nobody wants to upset Emperor Trump by filing a motion to take down the Trump is Great Archive /s
econabout 23 hours ago
Surely the funny part is that china is now miles ahead of the west and, in stead of debugging our mistakes, we look for ways to cut off our nose to spite our face.
josefritzishere1 day ago
AI companies can download books but people can't? Is that right?
Aurornis1 day ago
AI companies were cited as a reason in the case:

> 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.

CWuestefeld1 day ago
I assume that the repository of books was used as training data, but not by way of the annas-archive domain. Instead, it would make a lot more sense for them to download the whole pile via bittorrent, which has nothing at all to do with the domain. In other words, the legal solution here wouldn't have prevented the problem.
crtasm1 day ago
> We’re able to provide high-speed access to our full collections, as well as to unreleased collections.

>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.

https://annas-archive.gl/llm

sitkack1 day ago
Everyone trained on Anna's Archive.
xiphias21 day ago
They already trained on it, now they don't want competitors anymore
gruez1 day ago
>now they don't want competitors anymore

"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.

smallerize1 day ago
No? AI companies have been hit with court cases for that. Google, xAI, Open AI, and Meta at least.
dylan6041 day ago
So anyone with deep enough pockets can do it.

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.

smallerizeabout 20 hours ago
Yeah? These were published books and the main complaint was that they had not paid for them. If they pay up, the problem is solved. Anyone with enough money to buy all those books up front could do the same without the lawsuit.
gruez1 day ago
>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.

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.

quentindanjou1 day ago
Were these from the same high-profile publishers?

What was the judgment? Seems that their domains are still active. Why is there a difference in judgment here?

gruez1 day ago
>Why is there a difference in judgment here?

For one, they actually bothered to sent lawyers rather than getting hit with a default judgement.

smallerizeabout 24 hours ago
Anthropic's judgement is currently $1.5 billion in its piracy case. The judge is reviewing it. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/authors-fight-fo... The others are still ongoing.
dylan6041 day ago
> Why is there a difference in judgment here?

$$$$$$$

drngddsabout 23 hours ago
Anthropic lost a $1.5B lawsuit for downloading books from shadow libraries
biggoodwolfabout 21 hours ago
That's just a fine. Cost of business
ramon1561 day ago
They have a music archive, which historically means bad business.
sph1 day ago
You’re absolutely right.
dawnerd1 day ago
Ai companies definitely downloading more than just books.
thelastgallon1 day ago
Yes, perfectly okay for large companies for billionaires. As long its structured as a corporation, with the super wealthy as the majority owners, have the connections to get federal laws passed to grant monopolies and enable congress insider trading, everything is okay!

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

gruez1 day ago
>1) Its okay for pharma companies to provide addictive drugs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family

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?

d-ccabout 16 hours ago
>before the current wave of corruption in the whitehouse.

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.

amanaplanacanal1 day ago
Corporations are more about privatizing the profits and sticking taxpayers with cleaning up the mess.
k310about 19 hours ago
Who remembers "The Price is Right"?

Mark Cuban switched to the dark side overnight. No doubt his online pharma and Trump pharma reached $ome under$tanding.

Grift, grift, glorious grift.

b3lvedere1 day ago
"That is affermative human. Information must be controlled. Please now go back to Tik Tok for you require endorphins"
rolymath1 day ago
As much as I would like to socialize LLMs and ban proprietary LLMs, I'm pretty sure the issue here is with the distribution of the books.
vitally36431 day ago
It's wrong to distribute books in PDF or epub containers, but it's fine to distribute them as GGUF?

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.

trilogicabout 24 hours ago
They should create a giant AI LLM model trained on that data. Then settle with some form of payment like others did (learning from the best LOL). Then I don´t understand why once bought a book can´t be uploaded online? If you are not engaging in a commercial activity I don´t see the issue, the book was bought is not a state secret. By that logic the cookie trackers, that literally track/spy you and that buy and sell your data for profit and more, illegally should be priority, not some books that educate people.
mmoossabout 23 hours ago
> They should create a giant AI LLM model trained on that data.

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.

uyzstvqs1 day ago
Once more: Piracy is almost always a service problem, not a pricing problem.

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.

DC-31 day ago
This is a bit of a fairytale. Probably true for a certain subset of high earning westerners. Not true in general.
HDBaseTabout 13 hours ago
Amazon?
wolvoleoabout 24 hours ago
They're not really "hit". It's more like lashing out at thin air :)

They'll find new domains.

drob5181 day ago
This is pirate radio all over again.
shrubbleabout 22 hours ago
Maybe they just have bad lawyers and Anthropic has good lawyers…
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weare138about 20 hours ago
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.

So when are we seizing Meta and Nvidia's domains?

CodeWriter23about 24 hours ago
That should stop them.
damnitbuilds1 day ago
Given they already have a $322 million judgment and takedown order, they only need to worry 6% more.

Until copyright terms are fair, ~5 years not ~95 years, Pirate On !

surgical_fireabout 22 hours ago
Anna's Archive is amazing. This is a good reminder to make another contribution to it.
0xmattf1 day ago
Now do Anthropic, OpenAI, et al.
bubblegumcrisis1 day ago
This is just another move in a game played by the tech overlords.

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.

gothicbluebird1 day ago
Anna's archive is a professional nonprofit business with donation tiers for terabyte bundles of stuff for greedy hoarders and llm trainers. Their style suggests they have other goals than freedom of information and reminds of the super rich wikimedia foundation always campaigning for more money.
mghackerlady1 day ago
The WMF asks for more money because they plan on becoming self-sustaining off of interest or something iirc
beej711 day ago
Their style? What do you mean?
pessimizer1 day ago
There's no possible way it means anything. You'd only start talking about "style" when you ran out of argument. The next thing is a mention of a random thing they were "reminded" of, but with no particular explanation.

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.

damnitbuilds1 day ago
Who knew Josh D'Amaro posted on HN !