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.
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.
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.
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.
Libraries serve a lot purpose than you are giving credit for.
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.
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).
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!
> I have to moderate my book-purchasing to avoid over-spending.
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.
The price for that storage system will be far more dominated by drive prices than by the cost of the NAS box itself. Drive prices have approximately doubled in my area vs. 2 years ago.
This is also generally a selfish attitude where you personally benefit while structures that used to benefit society at large are eroded.
> price for that storage system will be far more dominated by drive prices...doubled in my area vs. 2 years ago.
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)
So we're at $1150+$3120 = $4270 for one library.
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.
You know what, 112TB starts to feel like not that much, when we look at the size of some of the libraries out there.
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
If a techie makes $150K, that's about 0.6%-2% of income, if we forget taxes (sales or income) entirely.
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.
The same argument could be made about any public service. Certainly, if libraries were funded to the tune of $1000 for every household, they would be very different places.
And you'll have your nice library and can read whenever you want from the comfort of your own home, and while most people will pirate shit libraries can be great for making things accessible without a $60/month mobile charge, especially when people can't afford shelter.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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?
I think the practical difference is that the rates that publishers charge libraries for ebooks are significantly higher than what either consumers pay for the ebook or what a physical book costs. See https://archive.is/Ha3VQ for one example:
> 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.)
One complication with e-books and e-audiobooks (as opposed to on CD) is that since you do NOT have to go in to "get" the book there's really no penalty for putting yourself on the waiting list, and it's long, and I've "checked out" more than one e-book that I never read (it had to be "returned" before I could begin).
The difference is that the books value, even reprints, become lower over time. Until they hit a minimum margin for the construction of said 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?
> Is there really a meaningful distinction between how libraries treat digital book licenses and physical books when you actually hit reality?
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.
My library was recently asking for donations and they said the reason is more people are loaning out digital books which are significantly more expensive. I don't recall the details on the flyer though.
They sell them at the end of their life, sometimes, so you recoup a bit of the cost there. And you can also get books donated which reduces the up front cost.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 ?
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.
Also if I were to guess the damages because of sci hub is higher than Anthropic training the models. I don't think I know anyone who didn't bought a book because the summary is available or they can ask about it to AI.
All AI companies should be forced to re-train their models without the offending materials, and this should also extend to all LLMs distilled from models exposed to copyrighted works. Also cover code under licences such as GPL as well. Not to mention patents and designs. This whole LLM business is a giant IP laundromat.
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.
Do you happen to have an example? The closest I can think of is adobe for images, but I've never heard of a text based llm trained purely on legally acquired books.
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.
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.
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.
To those in the know, it's not really uncommon knowledge.
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.
> 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.
> your vendors are likely neurocompromised as well.
Much of the drug trade is ran less than consensually, as is common knowledge.
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.
To be clear, your claim is that 'much of the drug trade is r[u]n less than consensually' via some kind of undocumented, unknown-to-most brain implant that can be used to remotely torture people for non-compliance?
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.
>At some point, one of those people would definitely have had a CT or an MRI on their skull
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.
There is a long history of militant and/or criminal (what's the difference) usage of adversarially designed brain-computer interfaces that you will not find documented.
Unless you have proper clearance or are involved with one of the parties propagating them, anyway.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I don't know, why do you follow the laws of the US? (Bear in mind, I live in the US, though I was born in Scotland.) Something something as enacted by democratically elected representatives something something.
There are only three primary global empires right now: Russia, China, and Pax Judaica (Israel and its vassal state, the USA). Europe does not fall under the influence of Russia or China to the same degree as the third one. The EU is a rudderless ship due to weak leadership and energy starvation.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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)
I wonder about the "psychopathy-sensing special abilities" being "conspiracy territory."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At least with scientific articles, the authors get precisely zero of the money that people pay for them. As for publishers, why should they be getting billions of dollars for putting up a PDF file on a website?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Which is interesting. What if they had proof of US AI companies paying them (AA) for sourcing “high quality collections we don’t have yet”? Procurement of an illegal act is an illegal act. Might this be enough to garner some legal cover from their presumably well-heeled customers?
"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.
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.
That's not always how things work. If you attempt to build something without a permit, the inspector will break out a can of spray paint and mark materials so you cannot resell or use them after getting a permit. That's on top of any fines. If you do get a permit, you have to buy all of that material again. Building a fence too high will see you having to take down that fence.
Some places not in tech actually have ways of dealing with "disruptors"
>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.
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!
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.
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
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Libraries serve a lot purpose than you are giving credit for.
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.
>Not everyone is willing to pirate books,
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.
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).
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"
> I have to moderate my book-purchasing to avoid over-spending.
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.
The price for that storage system will be far more dominated by drive prices than by the cost of the NAS box itself. Drive prices have approximately doubled in my area vs. 2 years ago.
This is also generally a selfish attitude where you personally benefit while structures that used to benefit society at large are eroded.
> price for that storage system will be far more dominated by drive prices...doubled in my area vs. 2 years ago.
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:
So we're at $1150+$3120 = $4270 for one library.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
---
You know what, 112TB starts to feel like not that much, when we look at the size of some of the libraries out there.Averaged over 5 years (though it's not) these are:
If a techie makes $150K, that's about 0.6%-2% of income, if we forget taxes (sales or income) entirely.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.
The same argument could be made about any public service. Certainly, if libraries were funded to the tune of $1000 for every household, they would be very different places.
And you'll have your nice library and can read whenever you want from the comfort of your own home, and while most people will pirate shit libraries can be great for making things accessible without a $60/month mobile charge, especially when people can't afford shelter.
> 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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> even though they seem to largely be little more than daytime homeless shelters and free internet for perverts
And, of course you know this to be objectively true and hence can produce a valid source for your claim?
> They don't share much
Why not?
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.
> 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.
It’s not a bad thing at all, and I think libraries do need to evolve, even if in sad that they’re doing so.
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.
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.
it's gotten scary out there for purveyors of truth and knowledge. book burnings, banning, retributive use of the judicial system, etc..
Well, that's where digital goods differ from physical goods. But it's also why piracy != theft.
> 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.
Are you in the United States? Many libraries loan digital goods, e.g., books, music, movies, and even software.
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.
>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.
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?
I think the practical difference is that the rates that publishers charge libraries for ebooks are significantly higher than what either consumers pay for the ebook or what a physical book costs. See https://archive.is/Ha3VQ for one example:
> 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.)
One complication with e-books and e-audiobooks (as opposed to on CD) is that since you do NOT have to go in to "get" the book there's really no penalty for putting yourself on the waiting list, and it's long, and I've "checked out" more than one e-book that I never read (it had to be "returned" before I could begin).
The difference is that the books value, even reprints, become lower over time. Until they hit a minimum margin for the construction of said 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 difference it's that in the physical case the choice is up to the library, in the other it's forced upon them by the publisher.
> Is there really a meaningful distinction between how libraries treat digital book licenses and physical books when you actually hit reality?
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.
My library was recently asking for donations and they said the reason is more people are loaning out digital books which are significantly more expensive. I don't recall the details on the flyer though.
They sell them at the end of their life, sometimes, so you recoup a bit of the cost there. And you can also get books donated which reduces the up front cost.
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.
It really comes back to IP law. In the past, the idea was you own the content for 20-30 years and then after that... It is owned by all of society.
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.
1) library has control of the decision-making; 2) they can resell or donate the book when it's exhausted its shelf-life
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...
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.
can I donate my ebook to them?
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.
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.
I pirate everything. I pay nothing. I have both DRM free and cost free. This is the best of both worlds.
> 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.
That's exactly what jonhohle was talking about -_-
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
It’s crazier to me that a number of Anthropic managers and executives aren’t in prison.
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 ?
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
Showing up is a trap for Anna - who doesn't have 5 billion dollars to settle.
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.
Justice should not depend on whether the aggrieved appears in court. That's a structural weakness of US law.
is there a country where if you don't show up to court you don't lose by default?
Exactly, how can you credibly mount a defence if you're unwilling to appear? Your defence is that, yours.
You cant mount defence if you dont have tons of money. If you are not super rich and can stay anonymous, showing up to money combat is just dumb.
Supposing that to be true... Does justice depend on what every other country is doing?
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Uh, aren't you confirming his opinion with that? After all, Anna doesn't have the money to fight this in court
No. Anthropic fought and paid $1.5 billion in settlement and agreed to delete all the copyrighted material.
I'm confused here, how is this not even more of a confirmation?
Essentially: have funny amounts of money and the law ceases to matter. Or don't, and be squashed by the right holders
$1.5 billion is more than $19.5 million though.
Also if I were to guess the damages because of sci hub is higher than Anthropic training the models. I don't think I know anyone who didn't bought a book because the summary is available or they can ask about it to AI.
Delete? Wasn’t that material already used to train models?
All AI companies should be forced to re-train their models without the offending materials, and this should also extend to all LLMs distilled from models exposed to copyrighted works. Also cover code under licences such as GPL as well. Not to mention patents and designs. This whole LLM business is a giant IP laundromat.
One of the best things about it IMO -- or we'd be spending the next hundred years waiting for copyright reform
"Deleting" data they already ingested is meaningless.
well i guess its copyright not distill-statistical-model-from-it-rights.
Anthropic knows they could just pay off the aggrieved party.
The operators of Anna's know they will go to prison.
A couple of millions are enough to grant you special treatment. Especially when you know where to "invest" some of them.
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.
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
I think some of the LLM companies have used legally purchased materials.
Do you happen to have an example? The closest I can think of is adobe for images, but I've never heard of a text based llm trained purely on legally acquired books.
There's stuff here on Anthropic https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1lkv2r9/anthropic_de...
Distribution. Anna's archive actively distributes the pirated material. LLM companies don't.
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?
Fruit of the poisonous tree.
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...
Since when does a judge in NY get to tell Greenland they can't have their registrar sell to Anna's Archive?
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.
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.
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.
And yet the pirate bay has stayed up and easy accessible to this day.
Let's not forget the Julian Assange extradition fiasco.
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.
You really think he got murdered?
To those in the know, it's not really uncommon knowledge.
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.
> 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.
> your vendors are likely neurocompromised as well.
What in the world are you talking about.
Much of the drug trade is ran less than consensually, as is common knowledge.
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.
To be clear, your claim is that 'much of the drug trade is r[u]n less than consensually' via some kind of undocumented, unknown-to-most brain implant that can be used to remotely torture people for non-compliance?
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.
>At some point, one of those people would definitely have had a CT or an MRI on their skull
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.
You understand how this sounds, right? It’s very “I totally have a girlfriend but she lives in Canada and is a model” vibes.
Do you have literally any proof? Otherwise, this is all just a silly made up story as far as I’m concerned.
Post some links, or keywords.
There is a long history of militant and/or criminal (what's the difference) usage of adversarially designed brain-computer interfaces that you will not find documented.
Unless you have proper clearance or are involved with one of the parties propagating them, anyway.
> There is a long history [...] that you will not find documented.
Then how do you know about it? This sounds extremely made up.
I've literally experienced torture first hand.
It's not just the drug trade, and torture isn't even the primary focus of the technology.
What torture did you experience, by whom and why?
> Have control over somebody else's organism
What does that even mean? Are you an InfoWars fan? lol
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
> 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.
cTLDs do things very differently
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.
So far root servers haven’t done stuff to ccTLDs
But they can if they want, which is what power is.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Don't forget wigs!
For some unfathomable reason, American judges don't wear wigs.
also treaties I imagine?
That's one of the perks of being a global empire.
Since sometime after the WW2 when most of Europe became US vassals.
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.
Since when does a commission in the EU get to tell the entire World how to treat Personal Data?
How to treat European Citizens' personal data.
Residents, not just citizens.
You as a business are free to not to business with Europeans.
Why can't euros do as they want instead of as they're told?
I don't know, why do you follow the laws of the US? (Bear in mind, I live in the US, though I was born in Scotland.) Something something as enacted by democratically elected representatives something something.
There are only three primary global empires right now: Russia, China, and Pax Judaica (Israel and its vassal state, the USA). Europe does not fall under the influence of Russia or China to the same degree as the third one. The EU is a rudderless ship due to weak leadership and energy starvation.
Because Greenland likely agreed to it
It's called international law, trade agreements, treaties etc.
Well, Denmark would have been the one to agree.
since never, gives them a sense of agency though i guess?
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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.
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...
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.
Yeah at the least they should have created a separate brand and released it under that.
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...
Metadata? Pretty sure they scraped the files and released them too.
Nope, only metadata so far. They keep promising to release the files, but havent yet.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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)
I wonder about the "psychopathy-sensing special abilities" being "conspiracy territory."
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.
There was a study about 4% psycho-whatever in politics.
https://archive.org/details/psychopathcode/psychopathcode deserves a mention here
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think if RIPE tries to force their hand without Russian courts, it will be the start of the end of the Global Web as we know it.
It might be simpler/faster to get US based transit providers to block the Russian ASN
Are you just making that up
[deleted to avoid potential misinformation]
there is no confirmed origin for the archivist but only speculation they might be russian or eastern european?
It's one of those interesting moments where the global humanitarian good is in conflict with the law.
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...
A digital Fahrenheit 451 burns a lot less bright it seems.
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.
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At least with scientific articles, the authors get precisely zero of the money that people pay for them. As for publishers, why should they be getting billions of dollars for putting up a PDF file on a website?
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.
> I'm sick and tired of people trying to justify piracy
You will have a hard time adapting to the AI era.
AI companies can download books but people can't? Is that right?
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.
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.
> 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
Which is interesting. What if they had proof of US AI companies paying them (AA) for sourcing “high quality collections we don’t have yet”? Procurement of an illegal act is an illegal act. Might this be enough to garner some legal cover from their presumably well-heeled customers?
We at least have proof of US AI Companies buying access to AA in general. [0]
[0] - https://torrentfreak.com/nvidia-contacted-annas-archive-to-s...
Everyone trained on Anna's Archive.
They already trained on it, now they don't want competitors anymore
>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.
No? AI companies have been hit with court cases for that. Google, xAI, Open AI, and Meta at least.
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.
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.
That's not always how things work. If you attempt to build something without a permit, the inspector will break out a can of spray paint and mark materials so you cannot resell or use them after getting a permit. That's on top of any fines. If you do get a permit, you have to buy all of that material again. Building a fence too high will see you having to take down that fence.
Some places not in tech actually have ways of dealing with "disruptors"
>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.
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?
>Why is there a difference in judgment here?
For one, they actually bothered to sent lawyers rather than getting hit with a default judgement.
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.
> Why is there a difference in judgment here?
$$$$$$$
Anthropic lost a $1.5B lawsuit for downloading books from shadow libraries
That's just a fine. Cost of business
They have a music archive, which historically means bad business.
You’re absolutely right.
Ai companies definitely downloading more than just books.
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
>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?
>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.
Corporations are more about privatizing the profits and sticking taxpayers with cleaning up the mess.
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.
"That is affermative human. Information must be controlled. Please now go back to Tik Tok for you require endorphins"
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.
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.
Wikipedia is US based so does this mean they’ll stop sharing the URLs on there?
The injunction appears to target DNS specifically, so no. The links will just break.
And then the new links will be added to Wikipedia.
Next week American ISP's will block Annas-archive, people use VPN's, they get confused. The cycle goes on
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.
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.
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.
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
Verizon does block catbox.
That's just because it's a frequent malware host. You can disable that in your settings or use a different DNS server.
It still counts as a block.
A trivial block that is opt-in...
Go to your Verizon account -> Safe Browsing -> Uncheck all the content filters you don't want.
The solution to this problem isn't technological and never has been.
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.
So what stops them from just changing it to NotAnna's Archive and operating under that domain?
Nana's Archive would have a nice cozy feel to it
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
Hail hydra
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_permanence
Nothing, but are the courts to throw their arms up in the air and go "We can't stop them so whatever"?
No but it’s fast to spin up a new mirror copy, and slow for the courts to respond
Trumps archive?
Ms Anna's Great Archive.
Make Archives Great Again.
Gotta appeal to advertising.
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
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
This is a bit of a fairytale. Probably true for a certain subset of high earning westerners. Not true in general.
Amazon?
They're not really "hit". It's more like lashing out at thin air :)
They'll find new domains.
This is pirate radio all over again.
Maybe they just have bad lawyers and Anthropic has good lawyers…
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 !
That should stop them.
Anna's Archive is amazing. This is a good reminder to make another contribution to it.
Now do Anthropic, OpenAI, et al.
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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.
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.
The WMF asks for more money because they plan on becoming self-sustaining off of interest or something iirc
Their style? What do you mean?
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.
Who knew Josh D'Amaro posted on HN !