Ask HN: Has anybody built search on top of Anna's Archive?

Post by DaSHacka » Wed, Jun 04, 2025, 4:42 PM UTC

Aachen wrote: post #86

bbor wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. It'd be for the scientific community (broadly-construed). Converting media that is currently completely un-indexed into plaintext and offering a suite of search features for finding content within it would be a game-changer, IMO! If you've ever done a lit review for any field other than ML, I'm guessing you know how reliant many fields are on relatively-old books and articles (read: PDFs at best, paper-only at wor…

> I really don't see how this could ever lead to any kind of legal issue. You're not hosting any of the content itself, just offering a search feature for it. You don't need to host copyrighted material. It's all about intent . The Pirate Bay is (imo correctly, even if I disagree with other aspects about copyright law and its enforcement) seen as a place where people go to find ways to not pay authors for their conte…

Post by gosub100 » Wed, Jun 04, 2025, 4:51 PM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #94

executesorder66 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or some other country that doesn't respect international copyright though. Like the US? OpenAI et al. don't give a shit.

> > or some other country that doesn't respect international copyright though. > Like the US? OpenAI et al. don't give a shit. OpenAI is not a country and therefore cannot make laws that don't respect international (or domestic) copyright. Also the US is a lot bigger than OpenAI and the big tech corps, and the law is very much on the side of copyright holders in the US.

Post by r14c » Wed, Jun 04, 2025, 4:59 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #62

executesorder66 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or some other country that doesn't respect international copyright though. Like the US? OpenAI et al. don't give a shit.

There's a difference between feeding massive amounts of copyrighted material to a training process that blends them thoroughly and irreversibly, and doing all that in-house, vs. offering people a service that indexes (and possibly partially rehosts) that material, enabling and encouraging users to engage directly in pirating concrete copyrighted works.

Post by echollama » Wed, Jun 04, 2025, 5:01 PM UTC

exe34 wrote: post #52

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs already use it, dude )

I think one use would be to search for information directly from a book, rather than get a garbled/half-hallucinated version of it.

Post by gosub100 » Wed, Jun 04, 2025, 5:22 PM UTC

simgt wrote: post #14

Related question, has Anna's archive been thoroughly filtered for non-copyright-related illegal material? Pedo, terrorism, etc. I've considered downloading a few chunks of it but I'm worried of ending up with content I really don't want to be anywhere near from.