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Anna's Archive Faces Millions in Damages and a Permanent Injunction

torrentfreak.com

41–50 of 212 posts

Re: Anna's Archive Faces Millions in Damages and a Permanent Injunction

#41

What a ridiculous claim. They call computer hardware and salaries damage. I want a competent judge to make sure that these are not damages and I wish that Anna’s Archive continues to operate in sensible jurisdiction for the foreseeable future. If I had the means I would donate to them.

https://annas-archive.gs/donate

Having the means normally means the extra finances to give away vs knowing the link to their donation form

Re: Anna's Archive Faces Millions in Damages and a Permanent Injunction

#42
post #18

At this point, we need a service that "offers" an 8-bay (with 12TB? 14TB? drives) full with the whole ~80TB Anna's Archive. It's essentially all of human knowledge and to be frank it belongs to no one - rather...everyone. People can store this at their house, keep it offline. Just to have these seeds of knowledge everywhere. ...I suppose LLM's trained on this data, essentially their model weights and tokenization are…

You dropped a 0. Anna's Archive is currently 862.4 TB

That is true. However, it also has a staggering amount of duplicate data. I have _heard_ that if you search for most any particular book, you often get a dozen results of varying sizes and quality. Even for the same filetype. It's a hard problem to solve, but if we had something that could somehow pick the "best" copy of a particular title, for every title in the library, Anna could likely drop the zero herself.

Re: Anna's Archive Faces Millions in Damages and a Permanent Injunction

#44
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would we use instead?

Copyright should expire after like 15 years. Academic publishers should not exist, research - especially publically funded research - should just go straight to the public domain.

Some research is funded through private donations to a specific school, or because the team shopped their project around to find private funding directly. This goes beyond public funding which grays up that public access to the research especially when compared to something like data produced by NASA

Re: Anna's Archive Faces Millions in Damages and a Permanent Injunction

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been trying to convince people of this for years. The problem is from my view, that people have the idea of IP being some sort of the American Dream ingrained in their heads that they can't even reason about anything else.

What's a suitable replacement?

Copyright should probably grant some benefit to an author, but just the bare minimum necessary to incentivize people to actually submit their work and file for copyright (also, we should resume requiring that you actually file for copyright, as was the case before 1978). This probably means some period of exclusive monetization rights. Anyone should be able to search for and read any filed works for free from the moment they are filed, or possibly after this exclusive monopoly period.

Any additional benefits to copyright holders beyond what is needed to make sure we don't lose the works are essentially graft, no different in principle to the medieval church selling lucrative offices.

If these things are valuable only because of scarcity, then we are incentivizing scarcity by granting monopoly, so we should do as little of that as we can manage. If they are inherently valuable, they should be as widely disseminated as possible (a cost that government can easily afford given modern technology). If they are worthless, there is no harm in the government keeping a copy anyway.

Re: Anna's Archive Faces Millions in Damages and a Permanent Injunction

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://annas-archive.gs/donate

Having the means normally means the extra finances to give away vs knowing the link to their donation form

Still kind of nice to have that link thrown out here for those with the means to support their work.

Re: Anna's Archive Faces Millions in Damages and a Permanent Injunction

#47
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would we use instead?

Copyright should expire after like 15 years. Academic publishers should not exist, research - especially publically funded research - should just go straight to the public domain.

14 years was considered good enough back when it was prohibitively expensive to publish anything and worldwide distribution was basically impossible. Today, when publishing is essentially free and worldwide distribution happens at close to light speed you think we should expand copyright for another year?

I lean more towards 7-10 years, with required registration involving a DRM free copy of the work submitted to the US copyright office (where possible) who will automatically host that file for free once the copyright term has expired. There should be an RSS feed from copyright.gov with download links to the latest works entering the public domain. That'd also make it dead simple to find who you need to contact if you want to negotiate rights to use a work still under copyright's protection.

I agree that anything getting public funding should be public domain on day one (normal exceptions for national security etc)

Re: Anna's Archive Faces Millions in Damages and a Permanent Injunction

#49

Mixed feelings about the case. Sharing is the best thing that can happen to knowledge. It is great that gatekeepers lose money over this. However, the blame of the loss might burden oclc, which might have been doing a positive job. https://www.oclc.org/en/about.html

OCLC's slogan is literally "Because what is known must be shared". Them being a litigative gatekeeper is mighty hypocritical.

I don't really get their dilemma. They claim that a publicly available copy of the data on Anna’s Archive is a direct threat to their business. But the same data is freely available by going to their own worldcat.org. Any library that was satisfied with pure read access to the data was already not going to pay them money.

They allege that scraping the 2.2TB of data cost them $5 million over 2 years. That's $2 per megabyte. If the cost of providing this was the only issue surely within those two years someone would have gotten the idea to just put up an XML dump for download, or to shoot Anna's Archive an email with an offer to just send them the data as soon as it became clear that it was them.

Re: Anna's Archive Faces Millions in Damages and a Permanent Injunction

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://annas-archive.gs/donate

Having the means normally means the extra finances to give away vs knowing the link to their donation form

It an easily misunderstood idiom since the difference between the two meanings is just the definite vs indefinite article: 'the means' vs 'a means'.
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