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

torrentfreak.com

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

#81
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Article says nobody is responding as defendant except one individual who has filed a motion to dismiss based on being misidentified. I don’t know the status of that motion though.

[flagged]

I'd be very curious about that analysis should it be publicized. Specifically: how many other people does that stylometric analysis match "with a high degree of probability"? And what measures were taken to rule out things like adversarial stylometry?

My point: stylometry alone doesn't strike me as particularly strong evidence - especially in this day and age wherein people influence each others' writing styles bidirectionally all the time.

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

#82

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.

They mean "damages" in a legal sense, not in a "broken" sense. Damages in tort law are the amount intended to make the claimant whole -- that is, to reimburse expenses incurred to protect legal rights, compensate for lost revenue, or to restore the status quo ante.

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

#83

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

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

> In November 2008, the Board of Directors of OCLC unilaterally issued a new Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat Records[66] that would have required member libraries to include an OCLC policy note on their bibliographic records; the policy caused an uproar among librarian bloggers.[67][68] Among those who protested the policy was the non-librarian activist Aaron Swartz, who believed the policy would threaten projects such as the Open Library, Zotero, and Wikipedia, and who started a petition to "Stop the OCLC powergrab".

and

> OCLC acquired NetLibrary, a provider of electronic books and textbooks, in 2002 and sold it in 2010 to EBSCO Industries.[54] OCLC owns 100% of the shares of OCLC PICA, a library automation systems and services company which has its headquarters in Leiden in the Netherlands and which was renamed "OCLC" at the end of 2007.[55] In July 2006, the Research Libraries Group (RLG) merged with OCLC.

My theory is that OCLC expanded outside of Ohio, and then the bureaucracy expanded to the point where it became self sustaining. It accidentally merged with monopolistic strains from The Netherlands and is now no different from the other knowledge ransoming entities, also in The Netherlands.

Oh man, the current president and CEO of OCLC.

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

> Prichard held executive positions with LexisNexis from 1995 to 2003. As vice president, he focused on business information and risk management solutions for corporations, libraries, and other organizations.[4]

> Prichard was general manager and senior vice president of sales and marketing at ProQuest Information and Learning, a global publisher and information provider, from April 2003 to October 2005.[4] From October 2005 to April 2007, he served as president and CEO of ProQuest.

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

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the key differences being that physical theft deprives the rightful owner of the property. It's not an analogous crime.

Of course I agree that there are some differences, but they are the same with respect to the sated role of government. Physical theft deprives the owner of physical property (where this right is respected by law. IP theft deprives the owner of intellectual property ( where this right is respected by law). People can and do make arguments against both IP and physical property, but the role of government the the same i…

Unlike physical property, "intellectual property" doesn't exist by itself. The thing that exists, the product that it is that you ostensibly "own" that is protected by the government is the copyright, a soft of reified extension of ownership, which only has any value inasmuch as the government protects it.

In other words, intellectual property is only worth what the government says it is. It doesn't just hold the gun, in this case, it contrived the whole scenario in which a gun was necessary, and the presence of the gun is the only thing that prevents the "intellectual property" from spreading naturally, as information is wont to do.

You can argue whether the creation of this market is for the greater good, but the fact is that it's not in any way the same kind of market as evolves around physical goods, and is not regulated or enforced in the same kind of way.

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

#85
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.

5 year, renewable twice to a maximum of 15 years, by registering and paying a nominal renewal fee (let's say $200), which is multiplied on the second renewal (let's say 3x or $600).

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

#86
post #42
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The above number is excluding duplicates.

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

#87
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, too much for one person, but collectively it is possible to keep it alive. If anyone wishes to help, you can generate a chunk in 1TB units and seed via BitTorrent here: https://annas-archive.gs/torrents

Honestly, if I can't have the whole thing, I'm not going to bother mirroring a 1TB fragment that's worthless by itself to everybody except copyright attorneys. As ndriscoll points out, the only feasible way to distribute an archive of this size is with physical hard drives. I sure wish they would find a reasonably-trustworthy way to offer that.

You are never going to have a physical copy of the archive. It's nearly a petabyte in size.

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

#88
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is web scraping now considered a cyberattack? Was it eating their bandwidth even if it was served through Cloudflare? LOL. We've been tobagonning down the slippery slope of "cyber" damages for a long time now.

Dang, surely this will put an end to AI training by scraping the web! Unless... perhaps such standard might not get evenly applied?

Case in point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn

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

#89
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, if I can't have the whole thing, I'm not going to bother mirroring a 1TB fragment that's worthless by itself to everybody except copyright attorneys. As ndriscoll points out, the only feasible way to distribute an archive of this size is with physical hard drives. I sure wish they would find a reasonably-trustworthy way to offer that.

You are never going to have a physical copy of the archive. It's nearly a petabyte in size.

I know several datahoarders that have at least 1PB, also archive.org grows by that much at least every day

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

#90
post #57
post #3

I feel obligated to say my usual "IP is at this point doing more harm than good" spiel here but don't have the time budget to argue it with people today

IP-intensive industries contribute 41% of the US GDP and employ 44% of the US workforce [1]. If you abolished IP all of that would go away. How would you replace that? I'm not a fan of IP either but I think it's pretty hard to escape that reality. Big companies like NVIDIA (3T market cap) are almost 100% IP. IP is more-or-less central to the US's economic and security strategy. Without it, the country loses a huge am…

this specious argument relies on conflating 'intellectual property' in the sense of 'useful knowledge and designs' with 'intellectual property' in the sense of 'legal restrictions on using knowledge and designs'. to avoid getting caught up in these word games, let's use different terms for these two concepts; for this comment, i'll use the terms 'knowledge' and 'intellectual enclosure'

when someone says 'ip is doing more harm than good' what they mean is 'intellectual enclosure is doing more harm than good'. when someone says 'ip-intensive industries contribute (...)% of the (...) gdp' what they mean is 'knowledge-intensive industries contribute (...)% of the (...) gdp'

specifically the thing that intellectual enclosure is doing harm to is those knowledge-intensive industries, who are obliged to spend large fractions of their revenues on unproductive lawsuits instead of creating and sharing knowledge. in numerous cases it has destroyed major parts of those industries; two memorable examples are digital, which created the minicomputer and much of the internet, and diamond, which created the mp3 player

but the greatest casualties are not the productive activities that are terminated by intellectual enclosure, but the productive activities that are never born. do you know why linux didn't get a crashproof filesystem with snapshots 25 years ago? it's because of netapp patents. all the damage done by accidental file deletion and crashes on linux in that time could have been avoided. do you know why today there's still no simple way for regular people to send a ten-gigabyte file across the internet? mgm vs. grokster. and for every well-known catastrophe like this, there are ten thousand that never grow big enough for us to even guess what might have been

unsurprisingly the businesses that are most profitable in the current market are using strategies that fit well with the current regulatory regime. but that does not constitute argument that the current regulatory regime is good in any way, except perhaps by the minimal criterion of not completely cratering the entire economy yet

my intellect is not your property

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