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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

#151

Post by kragen »

computerfriend wrote: post #121
kragen wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in the case you mention, the geopolitical considerations run strongly counter to what you suggest chinese policymakers can loosen domestic restrictions on innovation such as copyright and patent laws; then the laws in the us will only restrict us companies like nvidia. in large part this has happened, which is a major reason chinese companies (in both prc and roc) have become the leading organizations in a wide varie…

In sentences like "The last thing the US wants to see is for China to close the technology gap on this stuff", China is referring to the PRC. In sentences like "you may not be aware of this, but tsmc is a chinese company", China is referring to Taiwan. It is disingenuous to conflate these.

conflating them has been the official policy of both prc and taiwan since the prc was founded, as well as of the un, and it shows little sign of changing. in day-to-day life, there is an enormous flow of money, technical information, hardware, and skilled workers back and forth between taipei and shenzhen. taipei is a 20-minute flight away from fuzhou. the idea of maintaining a 'technology gap' between the prc and the roc is more wishful thinking, like the idea of maintaining a technology gap between california and washington, or between france and germany. i mean, at least france and germany speak different languages

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

#153

Post by red-iron-pine »

gmerc wrote: post #123
freehorse wrote: post #65

This is the most ridiculous lawsuit ever. How is scrapping publicly available data "hacking"? How is less than 2TB of total bandwidth amount to millions of dollars of damage? Something is off here. Maybe there is some other motivation behind this, like drawing some legal representative of Anna's archive out? It makes no sense otherwise. Considering that high ranking officers of OCLC (taking a look over their executiv…

It’s great. Maybe we can turn it against OpenAI as established precedent if it happens

Careful, there may be 2nd order effects there.

And that's also a "maybe" -- ruling could go the other way and get even worse.

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

#154

Post by vundercind »

udev4096 wrote: post #140
vundercind wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High-transfer users can easily pay tens of thousands a month to a CDN. And not even that high an amount of transfer, even. Not like Steam or someone like that. Cloudflare also offers other services and likes to bundle them with their enterprise accounts. They don’t really compete on transfer costs vs other decent CDNs. They prefer you’re using lots of their stuff than just watching the meter every month. They may hav…

Why not rent servers from hetzner or ovh for a lot less and setup a CDN of their own? Or is it difficult to do that?

TL;DR actually delivering serious quantities of bits to clients globally is kinda hard and costs real money.

The just-rent-servers scheme presents the following issues:

1) Won’t get you anywhere near as good a network of globally-distributed servers. [edit] I mean, maybe, but at that point you’re looking at a fair amount of cost in vendor management—you’ll probably need several hosting providers to even approach it.

2) You need minimum three good full-time ops people to build and support such a thing. What’s the salary on that over two years? Even with Polish salaries or what have you, it’s cheaper, but not cheap. Let’s say $300,000 fully-loaded cost over two years, just for a nice round number, for three ops/sysadmin sorts. Even in cheaper markets, that may be underestimating what it’d take. Halfway there already, and you haven’t rented servers or rack space yet. I’m not gonna claim that your infra will also work far less well and break more often than Cloudflare, because sometimes these sorts of set-ups do end up being rather stable because they can be far simpler and smaller-scale than an as-a-service product, but that is a risk if it’s not done quite well.

3) Server providers may drop you if you get too expensive. Get DDOS’d too much, just use their bandwidth too heavily but within your nominal limits. It’s a risk.

4) Those rented servers do cost money, and add to the operations salaries costs above. Buy servers? Also money, and now you need to rent rack space and bandwidth.

5) Peering agreements for server hosts are sometimes bad. It’s hard to know whether yours is bad until you do something at-scale on it and see support tickets roll in for consistently dial-up speeds for clients who really ought to be seeing better than that. This info doesn’t make service comparison spec sheets.

6) CDNs have usually put in some effort to solve e.g. China deliverability. You’re starting from scratch as far as political difficulties go.

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

#155

Post by toast0 »

ASalazarMX wrote: post #12

They're just piling on anything they can regardless of reason. A real damage count would be lost sales due to web scraping, but they don't sell anything. > For example, the organization spent $1,548,693 on upgrades for its hardware infrastructure, and an additional $608,069 for a two-year Cloudflare contract [..] Other costs include the salaries of 34 full-time employees, who were tasked with mitigating the harm caus…

>> and an additional $608,069 for a two-year Cloudflare contract

> Was it eating their bandwidth even if it was served through Cloudflare? LOL.

On the paid plans, I think Cloudflare charges for bandwidth. Also, you still need to pay for bandwidth from the origin to Cloudflare. And if it's scraping, it's likely to be a lot of cache misses that need to go to the origin.

> Is web scraping now considered a cyberattack?

I've run sites that attract scraping... Aggressive scapers can effectively DoS a server; and if they're trying to get around rate limits, that can look like a DDoS.

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

#156

Post by freejazz »

gbear605 wrote: post #135
tivert wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The best model I've seen for patents is increasingly escalating renewal fees for periodic terms. Such as get the first 5 years for very limited fees, every 5 years (up to some max such as 30) require 2-5x to renew or the patent expires. The exponentially increasing fees limit the hoarding of patents without direct economic benefits, but the high cost means you are able to provide offsetting social benefits while st…

If the scale is exponential, it becomes billions of dollars to keep a patent after a couple decades. Then trillions, at some point after which they’ve decided to give up the patent. Many companies are rich, but they aren’t infinitely rich.

Patents already have a limited term, why would we want this in a policy?

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

#157

Post by richie_adler »

computerfriend wrote: post #122
freehorse wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IP is more-or-less central to the US's economic and security strategy. Without it, the country loses a huge amount of power and influence in the world. Good?

One loss is another's gain.

The numerous countries submerged in misery due to US intervention certainly would welcome a lessening of its power.

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

#158

Post by CamperBob2 »

squigz wrote: post #138
CamperBob2 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In any case, if you're okay with that, you should do it. Please report back in 6 months with how it's going. Point being, if I tried to torrent the whole thing, it probably would take 6 months, and would likely get me booted from my ISP and/or sued. I would much rather buy a set of hard drives with the contents already loaded. Or tapes, as userbinator suggests. (And as for the hypothetical "average person" you keep c…

> I would much rather buy a set of hard drives with the contents already loaded. Or tapes, as userbinator suggests. And my point is that this is an absurd suggestion. I shouldn't have to explain why a shadow library shouldn't be selling (tens of) thousands of dollars worth of hard drives containing pirated content. Beyond that, and what I was getting at earlier, is that maintaining a 1PB storage array at home isn't e…

I shouldn't have to explain why a shadow library shouldn't be selling (tens of) thousands of dollars worth of hard drives containing pirated content.

Depends on what their goal is. I shouldn't have to explain why a "library" that's operating illegally in virtually every jurisdiction, with few or no complete mirrors, is vulnerable to being shut down by a small number of governmental or judicial entities.

If I were running the archive, not being a single point of interdiction would be high on my list of priorities. Especially when any number of people are indeed willing and able to keep 1 PB+ of content in circulation, samizdat-style. I would work to find these people, put them in touch with each other, and help them.

Beyond that, and what I was getting at earlier, is that maintaining a 1PB storage array at home isn't exactly easy, or cheap.

Not everything that's worth doing is easy or cheap, or otherwise suited to "average people." Again, I don't know where you're coming from here. What's your interest in the subject, exactly?

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

#159

Post by jacobr1 »

freejazz wrote: post #156
gbear605 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the scale is exponential, it becomes billions of dollars to keep a patent after a couple decades. Then trillions, at some point after which they’ve decided to give up the patent. Many companies are rich, but they aren’t infinitely rich.

Patents already have a limited term, why would we want this in a policy?

The term is too long. This changes it from a fixed term, to a use-it-or-lose-it oriented policy.

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

#160

Post by jerojero »

freejazz wrote: post #156
gbear605 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the scale is exponential, it becomes billions of dollars to keep a patent after a couple decades. Then trillions, at some point after which they’ve decided to give up the patent. Many companies are rich, but they aren’t infinitely rich.

Patents already have a limited term, why would we want this in a policy?

Current term is something like 70 years after the death of the author.

It's simply too long for a world that moves this fast.

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