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

torrentfreak.com

191–200 of 212 posts

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

#191
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being ambiguous as to what "China" means is both vitally important for international relations and also generally unhelpful for the purpose of clear communication. Corporate (and other) espionage notwithstanding.

there was no ambiguity in my comment; i said 'chinese companies (in both prc and roc)' to ensure that i was communicating clearly

Deliberately conflating the two, especially in discussion of US strategic interests, is not just unhelpful but makes your entire argument nonsensical.

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

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So after 15 years, I can start selling other people's movies and books? That seems odd.

Why is that odd? Do you think it's odd that Disney is selling fables that they did not come up with? Shared culture belonging to everyone used to be what was normal.

>Do you think it's odd that Disney is selling fables that they did not come up with?

I don't, anyone is free to animate their own versions of public domain material and sell it? What's weird about that? Perhaps you don't understand how copyright law functions, but Disney has no copyright in the underlying fable.

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

#193
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So after 15 years, I can start selling other people's movies and books? That seems odd.

Public domain seeming odd is a major problem.

It's the timing that seems odd.

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

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patent term is 20 years from the date of filing, and doesn't begin to run until the patent issues, which is usually years after it was filed. It's incomprehensible to me how you can seriously argue that the US patent term is too long but then should be replaced with a system that allows for an indefinite term. Do you know what a trade secret is? Trade secret already has an indefinite term. There's no reason why paten…

> Patent term is 20 years from the date of filing, and doesn't begin to run until the patent issues, which is usually years after it was filed. It's incomprehensible to me how you can seriously argue that the US patent term is too long 20 years is too long for many things where after that time the technology is no longer relevant. Remember that the entire point of intellectual property is to encourage creation in ord…

>And exponentially increasing fee does not allow an indefinite term because noone has infinite money. At some point the fee will be more than the entire global wealth.

Don't be obtuse. If 20 is too long, telling me that it can't actually be indefinite* isn't a great argument. So it can be 40 years if they pay? How is that better?!?

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

#195
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as hug correctly points out, you have accidentally made a circular argument; without the regulatory regime, the thing that 'ip theft' deprives the owner of doesn't exist in the first place so the role of government is quite different in the two cases: it creates 'intellectual property', in the sense of 'what the owner is deprived of by so-called ip theft', while physical property exists in its own right if we instead…

Physical property rights, which I strongly support, are not a law of nature. lions and tigers dont have property rights. They are a concept, but one is no more natural than another. matter exists, knowledge exists. exclusive monopoly to one or the other is no different. RE Cars: I think the analogy is apt, but you you ignore the time an effort that goes into creating one. Who would build or buy a car if someone could…

> Physical property rights, which I strongly support, are not a law of nature. lions and tigers dont have property rights. They are a concept, but one is no more natural than another.

Then why have physical property rights existed for the entirety of recorded history while intellectual property rights are a very modern invention?

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

#196
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…

> tsmc is a chinese company This part is wrong. TSMC is a Taiwanese company and as much as China's bullying behavior in the UN means most other contries do not officially recognize Taiwan, it still does not change the reality of the situation that Taiwan is independent in every way you can think of and the chines government has no more control over or benefit from TSMC than it does for an american company.

please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40915409

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

#197
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there was no ambiguity in my comment; i said 'chinese companies (in both prc and roc)' to ensure that i was communicating clearly

Deliberately conflating the two, especially in discussion of US strategic interests, is not just unhelpful but makes your entire argument nonsensical.

sigh

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

#198
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original "damages" in a lawsuit are almost always made up. They're supposed to get adjusted downward during and after the lawsuit. This is also why having a default judgement delivered against you for failing to show up generally isn't great.

They haven't even named a defendant except for some random archivist [0] they have no evidence against. I get suing John Doe for discovery and injunction purposes but how can they even be awarded damages - no show or not - without identifying the defendant. [0]

You forgot to add a link about the accused archivist, here's an article[0] about her denial of any connection to the group. (One of their arguments is that she has a github account named "anarchivist", which is a pretty sick name)

[0] https://torrentfreak.com/key-defendant-in-annas-archive-laws...

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

#199
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.

As one of their blog posts explains that's by design, they download all versions of any file. The reasoning was that some worse quality video files will have subtitles or better audio than the high quality video.

Some filtering may be possible to automate but lots of the tasks involved will have to be manual. Like merging video and audio from different sources or syncing subtitles from another file.

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

#200
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.

Most of the books are bloated PDFs. I'm slowly working on a project to reliably convert PDF to DjVu, which on average yields a highly readable document that's 33% of the original size on disk. The project is proving difficult, as the tooling for DjVu is quite moldy now, and often needs to be manually reviewed to ensure the file remains readable. Pdf2djvu exists, but it's highly unreliable, and thus can't be used in bulk. Other ebook formats are XML-based and tend to be similarly bloated due to the overhead of the markup. It's a hard problem with so little in the way of good file format choices.
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