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Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

annas-archive.org

271–280 of 560 posts

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#271

remember guys, it's not pirating, it's gathering date from AI model training purposes. Perfectly legal.

I know you're joking, but what the AI training lawsuits have said so far is that training and digitizing used books that you bought is fair use, but piracy isn't.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#272
post #244

Know am going to be downvoted into oblivion, but as a composer, can see it from the side of creators. Yeah, making their products free is starving these industries. For instance, in music, there is already very little money in music (think about how many musicians you personally know who can make a living off of music, besides being a music teacher). And, the music industry is still not even the same size as it was i…

I agree with you. There's a huge sense of entitlement from people who pirate, and the most absurd set of excuses. I bet most of them would shoplift if it was consequence free. And then complain that shops were going out of business.

[flagged]

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#273
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Am I an exception? Yes, I think you're an exception, sorry. We will never have real data on this. But simply on its face, I find it extremely hard to believe that most consumers have a strong enough moral compass to go out of their way to buy something they already have access to. Maybe they will for a tiny handful of special books that they want hard copies of, or authors they really like, but not for most media t…

> I find it extremely hard to believe that most consumers have a strong enough moral compass to go out of their way to buy something they already have access to. This is zero-sum thinking. Do you oppose libraries on the same principle? Sometimes making a thing accessible can increase the overall market for the good, because it trains the behavior. The market for books requires readers, and readers are created by peop…

> Do you oppose libraries on the same principle?

No, because libraries have to buy the books! If lots of people check out a book, the library will have to buy more copies! Yes, maybe the authors loose out on some revenue, but there's a clear relationship between number of readers and the author getting paid for their work.

This is also why I thought the Internet Archive's lending lending library was great! I'm aware they got sued anyway, and I think that's a real shame.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#274
post #219
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC it was shown that piracy increases sales for books. For example, if you pirated an ebook and liked it, you'd likely buy a physical copy.

That's absurd. I could potentially believe the conclusion that piracy doesn't take away from sales (that is, most people who pirate would otherwise do without, and not buy a copy). But the idea that many/most (or even some significantly-small percentage) of people who pirate will buy copies of the things they like? No, that doesn't pass the sniff test.

Kids who don’t have pocket money won’t, but they aren’t lost sales anyway.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#275
post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is neither humorous nor strange because that formulation omits authors . How many authors who write the books in Anna's archive are happy about it? I personally am pro Anna's archive (and sci-hub, etc) because I believe it benefits society to have better-read citizens. That said, I have some misgivings, because under our current system, there are issues with law and remuneration.

IMO, Scihub and the ebook parts of AA should be considered differently and not conflated. In particular, Scihub is in opposition to the parasitic international publishers who dominate and control scientific publishing for profit, mostly on the backs of science generated by academia and other not-in-it-for-the-profit folks. In contrast, downloading ebooks may, in some cases, lead to individual authors being hit in the…

That's an excellent point. The problem cases with AA are edge cases on sci-hub.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#276

Given that big tech has been scraping everything ever written to train LLMs, are there specialized prompts to trick models into spitting out copyrighted works ?

Foundation LLMs are lossy compressed databases, you might never get the exact work back from it.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#277
post #140

I choose the books I buy, from Anna's Archive. I choose the comics I buy from readComicsOnline. I choose the [european] graphic novels I buy from #WONTTELL. And I am one of the best customers of these 3 physical shops, in my town. So sure, I don't buy the latest trends based on ads. I investigate a lot to buy GREAT stuff. Sometimes the shopkeeper has headaches to find the obscure stuff I discovered online that NOBODY…

> Am I an exception? Yes, I think you're an exception, sorry. We will never have real data on this. But simply on its face, I find it extremely hard to believe that most consumers have a strong enough moral compass to go out of their way to buy something they already have access to. Maybe they will for a tiny handful of special books that they want hard copies of, or authors they really like, but not for most media t…

You are probably right, I am not representative of the vast majority of people who consume products, whereas I collect [what I consider to be, for me] GREAT stuff.

But one of the point I also wanted to highlight is that I knew nothing about those stuff and would have had no opportunity to taste them and be convinced that they are GREAT stuff [for me].

And to come back to your comment regarding creators. The thing that I hate are creators [for example writers who are interviewed in radios] who sell their book with a marvelous speech, but the content is eventually very so/so. As a consumer I feel robbed.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, absence of evidence ≠ evidence of absence. I obviously don't have time to read a 300 page report—I wish I did—but the conclusion says: > With regard to total effects of online copyright infringements on legal transactions, there are no robustly significant findings. The strongest finding applies to films/TV-series, where a displacement rate of 27 with an error margin of roughly 36 per cent (two times t…

> The report found a lack of evidence that piracy displaces sales. This isn't true though, as they conclude a 40% displacement in blockbuster movie sales. You would need a better analysis of their methodology to dismiss their other conclusions

As far as I can tell from the conclusion, everything was within the margin of error, so my assumption is that it's random noise. If there's a place in the paper that says otherwise, please let me know what page its on. If I'm misreading the results, please let me know that as well.

Re: Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This strikes me as a bit ironic, if you're serious, as you list your current work as covering the entirety of the Beatles discography. Are you paying them for the rights?

I don't think this is a useful path to go down; there's a legal precedent for cover songs, and perhaps he did pay the fee: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/question-when-mechan...

I think GP's criticism is valid. The toplevel poster is creating work that leverages the creativity of others. Regardless of whether or not he's paid a fee to do so, it's still funny to see the indignation about sharing, when the person's current project involves using the work of others.
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