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Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

annas-archive.org

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

#301

Post by CamperBob2 »

dns_snek wrote: post #131
crazygringo wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Authors and rights holders are supposed to just take it? If it's judged as fair use, then yes. And then it's not flouting anything. Remember the whole point of fair use is to benefit society by allowing reuse of material in ways that don't directly copy large portions of the material verbatim. For example, nonfiction authors already "just take it" when reviews describe the main points of their book without paying t…

> Remember the whole point of fair use is to benefit society by allowing reuse of material in ways that don't directly copy large portions of the material verbatim. That's a rather bastardized and twisted representation of copyright and fair use. The "whole point" of copyright was to promote the authorship of original creative works by legally protecting the financial income of those authors. The "whole point" of fai…

If wildly optimistic predictions of LLM proponents turn out to be correct then they will never buy a book again, they will have no reason to. And this is precisely what the copyright was designed to protect authors against.

And under those circumstances, your opinion is that copyrighted books should continue to exist, with full legal protection?

How could anyone, including the authors, possibly benefit from an obsolete paradigm like that? At that hypothetical point, your attachment to legacy copyright law would arguably hold back human progress as a whole, not just impede a few greedy corporations from training models on illegally-downloaded books.

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

#303

Post by xandrius »

brianstorms wrote: post #174

Fuck that site. Offers people links to free PDF downloads of my book that I worked on for 32 years and finally got published by Pantheon Books in 2017. I didn't work all that fucking time for criminals like these to just break copyright law and make the book available for free. Fuck Anna's Archive, and I hope they go down in legal flames ASAP.

[flagged]

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

#304

Post by aidenn0 »

lolive wrote: 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…

It's complicated.

Many years ago, I was involved in a movie release group. Pretty much everybody in that group owned more VHSs/DVDs than the typical person. This is probably not surprising, since the time and effort one needs to put into that is rather large.

Those who only downloaded were more of a mixed bag; some of them were not in the US and might not be able to see a domestic release of the movies any time soon. Some proudly claimed that they never bought any media because paying for it when you could pirate was for losers.

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

#305

Post by neilv »

skeaker wrote: post #226
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the video piracy thread had a lot of justification to the effect of 'the people that work on these shows/movies don't get paid enough anyways, so it's ok for me to pirate'. Wait, so you think they should get paid more for their work, this what they do is worth being paid for, just not by you? Weirdest flex.

You've just made this person that you're arguing against up.

No, I've absolutely seen that argument made online as justification for music and movie piracy, many times, for many years.

People rationalizing aren't mental giants. Piracy is generally by people who want free stuff. Not by philosophers who arrived at piracy through some line of reasoning other than wanting free stuff.

The dialogue in the space is what you'd expect.

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

#306

Post by pdabbadabba »

anigbrowl wrote: post #136
pdabbadabba wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in the US, claiming that you are a nonprofit implies that contributions are tax deductible. Claiming that you are a nonprofit when contributions are not tax deductible might be considered fraudulent.

Not true. There are different classes of nonprofit and they are not all tax deductible. Some nonprofits opt to forgo pursuing that status because it involves a lot of extra administration/filing requirements.

You're responding to a different point than the one I made. It's true that being a "nonprofit" doesn't logically entail that donations will be tax decudtible. But it still implies it to potential donors. The former is a matter of logic, the latter is a matter of psychology. Both are relevant.

Yes, there are multiple classes of nonprofit, not all of which are tax deductible. But it is also true that holding yourself out to the public as a "nonprofit" has the potential to mislead because it may imply to potential donors that contributions would be tax deductible. That is why responsible (or at least well advised) nonprofits disclose which they are, because claiming you're a "nonprofit" in marketing materials, without further explanation, can mislead potential donors.

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

#307

Post by ilikegreen »

computerdork wrote: post #202

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 think a lot has happened since the 90's, and you rightfully point out that there was very little money in music to begin with. Labels generally always took a very large fraction of a physical CD sale, for example, so the model was rather rigged from the beginning (and recorded music doesn't have that long of a history, anyway).

In general, I'd argue that Spotify will be more toxic to the industry (or the artists' livelihood) than piracy. Streaming is even more predatory and centralized than labels in the 90's, but with an important caveat: it's legal. When people engage in piracy there is at least some awareness of, say, the pirate being at fault in the transaction — even though, as someone else already mentioned, people who pirate might contribute, or engage in other ways, with the creators. But with streaming, it got normalized to pay artists a fraction of a cent per stream (and the terms get progressively worse). I've countless times heard the argument "at least they get paid something!"

Bandcamp, for example, seems like a much fairer ideal for the industry. Luckily, the Epic buyout a few years ago did not immediately ruin the business.

As for the music in the 90's...music has changed. Naturally, one could argue that these are also exciting times: one can singlehandedly produce a record, distribute it independently, and be touring all over Europe without ever having to sign off to a major label. Is this not a good thing — or at least, a notable one? Of course, there's still great music around.

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

#308

Post by alfalfasprout »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #301
dns_snek wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remember the whole point of fair use is to benefit society by allowing reuse of material in ways that don't directly copy large portions of the material verbatim. That's a rather bastardized and twisted representation of copyright and fair use. The "whole point" of copyright was to promote the authorship of original creative works by legally protecting the financial income of those authors. The "whole point" of fai…

If wildly optimistic predictions of LLM proponents turn out to be correct then they will never buy a book again, they will have no reason to. And this is precisely what the copyright was designed to protect authors against. And under those circumstances, your opinion is that copyrighted books should continue to exist, with full legal protection? How could anyone, including the authors, possibly benefit from an obsole…

You say it's human progress. Many, many others would disagree.

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

#309

Post by tokai »

senderista wrote: post #278
tokai wrote: post #267

SciDB DOI lookup has given me dud after dud recently with newer publications. Anyone else experiencing the same?

I think they've paused uploading since 2021 or so, due to the pending case in India.

That is Sci-Hub. "Sci-Hub has paused uploading of new papers. SciDB is a continuation of Sci-Hub" from the AA front page.

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

#310

Post by iLoveOncall »

vixen99 wrote: post #232
mavamaarten wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right? I mean I love what they're doing. But at the same time please, stop claiming to be holy angels trying to build an archive for historical purposes. You're a terrific piracy site, period.

What is it then that they love doing? Is there a long-term thrill in being a piracy site? I don't think so. No truth in the angel story but they do say "it aims to "catalog all the books in existence" and "track humanity's progress toward making all these books easily available in digital form".

> What is it then that they love doing?

They're earning a fuck ton of money, that's what they're doing.

Just like megaupload back in the days, they sell premium accounts for fast download speeds and no queue.

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