Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team • Hacker News Board

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

#311

Post by alfalfasprout » Mon, Aug 18, 2025, 8:59 PM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #175

Night_Thastus wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the whole point of fair use is to benefit society I'll stop you right there - I really don't think that applies at all. Does 'society' really benefit when the whole thing is a funnel for enormous amounts of wealth to go to already-gigantic companies like Microsoft?

Yes, if it helps me get my own job done more effectively, efficiently, and economically. That's how our society works. You and I benefit from this, too, not just Microsoft. If you don't like it, there's a process for changing how it works, but don't expect an easy path to success. Various people will object, and will have to be won over to your way of thinking.

> If you don't like it, there's a process for changing how it works

Except the converse is true. Copyright law today governs how fair use works and even so, how material can be obtained, licensed, etc. To change it to explicitly allow what you're suggesting would require changing copyright law.

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

#312

Post by whimsicalism » Mon, Aug 18, 2025, 9:02 PM UTC

baq wrote: post #258

jancsika wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satoshi's pride: * ability to fund shadow libraries without fear of censorship * lists with a single item still count as lists

> ability to fund shadow libraries without fear of censorship Bitcoin is much worse than cash in that regard

sure except for all the reasons cash doesn’t work for this

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

#313

Post by Wowfunhappy » Mon, Aug 18, 2025, 9:04 PM UTC

gspencley wrote: post #206

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #165

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…

> But I flat out don't believe the "piracy doesn't lead to lost sales" shtick, of course it does. I'm not as certain as you are. Correlation does not imply causation, but media sales have trended upwards in the age of piracy which leads to some interesting hypotheses. A few years ago Shirley Manson (lead singer of the 90s band Garbage) accused YouTube of making its fortune off the backs of content creators - basicall…

> but media sales have trended upwards in the age of piracy which leads to some interesting hypotheses.

But they were also on an upward trend before the age of piracy, so it's perfectly plausible to think they would be even higher. The same technologies that enable digital piracy also lower the cost of legal distribution, so you'd expect to see the industry doing better at the same time that piracy is rising.

Now, I'm of course not shedding too many tears for the major Hollywood studios, but I would like to live in a world with more niche films and games, and of course it's still quite difficult to make a living as an author or musician—a few manage it, most don't.

We agree that we don't have data—but to me, it just makes intuitive sense that a large majority of pirates are pirating lots of things they would have otherwise bought. For piracy to counteract that by generating buzz or aiding discovery or whatever it is... well, it would have to be an awful lot of buzz!

Occasionally in life, intuitions are dead wrong, and actual data leads to surprising discoveries. However, when faced with a lack of data, the first assumption shouldn't be "reality is the opposite of whatever I'd intuitively expect," that makes no sense.

I think there's a ton of motivated reasoning going on, and it just really bothers me. If you're going to pirate stuff, at least be honest with yourself about it.

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

#314

Post by scarlehoff » Mon, Aug 18, 2025, 9:07 PM UTC

stavros wrote: post #204

foobarchu wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CF is in a position such that if they aren't cooperating with national laws, then they are actively hindering them. National governments don't like that, and will have ISPs block CF wholesale if that's what accomplishes their goals.

Eh, they can't block half the Internet.

Apparently in Spain they can: https://www.reddit.com/r/CloudFlare/comments/1j7yx5y/i_cant_...

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

#315

Post by kmoser » Mon, Aug 18, 2025, 9:07 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #45

alfalfasprout wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, what? Authors and rights holders are supposed to just take it? Copyright law exists for a reason. Trying to improve an LLM doesn't give you the right to flout our legal system. Yes, other countries might have an advantage in LLM training as a result but so be it.

> 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…

If I was a writer, I'd consider publishing my works under a license that explicitly bans AI training. What happens when those works inevitably get ingested by an LLM?

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

#316

Post by mistercheph » Mon, Aug 18, 2025, 9:10 PM UTC

baq wrote: post #258

jancsika wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satoshi's pride: * ability to fund shadow libraries without fear of censorship * lists with a single item still count as lists

> ability to fund shadow libraries without fear of censorship Bitcoin is much worse than cash in that regard

That's why most shadow libraries are funded with cash.

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

#317

Post by ndriscoll » Mon, Aug 18, 2025, 9:13 PM UTC

carlosjobim wrote: post #287

ndriscoll wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The obvious fix for this is to either eliminate trade secret protections in favor of patents, or make them conditioned upon escrow with the government to be released to the public domain after some time (perhaps half the time of a patent). Don't want to release your recipe ever? Tough cookies when your lead scientists bring it to a competitor. Trade secrets are counter to the purpose of "IP" law. The public has no in…

Until every new born child is forcefully implanted with a microchip in their brain at birth, you will never be able to stop people from thinking and having secrets. If people are not fairly compensated for sharing their secrets and discoveries with the public, they won't do it. They'll take it to the grave if so be. And we loose out on information which can benefit an enormous amount of people. So the quoted person i…

Trade secrets never expire and sharing them is a crime, so currently people can take them to their grave and the government will have their backs in doing so. A single person's secret is also unlikely to matter much next to the potential of global corporations' secrets, and the nature of corporations is that they are made of people who have little reason not to take an offer with a competitor after they've learned the necessary secrets to do their job. Hence, don't protect those corporations unless they offer something in return (explicitly divulging them/contributing to the common knowledgebase). Without that protection, knowledge can more naturally spread.

The fair compensation they should be offered is time limited protection. Otherwise it should simply be legal for any of their employees to spread that knowledge. Giving unlimited protection to not divulge knowledge is counter to the entire point of "IP" law.

"The" Coca-Cola formula would have lost its patent restrictions a century ago. It's still unshared. Why exactly should we continue to grant any legal protection from an employee sharing it?

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

#318

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Aug 18, 2025, 9:14 PM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #304

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.…

I spent a small fortune on a record collection. Then the record format was abandoned and it was all CDs. I spent a small fortune re-buying that same record collection, insofar as the records were even available as CDs. Then we went all digital (yes, I know CDs were already digital) and it became MP3s. So I ripped my CD collection and assigned them to a box in my attic. I will not be spending money on spotify or whatever other service to listen to stuff that I already have.

Movies... I spent a small fortune on a movie collection. Then I moved countries and to my surprise found that my movies wouldn't play anymore. So I ripped the DVDs to digital media and played them using open source software. This saved a small fortune and was more convenient as well. I think I still have the DVDs.

I spent a large fortune on books. Thousands of them. Typically read once, a much smaller number read multiple times. So I gave away my books, except for a few hundred that I still keep. I support the authors that I like by buying their books but I read on screens not on paper because my eyesight sucks and on screens I can set the font to whatever I want rather than to what the publisher thought was optimal.

There is no way the media companies are going to guilt trip me over any of this, besides that I read both Janis Ian and Courtney Love's pieces on the recording industry.

Copyright is great, it has enabled lots of people to earn a living creating content. But it has also become a weapon in an ever more absurd war between consumers and middle men, the producers caught in some uncomfortable position in the background.

What's interesting is that the middlemen brought this all on themselves: they equated buying a physical copy of a production with licensing IP, but the general public didn't think that way at all: they bought a book, they bought a record, they bought a movie. And passing on what you've bought when you no longer need it was and still is such an ingrained part of our culture that it felt really weird to have restrictions placed on what you could do with stuff you bought and paid for. So when the format changed from physical to nothing (bits) plenty of people felt that this was not quite what we had agreed to, after all we were paying for the medium as much as we were paying for the content so how come we paid the same or even more as before? And now we paid and got something that we could no longer share with others. No way to easily pass that e-book to someone else (talk about malicious compliance), no way to send the song you just paid for through Spotify or iTunes to someone else to let them hear it after you are done with it. You don't own the medium any more so therefore you own nothing at all.

And those publishers and movie producers are all laughing to the bank whilst doing nothing at all except for playing bank.

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

#319

Post by fwip » Mon, Aug 18, 2025, 9:16 PM UTC

trinsic2 wrote: post #261

fwip wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you must be using an unusual definition of culture. As I understand it, culture is, broadly speaking, the shared values and practices of a group of people. The only way to avoid having culture, in the usual sense, is to prevent groups of people from existing.

It is unusual. We have been condition to believe that culture is created by shared values. But actually is guided and molded by authority to create the illusion that its driven by society. Obviously this isn't true in all cases, but for most, its my belief that it is. People can exist out side of the constrains of a culture that is imposed on then by understanding their own human value and worth that they are born wi…

Oh, gotcha - if you'll permit me to paraphrase: it's not culture itself that you find evil; but that the powerful tend to warp the culture to protect their own interests.

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

#320

Post by mistercheph » Mon, Aug 18, 2025, 9:16 PM UTC

mavamaarten wrote: post #194

iLoveOncall wrote: post #114

> In recent weeks we’ve seen increased attacks on our mission. A pretty rich thing to say when your mission is piracy. I'm not against piracy at all, quite the contrary, but this is quite laughable.

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.

Zoom out, annas archive and every incarnation of the shadow library that exists is like the library of alexandria, in 150 years the copyright holders of the hour will be meaningless, nobody will care who got monetized or whatever, the point will be that a small number of vigilantes preserved human knowledge for posterity, and not even a half-second of thought will be given to the "crimes" that were involved in doing so.