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Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

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

#341

Post by dns_snek »

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…

Sure, but copyright was designed to accomplish clearly defined goals and LLMs clearly undermine those goals. The motivation and spirit of the law are extremely plainly stated, you don't need to be a legal expert to understand it.

We should absolutely have a discussion about modernizing copyright (and patent!) protections. But it has to be done through a democratic process, companies shouldn't be allowed to just ignore laws that are inconvenient to their business model.

> At that hypothetical point, your attachment to legacy copyright law would arguably hold back human progress as a whole

There won't be any progress if nobody is getting paid for their work. Either copyright stands and LLMs aren't allowed to train without compensation, or they get an exemption and there will be nothing left to train on in a few years.

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

#342

Post by skeaker »

griffzhowl wrote: post #254
skeaker wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends. I've seen some in favor and some against. Academics who have their papers paywalled by publishing entities against their own wills are generally for it.

Academics get their income from their university positions, and don't get any royalties from sales of their articles. Instead, the benefit they get from publishing is to their reputation, and for that it's better for their work to be as available as possible. It's completely different for a writer who gets their income from sales of their work, obviously

Yep. And not that you asked, but my own opinion (not theirs) is that even writers who get income from sales will be fine either way. Reading a book for free and then buying it to support the author if you want to has been a practice for longer than the internet has existed. It's exactly how libraries have always worked!

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

#343

Post by gattilorenz »

bigyabai wrote: post #323
xvector wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Super selfish of Anna's Archive to mention this. "Look what we did!" with zero thought to the consequences for others.

> the consequences for others. The only people facing consequences are the license-holders. Online lending libraries aren't missing a copy now that AA archived it, and there's not really a substantial cost to the hosters in network bandwidth. Am I missing something here? As a user I don't empathize with anyone but the archivers.

IA can be painted in court as an “unwilling enabler” of something like Anna’s Archive, instead of a regular library

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

#344

Post by viccis »

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…

>readComicsOnline

I'll never get over piracy sites blocking VPNs...

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

#345

Post by fsflover »

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…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15305476

EU paid for report that concluded piracy isn’t harmful, tried to hide findings (thenextweb.com)

280 points by tchalla on Sept 21, 2017 | 59 comments

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

#346

Post by skeaker »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #253
skeaker wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That makes the very silly assumption that the default is to boycott everything, which is really not the case. People at large definitely still default to purchasing things first, for all sorts of reasons from just feeling that it is moral to the service being convenient to just enjoying and wanting to support the work itself. This is self evident in the fact that boycotts essentially never actually kill anything beca…

The default is to not buy something . People don't like loosing money. If you can get something without loosing money, it's super easy to rationalize why you you're skipping the loose money part. People tend to make decisions which are in their financial interest.

> The default is to not buy something.

But if this is already true by default, then we're back to square one where the important financial decision was already made. Again, if it was already decided by default that there is no sale to be made, then whatever the end user does after that is irrelevant.

But beside that, in my last response I gave you three very common reasons that people do buy things against their own financial interests, and you've ignored that part. How do you fit that into your argument?

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

#347

Post by subscribed »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #165
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…

> 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…

In several countries customers are forced to pay a special tax on empty media (storage) with the intention of proceedings to be redistributed among the copyright owners.

Some of these countries are codified under the Roman law principle, ie whatever is not explicitly forbidden by law, is simply not forbidden (as opposed to common law).

In some countries downloading the published media (eg a film after the official release) is permitted.

And those who download, paid for it in the form of tax.

Directive 2001/29/EC for the EU only (Article 5).

Other countries rely in provisions of WCT, 1996 (Art 10) and WPPT, 1996 (Art 16)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy has several countries listed, with examples/extent of these laws

I hope you support downloading books/films/TV shows/music by the customers who paid for this privilege.

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

#348

Post by epiccoleman »

lolive wrote: post #259
Phelinofist wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you recommend some of the obscure stuff?

Ok, there are not only obscure stuff. More blasts from the past, that really would deserve a better exposure. In term of non-Marvel/DC comics, things from Bernie Wrightson, P Craig Russel, George Besse, Alberto Breccia, Moebius, Druillet, Scuitten/Peeters, and others. In term of letters, once again the almight Lovecraft letters are really jaw-dropping ! For movies, I discovered Vincent Price, Sam Peckimpah, John Ford…

Bernie Wrightson's is beyond awesome, fills me with nostalgia for a time I never lived through.

The Roots of the Swamp Thing collection is really fun and serves as a fantastic hors d'oeuvre for reading the famed Alan Moore run.

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

#349

Post by Wowfunhappy »

bawolff wrote: post #339
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but whereas libraries need to buy more copies of books that lots of people check out, Anna's archive only ever needs one. Not exactly sustainable for the author. As I said, I loved the Internet Archive's approach to this! That's very much not what Anna's archive is doing.

Still, libraries buy what, maybe 5 copies of a mildly popular book. I don't think that would be sustainable either if that was the only books sold.

Libraries have to replace paperback books after ~20 checkouts on average. (This number is from memory but I'm quite sure it's in this range.) Hardcover books last a bit longer but of course are also more expensive.

I agree the industry would have a hard time surviving off library sales alone, in the same way that most businesses rely on multiple revenue streams to make ends meet, but I think library revenue is much more significant than you're making it out to be!

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

#350

Post by griffzhowl »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #279
griffzhowl wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The 40% figure seems to come from section 8.2, p.152, which the authors describe as "robust".

However, having seen the report now, this section on top films seems to use a different methodology to that used for books, so it's not really comparable, and in general I wouldn't put much confidence in these results anyway.

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