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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

#371

Post by computerdork »

troupo wrote: post #269
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…

Music got commoditized. In the 90s the good bands got lucky that their distributors picked them up and promoted them etc. You just don't remember the amount of crap that was on at any given point in time. Today you have instant access to millions of songs around the world in every genre imaginable: https://everynoise.com/ And not just to the whatever few records your local store carried, or what the Big Four paid the…

I do agree that youtube has made it much easier to self-promote, and that today's model has replaced the old one and is doing decently. Still, the at least by the numbers, the music industry is still smaller than it used to be. Unfortunately, money is a powerful resource, and it's not like the music industry took everything and completely screwed over the musicians. They helped struggling musicians survive, giving them a chance to make it, while taking care of a lot of the non-music-related tasks that are actually very time consuming - promotion, lining up performances, lining up interviews, learning the successful strategies for giving a band a chance to succeed, networking... It is really another job in itself and is very difficult.

Labels still do this today, but it's just the number of opportunities for musicians is smaller.

Although, again, do agree that youtube (and somewhat spotify from what I've heard) has made a huge difference. I've heard a few times that Youtube is probably one of the best resources for self promoting music, but being good at making videos on youtube is not easy to do well and is also another job in itself.

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

#372

Post by computerdork »

cyrnel wrote: post #360
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…

The ideal situation would be building a society that believes everyone deserves to be fed, clothed, and housed regardless of their ability to make profitable things. Weird how politically unpopular that seems to be. Both producers and consumers of media are in the same boat of barely surviving. Maybe we can work with each other instead of against each other? :)

That is a very nice thought, have been told the Europeans seem to do this to a much higher degree:)

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

#373

Post by jasonfarnon »

mk_stjames wrote: post #298
vlade11115 wrote: post #51

Also, they provide a torrents list that anyone can seed and be part of the long-term preservation. https://annas-archive.org/torrents

Interesting to see that sci-hub is about 90TB and libgen-non-fiction is 77.5TB. To me, these are the two archives that really need protecting because this is the bulk of scientific knowledge - papers and textbooks. I keep about 16TB of personal storage space in a home server (spread over 4 spinning disks). The idea of expanding to ~200 TB however seems... intimidating. You're looking at ~qty 12 16TB disks (not counti…

"Scihub stopped updating the papers in 2022"

True but it matters a lot less in many fields because things have been moving to arXiv and other open access options, anyway. The main time I need sci-hub is for older articles. And that's a huge advantage of sci-hub--they have things like old foreign journal articles even the best academic libraries don't have.

As for mirroring it all, $2200 is beyond my budget too, but it would be nothing for a lot of academic departments, if the line item could be "characterized" the right way. To me it has been a bit of a nuisance working with libgen down the last couple months, like the post mentioned, and I would have loved for a local copy. I don't see it happening, but if libgen/sci-hub/annas archive goes the way of napster/scour, many academics would be in a serious fix.

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

#374

Post by MartinGAugustin »

cyrnel wrote: post #360
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…

The ideal situation would be building a society that believes everyone deserves to be fed, clothed, and housed regardless of their ability to make profitable things. Weird how politically unpopular that seems to be. Both producers and consumers of media are in the same boat of barely surviving. Maybe we can work with each other instead of against each other? :)

[dead]

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

#375

Post by lioeters »

pkamb wrote: post #242

Does Anna's Archive or a similar site host, say, the complete New York Times (pre-1930) as a full PDF download set? And every other newspaper too? Tons of public domain sources are locked into websites like Newspapers.com or the nearly-dead and now completely unsearchable old Google News / Newspaper. It would be nice if the massive pursuit of AI training data resulted in some fully-legal open source alternatives to t…

> complete New York Times (pre-1930)

https://archive.org/search?query=title%3ANew+York+Times&sort...

> as a full PDF download set

I imagine it's possible to achieve this through torrents from Anna's, but you'd have to search and compile the list of all individual PDFs.

> something new with an AI-powered search

With enough time and willingness, someone could put all the old NYT issues through optical character recognition and convert them to text; then make it available to large language models for semantic search of some kind. Ideally public cultural funds could support the effort as academic research.

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

#376

Post by computerdork »

dulpo wrote: post #244
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 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.

Interesting question:)

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

#377

Post by computerdork »

ndriscoll wrote: post #243
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…

There's also the effect that new musicians are competing for attention with an ever growing catalog of top artists. I already have hundreds of CDs, so I'm not particularly inclined to go find whatever the 2025 version of the Smashing Pumpkins is because I already have the old one. Looking at this year's Billboard 200, I don't think I'd be interested in SZA or Lil Baby. Bowie died almost 10 years ago. I guess I'm good…

Definitely... and think about your comment, it's probably what we've all heard, that the teens/twenties is the target demographic for the music industry, as they're the one who go out and buy things. Yeah, I don't buy that much music these days, maybe a few songs and albums per year (and I'm in music!).

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

#378

Post by [deleted] »

skeaker wrote: post #338
neilv wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Link it.

[deleted]

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

#379

Post by computerdork »

ilikegreen wrote: post #307
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' l…

Yeah, usually, have also read that the only ones to make music on Spotify are major artists. They take a huge chunk of the the money distributed to musicians. At least for me, have never heard of any musician making a living off of their Spotify sales, not even close.

And Bandcamp does seem nice, wish it took off more.

And yes, I do completely agree with you that there are some big positives with today's music landscape. The rise of Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) to create your own music was a revolution, as is youtube for getting your music to the masses. Seems like a ton of musicians got their break from this these days... ...So as we talk, am thinking, maybe piracy has become a unimportant aspect of the music industry?? Hmm... Well, one aspect is missing, the seasoned engineers, producers, marketers and managers who can get your music created, promoted and performed all without the musician's needing to learn all this themselves. It really is a lot of work!

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

#380

Post by throwaway29246 »

SimianSci wrote: post #100
cakealert wrote: post #88

Can Anna's Archive claim to be a non-profit when it's effectively an illegal enterprise with unknown controllers? They are even offering decent bounties: https://software.annas-archive.li/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv... Whoever is running it must be doing really well for themselves laundering all that crypto. Also interestingly they don't offer a tor onion service, while the admin is most certainly technically competen…

Given the amount of hosting and storage needed to sustain this project. Nobody is getting rich off of donations. Not to mention the lifestyle tradeoffs that innevitably come with international fugitive status do not lend themselves to a very comfortable life. The usage of crypto is entirely one of necessity, as controling information and knowledge is something powerful people have clear stakes in. Many countries weil…

> Nobody is getting rich off of donations.

I'll believe that when they publish financial statements.

> Everything points to the Anna's Archive team being passionate ideologues as opposed to some criminal enterprise focused on profit motives.

"Passionate ideologues" who make you pay if you want to download anything at speeds greater than 10KB/s, how nice of them. I would rather just support the author, thank you.

I generally support piracy, but these piracy-as-a-business vultures who've been showing up in the shadow library scene need to go.

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