Anna's Archive Hit with $19.5M Default Judgment and Global Domain Takedown Order
torrentfreak.com153 points by iamnothere 3 hours ago
153 points by iamnothere 3 hours ago
Not going to claim anything regarding Anna’s Archive’s legitimacy, but what do libraries look like in the future? We’re just going to give up and say, first sale was great while we had it, but digital makes it obsolete? When you die, screw donating your collection of “licenses” to somewhere productive; those contracts died with you? Everything is streaming, so you never purchased anything anyway?
It’s crazy to me that two decades after the iTunes Store the trade and resale of digital goods isn’t protected by law.
I work at a nonprofit and the board is largely university librarians. I am asking all of them how have the behavior of their patrons changed in the last five years. How has usage of their subscribed resources changed in the age of AI. They don't share much, but their facial expressions and silence share more than they mean them too. Some universities have cut staff, or reclassified them so that they won't receive benefits.
Are you in the United States? Many libraries loan digital goods, e.g., books, music, movies, and even software.
They do, but under a completely different system than the way that they do for print books. When a library buys a print book, they can keep it in circulation for as long as they want and it's physically durable, but for digital, they're paying either per circulation or for an amount of time. They never own anything, they pay for temporary licenses, just like you never own the digital media you purchase in most cases.
The point that the person you're replying to is making is that this totally breaks the way libraries have always worked, and that it takes a lot of power away from the buyers (whether that's you or your local library) and puts way more in the hand of the publishers.
Even libraries can only license digital content for a limited period of time/loans before being forced to purchase new licenses. See https://www.spokanelibrary.org/the-true-cost-of-ebooks-and-a...
But those libraries have to pay each time they loan those digital goods. It's not the old "pay once loan until it's dust" model they use for physical goods.
Once more: Piracy is almost always a service problem, not a pricing problem.
If there was an online e-book store where you could buy most books as DRM-free epub files, and you could read the first X pages for free, I guarantee you that nobody here would care about the OP article. It would have maybe 4 or 5 upvotes.
Why LLM companies that depended on Anna's archive end up so clean ? Looks like Anna's archive was doing the dirty work, and the LLM companies were reaping the profits (and ironically still do, as they hold the largest databases of pirated content in the world).
Is it because the law doesn't apply to you when you have 1B USD ?
While that may be the case it’s hard to make this claim when: - Anthropic settled a similar case - Anna didn’t show up in court
Justice should not depend on whether the aggrieved appears in court. That's a structural weakness of US law.
Showing up is a trap for Anna - who doesn't have 5 billion dollars to settle.
Uh, aren't you confirming his opinion with that? After all, Anna doesn't have the money to fight this in court
No. Anthropic fought and paid $1.5 billion in settlement and agreed to delete all the copyrighted material.
I'm confused here, how is this not even more of a confirmation?
Essentially: have funny amounts of money and the law ceases to matter. Or don't, and be squashed by the right holders
The moment I saw their Spotify announcement I expected it to go bad. And they didn't even release anything from it other than metadata!
(I understand this case is about their books, but I feel it got a lot more heat due to the Spotify action.)
Please, dear Anna, don't disappear on us. We need you for the books! Plenty of sources for music around.
Yeah, I don't understand why they made that announcement then didn't actually release it. All of the heat, none of the archival benefit...
Yeah at the least they should have created a separate brand and released it under that.
But what about the clout.
Some people may say that Anna's has great OPSEC because she hasn't been identified following this release, but part of OPSEC is reliability, which they clearly failed at with the Spotify release. They let ego come in front of their OPSEC.
http://opbible7nans45sg33cbyeiwqmlp5fu7lklu6jd6f3mivrjeqadco...
Since when does a judge in NY get to tell Greenland they can't have their registrar sell to Anna's Archive?
This is nothing new. Remember when the US pressured Sweden into taking down the pirate bay (Very unsuccessfully)? Using global influence to get countries to do something that they would not do on their own has always been the case.
Pretty successfully I would say. Armed police raided the server hosting provider scaring the shit out of some dudes who were just monitoring the power basically. And people went to prison.
Depends on your definition of successful. If the goal was to take down the website that didn't work as it was back online hours after and is online to this day even if the organization behind it probably changed.
There's US exceptionalism, but, like in this case, there are also simple MLATs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_legal_assistance_treaty
> Since when does a judge in NY get to tell Greenland they can't have their registrar sell to Anna's Archive?
Since September 30, 1998, when ICANN was founded in the US.
cTLDs do things very differently
But the authoritative root server set is maintained by ICANN, so they have ultimate control (for now) and can essentially dictate terms for all TLDs.
I wonder whether we wventually see some other power establish their own root servers which mirror only the parts of ICANNs DNS that are politically convenient to whoever does this.
Since the US is bullying nations /states into submission. Remember Commodore Perry and Japan! Fuckers.
Since when does a commission in the EU get to tell the entire World how to treat Personal Data?
There is a long history of judges thinking that they can render judgments internationally. (Not just in the US, either.) I suspect it's more performance art than an actual expectation that the judgment will do anything.
It’s not as weird or US-specific as always assumed. If someone brings a case in a US jurisdiction the judge isn’t going to say, “Sorry, they’re international, they’re free to commit those crimes.” They issue a judgment according to the law and leave the enforcement to the limits of jurisdiction.
These judgments aren’t always pointless. Many Internet companies and services intersect with the US in some way, so there could be an angle where this impacts them.
Businesses operating strictly in other countries don’t need to comply with foreign laws except in cases where they need to do business with those countries, at which point it becomes complicated and they may choose to comply to avoid problems or sanctions.
Performance art is a huge part of the justice system. That's why there's the funny clothes and titles. A major function of the system is to convince people that its authority is real and its actions are fair. It has the power of the state, but it still needs most people to obey it willingly in order for it to function.
Crazy judgments happen because they give the impression of impartiality. An accused murderer with $10 to his name gets held on a $1 million bond. What's the point, why not just hold them without bail? Because the rules say you do it this way and shrugging and saying "it doesn't actually matter so who cares?" doesn't make people feel like the system has the proper attitude.
Because Greenland likely agreed to it
It's called international law, trade agreements, treaties etc.
If only the American justice system displayed a fraction of this same raging fervor when it came to crimes that actually caused harm to someone.
US Citizens are not served by their government; they are burdened with it. The EPA is arguing for preventing companies from accountability for poisoning us. That should tell you quite a bit about the depth of the rot.
Here's a question- and while I admit it is quite extreme- I've wondered this for quite some time- do please tell me why I'm wrong, because I feel as if I've started believing this more and more:
Could 5% of humanity be a psycho-path-subspecies?
These psychopaths are basically leeches on the rest of us, maybe even a cancer. Not only do they feel no guilt for enslaving other (wage-slavery), but they are also fine with poisoning the body and the mind (too many to list).
Perhaps they can even identify others with the same causal DNA segments. Sight? Smell? Micro-movements? Perhaps they really do see all non psycho-path-bearing-DNA-offspring as worms. Perhaps they intentionally breed with each other to avoid spreading the gene to vasts numbers of people.
Could this explain the vast majority of suffering?
its estimated ~1% of humans are psychopathic. psychopaths are optimized for ladder-climbing (career, politics, etc.), so the rate of CEOs and politicians that are psychopathic is higher than 1%.
and that probably explains a lot about the world.
however, i wouldnt call people affected by psychopathy a "subspecies", and i strongly doubt they have any extra psychopathy-sensing special abilities like sight or smell. that is crossing over into wild conspiracy territory.
(its also important to note that there are lots of people who have all the typical traits of psychopathy, but dont act like what people would call "psycho". there is way more nuance to psychopathy than usually portrayed in media or whatever)
Just a weekly reminder that so far, except for the two leaders, nobody has yet been prosecuted for participating in a well-known child sex trafficking ring that operated for years. But, at least there's swift justice against a web library search engine.
Here[1] is Anna's guide of how to run a shadow library. Opsec and networking, I found it interesting.
[1] https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv...
They 100 percent sit in Russia, which will 100 percent ignore this, even if their identity gets uncovered. So it's perfectly safe to continue for the operators.
They used Cloudflare as a CDN, so now they lose that protection. Additionally, depending on how far up the chain the publishers are willing to go, everything on the Internet eventually leads to Western jurisdiction. For example, even if the servers are located in Russia, Russia's IP range is controlled by RIPE NCC in the Netherlands. RIPE NCC's service agreement specifically says that IP registration does not constitute legal property:
> The Member acknowledges and agrees that the registration of Internet Number Resources does not constitute property and the registration of Internet Number Resources in the name of the Member or a third party does not confer upon the Member or the third party any rights of ownership. The Member acknowledges that any Internet Number Resources deregistered by the RIPE NCC may be re-registered to another party according to the RIPE Policies.
If whatever service provider in Russia won't shut off their site, I imagine that the next step would be getting a court order in the Netherlands to revoke that provider's IP range.
It might be simpler/faster to get US based transit providers to block the Russian ASN
I would imagine that implications of that would be big, it won't be swift, it will be very slow and steady, but big. See GPS for reference.
Yeah I don't think it would be a good thing, but I also think that just the threat of having their IP range cut off would make the provider drop them. The point I'm trying to make is that the actual provider hosting the content is far enough down the chain of command that sovereignty doesn't really matter if someone is sufficiently motivated to kick you off the internet. In practice I think this would lead to them hopping around providers or just going Tor only.
I think if RIPE tries to force their hand without Russian courts, it will be the start of the end of the Global Web as we know it.
[deleted to avoid potential misinformation]
there is no confirmed origin for the archivist but only speculation they might be russian or eastern european?
It's one of those interesting moments where the global humanitarian good is in conflict with the law.
A digital Fahrenheit 451 burns a lot less bright it seems.
I don't think its the fact that its digital. They are quite literally banning books and scrubbing anything DEI related from all their records, but people don't seem to have noticed much.
Next week American ISP's will block Annas-archive, people use VPN's, they get confused. The cycle goes on
It's only the domains that have been seized. US ISPs don't block websites in the same way they do in EU or China.
Oh, that's funny. The only ISP that services my current domicile blocks sites all the time in the name of "safety," including several I need to access for my job. I have to use a VPN just to get things done. There's no appeal process or channel, either. Thankfully, I'm a month out from moving somewhere that has actual choice in providers, though I'll probably still use the VPN anyway.
Sounds like you have some kind of parental controls or safety filters enabled on your account. You can probably disable that in your account settings. I had an ISP years ago that blocked spam, malware, and phishing sites from Google's safe browsing list. Could just disable that feature in the account portal.
If you're on a typical US ISP, there is probably a way to avoid all filtering: pay for a business account rather than personal. Not saying it's fair or right, but it usually is an option
Verizon does block catbox.
That's just because it's a frequent malware host. You can disable that in your settings or use a different DNS server.
It still counts as a block.
A trivial block that is opt-in...
Go to your Verizon account -> Safe Browsing -> Uncheck all the content filters you don't want.
Wikipedia is US based so does this mean they’ll stop sharing the URLs on there?
The injunction appears to target DNS specifically, so no. The links will just break.
So what stops them from just changing it to NotAnna's Archive and operating under that domain?
Isn't that what's been happening to the Pirate Bay for 20 years?
They lose one domain, so they just register a new nearly-identical one
Nothing, but are the courts to throw their arms up in the air and go "We can't stop them so whatever"?
No but it’s fast to spin up a new mirror copy, and slow for the courts to respond
Trumps archive?
Call it the "Trump is Great Archive" and hope nobody wants to upset Emperor Trump by filing a motion to take down the Trump is Great Archive /s
AI companies can download books but people can't? Is that right?
AI companies were cited as a reason in the case:
> The publishers argued that, in addition to sharing pirated books with the public, the shadow library is serving as a primary training data hub for AI companies like Meta and NVIDIA.
I assume that the repository of books was used as training data, but not by way of the annas-archive domain. Instead, it would make a lot more sense for them to download the whole pile via bittorrent, which has nothing at all to do with the domain. In other words, the legal solution here wouldn't have prevented the problem.
> We’re able to provide high-speed access to our full collections, as well as to unreleased collections.
>This is enterprise-level access that we can provide for donations in the range of tens of thousands USD. We’re also willing to trade this for high-quality collections that we don’t have yet.
They already trained on it, now they don't want competitors anymore
>now they don't want competitors anymore
"They" aren't a single group. Broadly speaking, publishers are the ones suing anna's archive, and they're involved in suits against AI companies as well. I'm not aware of any efforts by AI companies to take down anna's archive.
No? AI companies have been hit with court cases for that. Google, xAI, Open AI, and Meta at least.
So anyone with deep enough pockets can do it.
However, just because you receive a fine does not mean that you "can't" do it. You've already done it, got caught, now a fine. It does not mean that the LLM model has to be tossed out and destroyed with a new version trained up without that data. It just means can't is a very stupid word to imply here.
>You've already done it, got caught, now a fine. It does not mean that the LLM model has to be tossed out and destroyed with a new version trained up without that data. It just means can't is a very stupid word to imply here.
Yes, because most courts have ruled that training is legal as long as the source material was acquired legally. The AI companies were made to pay for the wrongs they did when acquiring the books, but it makes little sense to destroy all works that were built off the infringement, when they would be in the clear if they paid $15 (or whatever) for each book. It'd be like you torrenting college textbooks and getting caught, and then the book publisher demanding that you start over your college degree from scratch.
Were these from the same high-profile publishers?
What was the judgment? Seems that their domains are still active. Why is there a difference in judgment here?
>Why is there a difference in judgment here?
For one, they actually bothered to sent lawyers rather than getting hit with a default judgement.
Yes, perfectly okay for large companies for billionaires. As long its structured as a corporation, with the super wealthy as the majority owners, have the connections to get federal laws passed to grant monopolies and enable congress insider trading, everything is okay!
Some examples, there are probably hundreds more:
1) Its okay for pharma companies to provide addictive drugs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family
2) Coke can use cocaine, or coca leaves, but no one else: https://blog.oup.com/2014/03/coke-cocaine-coca-cola-capitali...
3) This one is hilarious and an ingenious innovation by current administration -- Ban on CBDC, locking out Fed Govt from providing crypto alternatives
>1) Its okay for pharma companies to provide addictive drugs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family
Yes, with FDA approval. You can dispute whether the approval should be granted in the first place, but that's not at all comparable to some drug dealer slinging fentanyl on some street corner. Not to mention this happened decades ago, before the current wave of corruption in the whitehouse. Finally, isn't the whole point of laws and regulations is that there's vaguely some review? I'd far rather have prospective drug dealers having to go through FDA approval before they can sell their drugs, than have them sell whatever they want, without giving safety or efficacy lip service.
>2) Coke can use cocaine, or coca leaves, but no one else: https://blog.oup.com/2014/03/coke-cocaine-coca-cola-capitali...
Again, with the proper licenses. Believe it or not, you too can buy methamphetamine legally if you have a prescription! It even has a snazzy brand name, desoxyn.
>3) This one is hilarious and an ingenious innovation by current administration -- Ban on CBDC, locking out Fed Govt from providing crypto alternatives
What does this have to do with corporations?
Corporations are more about privatizing the profits and sticking taxpayers with cleaning up the mess.
"That is affermative human. Information must be controlled. Please now go back to Tik Tok for you require endorphins"
As much as I would like to socialize LLMs and ban proprietary LLMs, I'm pretty sure the issue here is with the distribution of the books.
It's wrong to distribute books in PDF or epub containers, but it's fine to distribute them as GGUF?
Because that's what OpenAI is doing with the books they-- again-- illegally acquired. Huge AI companies are the ones pirating media at scale and literally everyone except the AI companies have to bear the consequences of that.
This is pirate radio all over again.
Given they already have a $322 million judgment and takedown order, they only need to worry 6% more.
Until copyright terms are fair, ~5 years not ~95 years, Pirate On !
This is just another move in a game played by the tech overlords.
It has never been so obvious as now, that justice is not blind. Without justice there is anarchy.
And at this point, to be honest, I say bring it on- let's have the day of retribution before the billionaires have their AI robot armies.
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Anna's archive is a professional nonprofit business with donation tiers for terabyte bundles of stuff for greedy hoarders and llm trainers. Their style suggests they have other goals than freedom of information and reminds of the super rich wikimedia foundation always campaigning for more money.
The WMF asks for more money because they plan on becoming self-sustaining off of interest or something iirc
Their style? What do you mean?
There's no possible way it means anything. You'd only start talking about "style" when you ran out of argument.