Anna's Archive Owes $340 Million, Lost Several Domains, but It's Still Online
torrentfreak.com89 points by Brajeshwar an hour ago
89 points by Brajeshwar an hour ago
Long live Anna’s Archive. I stand on the shoulders of the Internet, Wikipedia, Anna’s Archive, Z-Library, LibGen, YouTube, Hacker News, Reddit, and Sci-Hub.
I deeply admire the people who are obsessed with their passions and strive to build things that will lay the foundations for others.
Why don't Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Facebook & Co defend Anna's Archive publicly?
Coming out would be a bold move for them.
Anthropic paying $1.5 billion in fines for downloading Anna's Archive established a moat. They want it to be illegal to pirate books: they can afford the penalties and continue doing it. Just like they want it to be illegal to run local ML inference.
In theory none of them actually got the right to train on illegally downloaded books. Anthropic was simply punished for doing it once.
One wonders if they're still doing it.
No gain, all liability. Easier to cut them a check for access to training data and say nothing. Unless legal discovery was performed, the outside world would never know, and the payment records would roll off corporate records through a record retention schedule eventually. Could obfuscate it as a contractor consulting fee ("knowledge management subject matter expert") if you wanted to get tricky, depending on the risk appetite of whomever would receive the funds.
(not legal advice!)
There’s zero liability in a company stating publicly that they support Anna’s Archive. Zero. Free speech protections cover much more egregious statements than that.
I disagree. Anyone with even a hint of standing will sue, and keep suing. As someone who has to work with corporate counsel often, do not say anything you don't have to say. Only say what is absolutely necessary. Free speech protects you from your government. It does not shield you from civil suits, and the US is extremely litigious.
Incredible website. Really one of the dreams of the internet realised, the ability to access all knowledge at your fingertips.
Probably the greatest achievement of modern society, a rebirth of the Library of Alexandria. Of course, only private for-business corporations are allowed to steal the world's knowledge, apparently, and only to be able to monetise it. There's something deeply wrong with our civilization that Anna's Archive is punished while companies like OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Anthropic, etc are just ... ignored when they do things like destructively digitise books or pirate things.
I was blown away when I paid to get an API key for it. The process is intricate and state of the art.
Didn’t they have a default judgment against them because they didn’t show up to court? Do they even know who runs it?
They railroaded Aaron Swartz (which eventually lead to his suicide) for much, much less.
One side wants to freely share knowledge with all of humanity, the other wants to restrict it to make a buck. I know who I support.
Anna's Archive is a gift to humanity
Exactly. All libraries are worthy of being supported and grown. I make no distinction between a physical dead-tree library and a digital library.
The only reason we even have dead-tree libraries at all is because 100 years ago, that was what John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie put forth to whitewash their horrible capitalist behaviors across the USA. And because it was done by those generations' billionaires, public libraries because acceptable.
If public libraries were created in the last 20 years, they would have been banned and felony copyright charges would have been levied. In fact, thats exactly what happened WHEN people tried to create free digital libraries.
> If public libraries were created in the last 20 years, they would have been banned and felony copyright charges would have been levied. In fact, thats exactly what happened WHEN people tried to create free digital libraries.
I wonder why nobody created a Netflix-like subscription for digital books
Amazon maybe? Kindle Unlimited. In some ways Audible with audiobooks. Which actually has lot of entrants though they tend to limit listening time on large part of their portfolio.
I believe you can get access to a lot of digital books with a library card online. Not something I have personally done, so can't really give details.
Libby very much exists, you just need to sign up through your local library.
Because you have to pay a ton more for a lot of digital copies of books if you're doing any kind of lending and you're competing with existing libraries. So you both have higher costs (e.g. you have to pay more for a digital file that may have DRM, be required to self destruct after a certain number of uses, doesn't allow multiple lends at a time, etc.) and your prospective consumers have a free option so convincing them to pay is going to be difficult.
The economics aren't there.
I consider libraries, public schools and maybe even public fire departments in the list of things that could never be proposed today if they didn't already exist.
And Google owes 20 decillion dollars to the Russian government. Who cares either way.
"owes" seems like a wrong word here
Anna's Archive is what TV told me in the 2000s that the future was. An online database with all published books one click away. Far from the dystopian reality than the corporate internet has become.
Unfortunately it’s blocked in Germany
"If you own someone $340, that's your problem. If you owe someone $340,000,000, that's there problem."
Might as well be a trillion dollars as it's never getting paid.
"when you're $100,000 in debt, it's your problem. But when you're $1 million in debt, it's the bank's" - Rosalie Goes Shopping (1989)
An old variation:
Fred and Wilhelmina are in bed together. Fred tosses and turns, unable to sleep. "Fred, what's troubling you?"
"You know Bjarne from the bank? Well, a balloon payment is due tomorrow on my loan, and I don't have the cash flow to pay it."
Wilhelmina thinks for a bit, then reaches for her phone. "Betty? Yes, this is Wilhelmina. Sorry to call so late. Would you tell Bjarne that Fred can't make the loan payment tomorrow? Yes, that's all. Good night."
Fred states at Wilhelmina, aghast. "What did you do THAT for?" She smiles. "Now it's Bjarne's problem. Let him toss and turn, you can go to sleep."
Just wished they didn't sell bulk access for LLM training.
Reminder for me to make another donation.
Piracy is morally justified at this point.
I wonder by if the US considers this “supporting a terrorist organization”.
Donate a significant amount of money, and you can get a free trip to the new gulag in El Salvador. Or maybe gitmo.
Don't give the government any ideas
Hardly a new idea: Trumplestiltskin suggested during this term that we should start detaining Americans who expressed their dissent against the government.
Maybe.
Thankfully I don't live in the US, and likely won't set foot there ever again.
US probably considers anything impairing profits, stock prices, or enterprise value terrorist activity at this point.
Yeah, truthfully. This type of article is generally a nice nudge to donate.
Might as well say "Annas Archive OWES ELEVENTY HUNDRED BILLIONTY-TRILLIONTY INFINITY DOLLARS!!!!!111" ala elementary school playground make-believe.
I remember when RIAA was shaking down 15 year olds for $7000 for a single Metallica download from Napster. Or how Aaron Schwartz was executed by proxy by JSTOR and the feds, for what should have been free to access for all.
But hey, Anthropic, OpenAI, X, and others can pirate to their hearts content with for-profit piracy, but "we" (royal) are OK with that. We just cant have the poors have access to the sum of human knowledge.
> Or how Aaron Schwartz was executed by proxy by JSTOR and the feds, for what should have been free to access for all.
What happened to Aaron Schwartz was tragic, but "executed by proxy by JSTOR?" That's ridiculous, overheated rhetoric. He committed suicide.
People can be predisposed towards something, and then have a tipping point brought by periods of great stress
Jason Arday recently committed suicide due to media pressure, and even when the media was told that he was not mentally well and should please back off, they didn't.
The man was accused of plagiarism, and there was no final verdict on if he did. The institutions that hired him clearly had no issues in vetting him. And yet he committed suicide.
There are absolutely horrible people out there right now who's entire careers are shams, and don't even come close to thinking about it. People are built different, and have different triggers
> The man was accused of plagiarism, and there was no final verdict on if he did.
Bullshit. It wasn't the first round of plagiarism, or redactions. His whole supposed life story was a fraud. He passed off other researchers' patient interviews as his own.
Sure. That he was facing 35 years in prison for his “crimes“ had nothing to with his suicide.
If only you were able to take your perspective one step farther. Why did he commit suicide?
Because something was wrong in his brain and he couldn't handle the stress of his situation.
Many people have faced similar or worse charges, and did not commit suicide, so we'll have to point at something else.
Fuck them for what they did to him, but we should be rallying to get him set free. We can't start pointing fingers at other people for suicides. We have agency.
"We are going to jail you for half or more of your life, restrict any medicines you might be on, treat you in deplorable conditions, constitute you as a slave of the state if we decide so". And there is no parole in federal prisons.
Feds did NOT have to choose to go the route they did. Their pursuance of a victimless "crime" lead to Aaron's only path was 'Exit'.
Sure, he committed suicide. Why? Because his life was already significantly threatened with what amounts to torture by prison.
The feds are not JSTOR now are they? Your discourse is disgusting and only weakens the cause.
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I really don't understand why HackerNews gets hard for Anna's Archive but you never see other illegal download websites praised here.
They're not more or less virtuous than any others, they're in it for the money and you're a fool if you think otherwise.
I'm not against piracy, it's great, but to claim they are moral saints is a joke.
Anyway, bring in the downvotes as I know will happen.
how's Anna make money? I know they offered to share the database for ai training (which I would criticize, that's very shady) but do they have donations or something
it doesn't seem like it would be high revenue at least
The same as most private Torrent tracker: via premium accounts masquerading as donations.
Anna's Archive is very limited in performance if you don't pay.
That's not how most established private torrent trackers operate? Account privileges are usually granted according to tenure, number of uploads and ratio requirements.
Not that the other guy is right, but most established private torrent trackers absolutely allow you to bypass requirements if you "donate."
Anyone paying for Annas Archive is a moron. It takes more time to find the right book/file than it does for the download, which is usually under ~5MB, to finish.
Can't talk for all of HN, but I for one hereby praise most/all piracy websites. Anna's Archive is great, and Rutracker is also great.
It's not a competition, and being a moral saint isn't a good KPI; being a net positive for society is.
As a hacker News viewer I'm for other illegal download sites as well.
If you just Google 'free media heck yeah' you'll see a great deal of them!
Yeah me too, but I don't claim that they're a moral good.
They provide the world with an invaluable service at the expense of their freedom. Seems incredibly noble and good to me. Especially considering the current climate.
It depends on what you consider to be a moral good. Some people feel that the world's information is getting locked down in the name of profit to the detriment of humankind. AA is providing knowledge to people who would otherwise not be able to get it. From that viewpoint, it's immoral to try to shut AA down.
OTOH, if you think that AA is robbing creators and publishers of their hard-earned proceeds, and that loss is greater than the loss to humanity from the destruction of AA, then you wouldn't think AA was a moral good.
Of course, it's all gray in the middle.
We don't have to have the same exact moral systems of course, but this is curious: if we (collectively!) support the thing, why not claim it's good?