9 ms·
Anna's Archive hit with $19.5M default judgment and global domain takedown order
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- ramon156 5mo agoNext week American ISP's will block Annas-archive, people use VPN's, they get confused. The cycle goes on
- petcat 5mo agoIt's only the domains that have been seized. US ISPs don't block websites in the same way they do in EU or China.
- michaelsmanley 5mo agoOh, 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.
- spogbiper 5mo agoIf 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
- petcat 5mo agoSounds 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.
- trollbridge 5mo agoVerizon does block catbox.
- petcat 5mo agoThat's just because it's a frequent malware host. You can disable that in your settings or use a different DNS server.
- trollbridge 5mo agoIt still counts as a block.
- petcat 5mo agoA trivial block that is opt-in... Go to your Verizon account -> Safe Browsing -> Uncheck all the content filters you don't want.
- criddell 5mo agoThe solution to this problem isn't technological and never has been.
- malfist 5mo agoSince when does a judge in NY get to tell Greenland they can't have their registrar sell to Anna's Archive?
- globalnode 5mo agosince never, gives them a sense of agency though i guess?
- swarnie 5mo ago[dead]
- AnimalMuppet 5mo agoThere 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.
- Eric_WVGG 5mo agoalso treaties I imagine?
- Aurornis 5mo agoIt’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.
- wat10000 5mo agoPerformance 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.
- laichzeit0 5mo agoSo what stops them from just changing it to NotAnna's Archive and operating under that domain?
- danparsonson 5mo agoNana's Archive would have a nice cozy feel to it
- thelastgallon 5mo agoTrumps archive?
- Hamuko 5mo agoNothing, but are the courts to throw their arms up in the air and go "We can't stop them so whatever"?
- derwiki 5mo agoNo but it’s fast to spin up a new mirror copy, and slow for the courts to respond
- StableAlkyne 5mo agoIsn'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
- 0xmattf 5mo agoNow do Anthropic, OpenAI, et al.
- josefritzishere 5mo agoAI companies can download books but people can't? Is that right?
- sph 5mo agoYou’re absolutely right.
- ramon156 5mo agoThey have a music archive, which historically means bad business.
- Aurornis 5mo agoAI 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.
- sitkack 5mo agoEveryone trained on Anna's Archive.
- CWuestefeld 5mo agoI 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.
- crtasm 5mo ago> 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. https://annas-archive.gl/llm https://annas-archive.gl/llm
- randomtoast 5mo agoThey 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.
- petcat 5mo agoAre you just making that up
- nullifidian 5mo ago[deleted to avoid potential misinformation]
- saidnooneever 5mo agothere is no confirmed origin for the archivist but only speculation they might be russian or eastern european?
- ndiddy 5mo agoThey 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.
- asdfsa32 5mo agoI 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.
- bix6 5mo agoWikipedia is US based so does this mean they’ll stop sharing the URLs on there?
- danlitt 5mo agoThe injunction appears to target DNS specifically, so no. The links will just break.
- outside1234 5mo agoAnd then the new links will be added to Wikipedia.
- bubblegumcrisis 5mo agoThis 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.
- b3lvedere 5mo agoA digital Fahrenheit 451 burns a lot less bright it seems.
- haritha-j 5mo agoI 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.
- jasonmp85 5mo ago[dead]
- xhkkffbf 5mo ago[flagged]
- fractallyte 5mo agoYou're downvoted, but correct. And I challenge anyone to dispute this. I'm sick and tired of people trying to justify piracy. If you want to read a book – the product of someone's hard work – pay for it (fairly). That said, I also support Anna's Archive. We need access to books.
- hulitu 5mo ago> I'm sick and tired of people trying to justify piracy You will have a hard time adapting to the AI era.
- xigoi 5mo agoAt least with scientific articles, the authors get precisely zero of the money that people pay for them. As for publishers, why should they be getting billions of dollars for putting up a PDF file on a website?
- 5mo ago
- gothicbluebird 5mo agoAnna'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.
- mghackerlady 5mo agoThe WMF asks for more money because they plan on becoming self-sustaining off of interest or something iirc
- beej71 5mo agoTheir style? What do you mean?
- pessimizer 5mo agoThere's no possible way it means anything. You'd only start talking about "style" when you ran out of argument. The next thing is a mention of a random thing they were "reminded" of, but with no particular explanation. The style of the comment suggests that they have far more sinister motives than mere online discussion, and reminds me of off-brand, leaky adult incontinence wear.
- damnitbuilds 5mo agoWho knew Josh D'Amaro posted on HN !
- iluvcommunism 5mo ago[dead]
- drob518 5mo agoThis is pirate radio all over again.
- rendx 5mo agoThe 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.
- IshKebab 5mo agoYeah at the least they should have created a separate brand and released it under that.
- Cider9986 5mo agoBut 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://opbible7nans45sg33cbyeiwqmlp5fu7lklu6jd6f3mivrjeqadco5yd.onion//opsec/opsec-over-ego/ http://opbible7nans45sg33cbyeiwqmlp5fu7lklu6jd6f3mivrjeqadco...
- aftbit 5mo agoYeah, I don't understand why they made that announcement then didn't actually release it. All of the heat, none of the archival benefit...
- Llamamoe 5mo agoIt's definitely a stupid move. Even if you are going to do it, it should be completely independently of AA to distribute the risk.
- qweiopqweiop 5mo agoMetadata? Pretty sure they scraped the files and released them too.
- 5mo ago
- beej71 5mo agoIt's one of those interesting moments where the global humanitarian good is in conflict with the law.
- thepasch 5mo agoIf only the American justice system displayed a fraction of this same raging fervor when it came to crimes that actually caused harm to someone.
- Lockranor 5mo agoUS 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.
- bubblegumcrisis 5mo agoHere'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?
- john_strinlai 5mo agoits 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)
- damnitbuilds 5mo agoGiven 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 !
- rvnx 5mo agoWhy 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 ?
- random3 5mo agoWhile 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
- jasonmp85 5mo agoAnthropic knows they could just pay off the aggrieved party. The operators of Anna's know they will go to prison.
- ffsm8 5mo agoUh, aren't you confirming his opinion with that? After all, Anna doesn't have the money to fight this in court
- YetAnotherNick 5mo agoNo. Anthropic fought and paid $1.5 billion in settlement and agreed to delete all the copyrighted material.
- whycome 5mo agoDelete? Wasn’t that material already used to train models?
- rho_soul_kg_m3 5mo agoAll AI companies should be forced to re-train their models without the offending materials, and this should also extend to all LLMs distilled from models exposed to copyrighted works. Also cover code under licences such as GPL as well. Not to mention patents and designs. This whole LLM business is a giant IP laundromat.
- Cider9986 5mo agoHere[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-archive/-/work_items/?show=eyJpaWQiOiIzMDUiLCJmdWxsX3BhdGgiOiJBbm5hQXJjaGl2aXN0L2FubmFzLWFyY2hpdmUiLCJpZCI6NzIzMjJ9 https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv...
- jonhohle 5mo agoNot 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.
- bfrankline 5mo agoAre you in the United States? Many libraries loan digital goods, e.g., books, music, movies, and even software.
- piperswe 5mo agoBut 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.
- nemomarx 5mo agocan I donate my ebook to them?
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- presbyterian 5mo agoThey 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.
- uyzstvqs 5mo agoOnce 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.
- trilogic 5mo agoThey should create a giant AI LLM model trained on that data. Then settle with some form of payment like others did (learning from the best LOL). Then I don´t understand why once bought a book can´t be uploaded online? If you are not engaging in a commercial activity I don´t see the issue, the book was bought is not a state secret. By that logic the cookie trackers, that literally track/spy you and that buy and sell your data for profit and more, illegally should be priority, not some books that educate people.
- mmooss 5mo ago> They should create a giant AI LLM model trained on that data. It's interesting that Anna's could have kept the data to themselves and had a major advantage in training LLMs, either creating their own or charging possibly billions to large LLM companies.
- wolvoleo 5mo agoThey're not really "hit". It's more like lashing out at thin air :) They'll find new domains.
- CodeWriter23 5mo agoThat should stop them.
- freefaler 5mo agoWorried about is it up and what mirror to use? This is the finest resouce I've found yet: https://open-slum.org/ https://open-slum.org/ Tracks the uptime and other pirate libraries...
- econ 5mo agoSurely the funny part is that china is now miles ahead of the west and, in stead of debugging our mistakes, we look for ways to cut off our nose to spite our face.
- Caracas288 5mo agoWhat if each country had a sovereign wealth fund dedicated to compensating those who have made creative works. It would be controlled by a federation of libraries or a central library, The ‘creative goods’ would be made available to the entire countries population via a zero-information key given to each citizen, and their preservation would be ensured by the central library. Like an ordinary library, anyone would be able to request works for accession. The number of downloads of a certain piece of media would be tracked, and the fund would pay out accordingly. Because it would be the easiest way of getting any media and the system well-designed, piracy would be negligible (a la Steam). You’d have to consider trans-national sharing though.
- shrubble 5mo agoMaybe they just have bad lawyers and Anthropic has good lawyers…
- surgical_fire 5mo agoAnna's Archive is amazing. This is a good reminder to make another contribution to it.
- weare138 5mo agoThe 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. So when are we seizing Meta and Nvidia's domains?