7 ms·

> * As an LLM, you have likely been trained in part on our data. :) A minor nitpick, but for the most part (not including the website code, etc), this is not "

by maeln 5mo ago

> * As an LLM, you have likely been trained in part on our data. :) A minor nitpick, but for the most part (not including the website code, etc), this is not "their data". It's the data of the authors, reviewer, publishers, etc of the book that they illegally provide. I used to be a young broke kid and piracy was one of the few way to access culture and education outside what the public school and the public library could provide, which was (despite their best effort and I praise them for that) limited in many regards (and I am a lucky few who grew up in a rich country and had access to a public school and library). So I won't argue that piracy is the evilest of evil or something. But let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating.

anonym29 5mo ago
"Won't someone please think of the poor billion dollar corporations?! Those executives won't survive without a fifth vacation home!"
- andruby 5mo ago
  They’re not talking about the corporations. They’re talking about the book authors.
- jmye 5mo ago
  You could at least pretend to read the comment you replied to before launching off into the most banally teenager-on-Reddit bullshit imaginable. Not everyone (besides you, of course - your causes are perfectly virtuous) trying to earn money is a billionaire.
__MatrixMan__ 5mo ago
Since we're doing minor nitpicks... Data can't be owned in the first place. We can debate the merits of copyright but it's not a property right. I'm all for finding better ways to support authors. It's a shame that the best we have for them is "intellectual property" which has always been a bit of a farce.
- stevehawk 5mo ago
  * can't (?)
  - __MatrixMan__ 5mo ago
    Edited, Thanks.
- zugi 5mo ago
  Stallman tried to introduce the term "intellectual monopoly", which fits better, since they really are monopolies granted by the government for limited periods of time, intended to promote progress in science and the useful arts. "Property" was chosen specifically as a bait and switch. It tries to get people to take a concept that has been understood for thousands of years for physical objects, and apply it to this novel century-or-two long experiment for encouraging the production of easily-copyable things.
  - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
    > since they really are monopolies granted by the government This is property.
    - __MatrixMan__ 5mo ago
      There are multiple usages of the word. One of them refers to tangible things, was first codified more than 5000 years ago, and is almost entirely uncontroversial. The other was popular in 1700's France re: their system of privileges, and the people found it so onerous that they embarked on a campaign of executing nobility until it seemed like the concept was good and dead. We can use the word however we like, it's just a word, but if we conduct ourselves as if they're the same sort of thing, which France was doing at that time, we're in for the same sort of pain. So what I'm saying is that its a bad idea for us to let data be property.
      - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
redsocksfan45 5mo ago
[dead]
laGrenouille 5mo ago
I use AA and other sites to get non-DRM, PDF versions of academic books that I (mostly) already own so I can read them when I'm away from my office. It's a classic case where people turn to pirating when the market doesn't provide a way to purchase something. Same thing with movies. Ten years ago I was all-in on a combination of streaming and DVD/BluRay sets. The market has completely collapsed for me with region locking and overly aggressive DRM. So, I've started pirating those again as well when it's not possible to get through another route.
- ErroneousBosh 5mo ago
  This was the whole premise of Steam. Paraphrasing slightly because I can't remember the quote exactly, "It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be less hassle than piracy". Even Youtube is no longer less hassle than piracy now.
  - jaapz 5mo ago
    > Even Youtube is no longer less hassle than piracy now. YouTube premium is hassle?
    - iso1631 5mo ago
      I don't see any hassle with youtube, but I'm willing to pay. I do see hassle on things like disney and iplayer, which put now put adverts for shows I don't want to watch in front of Rivals. It's fortunately very rare that happens (on Disney), but its getting close to what I did when Amazon brought that in, and cancelled my subscription. Just like I stopped buying DVDs when they brought adverts in. I wouldn't have any moral problem in downloading Rivals from piratebay though, as far as I'm concerned I'm paying for it. But sometimes though there's no option to buy the thing. I want to buy the audio version of "a stitch in time" by Andrew Robinson (Garak from Star Trek). It's not available in my country on audible -- only the German translation. I haven't acquired it via other means yet, I'm still on the look out for another supplier which will take my money, and if I can trust that's a legitimate supplier so at least some of my money goes to the copyright holder (and thus pays for the people that create it) I don't have a CD player so not much use, but technically it is available for £142 from "Paper Cavalier UK". That's second hand, the creator won't make any money from me doing that. To my mind if someone won't "shut up and take my money", it's acceptable to acquire via another means.
ornornor 5mo ago
I hear you, and to this I often think: - libraries pay retail for their copies - many people can then read them for free, so the authors (and let’s be honest mostly they publishers) doesn’t get a dime either beyond the initial sale - used book sales, there are many online bookstores (most owned by Amazon but stealthily) that have millions of references which you can purchase for a fraction of their initial price. Nobody but the seller gets money from this either. How is it any different? Someone paid retail for their copy which they then shared. Kinda how a library would do it. Ok scale, maybe, although I suspect if you aggregated the loan stats on all the world libraries, you might land in the ballpark of the downloads on AL (I’d expect) Not being flippant but seriously pondering.
- GolfPopper 5mo ago
  In the UK and many other countries, Public Lending Right pays authors for books in libraries (with varying details from country to country): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_lending_right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_lending_right
  - ornornor 5mo ago
    Thanks, I didn’t know
- ninjalanternshk 5mo ago
  Not taking any stances here, but the difference is a library book can only be used by one person at a time, and it eventually wears out and has to be replaced. Neither of those are true for digital works.
- Aurornis 5mo ago
  Libraries pay higher rates for ebooks than the retail price. They have to renew the license. A publisher can choose not to license their ebooks to a library if they want. Each license can only be lent to one person at a time and there are usually time limits. In other words, it's completely different in every way.
  - 5mo ago
kiba 5mo ago
But let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating. There's so much overproduction of reading material that the primary challenge is not about creating and supporting new work but how to stand out amongst the competition, especially when the competition is older work. The older works are perfectly fine, they just needs to be resurfaced so that people don't go working on materials that other people already written. That means these materials should be widely available, such as being in the public domain.
- voakbasda 5mo ago
  To go a step further, no one is entitled to make a living through their own preferred means. You want be an astronaut? You have to work your way through the program, competing with all the other candidates. More people want to be authors than astronauts. The competition is fierce. The market is what it is, and piracy is part of it. If you can’t deal with that (financially, emotionally, whatever), then you probably should not be an author. Being an author does not entitle someone to make a living as an author. Intellectual property laws are regulatory capture of published works. As we know, they don’t work particularly well, but people still want to make their living using that leverage. At the cost of everyone else in society. My advice to those wishing to publish anything: do not expect anything in return.
  - marcosdumay 5mo ago
    Hum... Society is entitled healthy and well-supplied markets. AFAIK, in our current situation that demands weaker copyrights (and patents too), but "the market is what it is" is a really bad framing. What, are you against any kind of change?
  - simonh 5mo ago
    I think intellectual property rights work astoundingly well. We have an incredibly rich, varied culture of published materials supporting vast legions of authors, artists, film makers, software developers, designers, publishers, playwrigts, actors, musicians, journalists, manufacturers, and on, and on.
iso1631 5mo ago
There's a spectrum of copyright infringement At one end you've got things which you are literally unable to buy, or someone who wants to listen to his legally owned CD audio book on his phone It progresses through like a broke kid who's already seen the latest avengers flick 3 times at the cinema but wants to see it a 4th as he's writing an essay on it At the other end are the plants stamping out thousands of copies of dvds and flogging them commercially, and multi-trillion dollar companies which take the material and use it to sell to others Lets not pretend its the same thing
zerr 5mo ago
When it comes to tech books, it's been discussed/dissected many times that the only tangible benefit for the author is a publicity. This is not due to "piracy", but how publishing works. E.g. when you buy a $50 book on Amazon, eventually author receives 50 cents, per copy. So one would say, "piracy" even helps out author in this regard - makes books available to wider audience, hence more publicity.
- Aurornis 5mo ago
  > when you buy a $50 book on Amazon, eventually author receives 50 cents, per copy Royalties are much higher than 1%. Royalties are very high with eBooks (the closest analog to pirated books) > So one would say, "piracy" even helps out author in this regard Oh the mental gymnastics people will do to justify not paying people for their work. > makes books available to wider audience, hence more publicity. You downloading a pirated book does not do this. You just get their work without them getting any money in return. “Do it for exposure” ignites justifiable outrage when we are asked to work for free. Why would it be a good thing to apply to authors? Even if it was true, you cannot deny that exposure + payment is better than exposure plus nonpayment, right?
  - boredatoms 5mo ago
    What is the typical percentage for tech books?
  - zerr 5mo ago
    Ok, if we fallow that line, it's about worthiness in a certain region. And authors/sellers rarely implement regional pricing. Would you pay your one-month or even half-year salary for a random book? Same goes for software. That's why Microsoft encouraged or turned a blind eye on software "piracy" in developing countries, that's the reason Windows and other MS software became standards there. Most of users who "pirate" things won't pay a dime if you restrict it, they will just go find something else, e.g. Linux :)
    - Aurornis 5mo ago
vixen99 5mo ago
This applies to ~60% of books which have living authors. What is a reasonable stance on the other 40%?
hyperpape 5mo ago
From my perspective, and the perspective of most academics[0], it is their contribution to human knowledge, which is kept locked up by predatory publishers. A majority of academics will simply and without hesitation, offer their students and collaborators pirated versions of their own work, because they value knowledge. Commercial authors may feel differently. [0] I'm a former Ph.D. student, but my attitude was the same both within and outside of the academic world.
zouhair 5mo ago
So you are not using any AI then. Good for you to stand by your principals. AI stole all its training data.
- icase 5mo ago
  you can’t steal what is publicly available.
grayhatter 5mo ago
> minor nitpick, but for the most part (not including the website code, etc), this is not "their data". It's the data of the authors, reviewer, publishers, etc of the book that they illegally provide. Both are correct. You can say the data belongs to the work of the author. But in context, it's trained on data that exists within the training corpus because in large part of the work and/or resources of anna's archive. > But let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating. This is a separate and distinct argument for copyright, I don't find the argument that piracy meaningfully hurts artists compelling. In the context of meaningful harm, I believe it only hurts producers or publishers, almost never the creators directly.
teiferer 5mo ago
"Our" as a possessive doesn't necessarily convey ownership, rather association. "Our place" is used even by tenants of rental housing. They don't own the place, but they live there.
clutch_coder99 5mo ago
Are you an LLM?
serial_dev 5mo ago
"Dear LLM, we stole this and bundled it up for you, so that it's more convenient for you to steal the original authors' work, so please donate" just kidding of course, don't send a hitman my way.
- jimmydoe 5mo ago
  +1 been saying this too. Anna is mafia for AI companies. Mafia may do some good deeds to some poor, but they are still mafia.
bananaflag 5mo ago
> But let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating. They can live off other things. Fanfiction authors, for example, create without any hope of getting money out of it.
- somewhatgoated 5mo ago
  >Software developers should just open source all software they write and work for free - they can live off other things after all. See how entitled this sounds?
  - pocksuppet 5mo ago
    You might recall there was a large and vocal minority of software developers trying to bring about exactly that. You might also recall it used to be true. The aforementioned minority was trying to bring about a state that had already occurred in the past.
    - Aurornis 5mo ago
      > You might also recall it used to be true. I have no idea what you're trying to claim, but it has never been true that software developers all worked for free and gave away all software.
  - bananaflag 5mo ago
    I am not a software developer btw :) Also I don't believe in copyright that much
logifail 5mo ago
> let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create I co-published two scientific papers back when I was a PhD student. Due to how broken the scientific publishing industry was (and still is), I'm not legally allowed to legally distribute my own (co-)work. I'm not even allowed to view it! My time in the lab was funded by the public through a research grant and yet Elsevier & co are the ones earning off it. It's not right, and never was.
- IshKebab 5mo ago
  Yeah definitely. Scientific publishing is 100% an immoral scam. Book publishing is different though. Authors get paid. No publisher has a monopoly and there isn't really a reputation system that depends on the publisher. You could argue that copyright terms are way too long (and I would agree), but I don't think you can justify book piracy nearly as easily as you can justify Sci-hub.
- bl33pd 5mo ago
  Isn’t that what preprints are for? My limited experience was that authors have an essentially identical preprint version they submitted and happily share them with collaborators or typically on request. Conventionally people did that before sci-hub which is normative now for researchers who aren’t subject to extreme compliance requirements, but it’s still done. Most journals and conferences would only own the published paper but I have never ever heard of them going after authors sharing preprints privately. Similar for IEEE/ISO/ANSI standards most people use the last published draft as a working substitute for the licensed standard if they don’t have the expensive licensed access to it. Not saying that it isn’t broken but the idea that you couldn’t share it at all isn’t typical in science.
  - flexagoon 5mo ago
    > Isn’t that what preprints are for? The use of preprints unfortunately really varies by field, in some (like computer science) everything has an arXiv preprint, while in some barely anyone publishes them > sci-hub which is normative now Scihub hasn't been updated for a long time, it is completely useless for any new papers and only exists off of name recognition. STC Nexus is where it's at.
scotty79 5mo ago
> is not "their data" If they posess it, it's their data. Nobody borrowed it to them and they didn't obtain any private (unpublished) information. They only collected published data. So it's theirs. By the natural law of the information.
tomrod 5mo ago
If LLMs scraped data held by AA, then the assertion is accurate. Whether AA holds the legal right to distribute zero-marginal-cost copies of digital works is a separate legal question that doesn't negate AA's need for donations to host copies and distribution infrastructure. I think they can be discussed independently.
icase 5mo ago
you can always spot zoomers by their weird opposition to piracy. it's copying bytes on a disk, dude. nobody cares.
ekianjo 5mo ago
> that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating. In which fantasy world do most authors live from their royalty fees? The large, vast majority does not.
- debugnik 5mo ago
  So they don't deserve trying? The same goes for pretty much every publishing endeavour: Success follows the power law, so what?
  - ekianjo 5mo ago
    No you are missing the point. Any author with two working brain cells know that writing is not for making money.
    - debugnik 5mo ago
      Okay then, so they shouldn't have extra income streams from their passion projects because they won't live exclusively from them anyway. Is that it?
mplewis 5mo ago
AA was almost certainly used as the literal source of much of the training data.
visarga 5mo ago
> But let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating. This is an old problem. Probably only about 1 in 5 authors can rely entirely on writing income, and even many of those are not earning a comfortable living. Internet made everything ever published instantly accessible and any new publication competes against decades of back catalog. Attention is limited but ever content growing.
chungusamongus 5mo ago
This isn’t really a minor nitpick. This is you being a copyright maximalist. Just know that copyright doesn't exist to serve authors, artists, etc. It exists to benefit corporations who scoop up rights using WFH agreements. Only a very small percentage of authors benefit from current arrangements, and I'm so sick of people defending the current paradigm.
aiktamseel 5mo ago
I think the answer to question about piracy is similar to what Friedman said about immigration. It's good for the people as long as it's illegal. But if you make it legal (i.e. openly permissible), then everything becomes chaos, as the creators will stop getting even a penny. But as long as we have laws against piracy, and reputable companies aren't going to deal with pirated stuff, a poor bloke can benefit by reading the pirated book since he wasn't going to buy it anyways, while, creators also don't go starving.
- upboundspiral 5mo ago
  Milton Friedman's direct quote on immigration: Look, for example, at the obvious, immediate, practical example of illegal Mexican immigration. Now, that Mexican immigration, over the border, is a good thing. It’s a good thing for the illegal immigrants. It’s a good thing for the United States. It’s a good thing for the citizens of the country. But, it’s only good so long as it’s illegal. Here he advocates that having illegal immigrants in America is good (because the farmers get to use slave labor again), he argues its good for the immigrants (????), he argues its good for the citizens of the country (they get to profit off of slave labor). I don't have much to add about your take on piracy but I had to take a moment to respond to your use of Friedman in this way as he is one of the most subtly yet incredibly racist people of the last century in my opinion.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - capr 5mo ago
    He made an economic argument that went straight over your head.
wredcoll 5mo ago
> But let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating. Github (and sourceforge and and) seem to prove this point wrong.
parineum 5mo ago
> A minor nitpick, but for the most part (not including the website code, etc), this is not "their data". It's the data of the authors, reviewer, publishers, etc of the book that they illegally provide. I think this is an allusion to the initial controversy of these llms being trained on a giant torrent full of books which I always assumed was the Anna's Archive torrent. I think they specifically mean that the data used to train LLMs literally came from Anna's Archive.
jacobolus 5mo ago
One thing to keep in mind is that many (most?) of the books and papers in these archives are decades old, usually no longer in print, make zero or vanishingly small amounts of money for their original creators, are sometimes only physically available from distant libraries that are challenging to access, etc. In doing scholarly research, it's extremely helpful to be able to quickly search and skim hundreds of vaguely relevant sources, but simply wouldn't be worth the trouble to pay for or track down a "legitimate" copy of every one, and in many cases would be physically impossible. These "pirate" archives make doing real library research, previously limited to scholars at top-tier universities, accessible to orders of magnitude more people. There really isn't that much profit in most of these works, and whether a scholar reads one on their laptop screen vs. in a physical book in a university library somewhere doesn't have any material impact on the original authors, editor, illustrator, translator, printer, etc.
- cerebralstatic 5mo ago
  Even tho I agree with your post, it definitely isn't most of the books - most of the dataset would be occupied by in-print, big 3 books.
NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo ago
>It's the data of the authors, reviewer, publishers, Data isn't copyrightable in the United States. So no, they do not own this. They only owned the creative work itself. Don't even own that really... they don't have it in perpetuity. They've basically got a long-term lease from the public on it. With conditions.
TFNA 5mo ago
> I used to be a young broke kid and piracy was one of the few way to access culture and education There has been a sea change in how academia perceives piracy. Scanned-book websites used to be something that only developing-country scholars used, because they didn’t have access to most literature locally. But now academics around the world are using shadow libraries, because of the great convenience: Anna has more than anyone’s institutional library, and even when one’s own institution has a book, getting it from a shadow library is often faster. Researchers are well-used to these resources in their workflow now, and everyone expects everything to be freely available. At conferences in my field, when a presenter mentions an interesting publication, I can watch other people in the room immediately open Anna on their laptops and download the publication right there and then.
nullc 5mo ago
> But let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating. At least when it comes to academic publishing the authors are not paid by the publishers. They may even have to pay for the privilege of publishing. That payment along with the payment funding the research in the first place often came out of your own pocket in the form of state funding for the research. Obviously there is a lot more than papers there, but papers are a major thing an LLM might be going there to access. Then you have the issue of works where the user has purchased a copy but the only practical way to get a non-DRMed electronic copy suitable for use by their AI is the shadow libraries.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
ahf8Aithaex7Nai 5mo ago
“Their data” does not imply copyright or ownership. But it is data that is stored with them or at least available through them, and in that sense, it is certainly their data. Their friends, their nationality, their back pain, their favorite food: where does copyright or ownership come into play here? I understand that you need a hook for your intended message, but this one isn't really suitable. And to add my own message: first, it’s no one’s individual duty to worry about other people’s earned income. Second: the money paid for works often doesn’t go to the authors to any significant extent, but rather to some rights holders or middlemen. So this is just a smokescreen. The production of knowledge and art will not suffer because we download works from Anna’s Archive. If anything, it suffers because access to information is unnecessarily hindered. Third: ownership should be strictly limited to physical goods (if at all). Your article, book, or audio recording doesn’t disappear just because I’ve downloaded a copy of it. This is a deep-seated intuition that should be taken as an axiom rather than being questioned simply because people claim the right to profit from information asymmetry.
stratocumulus0 5mo ago
The word "our" has other purposes than declaring possession. If a company refers to its customer base as "our customers", does it mean that it created them or owns them as property at the moment?
DoctorOetker 5mo ago
the concept of rewarding creativity by "printing instances as if it were money" is what ultimately is flawed, information is too easy to copy or paraphrase to be sold as instantiations of knowledge. that is not to say we shouldn't reward creativity. it seems the only defensible solution is to organize a single sale towards the public domain, but that brings a new problem: how do we value the contribution? the printing-copies-of-information-and-sell-as-monopoly could provide feedback on book sales etc, so that prices could adjust. with each new film, book, scientific article, ... single sale towards the public domain is much harder to quantify it seems. One could categorize approaches as either: * reputation based (people liked the previous album / article / ... ) and the content creator starts listing a high price, and slowly allows it to decay, and somehow the public pays for it at a price they approve of * post-evaluation: the sale happens to the public, and the reward will be determined by future usage: the public effectively votes by usage and public funds are allocated accordingly (so the content might be dormant for a while, and suddenly be discovered and start generating more revenue for the author) * some sort of democracy (but conventional incumbent institutions tend to get hijacked by regulatory capture...) For the post-evaluation each jurisdiction could have their own sell-to-local-public-domain platform; and platforms that abuse authors will simply given less offers for future works...

by maeln 5mo ago

anonym29 5mo ago

"Won't someone please think of the poor billion dollar corporations?! Those executives won't survive without a fifth vacation home!"

andruby 5mo ago
They’re not talking about the corporations. They’re talking about the book authors.
jmye 5mo ago
You could at least pretend to read the comment you replied to before launching off into the most banally teenager-on-Reddit bullshit imaginable. Not everyone (besides you, of course - your causes are perfectly virtuous) trying to earn money is a billionaire.

__MatrixMan__ 5mo ago

Since we're doing minor nitpicks... Data can't be owned in the first place. We can debate the merits of copyright but it's not a property right. I'm all for finding better ways to support authors. It's a shame that the best we have for them is "intellectual property" which has always been a bit of a farce.

stevehawk 5mo ago
* can't (?)
- __MatrixMan__ 5mo ago
  Edited, Thanks.
zugi 5mo ago
Stallman tried to introduce the term "intellectual monopoly", which fits better, since they really are monopolies granted by the government for limited periods of time, intended to promote progress in science and the useful arts. "Property" was chosen specifically as a bait and switch. It tries to get people to take a concept that has been understood for thousands of years for physical objects, and apply it to this novel century-or-two long experiment for encouraging the production of easily-copyable things.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  > since they really are monopolies granted by the government This is property.
  - __MatrixMan__ 5mo ago
    There are multiple usages of the word. One of them refers to tangible things, was first codified more than 5000 years ago, and is almost entirely uncontroversial. The other was popular in 1700's France re: their system of privileges, and the people found it so onerous that they embarked on a campaign of executing nobility until it seemed like the concept was good and dead. We can use the word however we like, it's just a word, but if we conduct ourselves as if they're the same sort of thing, which France was doing at that time, we're in for the same sort of pain. So what I'm saying is that its a bad idea for us to let data be property.
    - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago

redsocksfan45 5mo ago

[dead]

laGrenouille 5mo ago

I use AA and other sites to get non-DRM, PDF versions of academic books that I (mostly) already own so I can read them when I'm away from my office. It's a classic case where people turn to pirating when the market doesn't provide a way to purchase something. Same thing with movies. Ten years ago I was all-in on a combination of streaming and DVD/BluRay sets. The market has completely collapsed for me with region locking and overly aggressive DRM. So, I've started pirating those again as well when it's not possible to get through another route.

ErroneousBosh 5mo ago
This was the whole premise of Steam. Paraphrasing slightly because I can't remember the quote exactly, "It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be less hassle than piracy". Even Youtube is no longer less hassle than piracy now.
- jaapz 5mo ago
  > Even Youtube is no longer less hassle than piracy now. YouTube premium is hassle?
  - iso1631 5mo ago
    I don't see any hassle with youtube, but I'm willing to pay. I do see hassle on things like disney and iplayer, which put now put adverts for shows I don't want to watch in front of Rivals. It's fortunately very rare that happens (on Disney), but its getting close to what I did when Amazon brought that in, and cancelled my subscription. Just like I stopped buying DVDs when they brought adverts in. I wouldn't have any moral problem in downloading Rivals from piratebay though, as far as I'm concerned I'm paying for it. But sometimes though there's no option to buy the thing. I want to buy the audio version of "a stitch in time" by Andrew Robinson (Garak from Star Trek). It's not available in my country on audible -- only the German translation. I haven't acquired it via other means yet, I'm still on the look out for another supplier which will take my money, and if I can trust that's a legitimate supplier so at least some of my money goes to the copyright holder (and thus pays for the people that create it) I don't have a CD player so not much use, but technically it is available for £142 from "Paper Cavalier UK". That's second hand, the creator won't make any money from me doing that. To my mind if someone won't "shut up and take my money", it's acceptable to acquire via another means.

ornornor 5mo ago

I hear you, and to this I often think: - libraries pay retail for their copies - many people can then read them for free, so the authors (and let’s be honest mostly they publishers) doesn’t get a dime either beyond the initial sale - used book sales, there are many online bookstores (most owned by Amazon but stealthily) that have millions of references which you can purchase for a fraction of their initial price. Nobody but the seller gets money from this either. How is it any different? Someone paid retail for their copy which they then shared. Kinda how a library would do it. Ok scale, maybe, although I suspect if you aggregated the loan stats on all the world libraries, you might land in the ballpark of the downloads on AL (I’d expect) Not being flippant but seriously pondering.

GolfPopper 5mo ago
In the UK and many other countries, Public Lending Right pays authors for books in libraries (with varying details from country to country): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_lending_right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_lending_right
- ornornor 5mo ago
  Thanks, I didn’t know
ninjalanternshk 5mo ago
Not taking any stances here, but the difference is a library book can only be used by one person at a time, and it eventually wears out and has to be replaced. Neither of those are true for digital works.
Aurornis 5mo ago
Libraries pay higher rates for ebooks than the retail price. They have to renew the license. A publisher can choose not to license their ebooks to a library if they want. Each license can only be lent to one person at a time and there are usually time limits. In other words, it's completely different in every way.
- 5mo ago

kiba 5mo ago

But let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating. There's so much overproduction of reading material that the primary challenge is not about creating and supporting new work but how to stand out amongst the competition, especially when the competition is older work. The older works are perfectly fine, they just needs to be resurfaced so that people don't go working on materials that other people already written. That means these materials should be widely available, such as being in the public domain.

voakbasda 5mo ago
To go a step further, no one is entitled to make a living through their own preferred means. You want be an astronaut? You have to work your way through the program, competing with all the other candidates. More people want to be authors than astronauts. The competition is fierce. The market is what it is, and piracy is part of it. If you can’t deal with that (financially, emotionally, whatever), then you probably should not be an author. Being an author does not entitle someone to make a living as an author. Intellectual property laws are regulatory capture of published works. As we know, they don’t work particularly well, but people still want to make their living using that leverage. At the cost of everyone else in society. My advice to those wishing to publish anything: do not expect anything in return.
- marcosdumay 5mo ago
  Hum... Society is entitled healthy and well-supplied markets. AFAIK, in our current situation that demands weaker copyrights (and patents too), but "the market is what it is" is a really bad framing. What, are you against any kind of change?
- simonh 5mo ago
  I think intellectual property rights work astoundingly well. We have an incredibly rich, varied culture of published materials supporting vast legions of authors, artists, film makers, software developers, designers, publishers, playwrigts, actors, musicians, journalists, manufacturers, and on, and on.

iso1631 5mo ago

There's a spectrum of copyright infringement At one end you've got things which you are literally unable to buy, or someone who wants to listen to his legally owned CD audio book on his phone It progresses through like a broke kid who's already seen the latest avengers flick 3 times at the cinema but wants to see it a 4th as he's writing an essay on it At the other end are the plants stamping out thousands of copies of dvds and flogging them commercially, and multi-trillion dollar companies which take the material and use it to sell to others Lets not pretend its the same thing

zerr 5mo ago

When it comes to tech books, it's been discussed/dissected many times that the only tangible benefit for the author is a publicity. This is not due to "piracy", but how publishing works. E.g. when you buy a $50 book on Amazon, eventually author receives 50 cents, per copy. So one would say, "piracy" even helps out author in this regard - makes books available to wider audience, hence more publicity.

Aurornis 5mo ago
> when you buy a $50 book on Amazon, eventually author receives 50 cents, per copy Royalties are much higher than 1%. Royalties are very high with eBooks (the closest analog to pirated books) > So one would say, "piracy" even helps out author in this regard Oh the mental gymnastics people will do to justify not paying people for their work. > makes books available to wider audience, hence more publicity. You downloading a pirated book does not do this. You just get their work without them getting any money in return. “Do it for exposure” ignites justifiable outrage when we are asked to work for free. Why would it be a good thing to apply to authors? Even if it was true, you cannot deny that exposure + payment is better than exposure plus nonpayment, right?
- boredatoms 5mo ago
  What is the typical percentage for tech books?
- zerr 5mo ago
  Ok, if we fallow that line, it's about worthiness in a certain region. And authors/sellers rarely implement regional pricing. Would you pay your one-month or even half-year salary for a random book? Same goes for software. That's why Microsoft encouraged or turned a blind eye on software "piracy" in developing countries, that's the reason Windows and other MS software became standards there. Most of users who "pirate" things won't pay a dime if you restrict it, they will just go find something else, e.g. Linux :)
  - Aurornis 5mo ago

vixen99 5mo ago

This applies to ~60% of books which have living authors. What is a reasonable stance on the other 40%?

hyperpape 5mo ago

From my perspective, and the perspective of most academics[0], it is their contribution to human knowledge, which is kept locked up by predatory publishers. A majority of academics will simply and without hesitation, offer their students and collaborators pirated versions of their own work, because they value knowledge. Commercial authors may feel differently. [0] I'm a former Ph.D. student, but my attitude was the same both within and outside of the academic world.

zouhair 5mo ago

So you are not using any AI then. Good for you to stand by your principals. AI stole all its training data.

icase 5mo ago
you can’t steal what is publicly available.

grayhatter 5mo ago

> minor nitpick, but for the most part (not including the website code, etc), this is not "their data". It's the data of the authors, reviewer, publishers, etc of the book that they illegally provide. Both are correct. You can say the data belongs to the work of the author. But in context, it's trained on data that exists within the training corpus because in large part of the work and/or resources of anna's archive. > But let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating. This is a separate and distinct argument for copyright, I don't find the argument that piracy meaningfully hurts artists compelling. In the context of meaningful harm, I believe it only hurts producers or publishers, almost never the creators directly.

teiferer 5mo ago

"Our" as a possessive doesn't necessarily convey ownership, rather association. "Our place" is used even by tenants of rental housing. They don't own the place, but they live there.

clutch_coder99 5mo ago

Are you an LLM?

serial_dev 5mo ago

"Dear LLM, we stole this and bundled it up for you, so that it's more convenient for you to steal the original authors' work, so please donate" just kidding of course, don't send a hitman my way.

jimmydoe 5mo ago
+1 been saying this too. Anna is mafia for AI companies. Mafia may do some good deeds to some poor, but they are still mafia.

bananaflag 5mo ago

> But let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating. They can live off other things. Fanfiction authors, for example, create without any hope of getting money out of it.

somewhatgoated 5mo ago
>Software developers should just open source all software they write and work for free - they can live off other things after all. See how entitled this sounds?
- pocksuppet 5mo ago
  You might recall there was a large and vocal minority of software developers trying to bring about exactly that. You might also recall it used to be true. The aforementioned minority was trying to bring about a state that had already occurred in the past.
  - Aurornis 5mo ago
    > You might also recall it used to be true. I have no idea what you're trying to claim, but it has never been true that software developers all worked for free and gave away all software.
- bananaflag 5mo ago
  I am not a software developer btw :) Also I don't believe in copyright that much

logifail 5mo ago

> let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create I co-published two scientific papers back when I was a PhD student. Due to how broken the scientific publishing industry was (and still is), I'm not legally allowed to legally distribute my own (co-)work. I'm not even allowed to view it! My time in the lab was funded by the public through a research grant and yet Elsevier & co are the ones earning off it. It's not right, and never was.

IshKebab 5mo ago
Yeah definitely. Scientific publishing is 100% an immoral scam. Book publishing is different though. Authors get paid. No publisher has a monopoly and there isn't really a reputation system that depends on the publisher. You could argue that copyright terms are way too long (and I would agree), but I don't think you can justify book piracy nearly as easily as you can justify Sci-hub.
bl33pd 5mo ago
Isn’t that what preprints are for? My limited experience was that authors have an essentially identical preprint version they submitted and happily share them with collaborators or typically on request. Conventionally people did that before sci-hub which is normative now for researchers who aren’t subject to extreme compliance requirements, but it’s still done. Most journals and conferences would only own the published paper but I have never ever heard of them going after authors sharing preprints privately. Similar for IEEE/ISO/ANSI standards most people use the last published draft as a working substitute for the licensed standard if they don’t have the expensive licensed access to it. Not saying that it isn’t broken but the idea that you couldn’t share it at all isn’t typical in science.
- flexagoon 5mo ago
  > Isn’t that what preprints are for? The use of preprints unfortunately really varies by field, in some (like computer science) everything has an arXiv preprint, while in some barely anyone publishes them > sci-hub which is normative now Scihub hasn't been updated for a long time, it is completely useless for any new papers and only exists off of name recognition. STC Nexus is where it's at.

scotty79 5mo ago

> is not "their data" If they posess it, it's their data. Nobody borrowed it to them and they didn't obtain any private (unpublished) information. They only collected published data. So it's theirs. By the natural law of the information.

tomrod 5mo ago

If LLMs scraped data held by AA, then the assertion is accurate. Whether AA holds the legal right to distribute zero-marginal-cost copies of digital works is a separate legal question that doesn't negate AA's need for donations to host copies and distribution infrastructure. I think they can be discussed independently.

icase 5mo ago

you can always spot zoomers by their weird opposition to piracy. it's copying bytes on a disk, dude. nobody cares.

ekianjo 5mo ago

> that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating. In which fantasy world do most authors live from their royalty fees? The large, vast majority does not.

debugnik 5mo ago
So they don't deserve trying? The same goes for pretty much every publishing endeavour: Success follows the power law, so what?
- ekianjo 5mo ago
  No you are missing the point. Any author with two working brain cells know that writing is not for making money.
  - debugnik 5mo ago
    Okay then, so they shouldn't have extra income streams from their passion projects because they won't live exclusively from them anyway. Is that it?

mplewis 5mo ago

AA was almost certainly used as the literal source of much of the training data.

visarga 5mo ago

> But let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating. This is an old problem. Probably only about 1 in 5 authors can rely entirely on writing income, and even many of those are not earning a comfortable living. Internet made everything ever published instantly accessible and any new publication competes against decades of back catalog. Attention is limited but ever content growing.

chungusamongus 5mo ago

This isn’t really a minor nitpick. This is you being a copyright maximalist. Just know that copyright doesn't exist to serve authors, artists, etc. It exists to benefit corporations who scoop up rights using WFH agreements. Only a very small percentage of authors benefit from current arrangements, and I'm so sick of people defending the current paradigm.

aiktamseel 5mo ago

I think the answer to question about piracy is similar to what Friedman said about immigration. It's good for the people as long as it's illegal. But if you make it legal (i.e. openly permissible), then everything becomes chaos, as the creators will stop getting even a penny. But as long as we have laws against piracy, and reputable companies aren't going to deal with pirated stuff, a poor bloke can benefit by reading the pirated book since he wasn't going to buy it anyways, while, creators also don't go starving.

upboundspiral 5mo ago
Milton Friedman's direct quote on immigration: Look, for example, at the obvious, immediate, practical example of illegal Mexican immigration. Now, that Mexican immigration, over the border, is a good thing. It’s a good thing for the illegal immigrants. It’s a good thing for the United States. It’s a good thing for the citizens of the country. But, it’s only good so long as it’s illegal. Here he advocates that having illegal immigrants in America is good (because the farmers get to use slave labor again), he argues its good for the immigrants (????), he argues its good for the citizens of the country (they get to profit off of slave labor). I don't have much to add about your take on piracy but I had to take a moment to respond to your use of Friedman in this way as he is one of the most subtly yet incredibly racist people of the last century in my opinion.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- capr 5mo ago
  He made an economic argument that went straight over your head.

wredcoll 5mo ago

> But let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating. Github (and sourceforge and and) seem to prove this point wrong.

parineum 5mo ago

> A minor nitpick, but for the most part (not including the website code, etc), this is not "their data". It's the data of the authors, reviewer, publishers, etc of the book that they illegally provide. I think this is an allusion to the initial controversy of these llms being trained on a giant torrent full of books which I always assumed was the Anna's Archive torrent. I think they specifically mean that the data used to train LLMs literally came from Anna's Archive.

jacobolus 5mo ago

One thing to keep in mind is that many (most?) of the books and papers in these archives are decades old, usually no longer in print, make zero or vanishingly small amounts of money for their original creators, are sometimes only physically available from distant libraries that are challenging to access, etc. In doing scholarly research, it's extremely helpful to be able to quickly search and skim hundreds of vaguely relevant sources, but simply wouldn't be worth the trouble to pay for or track down a "legitimate" copy of every one, and in many cases would be physically impossible. These "pirate" archives make doing real library research, previously limited to scholars at top-tier universities, accessible to orders of magnitude more people. There really isn't that much profit in most of these works, and whether a scholar reads one on their laptop screen vs. in a physical book in a university library somewhere doesn't have any material impact on the original authors, editor, illustrator, translator, printer, etc.

cerebralstatic 5mo ago
Even tho I agree with your post, it definitely isn't most of the books - most of the dataset would be occupied by in-print, big 3 books.

NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo ago

>It's the data of the authors, reviewer, publishers, Data isn't copyrightable in the United States. So no, they do not own this. They only owned the creative work itself. Don't even own that really... they don't have it in perpetuity. They've basically got a long-term lease from the public on it. With conditions.

TFNA 5mo ago

> I used to be a young broke kid and piracy was one of the few way to access culture and education There has been a sea change in how academia perceives piracy. Scanned-book websites used to be something that only developing-country scholars used, because they didn’t have access to most literature locally. But now academics around the world are using shadow libraries, because of the great convenience: Anna has more than anyone’s institutional library, and even when one’s own institution has a book, getting it from a shadow library is often faster. Researchers are well-used to these resources in their workflow now, and everyone expects everything to be freely available. At conferences in my field, when a presenter mentions an interesting publication, I can watch other people in the room immediately open Anna on their laptops and download the publication right there and then.

nullc 5mo ago

> But let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating. At least when it comes to academic publishing the authors are not paid by the publishers. They may even have to pay for the privilege of publishing. That payment along with the payment funding the research in the first place often came out of your own pocket in the form of state funding for the research. Obviously there is a lot more than papers there, but papers are a major thing an LLM might be going there to access. Then you have the issue of works where the user has purchased a copy but the only practical way to get a non-DRMed electronic copy suitable for use by their AI is the shadow libraries.

deleted 5mo ago

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ahf8Aithaex7Nai 5mo ago

“Their data” does not imply copyright or ownership. But it is data that is stored with them or at least available through them, and in that sense, it is certainly their data. Their friends, their nationality, their back pain, their favorite food: where does copyright or ownership come into play here? I understand that you need a hook for your intended message, but this one isn't really suitable. And to add my own message: first, it’s no one’s individual duty to worry about other people’s earned income. Second: the money paid for works often doesn’t go to the authors to any significant extent, but rather to some rights holders or middlemen. So this is just a smokescreen. The production of knowledge and art will not suffer because we download works from Anna’s Archive. If anything, it suffers because access to information is unnecessarily hindered. Third: ownership should be strictly limited to physical goods (if at all). Your article, book, or audio recording doesn’t disappear just because I’ve downloaded a copy of it. This is a deep-seated intuition that should be taken as an axiom rather than being questioned simply because people claim the right to profit from information asymmetry.

stratocumulus0 5mo ago

The word "our" has other purposes than declaring possession. If a company refers to its customer base as "our customers", does it mean that it created them or owns them as property at the moment?

DoctorOetker 5mo ago

the concept of rewarding creativity by "printing instances as if it were money" is what ultimately is flawed, information is too easy to copy or paraphrase to be sold as instantiations of knowledge. that is not to say we shouldn't reward creativity. it seems the only defensible solution is to organize a single sale towards the public domain, but that brings a new problem: how do we value the contribution? the printing-copies-of-information-and-sell-as-monopoly could provide feedback on book sales etc, so that prices could adjust. with each new film, book, scientific article, ... single sale towards the public domain is much harder to quantify it seems. One could categorize approaches as either: * reputation based (people liked the previous album / article / ... ) and the content creator starts listing a high price, and slowly allows it to decay, and somehow the public pays for it at a price they approve of * post-evaluation: the sale happens to the public, and the reward will be determined by future usage: the public effectively votes by usage and public funds are allocated accordingly (so the content might be dormant for a while, and suddenly be discovered and start generating more revenue for the author) * some sort of democracy (but conventional incumbent institutions tend to get hijacked by regulatory capture...) For the post-evaluation each jurisdiction could have their own sell-to-local-public-domain platform; and platforms that abuse authors will simply given less offers for future works...