10 ms·
Google Books (or similar) all book scans – $200k bounty (2025)
- ThrowawayTestr 4mo agoOne of my hopes is that when the AI bubble bursts, some brave person will sneak out a copy of the last frontier model.
- Aboutplants 4mo agoNot worried about that, you will only have to wait 3-6 months and get a Chinese model just as good.
- yorwba 4mo agoChinese companies giving away expensive models for free is a symptom of the AI bubble, too. It's not a law of nature that they'll always be able to scrounge up the money for yet another training run.
- gpm 4mo agoShaping the tool that does the thinking is quite valuable when you're in the business of changing how people think - I think we can expect propaganda agencies to be subsidizing model creation forever. This doesn't strike me as a symptom of a bubble - except in so far as the bubble pushes the competitors models forwards and thus they need to invest more to stay competitive.
- rvnx 4mo agoAll the models, have to respect their local laws, and most of all, pressure from users and the employees. They all carry political weights, because humans behind defend their interests, and are promoting some social values. https://pastebin.com/hjhvsBFg https://pastebin.com/hjhvsBFg This answer from Claude is so biased that it is ridiculous
- nextos 4mo agoI think it's a deliberate business strategy of commoditization of their complement. China acts like an entire bloc, not as single companies, and they want to monetize hardware.
- yorwba 4mo agoIf you think Chinese companies always act as a bloc, your mental model needs to get about a billion times more detailed. But in this case just a few details may be enough: There are Chinese AI companies that have released LLMs without publishing the weights. ByteDance is going the direct-to-consumer route with their Doubao chatbot (the most popular in China, probably thanks to their social media prowess). iFlyTek seems to be angling for enterprise and government use cases, where they already have an in. The companies that have released weights have in common that they didn't have a monetization channel lined up and their models weren't good enough to make people pay attention with just API access. (You can see with Qwen Max that the calculus can change towards not releasing weights for better models.) And who exactly among the investors is having their complement commoditized? When Nvidia releases Nemotron, the story is clear, but it's less obvious for say Z.ai's GLM.
- jnwatson 4mo agoAs long as it is in the CCP's national interest to have a frontier model, Chinese companies will have the resources for another training run.
- sulam 4mo agoThat’s misunderstanding why these models are behind. A large part of why they’re behind is they aren’t able to do the reinforcement learning post-training steps that takes a pre-trained model and turns it into a frontier model like GPT 5 or Opus. Instead they do their best to recreate these models using distillation. Fundamentally, you can never distill your way to being the teacher, so these approaches will not advance the frontier. [edit, after thinking about it I think my phrasing is unfair. It's not necessarily that aren't able to do it, but they haven't yet shown that they are willing to do it.]
- computerex 4mo agoThat’s not remotely true. They did distillation as a cheap solution to the cold start problem. You need data/trajectories to hill climb to higher capabilities. All large Chinese labs do RLAIF.
- sulam 4mo agoOh yes, not remotely true. Which is why the frontier labs all have invested heavily in trying to identify and thwart distillers, using known company names / domains to drive their exclusion lists. /s
- logicchains 4mo agoIt's cheaper to distill than to do reinforcement learning, so of course they prefer that, but if it wasn't an option they could just pay up and spend more GPU time on RL.
- FpUser 4mo ago>"they aren’t able to do the reinforcement learning post-training steps" Not yet. If there is a need someone will come and fulfill. Personally for me now I do not even want to use top models. Professionally I use AI to help with the coding using Junie agent that comes with IDEs from JetBrains. Junie is told to use Gemini Flash and works fine for what I ("I" being an emphasis here) ask it to do. I tried more advanced models and different vendors only to discover credits going down the toilet without any extra benefit.
- thx67 4mo agoPrediction markets can solve this.
- fastball 4mo agoIf it's a bubble, why do you care about frontier models?
- FpUser 4mo agoInternet was a bubble, so was telecom etc. at some point. Being bubble does not mean that when 90% of investments go down the drain the remains are not useful.
- fastball 4mo ago"The Internet" was not a bubble. Companies with no long-term business model / sufficient product-market fit that were riding hype were the "dotcom bubble". But when those companies crashed, nobody said "I really want to get my hands on their IP", because it wasn't valuable – an important pre-requisite to the the bubble popping. Seems to be a different case here if people actually want the SOTA models.
- A1kmm 4mo agoA bubble just means it is overvalued beyond it's true fundamentals due to speculation on speculation. The underlying asset can still have value, just less than the market price. Consider Cisco. On the 31st of March, 2000, it was valued at US$77.31 / share, which in inflation adjusted terms is $150.46 (above the current price over 26 years later). This valuation was on the basis of speculation that the price would continue to go up and Cisco would get a large cut of the industry profits. Cisco's business is still valuable, it was just treated as overvalued by the market. Similarly, if we go back to one of the classic examples of a bubble - consider Dutch tulip prices in 1636; speculation drove future contracts high. But tulips still have value to people today, it's just the price was higher than was sustainable.
- mr_toad 4mo agoRailways were both a bubble and, eventually, one of the most significant technological innovations in history.
- 4mo ago
- zuzululu 4mo agowhich will be very difficult to run unless you have a large budget to operate your own mini datacenter
- lelanthran 4mo agoIn a crash the hardware will go for pennies on the dollar, if not for fractions of pennies on the dollar. Lots of companies will pick them up for scrap metal prices and host them for fractions of what we are paying today. That's the nature of bubbles.
- bix6 4mo agoPiracy / copyright predictions? The current situation feels untenable with renting. So many regular people I know have learned about VPN, NAS, etc.
- specproc 4mo agoIt was never sustainable, just regulatory capture by large IP owners. Spotify, Netflix, Amazon etc provided OK value for a while, but now enshitification is biting, this is due a massive comeback.
- codemog 4mo agoHopefully the guillotines. Look up how much the authors and artists who create the actual work get paid.
- 0x3f 4mo agoQuite a few textbook authors I know are paid well to be part of the whole scheme (kickbacks, forced yearly repurchase for the 'online' component of books, etc). So I think it varies a lot.
- smashah 4mo agoAll authors should have a pay + linktree type thing so pirates can pay them directly. Or something like thanks.dev
- FerritMans 4mo agoSo AA is a front for openai?
- awakeasleep 4mo agothe bounty would be a bit higher with openAI money behind it
- 650REDHAIR 4mo agoHow did you come to that conclusion?
- flexagoon 4mo agoNo, but they openly make a lot of money from selling their library to AI companies. Fast enterprise access to Anna's Archive starts at $100.000
- shevy-java 4mo agoInteresting. But AI companies drive the RAM prices, which costs me more. So someone makes me pay more here ... :(
- poly2it 4mo agoA lot? I would be kind of interested if there were any known figures. Do companies want to be implicated in AA-cooperation in any capacity?
- Cider9986 4mo agoThey likely use intermediary companies, but NVIDIA might have purchased from them directly, I don't remember the full story.
- flexagoon 4mo agoNo specific figures, but see, for example: https://annas-archive.gl/blog/ai-copyright.html https://annas-archive.gl/blog/ai-copyright.html > Virtually all major companies building LLMs contacted us to train on our data. Most (but not all!) US-based companies reconsidered once they realized the illegal nature of our work. By contrast, Chinese firms have enthusiastically embraced our collection, apparently untroubled by its legality. > We have given high-speed access to about 30 companies. Most of them are LLM companies, and some are data brokers, who will resell our collection. Most are Chinese, though we’ve also worked with companies from the US, Europe, Russia, South Korea, and Japan. DeepSeek admitted that an earlier version was trained on part of our collection, though they’re tight-lipped about their latest model (probably also trained on our data though). It's at least 30 companies, each of which paid hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- b112 4mo ago[dead]
- wxw 4mo agoSome more interesting bounties they offer: https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist/annas-archive/-/work_items?label_name%5B%5D=2-Bounty https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv... > Purchase all Library of Congress MARC datasets — $3,000 bounty > English Wikipedia pages about relevant institutions — up to $100 per new page > Internet Archive Digital Lending — $5000 per 1 million pdf files > Text version of our full library — $20,000 ...
- Cider9986 4mo agoUp to 500k for OPSEC failures is interesting, as well. It gives me hope that there are wealthy individuals contributing to sharing books, or many small donations. https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist/annas-archive/-/work_items/194 https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv...
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- trilogic 4mo agoWho is behind Annas archive, there is a lot of english speakers involved in the team and forums! Anyway as long as buying isn´t owning no issues here.
- Cider9986 4mo agoI think Anna is behind it. https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/Annas_Archive/comments/1f6h74r/im_curious_actually_who_is_anna/ https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/Annas_Archive/comments/1f6h74r... https://reddit.com/r/Annas_Archive/comments/1f6h74r/im_curious_actually_who_is_anna/ https://reddit.com/r/Annas_Archive/comments/1f6h74r/im_curio...
- ajcp 4mo ago> ANother aNonymous Address. True or not I rather like that one.
- Cider9986 4mo ago>Stands up "I am Anna!!" This one's good as well. This is an example of a rare good Reddit thread. Apparently this is the reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKCmyiljKo0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKCmyiljKo0 But this is what I thought of: https://youtu.be/hdsB99HQ2S8?t=194 https://youtu.be/hdsB99HQ2S8?t=194 All are examples of people with less power protecting each-other from a more powerful force.
- shevy-java 4mo agoI think the main source may be in Russia; or that was with libgen. But I could be wrong. I am more surprised to see that there are so few alternatives to it. Or perhaps I am unaware of them but after Facebook and co declared war on libgen, and libgen going down, there were surprisingly few alternatives. Anna was one of the few. I still don't know what happened with libgen, but since the attack it really is kind of semi-gone.
- trilogic 4mo ago
- hedora 4mo agoI wonder how long it will be before they offer bounties for internet scrapes. Cloudflare captchas have made the internet unusable for me, and I'm sure it will only get worse over time. I'd much rather just browse (or even torrent) a copy of archive.is or similar. The latter would be much better for privacy, and hey, I run ad blockers anyway.
- rvnx 4mo agohttps://x.com/CloudflareDev/status/2031488099725754821 https://x.com/CloudflareDev/status/2031488099725754821 Well, there is this little conflict of interest
- aspect0545 4mo agohttps://xcancel.com/CloudflareDev/status/2031488099725754821 https://xcancel.com/CloudflareDev/status/2031488099725754821
- TurdF3rguson 4mo agoSomeone on your network is likely playing one of the games that are monetized by bright data proxies, it was a thread on here a few days ago. It could be your smart TV. If you find the culprit and remove it there's a decent chance your ip reputation will improve enough to not see those captchas
- inigyou 4mo agoWhen everyone's a bot, noöne is.
- OrangeDelonge 4mo agoCurious as to how you would approach this. I have no experience in this area, anyone on this forum willing to share their expertise?
- 0x3f 4mo agoIf it works as AA seems to theorize, you'd need to: (a) work out how Google books exposes fragments of books, and see if there's a systematic way of using this to get whole books. For example, a naive approach might be to find any fragment of the book by searching some exact phrase. Then, you can search for an exact phrase from the start or end of the fragment it gave you, hoping it will show you the previous or next part of the book. You can then just loop that to get the whole book. (b) once you have (a), you need a way of bypassing Google's bot detection/rate limiting. I don't know what current state of the art is, but there may be a solution for sale out there. E.g. you pay to receive a cookie or browser state, and use that to fetch the URLs from (a). Or if you're good/already in the scene, you could do this part yourself.
- takipsizad 4mo agoThat way definitely will work with the current access google provides however its an extremely inconvenient way to scrape google books
- inigyou 4mo agoThat's why they're paying you $200k for it.
- takipsizad 4mo agoyeah it's similar to what I would value google books scraping job difficulty wise and data wise, I've done my probing on m own it was water tight as my probing has gone
- mr_toad 4mo ago(c) avoid being hounded to death by a zealous district attorney.
- neilv 4mo agoThe US should just find a way to quietly share literature access with the Russians, rather than letting piracy be promoted and facilitated for US consumers as freedom-fighter "archiving". Between all the piracy, and all the AI training and the purchase/visitor-circumventing AI services, the practice of writing and publishing genuinely good work is being wiped out. We're killing the goose that lays the eggs, for selfish gain.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- mjburgess 4mo agoPossibly but this act of governmental self-harm is useful to The People. We live in a world where if your valuation is ~1T you can more or less just do what you like. And the work of The People is stolen from you and launderd. In such a world, isnt it useful that governments are stupid enough to give adversaries reasons to undermine it? When the government props up a corporate tyranny domestically, and racketeering, should we make a temporary alliance with all its enemies? (Eg., the provision to AI companies of all corporate secretes and competitive practices via prompts, eventually to be used against their capital interests and their labour interests).
- LearnYouALisp 4mo agoSo when will the American people form an "Incorporation" to lobby against business for them?
- TFNA 4mo agoThis ship has sailed for academic publications, and academics define that term very liberally because we want to read everything, fiction included. The shadow libraries started off as a way for scholars in ex-Soviet countries in particular (but also India, SE Asia, etc.) to access literature that simply wasn’t available in their country. But the shadow libraries proved so successful and convenient that academics in all countries are using them now, even if they have access to official subscription services. I use AA several times a day and so do the researchers around me in my office; at conferences, if the presenter mentions an interesting publication, the whole room immediately opens AA on their laptops, etc. Even if projects like AA didn’t have nation-level support, academics would find a way to keep as much of it as possible going. After all, we’re the ones who compiled the bulk of pre-2020 material, and we’re the ones who do all the hard work of scanning from our institutional libraries stuff that doesn’t exist anywhere in digital form.
- ahmedfromtunis 4mo agoI live in a country where the selection of available books, especially in English, is very limited. Buying online from foreign markets comes with a long list of administrative hurdles and limits. If it were not for Anna's Archive and Z-Library, I would've never been able to read the books that shaped who I am today, or keep my passion for learning alive. Thanks, AA and ZLib! (Also, thank you to the authors whose books and knowledge I consumed without being able to pay them back.)
- jvm___ 4mo agohttps://send.djazz.se/ https://send.djazz.se/ This is key for getting epubs to your Kobo.
- christofosho 4mo agoCalibre? https://calibre-ebook.com/ https://calibre-ebook.com/
- ahmedfromtunis 4mo agoThanks, but I don't use e-readers as they are not available here. I've been using MoonReader for many years now and settled on pretty good parameters that make the reading experience very comfortable on both my phone and my tablet.
- subscribed 4mo agoMoon reader is amazing. I love mine so much I don't see a point of having a separate book reader.
- pull_my_finger 4mo agoI don't understand what this is doing. Can't you sideload any ebook onto a kobo anyway? Never had an issue on my Clara
- TFNA 4mo ago
- DeepYogurt 4mo agoAnyone afraid of being laid off at google right now? Perhaps this is a backup :)
- Cthulhu_ 4mo agoI think if you get caught exfiltrating data they'll sue you for much more than $200K.
- the_real_cher 4mo agoIf your money is in private crypto or offshore you have nothing to worry about.
- mock-possum 4mo agoExcept perhaps jail time. Lying about your assets to avoid paying a lawful fine is criminal. Just because they can’t see your money doesn’t mean they can’t prove that you have it, and can’t jail you for hiding it to get out paying a fine.
- LearnYouALisp 4mo agoGoogle, Amazon, and FB: It's not me, right
- LastTrain 4mo agoSo is stealing
- zuzululu 4mo agoi'd strongly caution anybody foolish enough to go down this path financial watchdogs and international treaties make it impossible unless you are perhaps a multi billionaire who can afford to buy people at the political level
- merpkz 4mo agoCopy data into extra large capacity micro sdcard and hide it in your rubiks cube, nobody will suspect a thing
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- dr_dshiv 4mo agohttps://SourceLibrary.org https://SourceLibrary.org has about 16,000 rare books translated — most for the first time. 50,000 books archived (will be translated when we have $$ for it). More tokens than English Wikipedia and about .75 petabytes. Not sure if we will qualify for a bounty, but happy to share! Btw, we are looking for funding from small or large donors who want to help us translate the Renaissance…
- wrsh07 4mo agoHey, this looks fascinating! I can't quickly tell what all you have archived^, but I have some friends who are academic historians who might be interested in certain categories of work (and could help verify some esoteric languages) - is it possible to search by region or language? Have you reached out to any types of historians WRT the project? It seems like some PhD students might be able to find some projects in this work etc ^ when I looked at the timeline https://sourcelibrary.org/timeline https://sourcelibrary.org/timeline, I got an error
- dr_dshiv 4mo agoYes, this is designed with historians and librarians from the Embassy of the Free Mind (https://embassyofthefreemind.com https://embassyofthefreemind.com) in Amsterdam, stewards of the collection of the Biblioteca Philosophica Hermetica Please share with historian friends. I’m not great at socials or fundraising but this was really designed to support humanists. It can give DOIs for the versions of the translated books, which means they can be quoted and cited in academic papers. Tip: Try it in Claude or Claude code (even better)! Just point it towards the source library. It can find quotes and evidence on any topic of interest. Or try the librarian — our source-grounded research agent https://sourcelibrary.org/librarian https://sourcelibrary.org/librarian Thanks for the feedback, I’ll fix the timeline.
- killix 4mo ago[flagged]
- therealpygon 4mo ago
- hereme888 4mo agoThe link sort of reads like people who have very easy access to the requested material. Almost like they're Google employees.
- inigyou 4mo agoNo it doesn't?
- anyaya1 4mo agoDoes Anna's Archive use a completely different "source repository" from LibGen?
- takipsizad 4mo agoannas archive is practically a compilation from all sources possible (including libgen afaik)
- TFNA 4mo agoAA compiles from everywhere; LibGen and Z-Lib served as the major sources of books. This has unfortunately led to search results for a particular book containing multiple versions of that book, and it is not readily clear which one is the highest-quality version. A real library would have librarian staff who carefully curate everything, but in the pirate world this isn’t realistic so it just gets all thrown together. LibGen is now more or less a dead project. The servers of the original version were reportedly seized a couple of years ago already, and other sites under the LibGen name were notorious for piggybacking the original collection and just plastering it with ads. If one wants to upload stuff, better now to upload it to Z-Lib (not a perfect site, but still) and it will then get picked up by AA in a few months.
- ALittleLight 4mo agoSurely this is realistic now (or soon) in the form of LLM curation. A few auto-librarians reading everything, looking at different versions side by side, making choices, etc.
- PaulRobinson 4mo agoDonate your tokens then. LLMs are many things, but one thing they definitely are not is cheap/free to run at scale.
- TFNA 4mo agoLOL, not realistic at all. The differences between book versions lie in more than the raw text. Moreover, an archival project would be loathe to favour or disfavour a version unless an actual human made the call.
- stephenlf 4mo agoAnna’s archive rocks
- stephenlf 4mo agoThe only legal hurdle keeping Anna’s Archive away from its noble goal (piracy laws) has been shown to mean zilch in the age of AI.
- thenthenthen 4mo agoThere was a time where you would get a random page preview, some artists found a way to extract full books that way (F.A.T lab?).
- mmooss 4mo agoHow is Anna's Archive funded? I see they have memberships, but it's hard to believe that can fund all these bounties - some going into six figures. Ask any FOSS project about funding by that method. It seems like there are some deep pockets funding them.
- atemerev 4mo agoChinese (and some other) AI companies buying fast access to their dataset.
- mmooss 4mo agoSo Anna's Archive is in some ways a front for AI companies, gathering the sources they can't get themselves?
- Cider9986 4mo agoThey could get access for free through torrents.
- HDBaseT 4mo agoMeta did, numerous Meta IP's appeared in the torrent swarms. The problem with using the torrents is they are slow, most of the larger sets have <3 seeders, with many dropping in and out, on home or slow connections. I would imagine other companies have learned from Meta's mistake and don't want to appear in the swarm either, which is why direct access is preferred. 100k for unlimited books access is nothing compared to the other costs these labs incur.
- Cider9986 4mo agoI'm under the impression that hiding IP addresses is easier than financial transactions, but both should be easy for a trillion dollar company. But I suppose they could use a shady intermediary company with a don't ask don't tell policy which would make high-speed access the final result.
- leoc 4mo agoJust do it and be legends, Larry. ;)
- Cider9986 4mo agoApple won't even help Asahi linux even though it would help hardware sales and give them a ton of goodwill.
- leoc 4mo agoOh, I have no expectation that Page or Brin would do something like this, let alone do it openly. But Page did seem to care about Books access at one point, and I find the image of him secretly leaking the Google Books corpus amusing.
- TZubiri 4mo agoI think this would cross the line from civil copyright claims into criminal activity https://chatgpt.com/share/6a4970e8-7fe8-83e9-8f81-3aefd76b6b54 https://chatgpt.com/share/6a4970e8-7fe8-83e9-8f81-3aefd76b6b... On another note, if Google's cybersecurity were always one rogue employee away from a massive leak, then it wouldn't be Google. What was the last Google leak you remember, defense in depth people.
- inigyou 4mo agoAA is an openly criminal organisation. Their attitude to prosecution is "you'll never catch us lol"
- TZubiri 4mo agoIndeed, took a closer look, and the court order that took down their .org domain included "Computer fraud and abuse" claims. Surprisingly the order is very specific about DNS registrars and authoritative domains not advertising the AA servers, so sharing IP addresses or alternative domain names through other means, like WikiPedia, is not against the order. Which means that nowadays the Wikipedia page works as a pseudo authoritative DNS.
- tangenter 4mo agoAnna’s came clutch for me yesterday. I spent a few days trying to find a zip file of a CD that came with an old book from early 2000s on programming. One of those Thomson Publishing slap jobs that I actually enjoyed. I checked used copies all of them said does not come with CD. I tried googling around, nothing. LLMs couldn’t find it. ChatGPT kept saying it is on the archive (no it isn’t you useless piece of shit). Anyway, on a whim I went to AA, lo and behold, zip files for both first and second edition. Godsend.
- irthomasthomas 4mo agoWhat for?
- tangenter 4mo agoHonestly? Nostalgia. I ran it in a sandbox just to check it out and play with it.
- ornornor 4mo agoConsider putting them on archive.org then, they have a section for that and it helps spread sources
- tangenter 4mo agoGood idea. I’ll see when one of the used copies I got comes with a CD so I can provide the actual .iso image.
- tolerance 4mo agoIf you shouldn't be able to copyright GRAPES...you shouldn't be able to copyright BOOKS.
- ajcp 4mo agoAnd why's that? I don't see how either of those two things relate to one another. A grape is a naturally occurring fruit, while the creation of a book is wholly a human creative endeavor.
- tolerance 4mo agoWhen I buy grapes, yeah, I get that someone worked for me to get 'em. But I don't get all metaphysical and spooky about it. I'm buying the grapes as objects. Like a book. Once I take ownership of the object, yes, thanks for your work. I paid you and I wish you well. As far as what I ought to be able to do with the thing? Beat it. Of course there are exceptions. You say, "Don't scan the book and upload it to object storage and place it behind a CDN so Ahmed from Tounis can access it". I say, "Don't make wine".
- NeutralCrane 4mo agoThere’s a lot of crops that are very intensively bred to create new, specific cultivars. Take a look at all the new Apple varieties popping up. There’s nothing natural about their creation: https://applerankings.com https://applerankings.com
- gpm 4mo agoMonsanto here, tell us more about copyrighting grapes!
- tolerance 4mo agohttps://www.monsantotechnology.com/Vegetables/main-page-monsanto-Vegetables.aspx https://www.monsantotechnology.com/Vegetables/main-page-mons... Poetic license, pal!
- TurdF3rguson 4mo ago
- alkyon 4mo agoGemini should be trained on those books already, so in theory it could regurgitate some verbatim fragments (as NYT lawsuit against OpenAI showed some time ago).
- motoboi 4mo agoGemini, gpt and fable are actually very good compressions of internet content. But is lossless compression as in they kept the most important part (for them to fulfill the next token task) and found a way to mimic the rest.
- alkyon 4mo agoI think you meant lossy compression and not lossless. I'm not suggesting this as a method to extract those books from the models, which by their nature are not databases. Just commenting on the somewhat surprising fact that the bigger the model the more likely it is to produce some (short) excerpts of the original training material
- cubefox 4mo agoHN logic: Training on copyrighted material --> bad Actually distributing copyrighted material --> good Needless to say, this is backwards. Any copyright holder will be much more worried about the latter.
- johndough 4mo agoThis could be another fine example of the Goomba fallacy: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy Another explanation might be a general dislike of big establishments like AI companies and publishers (which glosses over individual authors, but they probably make up a negligible portion of total sales anyway).
- Cider9986 4mo agoAt least Anna's archive is consistent. Copyright reform is necessary for national security https://annas-archive.gl/blog/ai-copyright.html https://annas-archive.gl/blog/ai-copyright.html
- sublimefire 4mo agoThe problem is that it is quite difficult to access the published papers is you are not in academia or some company that pays for the access, so AA sort of serves that niche to transfer the knowledge. Training on the other hand is a commercial activity to later rent the model, if this would be purely for open weights I suspect everyone was cool with it.
- xdennis 4mo agoIt's all about what you actually care. Piracy helps people who can't afford to pay or have no way of acquiring legally. LLM training helps megacorps replace people. If you side with common people against megacorops, you're okay with piracy and against LLM training on copyrighted works.
- zanderwohl 4mo agoIt's not backwards. Which of the two makes a profit? Which of the two comes away richer? Which of the two actually takes business away from the original copyright holder?
- rvba 4mo agoComment by Borja is a great example of eternal September.
- vagab0nd 4mo agoAnother source I'd love to see scraped or opened up is the New York Times archive, along with other newspaper archives.
- jagged-chisel 4mo ago> Plead read [this] carefully before working on a bounty. [this] appears as a link to a .li address, and that goes bad places. Should be https://annas-archive.gl/volunteering#bounties https://annas-archive.gl/volunteering#bounties
- NavneetKr 4mo agoI went to that link and almost ran a malicious script in my terminal for a supposed reCAPTCHA verification. Just before pressing enter, I verified it with gemini and it said it was a ClickFix script designed to steal passwords and other sensitive information. Because of all the weird things we have to do for CAPTCHA verification these days, I almost believed it was legitimate and went with the steps. It is really frightening.
- Cider9986 4mo agoTrying to follow that link I have to go past multiple security warnings in my browser and the final destination blocks me for using a VPN. It won't even open in Brave.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- squigz 4mo agoWhat's frightening is that you almost ran a script in your terminal for a captcha. Good thing you have Gemini though.
- yreg 4mo agoSo how did this happen? Is https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist a legitimate staff account? Is this a scam? Or did they lose the domain to scammers and never update the link in the bounty?
- inigyou 4mo ago
- throwthrow7766 4mo ago[flagged]
- pseingatl 4mo agoMicropayments (charged in mills, not cents) is the solution. Downloading books remains essentially "free" for the individual but the Internet scale is such that authors would receive compensation for their work. The Spotify model is better than downright piracy. It is very difficult to compete with free.
- ilikegreen 4mo agoI would argue precisely that downright piracy is better than the Spotify model. It is based in micro-micropayments, so much so that even at internet scale very few artists outside of the uber-macro-Taylor-Swift size get proper compensation. Sending a single dollar through Bandcamp amounts to hundreds of listens on Spotify. It really sucks, but I'd rather pirate and know I'm at fault with the artist – maybe I'll buy some tracks off Bandcamp to make up for it – rather than let Spotify cover the transaction with a legal blanket, while the artists get almost nothing in return.
- jmakov 4mo agoCan't LLMs now just write books that aren't publicly available?
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 4mo agoI live in Canada but was born in Italy. I want to often buy books in Italian (digital) and it's incredibly complicated because licensing deals are never for people speaking Italian in Canada. You often need an Italian credit card to pay. The digital world is crazy.
- incompatible 4mo ago"If you work at Google and have access to this data, then we realize that $200,000 means little to you, but you'd be hailed a legendary archivist if you're able to sneak out this data." Yeah, but still, I think I'd prefer to do it anonymously than be the legendary archivist rotting away in prison.
- sliqqq 4mo agoWARNING! The link they posted on this Gitlab issue is a scam redirect loop, leading to something that uBlock rates as malicious. Also the /contact URL is not reachable, the entire .li of annas archive seems to be a scam. I'm writing this 2 days after this hackernews post went viral, it might be that somebody changed the links in between.
- DIHCAPITAL 4mo ago[flagged]