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The piracy organizations are playing 4D chess while everyone else is playing checkers. The irony of this entire situation - AI companies being legally required

The piracy organizations are playing 4D chess while everyone else is playing checkers. The irony of this entire situation - AI companies being legally required to shred books due to kafkaesque copyright laws, then used as a marketing tactic by Anna's Archive - is a work of art. I support Anna's Archive, by the way. Information wants to be free.

Cider9986 2mo ago
You can donate with over 20 different payment methods after making an anonymous account. https://annas-archive.gl/donate https://annas-archive.gl/donate
Levitz 2mo ago
It's an excellent play by them, using moral outrage to the benefit of the project. When life gives you lemons...
tene80i 2mo ago
Plenty of written works aren’t “information” but rather art. Most piracy is just about people preferring not to pay for novels, TV and film.
- guax 2mo ago
  Or not being able to. Regional licensing, missing and shuffling content. To watch the world cup I had to spin up a VM in Brazil to watch it with Portuguese narration because the free transmissions are region locked. I would gladly pay 5 bucks for it if it was possible otherwise and avoid the hassle.
  - tene80i 2mo ago
    There was no way in your country to pay and watch it? FIFA will have sold the tv rights there to someone, surely. In which case your complaint is what, that it was expensive?
    - guax 2mo ago
      Free on both, but not with the narration in my native language. On Brazil the world cup was being transmitted on youtube. in NL only on traditional TV channels or Online for the same channels (all for free but in Dutch). And literally as I write this I receive an email saying that my youtube premium was raised from 33 to 38 EURO. So there we have piracy getting juicier and juicier.
  - Xunjin 2mo ago
    We humans, often forget that logistics is always the bottleneck in any Industry.
- dombiscoff 2mo ago
  Art is information, always.
  - tene80i 2mo ago
    It’s not tautological. Explain why, and particularly why it’s only information, which is the thing that purportedly wishes to be free.
- mrweasel 2mo ago
  There is also a ton of tv shows, movies, music and books that you cannot buy, for now real good reason. I wouldn't be surprised that if in a few years there will be shows and movies that are only exists as pirated versions. With things increasingly only being available on streaming platforms or behind DRM in other ways, we risk looking back on the current era as a black hole 50 years from now. My concern is that less popular content is just erases, lost in mergers or lost in massive datacenters, never to be seen again.
  - tene80i 2mo ago
    I agree there is an archival justification. I just don’t think that’s why most people who pirate things are doing it.
  - merely-unlikely 2mo ago
    > I wouldn't be surprised that if in a few years there will be shows and movies that are only exists as pirated versions. I can already think of a couple examples I've run into in the audiobook world. I have copies of Douglas Adams himself narrating his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and subsequent books. As far as I know, these recordings are not available for purchase anywhere. I got them because someone was kind enough to upload them. I would have preferred to buy them but didn't have that choice. Some of Iain Bank's audiobooks were only available in Europe for a time (and maybe still are). For those I was able to convince Amazon I was buying in Germany at least.
- TFNA 2mo ago
  Indeed, art. And it is a pretty common position that all people should have access to art and culture. Add up the cost of buying the DVD/Blu-Ray releases for the 1500 or so films that make up the canon of cinema. That's a sum of money daunting even for people in developed countries, let alone most of the world. Piracy is going to be the realistic solution. (And before you say "Use the library", you know well-stocked libraries don't exist in most of the world, right?)
  - FeloniousHam 2mo ago
    > And it is a pretty common position that all people should have access to art and culture. Access to _all_ art and "culture"? For free?
    - TFNA 2mo ago
      Even if not all art, once something becomes canonical, it then becomes something that people should be able to easily familiarize themselves with for the sake of an educated and edified citizenry. And indeed, many countries subsidize public libraries and live performances for this very reason. But no state can manage to provide free or nearly-free access to the entire canon, so piracy helps fill the gap.
      - FeloniousHam 2mo ago
        Do you have any examples of art or culture that is unavailable?
  - tene80i 2mo ago
    If you're saying "piracy is justified in those parts of the world where access to any art or culture is prohibitively expensive", then that's a pretty defensible position, not unlike "It's ok to steal bread if you are starving". But that's not what many people defending piracy are doing. Many of them do indeed have great libraries nearby, and art and culture on demand at prices they happily spend having food delivered to their house.
everyday7732 2mo ago
Anna's archive is selling data to AI companies. They're essentially saying "hey, don't sell your books to be scanned by AI companies, scan them yourself, and give us the data, so we can sell it to AI companies."
- urbnspacecowboy 2mo ago
  With the important difference that scans sent to Anna's Archive are, you know, archived.
srj 2mo ago
Why are the companies legally required to shred the books? That's the most surprising part about this to me. Surely if they bought them second hand they could donate or resell after scanning. I'm wondering if the scanning machines are damaging the books.
- famouswaffles 2mo ago
  You're not allowed to make copies of copyrighted work. Of course this law was made long before the reality of digital books. The argument for the digital era is that you can make a digital scan and it's not a 'copy' so long as you shred the original and don't attempt to distribute it.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 2mo ago
  The legal idea behind it is that if you "copy" the book it's bad because now there are two copies and you "stole" from the author, but if you "move" the book to a digital form (and don't copy that outside of your organization), it's fine. Given that they have to destroy them anyway, they're obviously also going to use the much cheaper destructive scanning (cutting off the spine and using a feed scanner rather than carefully turning page by page).

Cider9986 2mo ago

You can donate with over 20 different payment methods after making an anonymous account. https://annas-archive.gl/donate https://annas-archive.gl/donate

Levitz 2mo ago

It's an excellent play by them, using moral outrage to the benefit of the project. When life gives you lemons...

tene80i 2mo ago

Plenty of written works aren’t “information” but rather art. Most piracy is just about people preferring not to pay for novels, TV and film.

guax 2mo ago
Or not being able to. Regional licensing, missing and shuffling content. To watch the world cup I had to spin up a VM in Brazil to watch it with Portuguese narration because the free transmissions are region locked. I would gladly pay 5 bucks for it if it was possible otherwise and avoid the hassle.
- tene80i 2mo ago
  There was no way in your country to pay and watch it? FIFA will have sold the tv rights there to someone, surely. In which case your complaint is what, that it was expensive?
  - guax 2mo ago
    Free on both, but not with the narration in my native language. On Brazil the world cup was being transmitted on youtube. in NL only on traditional TV channels or Online for the same channels (all for free but in Dutch). And literally as I write this I receive an email saying that my youtube premium was raised from 33 to 38 EURO. So there we have piracy getting juicier and juicier.
- Xunjin 2mo ago
  We humans, often forget that logistics is always the bottleneck in any Industry.
dombiscoff 2mo ago
Art is information, always.
- tene80i 2mo ago
  It’s not tautological. Explain why, and particularly why it’s only information, which is the thing that purportedly wishes to be free.
mrweasel 2mo ago
There is also a ton of tv shows, movies, music and books that you cannot buy, for now real good reason. I wouldn't be surprised that if in a few years there will be shows and movies that are only exists as pirated versions. With things increasingly only being available on streaming platforms or behind DRM in other ways, we risk looking back on the current era as a black hole 50 years from now. My concern is that less popular content is just erases, lost in mergers or lost in massive datacenters, never to be seen again.
- tene80i 2mo ago
  I agree there is an archival justification. I just don’t think that’s why most people who pirate things are doing it.
- merely-unlikely 2mo ago
  > I wouldn't be surprised that if in a few years there will be shows and movies that are only exists as pirated versions. I can already think of a couple examples I've run into in the audiobook world. I have copies of Douglas Adams himself narrating his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and subsequent books. As far as I know, these recordings are not available for purchase anywhere. I got them because someone was kind enough to upload them. I would have preferred to buy them but didn't have that choice. Some of Iain Bank's audiobooks were only available in Europe for a time (and maybe still are). For those I was able to convince Amazon I was buying in Germany at least.
TFNA 2mo ago
Indeed, art. And it is a pretty common position that all people should have access to art and culture. Add up the cost of buying the DVD/Blu-Ray releases for the 1500 or so films that make up the canon of cinema. That's a sum of money daunting even for people in developed countries, let alone most of the world. Piracy is going to be the realistic solution. (And before you say "Use the library", you know well-stocked libraries don't exist in most of the world, right?)
- FeloniousHam 2mo ago
  > And it is a pretty common position that all people should have access to art and culture. Access to _all_ art and "culture"? For free?
  - TFNA 2mo ago
    Even if not all art, once something becomes canonical, it then becomes something that people should be able to easily familiarize themselves with for the sake of an educated and edified citizenry. And indeed, many countries subsidize public libraries and live performances for this very reason. But no state can manage to provide free or nearly-free access to the entire canon, so piracy helps fill the gap.
    - FeloniousHam 2mo ago
      Do you have any examples of art or culture that is unavailable?
- tene80i 2mo ago
  If you're saying "piracy is justified in those parts of the world where access to any art or culture is prohibitively expensive", then that's a pretty defensible position, not unlike "It's ok to steal bread if you are starving". But that's not what many people defending piracy are doing. Many of them do indeed have great libraries nearby, and art and culture on demand at prices they happily spend having food delivered to their house.

everyday7732 2mo ago

Anna's archive is selling data to AI companies. They're essentially saying "hey, don't sell your books to be scanned by AI companies, scan them yourself, and give us the data, so we can sell it to AI companies."

urbnspacecowboy 2mo ago
With the important difference that scans sent to Anna's Archive are, you know, archived.

srj 2mo ago

Why are the companies legally required to shred the books? That's the most surprising part about this to me. Surely if they bought them second hand they could donate or resell after scanning. I'm wondering if the scanning machines are damaging the books.

famouswaffles 2mo ago
You're not allowed to make copies of copyrighted work. Of course this law was made long before the reality of digital books. The argument for the digital era is that you can make a digital scan and it's not a 'copy' so long as you shred the original and don't attempt to distribute it.
tgsovlerkhgsel 2mo ago
The legal idea behind it is that if you "copy" the book it's bad because now there are two copies and you "stole" from the author, but if you "move" the book to a digital form (and don't copy that outside of your organization), it's fine. Given that they have to destroy them anyway, they're obviously also going to use the much cheaper destructive scanning (cutting off the spine and using a feed scanner rather than carefully turning page by page).