NVIDIA executives allegedly authorized the use of millions of pirated books from Anna's Archive to fuel its AI training. In an expanded class-action lawsuit that cites internal NVIDIA documents, several book authors claim that the trillion-dollar company directly reached out to Anna's Archive, seeking high-speed access to the shadow library data.
It's not settled law as it pertains to LLMs, but, yes, creating a "statistical summary" of a book (consider, e.g., a concordance of Joyce's "Ulysses") is generally protected as fair use. However, illegally accessing pirated books to create that concordance is still illegal.
Copyright laws are so undefined and NVIDIAs lawyers so plentiful that the statement works in their favor. You're allowed to copy part of a work in many cases, the easiest example is you can quote a line from a book in a review. The line is fuzzy.
Library Genesis worked pretty great and unmolested until news came out about Meta using it, at which point a bunch of the main sites disappeared off the net. So not only do these companies take ALL the pirated material, their act of doing so even borks the pirates, ruining the fun of piracy for everyone else.
> NVIDIA is also developing its own models, including NeMo, Retro-48B, InstructRetro, and Megatron. These are trained using their own hardware and with help from large text libraries, much like other tech giants do.
People HAVE to somehow notice how hungry for proper data AI companies are when one of the largest companies propping the fastest growing market STILL has to go to such length, getting actual approval for pirated content while they are hardware manufacturer.
I keep hearing how it's fine because synthetic data will solve it all, how new techniques, feedback etc. Then why do that?
The promises are not matching the resources available and this makes it blatantly clear.
Considering AA gave them ~500TB of books, which is astonishing (very expensive to even store for AA), I wonder how much nvidia paid them for it? It has to be atleast close to half a million?
I have a very large collection of magazines. AI companies were offering straight cash and FTP logins for them about a year or so ago. Then when things all blew up they all went quiet.
I've always wondered about some of the torrent whales with multiple petabytes on private trackers. A lot of the whales auto dl every single new torrent that's uploaded. Perhaps even the sites themselves are allowed to operate as a way to get users to crowd source media.
The reason why it's legal for Nvidia to download Anna's Archive and illegal for you is that they have well-paid lawyers and deep pockets to kick the can down the road for years before negotiating a settlement, making billions in the meantime. The settlement itself becomes a moat.
They also pay millions of dollars to lobbyists to encourage favorable regulation and enforcement.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 50.7 ms ] threadDoes this even make sense? Are the copyright laws so bad that a statement like this would actually be in NVIDIA’s favor?
• Anna’s Archive: ~61.7 million “books” (plus ~95.7M papers) as of January 2026 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive • Amazon Kindle: “over 6 million titles” as of March 2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive
Hard to compare because AA contains duplicates, and the Kindle number is old, but at a glance it seems AA wins.
I keep hearing how it's fine because synthetic data will solve it all, how new techniques, feedback etc. Then why do that?
The promises are not matching the resources available and this makes it blatantly clear.
They also pay millions of dollars to lobbyists to encourage favorable regulation and enforcement.