You buy an Amazon gift card as a gift and use the email Anna's Archive provide you as the recipient. The email is unique to you so they know when you paid them.
How on earth are they able to cash in on that? Surely they are not ordering neither air fryers nor their servers from Amazon.. Or anything for that matter, given the illegality of AA. Do they resell them at 90% on eBay?
Probably the greatest achievement of modern society, a rebirth of the Library of Alexandria. Of course, only private for-business corporations are allowed to steal the world's knowledge, apparently, and only to be able to monetise it. There's something deeply wrong with our civilization that Anna's Archive is punished while companies like OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Anthropic, etc are just ... ignored when they do things like destructively digitise books or pirate things.
It really is disheartening how much our society is set up to favor corporations over individuals. It’s hypocritical to attempt and shut down Anna’s while allowing big tech to pay a fine and continue pirating.
Might as well say "Annas Archive OWES ELEVENTY HUNDRED BILLIONTY-TRILLIONTY INFINITY DOLLARS!!!!!111" ala elementary school playground make-believe.
I remember when RIAA was shaking down 15 year olds for $7000 for a single Metallica download from Napster. Or how Aaron Schwartz was executed by proxy by JSTOR and the feds, for what should have been free to access for all.
But hey, Anthropic, OpenAI, X, and others can pirate to their hearts content with for-profit piracy, but "we" (royal) are OK with that. We just cant have the poors have access to the sum of human knowledge.
Because something was wrong in his brain and he couldn't handle the stress of his situation.
Many people have faced similar or worse charges, and did not commit suicide, so we'll have to point at something else.
Fuck them for what they did to him, but we should be rallying to get him set free. We can't start pointing fingers at other people for suicides. We have agency.
People can be predisposed towards something, and then have a tipping point brought by periods of great stress
Jason Arday recently committed suicide due to media pressure, and even when the media was told that he was not mentally well and should please back off, they didn't.
The man was accused of plagiarism, and there was no final verdict on if he did. The institutions that hired him clearly had no issues in vetting him. And yet he committed suicide.
There are absolutely horrible people out there right now who's entire careers are shams, and don't even come close to thinking about it. People are built different, and have different triggers
Many of us did, and I certainly still do, but there obviously weren't enough of us rebelling to convince them of how reprehensible it is to sue your own fans and sic the guns of the state on them.
What an incredible strategy - and it worked! And in something that's entertainment and fandom-driven; it's not like the fans need a medication, job, or their auto warranty. How pathetic. The day rock'n'roll died.
I have just been reading an article about it from the EFF[0]. What a vitriolic, hateful enterprise.
> Take, for example, the case of the Tammy Lafky, a 41-year-old sugar mill worker and single mother in Minnesota. Because her teenage daughter downloaded some music last year—an activity both mother and daughter believed to be legal— Lafky now faces over $500,000 in penalties. The RIAA has offered to settle for $4000, but even that sum is well beyond Lafky’s means—she earns just $21,000 per year and receives no child support.
It gets worse:
> Among those sued was Brianna Lahara, a twelve-year-old girl living with her single mother in public housing in New York City. In order to settle the case, Brianna was forced to apologize publicly and pay $2,000.
How could one justify tearing cash from the hands of poor children? The irony is that they may have been downloading music because they couldn't afford it in the first place, yet wanted to keep up with their peers.
Fred and Wilhelmina are in bed together. Fred tosses and turns, unable to sleep. "Fred, what's troubling you?"
"You know Bjarne from the bank? Well, a balloon payment is due tomorrow on my loan, and I don't have the cash flow to pay it."
Wilhelmina thinks for a bit, then reaches for her phone. "Betty? Yes, this is Wilhelmina. Sorry to call so late. Would you tell Bjarne that Fred can't make the loan payment tomorrow? Yes, that's all. Good night."
Fred states at Wilhelmina, aghast. "What did you do THAT for?" She smiles. "Now it's Bjarne's problem. Let him toss and turn, you can go to sleep."
I chose the names from The Flintstones, although the joke is not from the show.
Ridiculously unimportant trivia: The Flintstones borrows heavily from The Honeymooners, was the first animated sitcom, and was also the first animated show aired in prime-time.
Anna's Archive is what TV told me in the 2000s that the future was. An online database with all published books one click away. Far from the dystopian reality than the corporate internet has become.
Long live Anna’s Archive. I stand on the shoulders of the Internet, Wikipedia, Anna’s Archive, Z-Library, LibGen, YouTube, Hacker News, Reddit, and Sci-Hub.
I deeply admire the people who are obsessed with their passions and strive to build things that will lay the foundations for others.
I'm pretty sure[0] they're all using shadow libraries, and saying things in favor of them would increase their liability.
Furthermore, every pirate wants to be an admiral. None of the big tech companies are actually in favor of any amount of copyright reform. They never have been. There is a huge gulf between "personally benefitting from copyright theft" and "actually wants to legalize the theft". Anthropic still believes they deserve to be paid for their models, they just have this delusion in their head that doing a bunch of computation on stolen data is equivalent to actual human creativity.
[0] OpenAI, Anthropic and Facebook have been shown in court to be using shadow libraries, I don't know about Google.
You missed Gigapedia (library.nu [1]) , which preceded most of the others.
Although I partially applaud what Anna's Archive is doing, I like their model the least (they want to CHARGE to download while doing Copyright infringement?).
In any case, I strongly believe that Anna's Archive is the wrong approach, as it has a single point of failure. We have been doing massive P2P sharing for more than 26 years; we have the algorithms for fully distributed file sharing and databases. Why are we still depending on HTTP/DNS based interfaces that are easily taken down by people wanting to limit knowledge?
I'm glad and thankful that the people behind Anna's Archive dedicate their time maintaining the huge base of human knowledge (Encyclopedia Galactica Asimov would say), but we (the people) should make it really distributed, really infallible and accessible (no, downloading 10TB torrent files doesn't make sense, except for archiving purposes).
We should have something like Popcorn Time but for knowledge.
BBSes were the first, of course. In particular, Libgen, Sci-Hub and others can be traced back through several generations of libraries to the SU.BOOKS FidoNet echo conference created in the early 90's.
> Why are we still depending on HTTP/DNS based interfaces that are easily taken down by people wanting to limit knowledge?
Those are arguably the hardest protocols to block on the open Internet without causing major issues for all other sites, forcing those trying to take them down to play "whack-a-mole". If they were to create a new "AATP" for distributing data, it would make it trivial to block on every ISPs firewalls.
I only wish they allowed browsing journals by year and volume. Libgen allowed that but war in Ukraine broken libgen. It lives but as a much shadier alter egos that does not support all that original libgen supported.
Just make them owe $134 Trillion or whatever the evaluation was years ago suggested by the RIAA for their estimation of 'damages' for music piracy. It's about as meaningful.
Wikipedia usually has the most recent domains for sites like this. There's even a browser extension[1] that uses an `.idk` TLD to say "Look up the latest URL from this site's Wikipedia article".
when I read title .
"Annas archive owes $340 million absolutely first thing that came to mind is
" How much do all these Ai companies owe for their unauthorised use of books and other media?"
84 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 13.2 ms ] threadI remember when RIAA was shaking down 15 year olds for $7000 for a single Metallica download from Napster. Or how Aaron Schwartz was executed by proxy by JSTOR and the feds, for what should have been free to access for all.
But hey, Anthropic, OpenAI, X, and others can pirate to their hearts content with for-profit piracy, but "we" (royal) are OK with that. We just cant have the poors have access to the sum of human knowledge.
What happened to Aaron Schwartz was tragic, but "executed by proxy by JSTOR?" That's ridiculous, overheated rhetoric. He committed suicide.
Many people have faced similar or worse charges, and did not commit suicide, so we'll have to point at something else.
Fuck them for what they did to him, but we should be rallying to get him set free. We can't start pointing fingers at other people for suicides. We have agency.
If I get dumped and I commit suicide because of it, does that mean I was "executed by proxy" by my girlfriend/boyfriend?
"Executed by proxy" is ridiculous, overheated rhetoric.
Jason Arday recently committed suicide due to media pressure, and even when the media was told that he was not mentally well and should please back off, they didn't.
The man was accused of plagiarism, and there was no final verdict on if he did. The institutions that hired him clearly had no issues in vetting him. And yet he committed suicide.
There are absolutely horrible people out there right now who's entire careers are shams, and don't even come close to thinking about it. People are built different, and have different triggers
Weird way to spell "lied about nearly every facet of his life and anyone who questioned it was aggressively accused of being racist."
Oh yeah? Well, my dad works at Anna's Archive.
Why didn't Metallica's fans rebel? That would have stopped it quickly and set a precedent and example for the rest.
What an incredible strategy - and it worked! And in something that's entertainment and fandom-driven; it's not like the fans need a medication, job, or their auto warranty. How pathetic. The day rock'n'roll died.
> Take, for example, the case of the Tammy Lafky, a 41-year-old sugar mill worker and single mother in Minnesota. Because her teenage daughter downloaded some music last year—an activity both mother and daughter believed to be legal— Lafky now faces over $500,000 in penalties. The RIAA has offered to settle for $4000, but even that sum is well beyond Lafky’s means—she earns just $21,000 per year and receives no child support.
It gets worse:
> Among those sued was Brianna Lahara, a twelve-year-old girl living with her single mother in public housing in New York City. In order to settle the case, Brianna was forced to apologize publicly and pay $2,000.
How could one justify tearing cash from the hands of poor children? The irony is that they may have been downloading music because they couldn't afford it in the first place, yet wanted to keep up with their peers.
[0]: https://w2.eff.org/IP/P2P/RIAAatTWO_FINAL.pdf
Piracy is morally justified at this point.
They're not more or less virtuous than any others, they're in it for the money and you're a fool if you think otherwise.
I'm not against piracy, it's great, but to claim they are moral saints is a joke.
Anyway, bring in the downvotes as I know will happen.
It's not a competition, and being a moral saint isn't a good KPI; being a net positive for society is.
Maybe you can own (some) things, you can't own information
Might as well be a trillion dollars as it's never getting paid.
Fred and Wilhelmina are in bed together. Fred tosses and turns, unable to sleep. "Fred, what's troubling you?"
"You know Bjarne from the bank? Well, a balloon payment is due tomorrow on my loan, and I don't have the cash flow to pay it."
Wilhelmina thinks for a bit, then reaches for her phone. "Betty? Yes, this is Wilhelmina. Sorry to call so late. Would you tell Bjarne that Fred can't make the loan payment tomorrow? Yes, that's all. Good night."
Fred states at Wilhelmina, aghast. "What did you do THAT for?" She smiles. "Now it's Bjarne's problem. Let him toss and turn, you can go to sleep."
Ridiculously unimportant trivia: The Flintstones borrows heavily from The Honeymooners, was the first animated sitcom, and was also the first animated show aired in prime-time.
I deeply admire the people who are obsessed with their passions and strive to build things that will lay the foundations for others.
Coming out would be a bold move for them.
Furthermore, every pirate wants to be an admiral. None of the big tech companies are actually in favor of any amount of copyright reform. They never have been. There is a huge gulf between "personally benefitting from copyright theft" and "actually wants to legalize the theft". Anthropic still believes they deserve to be paid for their models, they just have this delusion in their head that doing a bunch of computation on stolen data is equivalent to actual human creativity.
[0] OpenAI, Anthropic and Facebook have been shown in court to be using shadow libraries, I don't know about Google.
INB4: "Here is one time one of those organizations broke the law". Don't go there, absolute lowest level of conversation.
Although I partially applaud what Anna's Archive is doing, I like their model the least (they want to CHARGE to download while doing Copyright infringement?).
In any case, I strongly believe that Anna's Archive is the wrong approach, as it has a single point of failure. We have been doing massive P2P sharing for more than 26 years; we have the algorithms for fully distributed file sharing and databases. Why are we still depending on HTTP/DNS based interfaces that are easily taken down by people wanting to limit knowledge?
I'm glad and thankful that the people behind Anna's Archive dedicate their time maintaining the huge base of human knowledge (Encyclopedia Galactica Asimov would say), but we (the people) should make it really distributed, really infallible and accessible (no, downloading 10TB torrent files doesn't make sense, except for archiving purposes).
We should have something like Popcorn Time but for knowledge.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library.nu
Those are arguably the hardest protocols to block on the open Internet without causing major issues for all other sites, forcing those trying to take them down to play "whack-a-mole". If they were to create a new "AATP" for distributing data, it would make it trivial to block on every ISPs firewalls.
They railroaded Aaron Swartz (which eventually lead to his suicide) for much, much less.
One side wants to freely share knowledge with all of humanity, the other wants to restrict it to make a buck. I know who I support.
better not miss!
[1] https://github.com/aaronjanse/dns-over-wikipedia