Discussion summary
Discussions revolve around the implications of large-scale book scanning projects, copyright issues, and the impact of AI on publishing. Participants debate the fairness of copyright laws and the accessibility of digital archives.
What the discussion says
- Some argue that copyright should not apply to naturally occurring or publicly available content.
- Others highlight the potential for AI to generate books and the challenges it poses to traditional publishing.
- There is concern about digital access to archives like the New York Times and international sharing of literature.
“If you shouldn't be able to copyright GRAPES...you shouldn't be able to copyright BOOKS.”
“AI publishing is just email spam, but for books.”
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- Hacker News
- Anna’s archive rocksby stephenlf
- Some more interesting bounties they offer: 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
...
by wxw - Up 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-archiv...
by Cider9986 - How 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.
by mmooss - They have a fast downloads tier starting at a few dollars a monthby TurdF3rguson
- Chinese (and some other) AI companies buying fast access to their dataset.by atemerev
- Piracy / copyright predictions?
The current situation feels untenable with renting. So many regular people I know have learned about VPN, NAS, etc.
by bix6 - It 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.
by specproc - Hopefully the guillotines. Look up how much the authors and artists who create the actual work get paid.by codemog
- "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.
by incompatible - Anyone afraid of being laid off at google right now? Perhaps this is a backup :)by DeepYogurt
- I think the problem is more that financial damage would result from this. So people would need to be prepared to relocate to another country probably.by shevy-java
- If you want to get fired / sued for leaking internal info, you should at least aim for 1 million (https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/27/google-employee-polymarket-i...)by jezzamon
- Doubtful that random employees just have access to the full archive. And among those few that do have access there are probably automated systems that will catch you once you start downloading even a small percent of the content
- I think if you get caught exfiltrating data they'll sue you for much more than $200K.by Cthulhu_
- I 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.
- > Plead read [this] carefully before working on a bounty.
[this] appears as a link to a .li address, and that goes bad places.
- So how did this happen? Is 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?
by yreg - I 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.by NavneetKr
- Who 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.by trilogic
- If no issue there, then why would you ask who is behind it in a public forum?by tumdum_
- I’d reckon many books available on there are otherwise available DRM-free, you’d be surprised really how many authors don’t bother with DRM.
And then you could obviously just buy it physically where buying is definitely owning, so I find that sentence a bit inappropriate for books
by bcye - I 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.
by shevy-java - I think Anna is behind it.
https://redlib.catsarch.com/r/Annas_Archive/comments/1f6h74r...
https://reddit.com/r/Annas_Archive/comments/1f6h74r/im_curio...
by Cider9986 - I 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.
by hedora - https://x.com/CloudflareDev/status/2031488099725754821
Well, there is this little conflict of interest
by rvnx - Someone 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 captchasby TurdF3rguson
- 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…
by dr_dshiv - TL;DR: AI translated books on the occult and occult-adjecent themes :/by paxcoder
- Wow this is amazing!by ziofill