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- Hacker News
- So when are Nvidia, Facebook, and everyone else going to chip in and pay up?by cloudie78
- Did you miss that they are huge corporations that the law doesn't apply to?by outside1234
- "owes" seems like a wrong word hereby NooneAtAll3
- Rembember to seed torrent kidsby profstasiak
- 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.by srean
- "If you own someone $340, that's your problem. If you owe someone $340,000,000, that's there problem."
Might as well be a trillion dollars as it's never getting paid.
by dcchambers - "when you're $100,000 in debt, it's your problem. But when you're $1 million in debt, it's the bank's" - Rosalie Goes Shopping (1989)by qwertox
- And Google owes 20 decillion dollars to the Russian government. Who cares either way.
- I don't understand why there is so much love for Anna's archive here. I feel like I'm getting whiplash because there is so much hate for AI companies training and profiting off of the worlds knowledge without licensing it. And yet, a site that directly facilitates that by taking payments from AI companies is lauded as this amazing and honorable thing. Can someone help me understand what im missing?
In general I don't have many qualms with modern piracy, it just seems very hypocritical and I'm confused.
by dominick-cc - I don't hate either particularly, but I care more about getting any book I want whenever, wherever, than I care about some abstract far away moralizing of something of consequence to me only ambiguously.by frgturpwd
- > Can someone help me understand what im missing?
One directly threatens the livelihoods of the commenters here, the other doesn't ;-)
by keeda - Obviously, not everyone on Hacker News shares the same opinion.
But, in general, Stewart Brand’s sentiment — expressed during a panel discussion at the first Hackers’ Conference in 1984, when he said that “information wants to be free” — is broadly shared here.
His full quote was: “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable… On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.” Steve Wozniak famously responded: “Information should be free, but your time should not.”
Even among those on HN who believe that copyright serves a societal purpose, many still want copyright terms to be drastically shortened (back).
So I’m skeptical that the hostility toward AI companies is primarily based on their training on, and profiting from, the world’s knowledge without licensing it. I suspect it is rather based on their doing so without making that knowledge accessible in return. In the recent news of their destroying books, it even means reducing the chance that that knowledge will ever become open.
Yes, opening the world’s knowledge can lead to good and bad uses — just like free software can be used for great as well as for nefarious purposes. We’re generally too techno-optimistic to judge technology solely by its worst possible outcomes. But for such a benevolent view to be justified, the potential benefits need to be also clear.
- AI companies turn public data into closed commercial products. They are allowed to profit off your copyrighted data, but only they get to profit from their own models.
I'd imagine the backlash to AI companies from us white collar workers to be less severe if they have to publish their weights. In fact if you look closer you will see HN is actually pretty content with Chinese open models. It's the American AI corps with closed models that attract criticism.
by pibaker - Anna's Archive is a gift to humanityby puppycodes
- Exactly. All libraries are worthy of being supported and grown. I make no distinction between a physical dead-tree library and a digital library.
The only reason we even have dead-tree libraries at all is because 100 years ago, that was what John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie put forth to whitewash their horrible capitalist behaviors across the USA. And because it was done by those generations' billionaires, public libraries because acceptable.
If public libraries were created in the last 20 years, they would have been banned and felony copyright charges would have been levied. In fact, thats exactly what happened WHEN people tried to create free digital libraries.
by nekusar - Exactly. if AI gets a pass on stealing all of the world's information and gets a pass why shouldn't we get to enjoy the same benefits?by weaksauce
- Didn’t they have a default judgment against them because they didn’t show up to court? Do they even know who runs it?
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.
- Incredible website. Really one of the dreams of the internet realised, the ability to access all knowledge at your fingertips.by Synaesthesia
- I was blown away when I paid to get an API key for it. The process is intricate and state of the art.by simlevesque
- 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.by Yokolos
- 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.
by num42 - 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.
by xtracto - I wouldn’t include YouTube given how only Google is allowed to index itby mips_avatar
- Why don't Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Facebook & Co defend Anna's Archive publicly?
Coming out would be a bold move for them.
by sam_lowry_