| ▲ | U.S. Court Order Against Anna's Archive Spells More Trouble for the Site(torrentfreak.com) |
| 84 points by t-3 8 hours ago | 41 comments |
| |
|
| ▲ | mmooss 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Specifically, the site’s operator and these third parties are prohibited from scraping WorldCat data, storing or distributing the data on Anna’s Archive websites, and encouraging others to store, use or share this data. I don't see how that impacts anyone but Anna's Archive. Arguably ISPs distribute the data, but how are registrars implicated? |
|
| ▲ | Frotag 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Specifically, the site’s operator and these third parties are prohibited from scraping WorldCat data, storing or distributing the data on Anna’s Archive websites, and encouraging others to store, use or share this data. Given the timing, I assumed it was Spotify trying to prevent the release of their dataset but apparently not. |
|
| ▲ | qingcharles 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| God knows how much OCLC spent in legal fees just to get it this far, even without any motions by the other party. What's the point? None of the people using Anna's Archive are potential customers of OCLC. Just lawyers trying to justify their existence. |
| |
| ▲ | mmooss 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Also, isn't OCLC focused on the mission of libraries, which is to distribute knowledge? What is their attitude toward services like Anna's, which accomplishes that mission much better than any OCLC member? | | |
| ▲ | RobotToaster 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | These so called charities have to justify their executives' seven figure salaries somehow. If someone is doing their job better without all the embezzling executives people may start asking inconvenient questions. | | | |
| ▲ | rf15 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | because The Mission is making money, too. | | |
| |
| ▲ | ls612 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | They also wasted a ton of money suing a random Washington state woman who wasn’t even affiliated with AA this whole case has really been a shitshow especially considering from a purely legal perspective the publishers have a point. I almost feel like every rightsholder other than Nintendo wants to engage in performative legal action more than substantive legal actions. | |
| ▲ | kingleopold 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | come one, we need lawyers so they can help owners make extra $billions. some lawyers are not humans, they are objects bought with money.literally, no humanity in them. |
|
|
| ▲ | superkuh 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Cory Doctorow has it right. Since the USA is applying tariffs to everyone everywhere anyway, everyone should abandon their US free trade agreements and get rid of the agreement required local laws that allow US companies to shut down others for felony violation of business model. |
| |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > everyone should abandon their US free trade agreements Do you have a link to Doctorow's argument? On its face, this is incredibly stupid--for most economies, the cost of losing a FTA is well above any of the tariff levels being discussed. | | |
| ▲ | dustyharddrive 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification... | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Thank you. Is there a transcript? I'm specifically interested in whether he's making an actual argument around trade, or if he's speaking metaphorically. | | |
| ▲ | alephnerd 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Transcript - https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/01/39c3/ He's serious in a techno-accelerationist manner, specifically around anticircumvention laws. That said, knowing the strength of the MT in TMT within the EU, it's more of an idealistic dream than a reality. | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > serious in a techno-accelerationist manner, specifically around anticircumvention laws So not serious as a policy proposal but serious for playing to his base. Got it. Disappointing coming from him. But I guess we all have to tend to our power. | | |
| ▲ | nebula8804 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | As much as I tire of Doctorow's style, I feel you have a level of pessimism that would prevent anyone from trying anything innovative. | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > you have a level of pessimism that would prevent anyone from trying anything innovative Dead wrong. I’m a risk taker. I wanted to see Doctorow’s argument because I respect him and would love if the numbers allowed for constraining Washington. Dismissing a stupid proposal for being wrong isn’t rejecting solutions in general. In this case, it’s pointing out that Europe escalating a trade war for copyright reform doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you’re rallying folks to that cause. | | |
| ▲ | saubeidl an hour ago | parent [-] | | I think it's ridiculous framing to call this Europe escalating. The US has been escalating non-stop for a year. This would be Europe responding for once. Constraining Washington is in their interest as Washington is a malign actor now. |
|
| |
| ▲ | GrowingSideways 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What does "serious policy proposal" even look like in the US? Two senators sucking each other off while ignoring their constituents hammering at the door? This is not a serious place. | |
| ▲ | alephnerd 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yep, but I think Cory truly believes this stuff deep down. | | |
| ▲ | pessimizer 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | He can't actually believe it. He's pretending like he doesn't know how numbers work, and burying it in words. There's a difference between a 1% tariff, a 2% tariff, and a 25% tariff. Just like there's a difference in forcing you to accept anticircumvention laws and forcing you to give up Greenland. > Well, they're saying that they won't take our coffee unless we give them anticircumvention. And I'm sorry, but we just can't lose the US coffee market. Our economy would collapse. So we're going to give them anticircumvention. I'm really sorry." > That's it. That's why every government in the world allowed US Big Tech companies to declare open season on their people's private data and ready cash. > The alternative was tariffs. Well, I don't know if you've heard, but we've got tariffs now! Comparing having any tariff to having your house burned down is pretending that it's not possible just to have your barn burned down. Or to have a window painted over. Or to have to trim the branches on your trees. Which ask is going to push you to the point where you give up your coffee industry? Nah, let's pretend not to know that all of this can be quantified, and that Hungary has any real leverage over the US on its own. If the US is asking too much from Hungary, Hungary can go to China or India - but China or India can ask for anything marginally less than what the US asked for, or can even agree with the US to ask for exactly what the US asked for. And Europe has cut itself off from Russian resources for ideological reasons, so it can't even take advantage of the fact that Russia's market for its resources is somewhat limited. He's suffering from applause addiction. China can do what they want because they are not a dependency of the US. Europe is. If anything, with all of his invective about Orban (because Orban is ideologically unpleasant), Hungary is in a better position than Europe as a whole because the Orban government doesn't have the self-destructive Russophobia that the rest of Europe does. Hungary can choose at any time whether to be in Europe or to rely on Russia, and China. That's more leverage than Europe has. | | |
| ▲ | JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I think they meant he feels like saying “fuck you,” even if it burns down the world around him. That’s a real human impulse. But it’s important to distinguish folks who want to watch the world burn from those floating serious solutions. | | |
| ▲ | jrflowers 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | He seems pretty emphatic that everything is burning and that we are watching it burn, right now, because it is on fire, presently. Is it your interpretation that Doctorow is a fan of this administration’s actions and wants them to continue? Or that he is advocating for a sort of… double fire? Like lighting fire on fire? Is there a physical world analogy for what you’re describing in terms of burning/not burning? |
| |
| ▲ | saubeidl an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Trump threatened an extra 10% tariffs on countries that don't think the US should be taking over Greenland. Who knows what dumb reason he'll come up with next? Under this regime, the US is eventually going to develop into something similar to Japan under Sakoku - a nonfactor in international trade, due to a self-imposed embargo. Of course it'll hurt former US trade partners (and the US itself even more!). But it's coming either way, whether we suck up to Americans or not. With that in mind, we might as well just do what we want since the US is for some reason voluntarily giving up power over us. |
|
| |
| ▲ | jrflowers 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > serious for playing to his base. Got it. Disappointing coming from him. But I guess we all have to tend to our power. What “power” does this blogger/sci-fi writer have? Who is “his base”? What responsibility to affect meaningful trade regulation did he abdicate when he said a thing you didn’t agree with? |
|
|
|
|
| |
| ▲ | CamperBob2 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Indeed, we in the US are about to find out what it means to voluntarily give up every bit of soft power we wielded in the post-WWII international order. |
|
|
| ▲ | greyface- 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Judgment: https://torrentfreak.com/images/anna-oclc-default-judgment.p... Disappointing in particular to see the court validate a ToS "browsewrap agreement", admitting that OCLC provided no evidence that Anna's Archive was aware of the agreement, but still finding the fact that "Defendant is a sophisticated party that scraped data from Plaintiffs website daily" as sufficient to bind them to it. |
| |
| ▲ | shakna 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Can that be used as precedent to bind the AI companies that see themselves getting blocked, and then just switch to residential IPs? | | |
| ▲ | perihelions 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > "used as precedent" It's only a default judgement (Anna's Archive was a no-show in court), so I'd assume not. Since there were no lawyers arguing the defense side, the judge would have more or less rubber-stamped everything the plaintiff argued, without careful analysis. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | dartharva 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I don't understand why Anna's Archive has such a convoluted donation system. At first glance it looks like it's trying to push a subscription on you, which is ironic considering aversion to subscriptions is exactly what's driving people to AA in the first place. I found no convenient single-link crypto donate button where I could just send some money whenever I want. |
| |
| ▲ | octoberfranklin 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Their Monero address is here: https://annas-archive.li/faq#donate | |
| ▲ | simoncion 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > I don't understand why Anna's Archive has such a convoluted donation system. What? It's one page with a bunch of very clear options. > At first glance it looks like it's trying to push a subscription on you... On the one hand, fair. On the other hand, this is prominently displayed on the donation page: Be aware that while the memberships on this page are “per month”, they are one-time donations (non-recurring). See the Donation FAQ.
Additionally, Q&A #1 on the Donations FAQ page are: Do memberships automatically renew?
Memberships do not automatically renew. You can join for as long or short as you want.
Even if we're too busy to read, we can think about how they would manage to set up a recurring cryptocurrency payment without possession of one's wallet keys and become enlightened.> I found no convenient single-link crypto donate button where I could just send some money whenever I want. From their Donation FAQ: Can I make a donation without becoming a member?
Sure thing. We accept donations of any amount on this Monero (XMR) address: 88gS7a8aHj5EYhCfYnkhEmYXX3MtR35r3YhWdWXwGLyS4fkXYjkupcif6RY5oj9xkNR8VVmoRXh1kQKQrZBRRc8PHLWMgUR.
| | |
| ▲ | toraway 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, what OP is bizarrely describing as "push a subscription" with a (completely false) "im 12 and this is deep" insight about Anna Archive becoming the very thing they swore to destroy, can accurately be explained as them trying to ensure you get the benefits entitled by your donation level via your access key (linked to zero personal information). I donate in 3 or 6 months chunks typically, if I forget, I don't get hassled to resubscribe or anything (nor could they even contact me for any reason), I just lose those bonus download benefits until I do it again. I could also generate a new key each time but it's convenient keeping the same one in my password manager so I like the way they do it now, basically works just like LWN.net. |
|
|
|
| ▲ | charcircuit 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| How does it take more than 24 hours to take these servers down when they obviously are violating copyright. It should only take a few phone calls to get them taken down. |
| |
| ▲ | thot_experiment 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Thankfully the horrendous concepts of western intellectual property haven't been forced upon the entirety of the the human race. One of the silver linings of the current administration speedrunning the destruction of American hegemony is that the waning of our power will likely have positive effects in this regard. | |
| ▲ | fragmede 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Who do you call? The Internet police? Anna's Archive is hosted in countries that don't give a shit about US copyright laws. Pirate bay is back up, and they've been at it for decades. | | |
| ▲ | charcircuit 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | The traffic is getting here via another country who has signed a copyright treaty with the US. Just follow the packets. | | |
| ▲ | octoberfranklin 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | If you block the packets, people will just use a VPN. The best you can hope for is something like the Great Firewall, which only works on normies. | | |
| ▲ | charcircuit an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | In this scenario your VPNs would still need to find a ISP that would let them route packets out of that country. This means that instead of a legit VPN company you have to deal with cyber criminals to get such a VPN. | |
| ▲ | prussia 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sure, ultimately technical/knowledgeable people will be able to get around it. But preventing normies from accessing Anna's Archive is what they care about, because most people are normies. |
|
|
|
|
