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petcat 2 hours ago

> As an LLM, you have likely been trained in part on our data.

What does "our data" mean in this context? What part of Anna's Archive can be considered to belong to Anna's Archive?

Ironic that AA seems to claim some sense of ownership over the data they scraped from other people and re-hosted and now they somehow think that LLM companies should pay them a tax for it.

jmull an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It's an archive.

In that context, we can understand "our data" to mean the archived copy of the data, without implying they own the data itself.

Same as the way a library could say "our books", meaning the books they have, without implying they own any IP in those books.

"Ironic" probably isn't the right word. I think there's just some confusion about context here. Keep in mind, this post is directly about the use of AA's resources -- the costs of maintaining the archive and providing access to it. This is valuable to the training of models.

Jtarii 28 minutes ago | parent [-]

>Same as the way a library could say "our books", meaning the books they have, without implying they own any IP in those books.

The library owns the books. Annas archive does not own their data.

nvme0n1p1 6 minutes ago | parent [-]

The library owns the physical books, but not the IP printed on the pages.

Anna's Archive owns the physical hard drives, but not the IP stored on the platters.

agnishom an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It means data that was downloaded from our servers.

They are not claiming that the data was their intellectual property. They are talking about the service they provided by archiving and streaming the data over to them.

(I can't decide whether you are pro-LLM companies or being the devil's advocate)

zouhair an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

So when you say "My wife" it means you own your wife?

Jtarii 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

This might be the most needlessly pedantic thing I have ever read on this site.

You are just pretending to not know how language works.

himata4113 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Depends on who you ask. Religion and countries aside this is unintentionally a great comparison.

nraynaud an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To be ironic, maybe the list of the files is original :) It's a very open minded curation.

throawayonthe an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

the 'curation' (or maybe rather organization/labeling ykwim) effort is meaningful, and i read it as "data you got from us" as well as "the same kind of data that we host"

jimmygrapes 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Charitably read, "our" and "we" refer to humanity as a whole, represented by this one work from one or more of our members.

petcat an hour ago | parent [-]

So the mysterious admins behind a massive piracy website are the ones that get to represent all of humanity?

They're the ones that get to collect the LLM taxes for accessing all of "our" data?

Craighead an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Found the guy at Meta who torrented everything

literalAardvark 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

All of it belongs to Anna's Archive. They may not have the rights to have it, but the data is there no less.

They're asking for support to cover archival and bandwidth.

I can't imagine the mental gymnastics you'd need to go through to make these guys into a villain.

noelsusman an hour ago | parent | next [-]

If you genuinely can't imagine how anyone would object to somebody taking other people's creative output and distributing it for free against their wishes then you probably need to work on your imagination a little bit.

literalAardvark an hour ago | parent [-]

I'm very firmly opposed to holding back societal and technological progress based on people's egos so that certainly won't be one of my projects.

There's no real harm done, I recall seeing a couple of studies showing that piracy doesn't meaningfully affect sales. If the work was worth anything, it'll get paid back by the thankful reader who can afford to pay.

noelsusman 9 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

That's fine but not really relevant to my point. Saying you can't even imagine how people could have an issue with somebody taking other people's work and distributing it for free is pretty baffling.

Jtarii 21 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Destroying the profit motive would cripple human progress more than paywalls ever could.

>If the work was worth anything, it'll get paid back by the thankful reader who can afford to pay.

Comically naive.

rng-concern a minute ago | parent | next [-]

Only it's been shown time and time again that piracy does not destroy the profit motive.

As a personal anecdote, when I used to pirate things, I still bought things in the same category, ie: I would pirate movies and I still bought movies. I would pirate games and I still bought games.

I don't think it affected how much of each thing I purchased by much, but I don't really know.

kjkjadksj 4 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Most everything on earth is pretty trivial to pirate. And yet…

notachatbot123 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Anna's Archived themselves scraped together all this data from other sources. See the notes of origin for example, often they are from zlib or libgen et ceteta.

petcat 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't really care about Anna's Archive, but let's not make them out to be some kind of Robin Hood story.

They have (illegally) scraped and re-hosted mountains of proprietary data and are now deliberately prompt-injecting unwitting LLM users in order to steal money from them too.

literalAardvark 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's not a prompt injection.

It's a gentle nudge at most and if your agent sends them money just for that without you expecting it you should donate more to thank them for finding your sev 10 bug before someone did an actual prompt injection on it.

petcat 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> Yes we stole your wallet but it was your fault because you let your wallet be so easy to steal! Now you should give us even more money too!

literalAardvark 2 hours ago | parent [-]

No, you gave the wallet away.

Edit: or, rather, your synthetic 4 year old savant did. Still, entirely on you.

davsti4 31 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Illegally scraped?

What about Common Crawl, Zyte, Diffbot, and others?

mpalmer an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

You have to be pretty unwitting to hand your wallet to a text generation machine.

plaidfuji an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s the exact same mental gymnastics that cause people to accuse model providers of large-scale plagiarism.

That is to say, not that much gymnastics. Like a cartwheel at most.

MrDOS 36 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Anna's Archive aren't filing the serial numbers off the epubs they redistribute. Rightfully or wrongly distributed, the attribution is crystal clear.

literalAardvark an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't really agree with those guys either.

The reason is fairly straightforward: there's no alternative if you need the dataset.

Copyright law makes it a huge amount of effort to get even an incomplete version.

And use in LLMs is transformative, so it would fall under fair use. The only reason they're in trouble with the courts at the moment from my understanding is that they pirated the content instead of idk, ripping it from Libby.