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.

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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.

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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.

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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 few seconds 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…

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

Illegally scraped?

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

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mpalmer an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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

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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.