Anthropic paying $1.5 billion in fines for downloading Anna's Archive established a moat. They want it to be illegal to pirate books: they can afford the penalties and continue doing it. Just like they want it to be illegal to run local ML inference.

No gain, all liability. Easier to cut them a check for access to training data and say nothing. Unless legal discovery was performed, the outside world would never know, and the payment records would roll off corporate records through a record retention schedule eventually. Could obfuscate it as a contractor consulting fee ("knowledge management subject matter expert") if you wanted to get tricky, depending on the risk appetite of whomever would receive the funds.

(not legal advice!)

I'm pretty sure[0] they're all using shadow libraries, and saying things in favor of them would increase their liability.

Furthermore, every pirate wants to be an admiral. None of the big tech companies are actually in favor of any amount of copyright reform. They never have been. There is a huge gulf between "personally benefitting from copyright theft" and "actually wants to legalize the theft". Anthropic still believes they deserve to be paid for their models, they just have this delusion in their head that doing a bunch of computation on stolen data is equivalent to actual human creativity.

[0] OpenAI, Anthropic and Facebook have been shown in court to be using shadow libraries, I don't know about Google.

> 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?).

This is bollocks. AA gives users a means of paying to enjoy faster speeds as a means of contributing to costs, but the downloads are free to anyone who doesn't want to pay, and very often quick enough.

> Why are we still depending on HTTP/DNS based interfaces that are easily taken down by people wanting to limit knowledge?

Those are arguably the hardest protocols to block on the open Internet without causing major issues for all other sites, forcing those trying to take them down to play "whack-a-mole". If they were to create a new "AATP" for distributing data, it would make it trivial to block on every ISPs firewalls.

BBSes were the first, of course. In particular, Libgen, Sci-Hub and others can be traced back through several generations of libraries to the SU.BOOKS FidoNet echo conference created in the early 90's.

What's the process like? I wasn't aware there was a paid API key.

> 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.

I wonder why nobody created a Netflix-like subscription for digital books

I consider libraries, public schools and maybe even public fire departments in the list of things that could never be proposed today if they didn't already exist.

Public libraries pay for their books

if this is true. what does this say about "rule of law"? is it all fiction?

I don’t get it. I am not a corp. i can download books from AA (who does the law apply to exactly?)

An old variation:

Fred and Wilhelmina are in bed together. Fred tosses and turns, unable to sleep. "Fred, what's troubling you?"

"You know Bjarne from the bank? Well, a balloon payment is due tomorrow on my loan, and I don't have the cash flow to pay it."

Wilhelmina thinks for a bit, then reaches for her phone. "Betty? Yes, this is Wilhelmina. Sorry to call so late. Would you tell Bjarne that Fred can't make the loan payment tomorrow? Yes, that's all. Good night."

Fred states at Wilhelmina, aghast. "What did you do THAT for?" She smiles. "Now it's Bjarne's problem. Let him toss and turn, you can go to sleep."

Donate a significant amount of money, and you can get a free trip to the new gulag in El Salvador. Or maybe gitmo.

Don't give the government any ideas

I wonder if the EU or UK does.

Maybe if they use encryption, which would make them all pedophiles according to those governments. Hope you have your VPNs ready if visiting countries without a free internet, like North Korea, China, UK, or EU.

Maybe.

Thankfully I don't live in the US, and likely won't set foot there ever again.

US probably considers anything impairing profits, stock prices, or enterprise value terrorist activity at this point.

Many of us did, and I certainly still do, but there obviously weren't enough of us rebelling to convince them of how reprehensible it is to sue your own fans and sic the guns of the state on them.

Because they are a bunch of mask wearing vaccine lovers obviously

The same as most private Torrent tracker: via premium accounts masquerading as donations.

Anna's Archive is very limited in performance if you don't pay.

Yeah me too, but I don't claim that they're a moral good.