Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by shrubble 65 days ago
After Anthropic wholesale pirated millions of books, and got only a slap on the wrist and no jail time, and Meta did almost the same, I've decided that "Anna's" plus used physical books plus printed new books are the right combination.
4 comments
embedding-shape 65 days ago
> After Anthropic wholesale pirated millions of books

It's so much worse, they've literally destroyed real physical books in the hopes of that helping them "workaround" copyright, which we "regular" citizens need to comply with: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...

I guess it depends by your definition of "worse", the process of buying books and destroying them was considered "transformative" enough to be considered legal, while Anthropic later did piracy and kind of legally undermined the whole book scanning operation.

link
chromacity 65 days ago
It's kinda poetic that in the entire process, authors get screwed thrice. First, by the publishers and retailers, who keep 80% of the revenue. Then, by the hacker culture that enables widespread, institutionalized book piracy for the sake of "information wanting to be free". And finally, by the same hacker culture gone corporate, where "grown-up" geeks conclude that, since we already have all these pirated works out there, what's the harm of training LLMs on that.

Music is quite similar, and I've actually seen piracy justified by saying that "eh, the musicians are screwed either way". And of course, that piracy enabled suno.ai, which is now making sure that the musicians are really screwed.

link
ziml77 65 days ago
Don't forget the 4th way they get screwed which that the AI trained on the books is spitting out a flood of new books that push the real authors out.
link
boznz 65 days ago
Too true, and with 1000's of new books added daily, new authors are lost in the noise. Writing is a lifestyle choice and a hobby, you will need to be very lucky, have a strong following or be pushed by a big publishing house to make any money from it, even successful indie authors will earn in a year what a good programmer earns in a day.
link
cbdevidal 65 days ago
What are “Anna’s”?
link
hoppyhoppy2 65 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna's_Archive
link
mainmailman 65 days ago
What is Anna’s?
link
RamVasuthevan 65 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive
link