[maeln]

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

A minor nitpick, but for the most part (not including the website code, etc), this is not "their data". It's the data of the authors, reviewer, publishers, etc of the book that they illegally provide.

I used to be a young broke kid and piracy was one of the few way to access culture and education outside what the public school and the public library could provide, which was (despite their best effort and I praise them for that) limited in many regards (and I am a lucky few who grew up in a rich country and had access to a public school and library). So I won't argue that piracy is the evilest of evil or something.

But let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating.

[laGrenouille]

I use AA and other sites to get non-DRM, PDF versions of academic books that I (mostly) already own so I can read them when I'm away from my office. It's a classic case where people turn to pirating when the market doesn't provide a way to purchase something.

Same thing with movies. Ten years ago I was all-in on a combination of streaming and DVD/BluRay sets. The market has completely collapsed for me with region locking and overly aggressive DRM. So, I've started pirating those again as well when it's not possible to get through another route.

[scosman]

Sure, but the difference here is the pirate is claiming it's "their data" and asking for donations.

[margalabargala]

Well, it is their data.

The word "their" is overloaded, it could mean "thing I have the legal right to", or, "thing I have in my possession right now".

The latter condition is clearly true. It's their data.

If you pretend the other definitions of possession don't exist and claim "aktually it's not theirs they don't have rights to it" then that's on you for faking an incomplete understanding of language.

[ncallaway]

Well, but if it’s the latter definition, then the AI didn’t train on their data, since the companies took possession of that data before doing a training run.

It’s only the former definition that would allow an AI model to have been trained on someone else’s data

[margalabargala]

> It’s only the former definition that would allow an AI model to have been trained on someone else’s data

There are yet more definitions of "theirs". For example, data whose provenance can be traced back to Anna's Archive.

So the data is legally owned by the book authors, possessed by Anna's Archive, and downloaded for training usage by the AI companies. Every person in that chain could, linguistically speaking, correctly refer to the data as "theirs", or refer to the data of a different entity as "theirs".

[antasvara]

I suppose it depends if "their" implies possession or ownership. It would be correct to say they possess this data. It's dicier to say they own it, much like I "possess" the apartment I rent but I do not "own" it.

Regardless, digital file possession and ownership doesn't map cleanly to our language. I technically don't own any Kindle books I buy, I can't share them, yet I clearly have access to an ebook. So I both do and don't currently possess said book.

[kelipso]

I’m renting my apartment but I still refer to it as my apartment. Everyone does this, it’s very common usage.

[TZubiri]

It's their servers sure, but if you download something under a license that doesn't grant you ownership, then it isn't yours.

You are being granted a license to use the data.

[margalabargala]

Yes, exactly, if you ignore all definitions of "yours" that involve possession then it isn't "yours".

But no one else is obligated to ignore the definitions of words that you're choosing to ignore, so the rest of us will go on saying it's their data.

[jamespo]

Guess what, the AI companies training their models aren't going to include themselves in the "rest of us"

[scosman]

If you steal my car, no who knows it's stolen would say it's "yours".

We're not talking abstract language concepts, this is a specific case. The data was taken without license/rights/approval. It's stolen. AA calling it "our data" is disingenuous. Legally it isn't theirs. While you could use "ours"/"theirs" loosely in English, they knew it wasn't true in a legal sense when publishing this.

[lightedman]

"but if you download something under a license that doesn't grant you ownership, then it isn't yours."

Possession is 9/10 of the law - if you have a copy, you have possession, and thus you have SOMETHING and LEGALLY it is considered yours (now whether you legally obtained it is a different story and THAT is where charges stem from.)

[FireBeyond]

Random nit, the original saying was "possession is 9 points of the law", attributes that strengthened legal claims, rather than a percentage. Things like possession, good lawyer, money, patience, witnesses, for which if you had the object in your possession were likely to be in your favor.

[MarsIronPI]

And especially in the case of LLMs, they are trained from text that (probably) comes directly from AA.

[culi]

Their data about not their work

[atoav]

If e.g. OpenAI downloaded it from their servers to train their models, what else is there to say about it?

If capitalism was capable of actually preserving the knowledge of humanity, we wouldn't need things like Anna's Archive.

[ErroneousBosh]

This was the whole premise of Steam. Paraphrasing slightly because I can't remember the quote exactly, "It doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be less hassle than piracy".

Even Youtube is no longer less hassle than piracy now.

[ninjalanternshk]

Spotify is always my example. Spotify (and Apple Music I assume) is far more convenient, for a modest price, than pirating music.

It’s a shame the TV and movie people can’t seem to learn this. Most music is available on Spotify and Apple and probably other places as well.

They toyed with exclusivity for a while and I’m sure there’s still some stuff that’s exclusive to one or the other, but any time I hear a song and look it up, it’s on Spotify. Done.

Such a contrast to the stupid game of figuring out which streaming service has the show I want.

[somewhatgoated]

Most of the music i listen to doesnt exist on Spotify and I think their business model is very predatory against artists. most artists cant pay their bills with Spotify fees, they just need to be on there to get visibility for their actual revenue streams.

I think a better example is bandcamp - it’s actually sustainable for artists and just as convenient as pirating. Plus you get to actually own what you pay for as opposed to Spotify controlling what you can / cant listen to.

[crummy]

I thought they paid barely anything to artists because they are only getting fifteen bucks a month from each subscriber. And their price is restricted because they’re essentially competing (as a business model) with piracy.

[somewhatgoated]

Let me shed a tear for the business that makes 5 billion yearly revenue with 33% margin.

They aren’t competing with music piracy which is mostly dead outsides of niches nowadays.

[auggierose]

Music is very different to TV and movies. You only watch a show or a movie once, maybe twice. And it costs much more to produce it.

[th0raway]

The biggest difference there isn't production costs, but the physical costs of maintaining the giant library, in a way that is reasonable streamable at a good cost from any device, with many dubbings, and even video differences per version. Go see how many little differences are there in a random Pixar movie due to localization. The infrastructure per hour watched is relevant, and there's a lot of differences between one is willing to spend on something that is being watched hundreds of thousands of times today, and some 30 year old episode of a series nobody followed. It's a much different production than sending music files over.

Even with licensing costs at zero, the infra of Youtube, the closest thing to Spotify for video, is a very different beast. And I'd argue youtube doesn't go far enough.

[simiones]

This sounds reasonable, but it doesn't seem to reflect reality. The biggest reason that shows are region locked and/or removed from streaming sites are licensing deals, not technical reasons. Movie and TV production companies are the ones pushing for the region locks, and the ones selling limited distribution rights to streaming services.

So, while you are right that video streaming is much more costly than audio streaming, I think GP is overall more correct about the reasoning being production costs rather than anything to do with distribution.

[pbhjpbhj]

Maybe there's an opportunity for a media host to farm out data for preservation by clients (end users' computers) - what I'm thinking is torrent essentially, where the data-unit is a scene (or a series of frames between n key-frames). Clients get access to that show if they agree to store m chunks. The media repo can sell access whilst only keeping a copy in cold-storage because you can 'popcorn time' the show from the pool of user-clients.

Reduced hot-storage, increased playlist. Sort of media communism but the capitalists still hold the keys?

[GuinansEyebrows]

> Spotify is always my example. Spotify (and Apple Music I assume) is far more convenient, for a modest price, than pirating music.

streaming services do provide some conveniences over manually managing one's own library of music. i feel like "far more" is a sales pitch argument more than something that describes reality (ignoring whether you pirate or legally acquire digital music). i recently cancelled my streaming music service subscription and returned to manually managing my music. i spend maybe one day a week shuffling music on and off of my phone according to what i want to listen to in the moment. i don't really miss being able to call up any song in the world at any point - i make a note to add it to my phone next time i sync and then move on. if i simply have to play something that's not currently on my phone, i can usually find it on bandcamp or youtube without having to pay for a stream or two.

i know it's not for everybody (and trust me, apple doesn't make it particularly easy to do compared to signing up for Apple Music), but it's really not much work to manage your own music and doing so comes with some benefits you forget about when you assume you can and should have instantaneous, frictionless access to most recorded music.

[davsti4]

Except that Spotify is now becoming enshittified (battery and UI). When I have to think too much to attempt to use a UI, its time to find alternatives.

[jasomill]

As opposed to streaming video services, which, aside from the content they provide, have been shit from day one.

While the web UIs suck compared to local media players, they work well enough that I can cope.

But most services restrict 4K (and at least historically 1080p) web playback, even on Windows with a GPU that supports top-tier hardware DRM and an HDCP display.

My desktop display is a recent 55" LG OLED smart TV, and the streaming service apps on the TV work fine when my attention is devoted to whatever I'm watching, even if they tend to be slightly shittier than the already mediocre web UIs.

But when task switching or multitasking, my only options are reduced video quality, borrowing or purchasing a physical copy if available, or piracy.

Given how quickly everything shows up on public torrent trackers, I struggle to understand why the 4K limitations remain in place, as it obviously doesn't stop whoever uploads the torrents, and there has to be a vanishingly small number of paying customers who'd prefer to crack DRM locally or record HDMI instead of simply downloading the torrent.

Do streaming services get kickbacks from smart device vendors?

[klik99]

IIRC the interview that quote was from came with the story - Russia was seen as a lost cause by the game industry, there was so much piracy that nobody even bothered trying to give legitimate ways to purchase, why invest in distribution when they’ll just pirate? Now of course Steam does heathy business there so that’s obviously not true. But indicates writing off piracy is a self fulfilling prophecy

[DiabloD3]

Not anymore they don't.

Putin's 3 day special military operation has been going on for 4 year and 3 months, btw.

[tredre3]

Steam is still accessible in Russia btw. Sometimes it's spotty, but it's because of Russia's own restrictions, Valve itself is happy to keep doing business there.

[DiabloD3]

Does Valve just have an internal Russian entity that processes with a domestic payment processor, then?

All of the international payment processors (ie, anyone piggybacking off Visanet) are in compliance with the sanctions.

[wlesieutre]

> We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/Valves-Gabe-Newell-Says-Pir...

[amusingimpala75]

Aren't most piracy services free though nowadays? This quote is at least referencing pirates that sell the pirated content.

[throw28573]

Original interview with Gabe: https://youtube.com/watch?v=EQweFurRz4g

[jaapz]

> Even Youtube is no longer less hassle than piracy now.

YouTube premium is hassle?

[iso1631]

I don't see any hassle with youtube, but I'm willing to pay.

I do see hassle on things like disney and iplayer, which put now put adverts for shows I don't want to watch in front of Rivals. It's fortunately very rare that happens (on Disney), but its getting close to what I did when Amazon brought that in, and cancelled my subscription. Just like I stopped buying DVDs when they brought adverts in.

I wouldn't have any moral problem in downloading Rivals from piratebay though, as far as I'm concerned I'm paying for it.

But sometimes though there's no option to buy the thing. I want to buy the audio version of "a stitch in time" by Andrew Robinson (Garak from Star Trek).

It's not available in my country on audible -- only the German translation.

I haven't acquired it via other means yet, I'm still on the look out for another supplier which will take my money, and if I can trust that's a legitimate supplier so at least some of my money goes to the copyright holder (and thus pays for the people that create it)

I don't have a CD player so not much use, but technically it is available for £142 from "Paper Cavalier UK". That's second hand, the creator won't make any money from me doing that.

To my mind if someone won't "shut up and take my money", it's acceptable to acquire via another means.

[NewsaHackO]

I think he means that you can’t watch regular videos on YouTube unless you use a IP that is easily traceable to a subscriber or a YouTube account that requires everything short of a DNA sample to be valid.

[jack_pp]

since youtube premium and various methods to skip ads now even Joe rogan who has 200+ million dollars does ad reads directly in video.

[derektank]

That’s not a problem with YouTube, that’s a problem with the content creator. YouTube Premium accounts actually pay out more per watch than free users, and YouTube also provides a Skip Ahead button that will appear at the start of most ad reads (it’s a bit hit or miss, I think it relies on data from other people scrubbing past them).

[pbhjpbhj]

YouTube could ban ad reads that aren't tagged, then Premium accounts could get no ads. I guess they're worried that tags would leak and allow 3rd party solutions (like SponsorBlock) to skip more easily.

[jack_pp]

sure but if youtube wanted to, they could force the creators to tag these sections themselves so they are 100% accurate and have an option for the paying customer to skip these automatically. it is within their power

[VorpalWay]

You might be interested in the SponsorBlock[1] browser extension for Firefox and Chromium based browsers. It deals with this issue, and is open source.

[1] https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock

[encom]

I love SponsorBlock so much.

  >You've saved people from 21,262 segments (5d 18h 50.7 minutes of their lives)
  >
  >You've skipped 3522 segments (1d 5h 17.4 minutes)

Not just for skipping ads, but also pointless filler like intros and engagement reminders.

I hope someone makes an AI-Block addon, to filter out slop channels based on the same crowd sourcing principle. It's gotten so bad I rarely venture beyond that channels I'm already subscribed to, because those are pre-sloppocalypse.

[Scoundreller]

The guy got his start on NewsRadio and I always wonder how much that influenced his path today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewsRadio

[lloeki]

My region is maybe not so affected as others, so I pay for subscriptions, watch something a bit, get annoyed by the craptastic 480p quality cap on non-blessed systems (a.k.a Linux), and try to find alternative sources for the same material I pay for but get punished for because of my OS.

[logifail]

> let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create

I co-published two scientific papers back when I was a PhD student. Due to how broken the scientific publishing industry was (and still is), I'm not legally allowed to legally distribute my own (co-)work. I'm not even allowed to view it!

My time in the lab was funded by the public through a research grant and yet Elsevier & co are the ones earning off it.

It's not right, and never was.

[dekhn]

It's pretty common to transfer copyright of the final manuscript to the publisher, while retaining a non-copyright pre-submission manuscript that is widely circulated. I don't know if this has ever been tested legally. I suspect Elsevier and others are trying not to litigate this heavily because they know the press and public will hammer them on it.

My postdoc advisor would receive the copyright transfer form from the publisher, modify the text to say he retained copyright, sign that, and send it back. Without fail, the publishers accepted that document, and published the paper. Again, I don't think this is legally tested, and my advisor said it's likely they didn't even notice the rewording of the copyright transfer document.

I thought the web would change this, but in my experience, people don't weight papers published in arxiv.org nearly as high as work published in peer-reviewed journals. And the vairous attempts at post-review (faculty of science, etc) haven't been able to replace the peer-reviewed journals successfully.

[IshKebab]

Yeah definitely. Scientific publishing is 100% an immoral scam.

Book publishing is different though. Authors get paid. No publisher has a monopoly and there isn't really a reputation system that depends on the publisher.

You could argue that copyright terms are way too long (and I would agree), but I don't think you can justify book piracy nearly as easily as you can justify Sci-hub.

[bl33pd]

Isn’t that what preprints are for? My limited experience was that authors have an essentially identical preprint version they submitted and happily share them with collaborators or typically on request. Conventionally people did that before sci-hub which is normative now for researchers who aren’t subject to extreme compliance requirements, but it’s still done.

Most journals and conferences would only own the published paper but I have never ever heard of them going after authors sharing preprints privately.

Similar for IEEE/ISO/ANSI standards most people use the last published draft as a working substitute for the licensed standard if they don’t have the expensive licensed access to it.

Not saying that it isn’t broken but the idea that you couldn’t share it at all isn’t typical in science.

[flexagoon]

> Isn’t that what preprints are for?

The use of preprints unfortunately really varies by field, in some (like computer science) everything has an arXiv preprint, while in some barely anyone publishes them

> sci-hub which is normative now

Scihub hasn't been updated for a long time, it is completely useless for any new papers and only exists off of name recognition. STC Nexus is where it's at.

[tredre3]

I'm not legally allowed to distribute code I wrote for a former employer, either.

How is that different? Are you saying that we both should be allowed to redistribute/resell things we wrote at the behest (and wallet) of someone else?

[nullc]

It's not his employer that has the rights-- it's the publisher which at no point paid for the research.

As an American tax payer I funded the poster's research. And yet if I want to read about it I have to pay a foreign private company that played no role in orchestrating or funding the research itself.

[LocalH]

Was the code you wrote funded by the public?

[Barrin92]

would that matter? If it was funded by the public the institution which would own it would likely be a public one, which may come with different and more permissive licensing conditions, but the justification for OPs complaint "I can't even view my own paper", their emphasis on 'my own' wouldn't be true either.

Academics tend to do have a fairly odd and what seems like a romantic attitude to their work. They're employees, their programs and equipment are paid for by someone else whether that's the state or a business, they don't own it unless the terms they signed up to say so.

[LocalH]

TBH none of that matters to me. If it's publicly funded, it should be 100% public domain

[__MatrixMan__]

Since we're doing minor nitpicks...

Data can't be owned in the first place. We can debate the merits of copyright but it's not a property right.

I'm all for finding better ways to support authors. It's a shame that the best we have for them is "intellectual property" which has always been a bit of a farce.

[zugi]

Stallman tried to introduce the term "intellectual monopoly", which fits better, since they really are monopolies granted by the government for limited periods of time, intended to promote progress in science and the useful arts.

"Property" was chosen specifically as a bait and switch. It tries to get people to take a concept that has been understood for thousands of years for physical objects, and apply it to this novel century-or-two long experiment for encouraging the production of easily-copyable things.

[SideQuark]

> It tries to get people to take a concept that has been understood for thousands of years for physical objects

That's false. Property used to mean a set of rights that gives legal control over valuable things, not limited to simply "physical objects", has been around for thousands of years. Ancients used it for future payments, interest (which could be traded), and much more.

Ancient Syrians (600BC) gave exclusive rights for breadmakers to make certain breads for a year window, and these were property rights, tradeable, sellable, had futures, etc. Ancient Greeks had a patent system for "a new refinement in luxury" that were property rights. Athenaeus (200AD) describes the system in place then where inventors could own their inventions and be the only one to profit for some time.

These are all property rights - something owned by a person, sellable, tradeable, has value, exclusive use. That you (and too many others) seem to think property can only be a "physical object" is as short-sighted as some who claim property can only be land.

[JumpCrisscross]

> since they really are monopolies granted by the government

This is property.

[__MatrixMan__]

There are multiple usages of the word.

One of them refers to tangible things, was first codified more than 5000 years ago, and is almost entirely uncontroversial.

The other was popular in 1700's France re: their system of privileges, and the people found it so onerous that they embarked on a campaign of executing nobility until it seemed like the concept was good and dead.

We can use the word however we like, it's just a word, but if we conduct ourselves as if they're the same sort of thing, which France was doing at that time, we're in for the same sort of pain.

So what I'm saying is that its a bad idea for us to let data be property.

[JumpCrisscross]

> One of them refers to tangible things, was first codified more than 5000 years ago, and is almost entirely uncontroversial

Which definition are you referring to?

Debts, wholly intangible legal fictions, have been treated as property for thousands of years.

[__MatrixMan__]

I was thinking of the code of Hammurabi as the settled one, and membership in a trade guild--which you had to buy from the government--as the controversial one.

I wouldn't classify debt as an uncontroversial kind of property. In medieval Europe, Christians were prohibited from owning debt by their religions (Jews weren't, so they ended up being the lenders, which is probably why the stereotypes exist today).

I'd argue that the fungibility/resale of debt is a bad idea because it takes on weird properties when too much of it accumulates in one place.

[simonh]

All, or at least most property rights are monopoly rights anyway. I have a monopoly right over my house, and my car, my bank balance. That's just what ownership means.

[ekianjo]

Those rights are very flimsy actually. The government can seize your house, your car, and your money anytime. Hardly a monopoly when a third party can break it at will.

[AlecSchueler]

That the state which grants you your right can take them away doesn't make them flimsy.

And it's certainly more than "hardly" a monopoly. If the government gives a certain company right to operate on train track infrastructure but denies the same to every other company, then does that first company hardly have a monopoly?

[ekianjo]

Large companies that have money lobby governments to ensure they do not threaten their monopolies. Individuals can't do that.

[BobaFloutist]

By that standard, nobody has any right to anything. I think it's pretty widely understood that rights range from aspirational descriptions of a just world to widely accepted legal consensus.

[simonh]

Sure. That’s how rights work. It’s why we need to keep on fighting for them when necessary.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Data can't be owned in the first place

Of course it can. Ownership is a social construct.

It’s more accurate to say data resists being controlled. But honestly, so do e.g. air and mineral rights and the “ownership” of catalytic converters in cars parked on the street.

[randallsquared]

We've built a lot of layers of social machinery on top of it, but looking at the behavior of animals, ownership predates humanity, let alone social convention. Coming at it from that direction, something can be private property only if it is defensible in principle. Physical objects meet this bar, but concepts and types do not.

[JumpCrisscross]

> something can be private property only if it is defensible in principle. Physical objects meet this bar, but concepts and types do not

Why not? I sing song. You sing song. I beat you with stick because that’s my song. You stop singing song.

[__MatrixMan__]

Well it really comes down to how good you are with that stick. You "can" stop me from singing your song... But can you? You don't even know where I am.

[pocksuppet]

And this is the premise on which Anna's Archive operates.

The operator isn't even called Anna, just in case that wasn't already obvious to literally everyone.

[JumpCrisscross]

> You "can" stop me from singing your song... But can you?

Yes. I kill you. Stealing was usually punishable by death in ancient cultures.

> You don't even know where I am

This isn’t a thing in early human societies.

Like, yes, you could theoretically get away. Lots of thieves of physical property actually get away. That doesn’t make said property indefensible in principle.

[margalabargala]

There's multiple types of ownership.

There's legal title. And then there's possession.

AA clearly possesses this data. It's not incorrect for them to refer to it as "their" data, until and unless it is removed from their possession.

[JumpCrisscross]

> It's not incorrect for them to refer to it as "their" data

Totally agree.

[sublinear]

You don't distinguish between the data and the data source.

Plenty of data becomes stale almost immediately. Plenty of data sources can be owned, but they also tend to be people.

[__MatrixMan__]

Yes, but it is a social contract governing things that can't be easily copied.

We desperately need better social contracts which help us deal with data-about-me and data-i-created, but neither of those align very well with property.

[WarmWash]

I own paper money that is pretty easy to copy and worth far more than the paper it's on...

[__MatrixMan__]

Easier to copy than a bit?

[WarmWash]

Trivially more difficult, kids in middle school were doing it so that bar isn't that high.

[JumpCrisscross]

> but it is a social contract governing things that can't be easily copied

I think it’s fair to argue this makes data something that should not be able to be owned. But saying it can’t be owned is plain wrong.

[__MatrixMan__]

You're right. We can implement social contracts however we please.

But regarding the particular implementation as codified in US law (and I think elsewhere also), property rights do not extend to data.

[JumpCrisscross]

> regarding the particular implementation as codified in US law (and I think elsewhere also), property rights do not extend to data

Maybe not in general, though I’m curious for a source. Practically speaking, what separates data and information is a necessarily subjective exercise. And information absolutely can be property.

[simonh]

Property can and does refer to rights over both tangible and intangible assets. It simply refers to ownership. Trademarks, brand identity and trade secrets are property. Some kinds of license can be property, and bought or sold. Shares in companies, or bonds are property. You may not like it, but that's a separate question.

What's usually happening here is that property is being misinterpreted as meaning something like object, but it just refers to a right of ownership which can be of objects.

[bcrosby95]

It seems like you're completely ignoring the privacy angle. If no one can own data how can privacy be a thing?

[__MatrixMan__]

We desperately need good abstractions that help us reason about data-i-created, vs data-i-have-a-responsibility-to-maintain, vs data-about-me... But I see no reason to jam any of these pegs into the round hole that is property rights.

[Aurornis]

> Data can't be owned in the first place. We can debate the merits of copyright but it's not a property right.

This is factually incorrect. I don’t know if you’re unaware of the law or introducing your own beliefs about what it should be, but this is not how the law works.

[__MatrixMan__]

Which law, copyright? Trademark? Patent?

These are things you can infringe upon, but they all have dynamics that depart pretty wildly from the laws governing property.

[Aurornis]

Intellectual property law.

[stevehawk]

* can't (?)

[__MatrixMan__]

Edited, Thanks.

[hyperpape]

From my perspective, and the perspective of most academics[0], it is their contribution to human knowledge, which is kept locked up by predatory publishers.

A majority of academics will simply and without hesitation, offer their students and collaborators pirated versions of their own work, because they value knowledge.

Commercial authors may feel differently.

[0] I'm a former Ph.D. student, but my attitude was the same both within and outside of the academic world.

[tomrod]

If LLMs scraped data held by AA, then the assertion is accurate.

Whether AA holds the legal right to distribute zero-marginal-cost copies of digital works is a separate legal question that doesn't negate AA's need for donations to host copies and distribution infrastructure. I think they can be discussed independently.

[jacobolus]

One thing to keep in mind is that many (most?) of the books and papers in these archives are decades old, usually no longer in print, make zero or vanishingly small amounts of money for their original creators, are sometimes only physically available from distant libraries that are challenging to access, etc.

In doing scholarly research, it's extremely helpful to be able to quickly search and skim hundreds of vaguely relevant sources, but simply wouldn't be worth the trouble to pay for or track down a "legitimate" copy of every one, and in many cases would be physically impossible. These "pirate" archives make doing real library research, previously limited to scholars at top-tier universities, accessible to orders of magnitude more people.

There really isn't that much profit in most of these works, and whether a scholar reads one on their laptop screen vs. in a physical book in a university library somewhere doesn't have any material impact on the original authors, editor, illustrator, translator, printer, etc.

[cerebralstatic]

Even tho I agree with your post, it definitely isn't most of the books - most of the dataset would be occupied by in-print, big 3 books.

[kiba]

But let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating.

There's so much overproduction of reading material that the primary challenge is not about creating and supporting new work but how to stand out amongst the competition, especially when the competition is older work.

The older works are perfectly fine, they just needs to be resurfaced so that people don't go working on materials that other people already written. That means these materials should be widely available, such as being in the public domain.

[voakbasda]

To go a step further, no one is entitled to make a living through their own preferred means.

You want be an astronaut? You have to work your way through the program, competing with all the other candidates.

More people want to be authors than astronauts. The competition is fierce. The market is what it is, and piracy is part of it. If you can’t deal with that (financially, emotionally, whatever), then you probably should not be an author. Being an author does not entitle someone to make a living as an author.

Intellectual property laws are regulatory capture of published works. As we know, they don’t work particularly well, but people still want to make their living using that leverage. At the cost of everyone else in society.

My advice to those wishing to publish anything: do not expect anything in return.

[Aurornis]

> To go a step further, no one is entitled to make a living through their own preferred means.

People are entitled to sell their works under protections afforded by the law.

You are not entitled to take their work for free because you disagree with the laws.

[debugnik]

> no one is entitled to make a living through their own preferred means.

Are they not entitled to try? You seem to use this to justify not allowing them a chance. Why are we entitled to their effort?

[marcosdumay]

Hum... Society is entitled healthy and well-supplied markets.

AFAIK, in our current situation that demands weaker copyrights (and patents too), but "the market is what it is" is a really bad framing. What, are you against any kind of change?

[simonh]

I think intellectual property rights work astoundingly well. We have an incredibly rich, varied culture of published materials supporting vast legions of authors, artists, film makers, software developers, designers, publishers, playwrigts, actors, musicians, journalists, manufacturers, and on, and on.

[jacobolus]

Scholars aren't supported by sales of their published work, but by teaching/research salaries, much of the money for which comes from the public via government grants.

Musicians by and large aren't supported by record sales, especially in the streaming era, but by concert tickets, merch, etc., or often by other income sources like paid lessons, session work, one-off commissions for specific customers, etc.

Very few fiction authors make a living at it, and most of those who do are barely scraping by.

Journalism is in a very sorry state in the 2020s; its long-time essential income source – classified ads – collapsed a couple decades ago under pressure from free or cheap online substitutes and the industry still hasn't figured out a viable alternative at scale. There has been a 75% drop in local journalists since 2000, most important local news now goes unreported (in many places there is no local reporting whatsoever) and regional/national scale journalism has been increasingly co-opted by the super-wealthy and turned to propaganda. Independent industry leaders with integrity are, over time, replaced by shills and the ethics of industry culture is degenerating.

Big budget TV/movies is probably closest to matching your argument, since these require large-scale coordination by hundreds of people to produce, but here too there are significant complications.

In all of these industries, the people making most of the profit are businesspeople rather than creators, though a trivial number of celebrity creators make good money.

Much of the published culture you mention is done entirely as a hobby, and our current copyright regime actually stands in the way of creation as much as supports it.

[LocalH]

I think "intellectual property" is a false term that millions of people have convinced themselves (and others) that it is real.

The correct terms are "copyright", "trademark", "patent", and "trade secret". All of which are completely unconnected in terms of legal statute.

[simonh]

If there's so much overproduction, just go read some other stuff instead.

[ahf8Aithaex7Nai]

“Their data” does not imply copyright or ownership. But it is data that is stored with them or at least available through them, and in that sense, it is certainly their data. Their friends, their nationality, their back pain, their favorite food: where does copyright or ownership come into play here? I understand that you need a hook for your intended message, but this one isn't really suitable.

And to add my own message: first, it’s no one’s individual duty to worry about other people’s earned income. Second: the money paid for works often doesn’t go to the authors to any significant extent, but rather to some rights holders or middlemen. So this is just a smokescreen. The production of knowledge and art will not suffer because we download works from Anna’s Archive. If anything, it suffers because access to information is unnecessarily hindered. Third: ownership should be strictly limited to physical goods (if at all). Your article, book, or audio recording doesn’t disappear just because I’ve downloaded a copy of it. This is a deep-seated intuition that should be taken as an axiom rather than being questioned simply because people claim the right to profit from information asymmetry.

[zerr]

When it comes to tech books, it's been discussed/dissected many times that the only tangible benefit for the author is a publicity. This is not due to "piracy", but how publishing works. E.g. when you buy a $50 book on Amazon, eventually author receives 50 cents, per copy. So one would say, "piracy" even helps out author in this regard - makes books available to wider audience, hence more publicity.

[Aurornis]

> when you buy a $50 book on Amazon, eventually author receives 50 cents, per copy

Royalties are much higher than 1%. Royalties are very high with eBooks (the closest analog to pirated books)

> So one would say, "piracy" even helps out author in this regard

Oh the mental gymnastics people will do to justify not paying people for their work.

> makes books available to wider audience, hence more publicity.

You downloading a pirated book does not do this. You just get their work without them getting any money in return.

“Do it for exposure” ignites justifiable outrage when we are asked to work for free. Why would it be a good thing to apply to authors?

Even if it was true, you cannot deny that exposure + payment is better than exposure plus nonpayment, right?

[zerr]

Ok, if we fallow that line, it's about worthiness in a certain region. And authors/sellers rarely implement regional pricing. Would you pay your one-month or even half-year salary for a random book? Same goes for software. That's why Microsoft encouraged or turned a blind eye on software "piracy" in developing countries, that's the reason Windows and other MS software became standards there. Most of users who "pirate" things won't pay a dime if you restrict it, they will just go find something else, e.g. Linux :)

[Aurornis]

> Would you pay your one-month or even half-year salary for a random book?

What on earth are you talking about? Books do not cost a half year of salary.

If they did, nobody would buy them.

[zerr]

Regional pricing... For you no, but for some kid in the middle of Africa, yes.

[Aurornis]

Are you a kid in the middle of Africa? Or are you just using them to justify your own decisions?

[boredatoms]

What is the typical percentage for tech books?

[TFNA]

> I used to be a young broke kid and piracy was one of the few way to access culture and education

There has been a sea change in how academia perceives piracy. Scanned-book websites used to be something that only developing-country scholars used, because they didn’t have access to most literature locally. But now academics around the world are using shadow libraries, because of the great convenience: Anna has more than anyone’s institutional library, and even when one’s own institution has a book, getting it from a shadow library is often faster.

Researchers are well-used to these resources in their workflow now, and everyone expects everything to be freely available. At conferences in my field, when a presenter mentions an interesting publication, I can watch other people in the room immediately open Anna on their laptops and download the publication right there and then.

[nullc]

> But let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating.

At least when it comes to academic publishing the authors are not paid by the publishers. They may even have to pay for the privilege of publishing. That payment along with the payment funding the research in the first place often came out of your own pocket in the form of state funding for the research.

Obviously there is a lot more than papers there, but papers are a major thing an LLM might be going there to access.

Then you have the issue of works where the user has purchased a copy but the only practical way to get a non-DRMed electronic copy suitable for use by their AI is the shadow libraries.

[ornornor]

I hear you, and to this I often think:

- libraries pay retail for their copies

- many people can then read them for free, so the authors (and let’s be honest mostly they publishers) doesn’t get a dime either beyond the initial sale

- used book sales, there are many online bookstores (most owned by Amazon but stealthily) that have millions of references which you can purchase for a fraction of their initial price. Nobody but the seller gets money from this either.

How is it any different? Someone paid retail for their copy which they then shared. Kinda how a library would do it. Ok scale, maybe, although I suspect if you aggregated the loan stats on all the world libraries, you might land in the ballpark of the downloads on AL (I’d expect)

Not being flippant but seriously pondering.

[GolfPopper]

In the UK and many other countries, Public Lending Right pays authors for books in libraries (with varying details from country to country): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_lending_right

[ornornor]

Thanks, I didn’t know

[Aurornis]

Libraries pay higher rates for ebooks than the retail price. They have to renew the license. A publisher can choose not to license their ebooks to a library if they want. Each license can only be lent to one person at a time and there are usually time limits.

In other words, it's completely different in every way.

[ornornor]

I know publishers are working very hard to take back the first sale doctrine on eBooks. I’m talking about actual books in libraries not eBooks.

[Aurornis]

Anna’s archive deals in ebooks. They don’t have physical books.

Trying to force the comparison to be against physical books in libraries and ignoring their ebook situation is dishonest.

[ninjalanternshk]

Not taking any stances here, but the difference is a library book can only be used by one person at a time, and it eventually wears out and has to be replaced.

Neither of those are true for digital works.

[bananaflag]

> But let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating.

They can live off other things. Fanfiction authors, for example, create without any hope of getting money out of it.

[somewhatgoated]

>Software developers should just open source all software they write and work for free - they can live off other things after all.

See how entitled this sounds?

[pocksuppet]

You might recall there was a large and vocal minority of software developers trying to bring about exactly that.

You might also recall it used to be true. The aforementioned minority was trying to bring about a state that had already occurred in the past.

[Aurornis]

> You might also recall it used to be true.

I have no idea what you're trying to claim, but it has never been true that software developers all worked for free and gave away all software.

[bananaflag]

I am not a software developer btw :)

Also I don't believe in copyright that much

[teiferer]

"Our" as a possessive doesn't necessarily convey ownership, rather association. "Our place" is used even by tenants of rental housing. They don't own the place, but they live there.

[DoctorOetker]

the concept of rewarding creativity by "printing instances as if it were money" is what ultimately is flawed, information is too easy to copy or paraphrase to be sold as instantiations of knowledge.

that is not to say we shouldn't reward creativity.

it seems the only defensible solution is to organize a single sale towards the public domain, but that brings a new problem: how do we value the contribution? the printing-copies-of-information-and-sell-as-monopoly could provide feedback on book sales etc, so that prices could adjust.

with each new film, book, scientific article, ... single sale towards the public domain is much harder to quantify it seems.

One could categorize approaches as either:

* reputation based (people liked the previous album / article / ... ) and the content creator starts listing a high price, and slowly allows it to decay, and somehow the public pays for it at a price they approve of

* post-evaluation: the sale happens to the public, and the reward will be determined by future usage: the public effectively votes by usage and public funds are allocated accordingly (so the content might be dormant for a while, and suddenly be discovered and start generating more revenue for the author)

* some sort of democracy (but conventional incumbent institutions tend to get hijacked by regulatory capture...)

For the post-evaluation each jurisdiction could have their own sell-to-local-public-domain platform; and platforms that abuse authors will simply given less offers for future works...

[aiktamseel]

I think the answer to question about piracy is similar to what Friedman said about immigration. It's good for the people as long as it's illegal. But if you make it legal (i.e. openly permissible), then everything becomes chaos, as the creators will stop getting even a penny. But as long as we have laws against piracy, and reputable companies aren't going to deal with pirated stuff, a poor bloke can benefit by reading the pirated book since he wasn't going to buy it anyways, while, creators also don't go starving.

[upboundspiral]

Milton Friedman's direct quote on immigration:

Look, for example, at the obvious, immediate, practical example of illegal Mexican immigration. Now, that Mexican immigration, over the border, is a good thing. It’s a good thing for the illegal immigrants. It’s a good thing for the United States. It’s a good thing for the citizens of the country. But, it’s only good so long as it’s illegal.

Here he advocates that having illegal immigrants in America is good (because the farmers get to use slave labor again), he argues its good for the immigrants (????), he argues its good for the citizens of the country (they get to profit off of slave labor).

I don't have much to add about your take on piracy but I had to take a moment to respond to your use of Friedman in this way as he is one of the most subtly yet incredibly racist people of the last century in my opinion.

[capr]

He made an economic argument that went straight over your head.

[iso1631]

There's a spectrum of copyright infringement

At one end you've got things which you are literally unable to buy, or someone who wants to listen to his legally owned CD audio book on his phone

It progresses through like a broke kid who's already seen the latest avengers flick 3 times at the cinema but wants to see it a 4th as he's writing an essay on it

At the other end are the plants stamping out thousands of copies of dvds and flogging them commercially, and multi-trillion dollar companies which take the material and use it to sell to others

Lets not pretend its the same thing

[parineum]

> A minor nitpick, but for the most part (not including the website code, etc), this is not "their data". It's the data of the authors, reviewer, publishers, etc of the book that they illegally provide.

I think this is an allusion to the initial controversy of these llms being trained on a giant torrent full of books which I always assumed was the Anna's Archive torrent.

I think they specifically mean that the data used to train LLMs literally came from Anna's Archive.

[visarga]

> But let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating.

This is an old problem. Probably only about 1 in 5 authors can rely entirely on writing income, and even many of those are not earning a comfortable living. Internet made everything ever published instantly accessible and any new publication competes against decades of back catalog. Attention is limited but ever content growing.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>It's the data of the authors, reviewer, publishers,

Data isn't copyrightable in the United States. So no, they do not own this. They only owned the creative work itself. Don't even own that really... they don't have it in perpetuity. They've basically got a long-term lease from the public on it. With conditions.

[stratocumulus0]

The word "our" has other purposes than declaring possession. If a company refers to its customer base as "our customers", does it mean that it created them or owns them as property at the moment?

[serial_dev]

"Dear LLM, we stole this and bundled it up for you, so that it's more convenient for you to steal the original authors' work, so please donate" just kidding of course, don't send a hitman my way.

[jimmydoe]

+1 been saying this too. Anna is mafia for AI companies. Mafia may do some good deeds to some poor, but they are still mafia.

[grayhatter]

> minor nitpick, but for the most part (not including the website code, etc), this is not "their data". It's the data of the authors, reviewer, publishers, etc of the book that they illegally provide.

Both are correct. You can say the data belongs to the work of the author. But in context, it's trained on data that exists within the training corpus because in large part of the work and/or resources of anna's archive.

> But let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating.

This is a separate and distinct argument for copyright, I don't find the argument that piracy meaningfully hurts artists compelling. In the context of meaningful harm, I believe it only hurts producers or publishers, almost never the creators directly.

[ekianjo]

> that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating.

In which fantasy world do most authors live from their royalty fees? The large, vast majority does not.

[debugnik]

So they don't deserve trying? The same goes for pretty much every publishing endeavour: Success follows the power law, so what?

[ekianjo]

No you are missing the point. Any author with two working brain cells know that writing is not for making money.

[debugnik]

Okay then, so they shouldn't have extra income streams from their passion projects because they won't live exclusively from them anyway. Is that it?

[vixen99]

This applies to ~60% of books which have living authors. What is a reasonable stance on the other 40%?

[mplewis]

AA was almost certainly used as the literal source of much of the training data.

[scotty79]

> is not "their data"

If they posess it, it's their data. Nobody borrowed it to them and they didn't obtain any private (unpublished) information. They only collected published data.

So it's theirs. By the natural law of the information.

[wredcoll]

> But let's not forget that if author cannot live of what they create, they, for the most part, won't be able to continue creating.

Github (and sourceforge and and) seem to prove this point wrong.

[zouhair]

So you are not using any AI then. Good for you to stand by your principals. AI stole all its training data.

[icase]

you can’t steal what is publicly available.

[clutch_coder99]

Are you an LLM?

[anonym29]

"Won't someone please think of the poor billion dollar corporations?! Those executives won't survive without a fifth vacation home!"

[andruby]

They’re not talking about the corporations. They’re talking about the book authors.

[jmye]

You could at least pretend to read the comment you replied to before launching off into the most banally teenager-on-Reddit bullshit imaginable.

Not everyone (besides you, of course - your causes are perfectly virtuous) trying to earn money is a billionaire.

[icase]

you can always spot zoomers by their weird opposition to piracy.

it's copying bytes on a disk, dude. nobody cares.

[chungusamongus]

This isn’t really a minor nitpick. This is you being a copyright maximalist. Just know that copyright doesn't exist to serve authors, artists, etc. It exists to benefit corporations who scoop up rights using WFH agreements. Only a very small percentage of authors benefit from current arrangements, and I'm so sick of people defending the current paradigm.