It’s crazy to me that two decades after the iTunes Store the trade and resale of digital goods isn’t protected by law.
The point that the person you're replying to is making is that this totally breaks the way libraries have always worked, and that it takes a lot of power away from the buyers (whether that's you or your local library) and puts way more in the hand of the publishers.
A purely assumptive example, but if a library pays for a 2 year license to lend a digital book, and the average shelf-life of a physical book is ~2 years, what's the difference?
> To illustrate the economics of e-book lending, the N.Y.P.L. sent me its January, 2021, figures for “A Promised Land,” the memoir by Barack Obama that had been published a few months earlier by Penguin Random House. At that point, the library system had purchased three hundred and ten perpetual audiobook licenses at ninety-five dollars each, for a total of $29,450, and had bought six hundred and thirty-nine one- and two-year licenses for the e-book, for a total of $22,512. Taken together, these digital rights cost about as much as three thousand copies of the consumer e-book, which sells for about eighteen dollars per copy. As of August, 2021, the library has spent less than ten thousand dollars on two hundred and twenty-six copies of the hardcover edition, which has a list price of forty-five dollars but sells for $23.23 on Amazon. A few thousand people had checked out digital copies in the book’s first three months, and thousands more were on the waiting list. (Several librarians told me that they monitor hold requests, including for books that have not yet been released, to decide how many licenses to acquire.)
Digital books/content requires little to no cost to replicate, unlike printing new books. But we have seen that the price of that content follows the "physical goods" model. Why should a 30-40 year old movie cost you $20 to steam?
The main difference I see is the centralisation of censorship vectors. Pulling physical books off library shelves is visible and rightfully prompts a shitshow. Bullying a publisher into not renewing lending licenses strikes me as way easier to pull off.
I don't see a good way to do that for digital copies, and of course the expiry would be wholly artificial scarcity for them even if it was only a little bit more expensive than physical.
Digital content is a great example of why we should fight back for old IP timelines.
Without it, we stagnate as a society. Our stories don't evolve, they just rot on the vine.
You aren't buying a digital good, you're buying a limited license to use that digital good.
Something like content addressed storage spread across many shards running locally that are linked together over Tor.
Is it because the law doesn't apply to you when you have 1B USD ?
The operators of Anna's know they will go to prison.
[1] https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv...
(I understand this case is about their books, but I feel it got a lot more heat due to the Spotify action.)
Please, dear Anna, don't disappear on us. We need you for the books! Plenty of sources for music around.
Some people may say that Anna's has great OPSEC because she hasn't been identified following this release, but part of OPSEC is reliability, which they clearly failed at with the Spotify release. They let ego come in front of their OPSEC.
http://opbible7nans45sg33cbyeiwqmlp5fu7lklu6jd6f3mivrjeqadco...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_legal_assistance_treaty
Since September 30, 1998, when ICANN was founded in the US.
I wonder whether we wventually see some other power establish their own root servers which mirror only the parts of ICANNs DNS that are politically convenient to whoever does this.
> However, most of the intermediaries are foreign entities. Whether they voluntarily comply with a U.S. court order remains to be seen. While some foreign companies have taken action following U.S. injunctions, others have historically ignored them, citing a lack of local jurisdiction.
These judgments aren’t always pointless. Many Internet companies and services intersect with the US in some way, so there could be an angle where this impacts them.
Businesses operating strictly in other countries don’t need to comply with foreign laws except in cases where they need to do business with those countries, at which point it becomes complicated and they may choose to comply to avoid problems or sanctions.
Crazy judgments happen because they give the impression of impartiality. An accused murderer with $10 to his name gets held on a $1 million bond. What's the point, why not just hold them without bail? Because the rules say you do it this way and shrugging and saying "it doesn't actually matter so who cares?" doesn't make people feel like the system has the proper attitude.
It's called international law, trade agreements, treaties etc.
Could 5% of humanity be a psycho-path-subspecies?
These psychopaths are basically leeches on the rest of us, maybe even a cancer. Not only do they feel no guilt for enslaving other (wage-slavery), but they are also fine with poisoning the body and the mind (too many to list).
Perhaps they can even identify others with the same causal DNA segments. Sight? Smell? Micro-movements? Perhaps they really do see all non psycho-path-bearing-DNA-offspring as worms. Perhaps they intentionally breed with each other to avoid spreading the gene to vasts numbers of people.
Could this explain the vast majority of suffering?
and that probably explains a lot about the world.
however, i wouldnt call people affected by psychopathy a "subspecies", and i strongly doubt they have any extra psychopathy-sensing special abilities like sight or smell. that is crossing over into wild conspiracy territory.
(its also important to note that there are lots of people who have all the typical traits of psychopathy, but dont act like what people would call "psycho". there is way more nuance to psychopathy than usually portrayed in media or whatever)
Let's say there were a sub-species of psychopaths.
Let's say, for you to be "evil-beyond-reason" it takes M chromosomes having N genes.
As a psychopath, you probably want to associate yourself with other psychopaths, but maybe not live/work among them, except to breed.
Why would you want to associate yourself? Because if you work in tandem, you can exploit the rest of us with less friction, i.e. make laws. Each psychopath draws their own little kingdom, for them to rule.
Hmm, I guess, if the psychopaths could "feel" that another was "one of them" they may indeed work with one another.
--
It is hard for me to think, that given the huge advantage of knowing "your kind" that you wouldn't somehow sense it.
This is crazy talk isn't it. But look at the world. It looks just like this.
The ‘creative goods’ would be made available to the entire countries population via a zero-information key given to each citizen, and their preservation would be ensured by the central library.
Like an ordinary library, anyone would be able to request works for accession.
The number of downloads of a certain piece of media would be tracked, and the fund would pay out accordingly. Because it would be the easiest way of getting any media and the system well-designed, piracy would be negligible (a la Steam).
You’d have to consider trans-national sharing though.
> The Member acknowledges and agrees that the registration of Internet Number Resources does not constitute property and the registration of Internet Number Resources in the name of the Member or a third party does not confer upon the Member or the third party any rights of ownership. The Member acknowledges that any Internet Number Resources deregistered by the RIPE NCC may be re-registered to another party according to the RIPE Policies.
If whatever service provider in Russia won't shut off their site, I imagine that the next step would be getting a court order in the Netherlands to revoke that provider's IP range.
You get censorship resistance and it also doesn't leave a trail that leads to your location or requires payment methods. All of which leads to deanonymization.
The main way that an adversary would identify the location of an onion site would be to shut off the power/internet in various locations. That would be an unlikely step against some book piracy, imo.
It's interesting that Anna's could have kept the data to themselves and had a major advantage in training LLMs, either creating their own or charging possibly billions to large LLM companies.
This is the finest resouce I've found yet: https://open-slum.org/
Tracks the uptime and other pirate libraries...
Go to your Verizon account -> Safe Browsing -> Uncheck all the content filters you don't want.
They'll find new domains.
If there was an online e-book store where you could buy most books as DRM-free epub files, and you could read the first X pages for free, I guarantee you that nobody here would care about the OP article. It would have maybe 4 or 5 upvotes.
They lose one domain, so they just register a new nearly-identical one
> The publishers argued that, in addition to sharing pirated books with the public, the shadow library is serving as a primary training data hub for AI companies like Meta and NVIDIA.
>This is enterprise-level access that we can provide for donations in the range of tens of thousands USD. We’re also willing to trade this for high-quality collections that we don’t have yet.
"They" aren't a single group. Broadly speaking, publishers are the ones suing anna's archive, and they're involved in suits against AI companies as well. I'm not aware of any efforts by AI companies to take down anna's archive.
However, just because you receive a fine does not mean that you "can't" do it. You've already done it, got caught, now a fine. It does not mean that the LLM model has to be tossed out and destroyed with a new version trained up without that data. It just means can't is a very stupid word to imply here.
Yes, because most courts have ruled that training is legal as long as the source material was acquired legally. The AI companies were made to pay for the wrongs they did when acquiring the books, but it makes little sense to destroy all works that were built off the infringement, when they would be in the clear if they paid $15 (or whatever) for each book. It'd be like you torrenting college textbooks and getting caught, and then the book publisher demanding that you start over your college degree from scratch.
What was the judgment? Seems that their domains are still active. Why is there a difference in judgment here?
For one, they actually bothered to sent lawyers rather than getting hit with a default judgement.
Some examples, there are probably hundreds more:
1) Its okay for pharma companies to provide addictive drugs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackler_family
2) Coke can use cocaine, or coca leaves, but no one else: https://blog.oup.com/2014/03/coke-cocaine-coca-cola-capitali...
3) This one is hilarious and an ingenious innovation by current administration -- Ban on CBDC, locking out Fed Govt from providing crypto alternatives
Yes, with FDA approval. You can dispute whether the approval should be granted in the first place, but that's not at all comparable to some drug dealer slinging fentanyl on some street corner. Not to mention this happened decades ago, before the current wave of corruption in the whitehouse. Finally, isn't the whole point of laws and regulations is that there's vaguely some review? I'd far rather have prospective drug dealers having to go through FDA approval before they can sell their drugs, than have them sell whatever they want, without giving safety or efficacy lip service.
>2) Coke can use cocaine, or coca leaves, but no one else: https://blog.oup.com/2014/03/coke-cocaine-coca-cola-capitali...
Again, with the proper licenses. Believe it or not, you too can buy methamphetamine legally if you have a prescription! It even has a snazzy brand name, desoxyn.
>3) This one is hilarious and an ingenious innovation by current administration -- Ban on CBDC, locking out Fed Govt from providing crypto alternatives
What does this have to do with corporations?
Because that's what OpenAI is doing with the books they-- again-- illegally acquired. Huge AI companies are the ones pirating media at scale and literally everyone except the AI companies have to bear the consequences of that.
Until copyright terms are fair, ~5 years not ~95 years, Pirate On !
It has never been so obvious as now, that justice is not blind. Without justice there is anarchy.
And at this point, to be honest, I say bring it on- let's have the day of retribution before the billionaires have their AI robot armies.
The style of the comment suggests that they have far more sinister motives than mere online discussion, and reminds me of off-brand, leaky adult incontinence wear.