I deeply admire the people who are obsessed with their passions and strive to build things that will lay the foundations for others.
Coming out would be a bold move for them.
This seems like a "heads I win, tails you lose" type of argument. If Anthropic was pro-piracy I can imagine everyone getting mad that they're flouting law and want to "steal from artists" or whatever.
>and continue doing it
Source? AFAIK they were caught and stopped. That's why there was the recent story about how they were destroying old books to scan them.
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bartz...
Sounds pretty pro piracy to me.
This is hysterical. No, format shifting old unwanted books is not unethical. The books still exist, in an internal digital library. If copyright law were to change to allow sharing orphan works some day, Anthropic could share them. But under current law, the books are preserved digitally and used for transformative uses that all Claude users benefit from.
I thought they could've bought just a single copy of each book and use the content to train their models. In that case, it falls into the fair use doctrine and they wouldn't need to pay the fine. And that will be way less expensive than the $1.5B price tag.
But when it was a proof of concept, they were using pirated data.
Just like Spotify did.
Citation?
1. Citation
2. Source
3. Reference
Long ago in a career based on original research, I/we ONLY used "reference."
One wonders if they're still doing it.
Plus this is not legal in the EU (and Canada, and ... let's just say the entire rest of the world, and accept that I'll be wrong for one or two smaller countries). Doesn't that matter? Or is only Mistral disallowed from training on copyrighted materials? Je veux ma chaton fat, goddamit!
And where are you getting the idea that Mistral doesn't train on copyrighted data? There's not a lot of code written by people who've been dead for more than 70 years, but somehow Mistral has been able to release coding models anyway.
(not legal advice!)
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?).
In any case, I strongly believe that Anna's Archive is the wrong approach, as it has a single point of failure. We have been doing massive P2P sharing for more than 26 years; we have the algorithms for fully distributed file sharing and databases. Why are we still depending on HTTP/DNS based interfaces that are easily taken down by people wanting to limit knowledge?
I'm glad and thankful that the people behind Anna's Archive dedicate their time maintaining the huge base of human knowledge (Encyclopedia Galactica Asimov would say), but we (the people) should make it really distributed, really infallible and accessible (no, downloading 10TB torrent files doesn't make sense, except for archiving purposes).
We should have something like Popcorn Time but for knowledge.
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.
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.
They railroaded Aaron Swartz (which eventually lead to his suicide) for much, much less.
One side wants to freely share knowledge with all of humanity, the other wants to restrict it to make a buck. I know who I support.
The only reason we even have dead-tree libraries at all is because 100 years ago, that was what John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie put forth to whitewash their horrible capitalist behaviors across the USA. And because it was done by those generations' billionaires, public libraries because acceptable.
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
The reason I don't subscribe is it takes me a lot longer to finish a book/audiobook than a movie. I just get them from the library/Libby - even if it's a 4 month wait, there are plenty of available books to read while I wait.
There was already one that existed in the web 2.0 era. Founded in 2012, raised a $3M seed from Founders Fund and a $14M A. Completely failed though and was acquihired by Google to have the founders lead Google Play Books.
Amazon now has Kindle Unlimited but I think it's mostly romance slop and self-published books. Seems like publishing rightsholders were just too inflexible to let the business model take off.
Usually funded by universities and foundations anyway because there's no real commercial market.
The economics aren't there.
In general I don't have many qualms with modern piracy, it just seems very hypocritical and I'm confused.
I'd imagine the backlash to AI companies from us white collar workers to be less severe if they have to publish their weights. In fact if you look closer you will see HN is actually pretty content with Chinese open models. It's the American AI corps with closed models that attract criticism.
In response to the 340M fine, .... "We have set up a LLM and are deleting all our books ? "
Might as well be a trillion dollars as it's never getting paid.
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."
Ridiculously unimportant trivia: The Flintstones borrows heavily from The Honeymooners, was the first animated sitcom, and was also the first animated show aired in prime-time.
Piracy is morally justified at this point.
The term "piracy" is used by record companies to demonize sharing and cooperation by equating them to kidnaping, murder and theft.[1]
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.
Thankfully I don't live in the US, and likely won't set foot there ever again.
You're welcome for your house.
I remember when RIAA was shaking down 15 year olds for $7000 for a single Metallica download from Napster. Or how Aaron Schwartz was executed by proxy by JSTOR and the feds, for what should have been free to access for all.
But hey, Anthropic, OpenAI, X, and others can pirate to their hearts content with for-profit piracy, but "we" (royal) are OK with that. We just cant have the poors have access to the sum of human knowledge.
Why didn't Metallica's fans rebel? That would have stopped it quickly and set a precedent and example for the rest.
Oh yeah? Well, my dad works at Anna's Archive.
Jason Arday recently committed suicide due to media pressure, and even when the media was told that he was not mentally well and should please back off, they didn't.
The man was accused of plagiarism, and there was no final verdict on if he did. The institutions that hired him clearly had no issues in vetting him. And yet he committed suicide.
There are absolutely horrible people out there right now who's entire careers are shams, and don't even come close to thinking about it. People are built different, and have different triggers
Bullshit. It wasn't the first round of plagiarism, or redactions. His whole supposed life story was a fraud. He passed off other researchers' patient interviews as his own.
Weird way to spell "lied about nearly every facet of his life and anyone who questioned it was aggressively accused of being racist."
Please also educate yourself about how federal prosecutors treated Schwartz after he scraped PACER.
Please also educate yourself about how long prosecutors attempted to negotiate a plea deal with Schwartz, what their final offer was, what his family, friends, his girlfriend, and his team of top-shelf, famous lawyers advised him to do, and what he actually did.
And PACER is federal court documents. Its a fucking scam and travesty that a system soo heavily built on precedent gatekeeps its own law at $.10/page.
Aaron is a motherfucking hero.
If I get dumped and I commit suicide because of it, does that mean I was "executed by proxy" by my girlfriend/boyfriend?
"Executed by proxy" is ridiculous, overheated rhetoric.
Many people have faced similar or worse charges, and did not commit suicide, so we'll have to point at something else.
Fuck them for what they did to him, but we should be rallying to get him set free. We can't start pointing fingers at other people for suicides. We have agency.
Feds did NOT have to choose to go the route they did. Their pursuance of a victimless "crime" lead to Aaron's only path was 'Exit'.
Sure, he committed suicide. Why? Because his life was already significantly threatened with what amounts to torture by prison.
Any time someone starts shrieking "half his life" you can assume they don't know a single factual thing about the case.
From the tone, ignorance, drama, and attitude I'm guessing they're about 22 years old.
They're not more or less virtuous than any others, they're in it for the money and you're a fool if you think otherwise.
I'm not against piracy, it's great, but to claim they are moral saints is a joke.
Anyway, bring in the downvotes as I know will happen.
it doesn't seem like it would be high revenue at least
Anna's Archive is very limited in performance if you don't pay.
Maybe if youre trying to pull an AI lab and download their full corpus, although I suspect thats not too onerous either. I have never had any issues getting stuff from annas archive for free
It also helps that AA has the best UI and search of any shadow library I've seen. Some really established bittorrent sites win out on curation but otherwise AA is top tier, not something I'm accustomed to seeing from a (free, no-signup!) clearnet/direct-download site
As far as GP's question I think you can be in it for the money (though I personally have my doubts that Anna is) and also be a force for moral good as well. Whether the operator's morals perfectly align with all of our ethics is an open question but the room at large generally tends to agree.
Also Torrentfreak's reporting has been extremely solid for an extremely long time so the link itself fits here too
Maybe you can own (some) things, you can't own information
It's not a competition, and being a moral saint isn't a good KPI; being a net positive for society is.
If you just Google 'free media heck yeah' you'll see a great deal of them!
OTOH, if you think that AA is robbing creators and publishers of their hard-earned proceeds, and that loss is greater than the loss to humanity from the destruction of AA, then you wouldn't think AA was a moral good.
Of course, it's all gray in the middle.
You cannot claim that AI labs are bad for illegally downloading content to build their AI without paying creators, and that AA is good for illegally offering the same content.
I think both are immoral, but I definitely pirate all the content I can (except video games but only because it's unsafe, not to remunerate creators).
It is not grey at all, this is some bullshit that people tell themselves to feel better. Whether it's using the output of AI models or downloading a book on Anna's Archive, you are ultimately robbing the creator of profits.
Nobody on HackerNews would argue otherwise if their employer stole their code from their mind and didn't pay for it.
Of course on a related note, most work that's interesting to me was created by people who are dead anyway, so they don't mind.
Anyway, are you sure most people that support AA don't also support e.g. Deepseek and Qwen's efforts?
Is your angle merely that shadow library hosts should be operating their services entirely for free (to the point of refusing payment) or is there something we're missing here?
If you want information to be free? Great. But most of those authors wouldn't be putting the work in to making that information/literature in the first place if they know they aren't going to get paid.
My understanding is that the number of authors that can make a full-time job of writing is a rounding error compared to the population of authors. I believe that people should be paid for their work, but I don't think the current copyright regime is actually very effective at paying authors for their work. So I value copyright enforcement proportionately less based on that observation.
Meanwhile, on the flip side of the coin, copyright rulings are causing companies like Atheropic to destroy books as they scan them, creating a rising sense of panic around knowledge scarcity. This panic is a direct result of the scarcity of the copyright intended to create in the first place. It's entirely artificial.
I've been saying this for 25 years, but copyright is essentially broken.
I don't really agree
Information itself should be free, authors deserve the right to monetise other ways (merch, physical media, exhibitions/shows, etc.) but society should pay artists and creators to do their thing[0]
Not everything needs to be a business, and I think art is one of those things
[0] I don't know much about it but maybe Ireland's Basic Income for the Arts scheme is a model. I think some other European countries do similar-ish things, too
So I would say it is morally acceptable to download stuff older than that. Torrents offer brand new things, so I wouldn't say they are morally good. I don't think they're morally worse than those locking up old media though.