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Nvidia accused of trying to cut a deal with Anna’s Archive for high‑speed access to the massive pirated book haul — allegedly chased stolen data to fuel its LLMs (www.tomshardware.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 209 points 9 months ago (11 children)

Allegedly most valuable company on the planet in all of history (can't afford books). Allegedly not a bubble or fraud.

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  • [–] 45 points 9 months ago* (9 children)

    Sadly I think it's more that there isn't really a standard way to buy books and other media in bulk at the scale of which AI training usually requires. So the companies realise they can save both time and money in just pirating after calculating the fine risk. Its just a bonus that they usually get away with it and that the fines would likely be cheaper than a legit transaction. But i do think it's the bulk data packaging that makes piracy look more attractive to them at the get-go.

    Heck, even video game publishers often source their roms for their official re-releases from pirated copies because pirates are better at preserving data and keeping it in a nice friendly format. Easier to search for it on the web and download it then it is too goo into their own archives and rip it themselves, if they even still have original copies, cause they sure as hell didn't keep their source code.

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  • [–] 7 points 9 months ago (5 children)

    Yeah, no, this genuinely doesn't make sense as there are legitimate repositories for these books and can do business-to-business negotiations for access to them. Even libraries have access to ebooks at bulk scale.

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  • [–] 0 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    Those kinds of negotiations if they haven't been done by other companies before, they won't have a process for it already in place. There'd be lots of friction for the first of such deal. Both in lots of legal work and software development to make sure they only get access relevant to the deal made.

    It's not something they can just be like "hey, here's the FTP URI". Because these legitimate repositories you speak of, like Amazon I guess, will already have existing deals with publishers. Currently as they stand, these deals may not be compatible with Amazon sharing their IP with other companies. So they will either have to redo those deals or restrict access of specific titles to the likes of Nvidia.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (3 children)

    Ah yes, of course, the legal challenges of selling a copy of a book that is literally for sale 🙄🙄🙄

    Yeah the existing deal with publishers is "sell my book", dummy. And no, there is no real software development work because you have genuinely no idea what you're talking about if you think it's not already just sitting in an S3 bucket with a database mapping it by those different publishers and deals. Again, even libraries have a database system that could handle this

    How do you think it works when an individual buys one book? A lawyer and software developer sit down to figure out the terms and conditions and overcome the technical challenge of finding that book in their computer system?

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (2 children)

    The development work I mentioned it you actually read it was about ensuring that specific access is given at the scale in which they need.

    Plus the legal challenge is not about the singular copies of books but for it to be in a state that is suitable for the ingestion of data which would likely mean giving them specifically DRM free versions which I imagine some book publishers would scowl at.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago* (1 child)

    Keep moving those goalposts! Eventually you'll be "right" and saved face.

    Yeah totally, I guess their only option is to pirate the books then, it's not like NVIDIA has access to OCR or anything 🙄

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