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Judge orders Anna’s Archive to delete scraped data; no one thinks it will comply (arstechnica.com)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/books@sh.itjust.works
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44 comments in c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com view that post
[–] 140 points 9 months ago (4 children)

The US government doesn't comply with it's own rulings. Why would anyone else?

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  • [–] 20 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    Because they're the ones with the monopoly on violence. Might makes right for those brutes.

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  • [–] 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Nobody has a monopoly on violence.

    Might does not make right. But might does make policy.

    The good people need wisdom and might, both. Then we will set policy and it won't suck.

    The world has to work for all its denizens and not just for the "top" (only in some sense, not in every sense) 0.01%.

    I don't want to build a gallows from which I myself will be hanged. I am not a masochist. I don't hate myself.

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  • [–] 9 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    The term describes a material condition. State police forces exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago

    My point is that what you are saying is simply a convention that for most of us made sense for a long time.

    I contend there do exist conditions under which that convention goes away. And at bottom we are all capable of violence.

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    • [–] 117 points 9 months ago (18 children)

    WorldCat.org is provided by OCLC, a nonprofit global library organization that provides shared technology services, original research, and community programs so libraries can better fuel learning, research, and innovation.

    In what way does anna's archive work contrary to their mission?

    It doesn't. It does their mission better than they ever could. They provide no value beyond the database that is being shared for free by anna's. There must be some salaries or some soft power being wielded somewhere by someone who doesn't want that to go away.

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  • [–] 97 points 9 months ago (16 children)

    $159,974,600 in "Salaries, wages, and related fringe benefits" for 2025.

    Why would a nonprofit company that supplies databases of library metadata need to pay $160 million dollars to staff? You can run a midsized business for that. https://www.oclc.org/content/dam/oclc/annual-report/2025/pdf/2025_OCLC_Audit_Report.pdf

    2024 executive earnings: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/310734115

    Key Employees and Officers Compensation

    Prichard David (President & Ceo) $1,347,322

    Rozek William (Cfo, Treasurer) $832,584

    Murphy Bart (Chief Tech. & Info. Officer) $765,667

    Leeches.

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

    They have 1,334 employees so a lot of it is fringe benefits... 30k for employer contribution of health/dental/vision/FSA&HSA program costs, $5k for sick leave payout costs, $5,250 training/tuition assistance budget. That's 40,250 per full time employee right there.

    If you take the almost 9mil C suite makes and round down to 150 Million and divide by 1,319 employees (subtracting C suite) that's 113,700 per employee. Now if we withhold the benefits above, that's $73,450. But we're not done yet.

    1% for workers comp, 6.2% for social security, 7% 401k match, 1.45% medicare, so a total of 15.65%. So we divide our 73,450 by 1.1565 and we are left with an average salary of $63,510.

    They also have an additional retirement plan which almost sounds like a pension, but I couldn't find easy info on. If that's what it is, then that further reduces the avg salary by 10%. They also offer $2,500 adoption assistance and an EAP program that's not factored in.

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  • [–] 41 points 9 months ago (11 children)

    I thought that was the point of non profits, you gotta funnel money to the people running it or you get looked at like a failure by the other oligarchs.

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  • [–] 44 points 9 months ago (9 children)

    I can't comprehend why the highest executive at one of these places would get paid more than 250k. It's a nonprofit in fucking ohio, MCOL in cities at best, LCOL in huge swaths of the state.

    They wield tremendous power. Nonprofits should not be tools for oligarchs to shelter assets and defraud the public, but they are all over the US and probably the world.

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

    Because that's the going rate for CEOs. Any of them could go to some private corporation and make just as much, if not more. So, nonprofits have to pay competitively or only afford CEOs willing to take the pay cut.

    Which is all really terrible because no CEO is worth that much. They only get paid that much because big corporations have absurd amounts of money, and the people in charge of setting salaries have no restriction on paying themselves that much.

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  • [–] 26 points 9 months ago (6 children)

    Any of them could go to some private corporation and make just as much, if not more. So, nonprofits have to pay competitively or only afford CEOs willing to take the pay cut.

    How is that a problem?

    Why not hire someone like me instead of someone that wants capitalist omnicide?

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

    We live in a Capitalist world, and like it or not, those CEOs know how to make companies thrive in it.

    That's the idea, at least.

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

    A non-profit does not need to embrace capitalism to survive.

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

    You say this with certainty, so you've got me curious. Could you show me some successful international non-profits that reject Capitalism?

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  • [+] -9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

    To me the real reason it's a red flag is that nonprofit staff are supposed to file income taxes, and those taxes have funded the Iraq invasion and Guantanamo Bay and starvation in Gaza and subsidies for the oil industry and shit, but there are other ways to divert that money through the nonprofit with tax exemption.

    So if I was the CEO of that nonprofit why tf would I ever take a big salary when I actually want to help the world survive, not ruin it like some corporate asshole?

    Seems like a signal that someone like me isn't allowed to be CEO of a nonprofit like that because I've done everything I can to avoid paying these warlord taxes instead of being part of some rich people money laundering club

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago

    The ivy league swells, oligarchs, see nonprofits simply as patronage and prestige, getting their intimates positions on boards or the like getting a half million to attend a few meetings and looking like a philanthropist.

    Meanwhile their stated missions are neglected. If you want to donate to charity, do it directly. Going through a nonprofit is handing 90 percent to the intimates of the ruling class, for them to look good.

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  • [–] 23 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    They serve 30,000+ libraries in 100+ countries according to Wikipedia, sounds like it might involve a lot of staff

    They might be leeches but on the other hand you might be underestimating how much work goes into trying to keep library databases accurate

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  • [–] 11 points 9 months ago

    I don't know why your getting so many downvotes because there seems to be a level of truth to what you say. They supposedly have 1,334 employees, which would make an average wage of 120k... But you have to notice it says "fringe benefits" which would include health insurance and retirement, which is $20k+ just for the health insurance and tax stuff and then if they do an employee 5% match that's another 5k bringing the avg salary down to 95k.

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  • [–] 17 points 9 months ago*

    I assume it's a ransom argument.

    WorldCat supports libraries -> "we" will hurt libraries if you Anna's Archive people don't stop -> this means you Anna's Archive people are in conflict with WorldCat's mission

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    • [–] 111 points 9 months ago (2 children)

    Didn't Facebook do basically this with books a little bit ago? Except fb did it for profit.

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    • [–] 80 points 9 months ago (1 child)

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    • [–] 80 points 9 months ago

    Lol if the US admin doesn't have to comply with courts why should they

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    [–] 65 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    ordering judge to suck my balls

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    [–] 52 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    They should train some ai on that scraped data. Just training.
    Now, if anyone is going to enforce this judgement, Anna’s Archive should sue because “other ai companies” are apparently allowed to steal.

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  • [–] 20 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

    They already did, obviously. It's not a secret nor aaa is opposed to it, they literally state that they are an archive for llm training as well as a library.

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago

    True. Let’s create a data model capable of generating bit-accurate files based on the originals. Then it is not just a copy. It is actually new data, produced by AI. Check mate.

    Also lol for trying to delete things from the torrent network.

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    • [–] 10 points 9 months ago

    i did my part to help the us government by downloading a bunch of tintin books as research

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    [–] 25 points 9 months ago (6 children)

    I dont get why they did the spotify thing, i feel its put a lot of smoke on them

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago

    Everything is, or will be, available in torrents. Once it's spread, we are all Anna's archive

    You can't kill a decentralized entity. What matters is just getting the information out there by any way possible, and thus it will stay out there

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    • 21 comments in c/technology@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 298 points 9 months ago (12 children)

    Hey judge, order AI companies to delete THEIR illegally-scraped data.

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  • [–] 88 points 9 months ago (10 children)

    Couldn't they make an argument with that pointing out that they're being unjustly targeted because they're smaller and easier to pick on?

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  • [–] 72 points 9 months ago (9 children)

    No one cares if they're small or unjustly picked on. If they want to beat the charges, they need to announce their own AI trained on the data.

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

    It would make me laugh if they could train an LLM that could only regurgitate content verbatim

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  • [–] 13 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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

    Before the advent of AI, I wrote a slack bot called slackbutt that made Markov chains of random lengths between 2 and 4 out of the chat history of the channel. It was surprisingly coherent. Making an "llm" like that would be trivial.

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  • [–] 8 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Reddit has at least one sub where the posts and the comments are generated by Markov-chain bots. More than a few times I've gotten a post from there in my feed, and read through it confusedly for several minutes before realizing. Iirc it's called subreddit_simulator.

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  • [–] 6 points 9 months ago

    The original subreddit simulator ran on simple Markov chains.

    Subreddit simulator GPT2 used GPT2, and was already so spookily accurate that IIRC its creators specifically said they wouldn't create one based on GPT3 out of fear that people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between real and not generated content

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago*

    It's actually kinda easy. Neural networks are just weirder than usual logic gate circuits. You can program them just the same and insert explicit controlled logic and deterministic behavior. To somebody who don't know the details of LLM training, they wouldn't be able to tell much of a difference. It will be packaged as a bundle of node weights and work with the same interfaces and all.

    The reason that doesn't work well if you try to insert strict logic into a traditional LLM despite the node properties being well known is because of how intricately interwoven and mutually dependent all the different parts of the network is (that's why it's a LARGE language model). You can't just arbitrarily edit anything or insert more nodes or replace logic, you don't know what you might break. It's easier to place inserted logic outside of the LLM network and train the model to interact with it ("tool use").

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    • [–] 94 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Defendant crashed its website, slowed it, and damaged the servers, and Defendant admitted to the same by way of default,” the ruling said.

    OK, so if I set up a lawsuit against OCLC in my country where they don’t reside, and they fail to show up to contest the charges, I get to claim they admitted guilt by default?

    Also, since the claim is they used bots that behaved like legitimate search engine bots, are they also suing Google?

    I can see why they might not want AA putting undue stress on their servers, but that doesn’t seem to be what they’re suing over.

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  • [–] 25 points 9 months ago

    OK, so if I set up a lawsuit against OCLC in my country where they don’t reside, and they fail to show up to contest the charges, I get to claim they admitted guilt by default?

    Assuming your country's laws are roughly based on British common law, yes.

    Winning a case is easy. How you enforce the judgement is much harder.

    This is why the speculation is that they will not comply. If the servers are not in reach of the US, the owners are not in a country that will extradite them, they don't store money in US banks and the US doesn't stupidly commit war crimes in order to capture them... then ignoring the court order is about as hard as you ignoring North Korean law.

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    • [–] 36 points 9 months ago*

    Eh, their crawler is now "AI", so it's fine.

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    [–] 27 points 9 months ago

    Anna’s Archive’s data is on IPFS, so effectively it’s pretty hard to remove the data from the nets. Good luck to the establishment though!

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    [–] 23 points 9 months ago

    Just say it is for Ai training then it will be ok.

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    [–] 22 points 9 months ago

    The court order, which was previously reported by TorrentFreak, was issued by Judge Michael Watson in US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio. “Plaintiff has established that Defendant crashed its website, slowed it, and damaged the servers, and Defendant admitted to the same by way of default,” the ruling said.

    US court. Where is Anna's Archive located?

    Because with the state of America right now, every country should be giving the US Courts the finger. We're pretty much a rogue nation now.

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    [–] 4 points 9 months ago

    Jokes on them, tiktok killed my attention span and I can't read ebooks anymore

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    7 comments in c/books@lemmy.ml view that post
    [–] 35 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Google Books ✅ Gemini ✅ Grok ✅ Claude ✅ Open AI ✅ Archivists who want regular people to have access, regardless of socioeconomic status ❌

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

    It makes me extremely happy to know that some dumbass went and begged in front of a judge for a couple hours, insisting that the defendant violated their copyright bullshit, and meanwhile there just.... isnt a defendant. Its like when that one guy successfully sued God, and the judge told him that in order to collect his earnings he would have to give the court Gods mailing address.

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  • [–] [S] 4 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Except they aren’t dumb. They won the case by default and now have the state’s monopoly on violence working for them for free. Anna’s archives isn’t imaginary like god; it’s run by real people, and the global hegemon is after their asses.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months ago*

    The case defaulted because they were unable to locate and serve the defendants, likely because they are outside the US and not beholden to US copyright law. They didnt show up to defend their case, because why would they? No one expects Annas Archive to comply, because why would they? If you cant even find the server host, let alone manage local law in whatever country that server might be in, then how are you going to enforce any more than a strongly worded letter?

    Edit: that being said, my original statement was in jest, a mere fantasy. They didnt have to beg because there was no defendant present. It was likely a very quick case, everyone showed up expect annas archive admins, and a default judgement was made. And then absolutely nothing happened because of it

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