Anna's Archive Owes $340 Million, Lost Several Domains, but It's Still Online

8/24/2026 at 3:34:49 PM

Long live Anna’s Archive. I stand on the shoulders of the Internet, Wikipedia, Anna’s Archive, Z-Library, LibGen, YouTube, Hacker News, Reddit, and Sci-Hub.

I deeply admire the people who are obsessed with their passions and strive to build things that will lay the foundations for others.

by num42

8/24/2026 at 3:44:24 PM

Why don't Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Facebook & Co defend Anna's Archive publicly?

Coming out would be a bold move for them.

by sam_lowry_

8/24/2026 at 3:51:56 PM

Anthropic paying $1.5 billion in fines for downloading Anna's Archive established a moat. They want it to be illegal to pirate books: they can afford the penalties and continue doing it. Just like they want it to be illegal to run local ML inference.

by peri-cl

8/24/2026 at 5:13:54 PM

>Anthropic paying $1.5 billion in fines for downloading Anna's Archive established a moat. They want it to be illegal to pirate books: they can afford the penalties and continue doing it.

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.

by gruez

8/24/2026 at 5:31:20 PM

> From the start, Anthropic “ha[d] many places from which” it could have purchased books, but it preferred to steal them to avoid “legal/practice/business slog,” as cofounder and chief executive officer Dario Amodei put it (see Opp. Exh. 27).

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bartz...

Sounds pretty pro piracy to me.

by bix6

8/25/2026 at 3:16:07 AM

Yes there are people who are both for and against copyright.

by austhrow743

8/24/2026 at 11:50:19 PM

They stopped because they already had everything in their model anyway.

by wolvoleo

8/24/2026 at 5:28:41 PM

[flagged]

by sam_lowry_

8/24/2026 at 5:51:28 PM

> This is an unethical as a company may behave, short of killing people.

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.

by yonran

8/24/2026 at 5:42:30 PM

did not follow all the details, but my understanding is that some form of copyright law nudges in the direction of destroy after scan?

by empiricus

8/24/2026 at 8:52:35 PM

> they can afford the penalties and continue doing it.

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.

by hintymad

8/24/2026 at 9:01:32 PM

That's what they're doing now, when they are established.

But when it was a proof of concept, they were using pirated data.

Just like Spotify did.

by Gud

8/24/2026 at 5:03:27 PM

> Just like they want it to be illegal to run local ML inference.

Citation?

by vaylian

8/24/2026 at 5:13:00 PM

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49076057 ("Our position on open-weights models (anthropic.com)", 1812 comments)

by peri-cl

8/24/2026 at 8:00:23 PM

Over the past decade I've noticed on HN the following order of frequency in choice of words, most common to least:

1. Citation

2. Source

3. Reference

Long ago in a career based on original research, I/we ONLY used "reference."

by bookofjoe

8/24/2026 at 8:23:42 PM

While it is definitely over a decade at this point (over two in fact), some of this likely comes from the term [citation needed], that originated on Wikipedia, as a cynical backhanded response to unsourced claims. It has become a catch-all. Language and how it evolves is a pretty interesting subject.

by tygon

8/24/2026 at 9:26:17 PM

You're right. Has to be of Wikipedia use origin. Thanks!

by bookofjoe

8/24/2026 at 3:58:24 PM

In theory none of them actually got the right to train on illegally downloaded books. Anthropic was simply punished for doing it once.

One wonders if they're still doing it.

by spwa4

8/24/2026 at 4:32:39 PM

OpenAI plainly admitted that it is impossible not to do so in a House of Lords inquiry. So, presumably there is no way around it to train models. There is just not enough non-copyrighted data out there.

by ungut

8/24/2026 at 4:50:52 PM

You mean this one https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/126981/pdf/ where they write "it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials"? That doesn't mean they have to download those materials illegally. For a billion dollars, you can easily buy one legal copy of each book in Anna's Archive and still have some cash left over to run a whole-of-internet scraping operation.

by yorwba

8/24/2026 at 8:27:29 PM

I wonder if anyone has run the numbers on what the actual cost, both in cash and logistical headache, contacting so many copyright holders would be. That seems like quite the feat to calculate.

by tygon

8/24/2026 at 8:42:21 PM

There's an established network of intermediaries that can supply a large variety of books for a few dollars apiece, so no need to contact copyright holders directly.

by yorwba

8/24/2026 at 9:15:44 PM

This is very true. As someone with quite the experience with materials published under Penguin, Scholastic, etc. you effectively have a "dictionary attack" on the matter, rather than true "brute force," but that still leaves quite a list to compile to send to each and is easier for larger titles than smaller ones. I wonder how that leads to a bias in what materials get used for training. You are not getting many local self-published books this way.

It is almost like we need a "for use for training" agreement across the board. This would not fix the current issues (at least without substantial work), but going forward would allow for creators (or publishers/rights holders) such as this to designate a work as crawl-able for AI. A robots.txt just for Claude.

by tygon

8/24/2026 at 11:28:00 PM

Doesn't really matter. The incentive structure to steal clearly exists, so why would they even go through the trouble?

by ungut

8/24/2026 at 11:25:05 PM

Pretty easy to assertain that they don't acquire them legally due to the plethora of evidence and court cases against them. No copyright holder would be sueing them if they knew they sold the works in the first place.

I always wonder why y'all feel the need for these impressive mental gymnastics. You can use the models /and/ think they are trained unethically. Living through the ambiguity without abandoning your ideals completely is a valuable skill these days.

by ungut

8/24/2026 at 5:11:17 PM

I'm pretty sure we would know if they did that. And we don't.

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!

by spwa4

8/24/2026 at 6:00:21 PM

AI companies legally acquiring books have indeed been in the news: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330742

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.

by yorwba

8/24/2026 at 8:17:41 PM

But they have been training on copyrighted data since GPT-2 at least. 2019, and that's when it came out, so before that of course.

by spwa4

8/24/2026 at 8:54:38 PM

GPT-2 was trained using data scraped from the web (https://cdn.openai.com/better-language-models/language_model... section 2.1), i.e. copyrighted data provided free of charge to anyone with an internet connection.

by yorwba

8/24/2026 at 5:08:26 PM

What tosh. It's copywrited material, they pay to access it like everyone else.

by deadbunny

8/24/2026 at 8:11:37 PM

I thought the outcome of that was basically it's legal to train on books, but they acquired the books in the wrong way. If they went out and bought copies of them and trained it would have been fine

by IncreasePosts

8/24/2026 at 4:25:27 PM

Of course they are. They have just put on their Swiss Banker suit now and have all sorts of deflection techniques in place such that, of course, "the money has the stamps that says its clean" (when it it really blood money hidden behind a pretty wall).

by outside1234

8/24/2026 at 3:45:42 PM

No gain, all liability. Easier to cut them a check for access to training data and say nothing. Unless legal discovery was performed, the outside world would never know, and the payment records would roll off corporate records through a record retention schedule eventually. Could obfuscate it as a contractor consulting fee ("knowledge management subject matter expert") if you wanted to get tricky, depending on the risk appetite of whomever would receive the funds.

(not legal advice!)

by toomuchtodo

8/24/2026 at 3:51:53 PM

There’s zero liability in a company stating publicly that they support Anna’s Archive. Zero. Free speech protections cover much more egregious statements than that.

by p-e-w

8/24/2026 at 8:55:10 PM

Your freedom of speech is your opponents' lawyers' wet dream. Your publicized support for a known piracy operation will not look very good in the court when you get sued by copyright holders.

by pibaker

8/24/2026 at 3:52:38 PM

I disagree. Anyone with even a hint of standing will sue, and keep suing. As someone who has to work with corporate counsel often, do not say anything you don't have to say. Only say what is absolutely necessary. Free speech protects you from your government. It does not shield you from civil suits, and the US is extremely litigious.

by toomuchtodo

8/24/2026 at 4:26:01 PM

Maybe they are worried about claims of contributory infringement?

by criddell

8/24/2026 at 9:24:01 PM

Those are all law-abiding organizations, which AA is not.

INB4: "Here is one time one of those organizations broke the law". Don't go there, absolute lowest level of conversation.

by TZubiri

8/24/2026 at 7:15:35 PM

I'm pretty sure[0] they're all using shadow libraries, and saying things in favor of them would increase their liability.

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.

by kmeisthax

8/24/2026 at 4:45:25 PM

You missed Gigapedia (library.nu [1]) , which preceded most of the others.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library.nu

by xtracto

8/24/2026 at 4:54:28 PM

> 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?).

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.

by squidbeak

8/24/2026 at 6:16:17 PM

Whilst it pays for the service (and, in that respect, may be a necessary evil), it's morally questionable (at minimum) to charge for things that, by law, aren't yours in the first place.

by tentacleuno

8/24/2026 at 6:43:04 PM

Less morally questionable than claiming to users they are "buying" access to media that can be revoked at any point in the future with no recompense, of course referring to Sony and Amazon.

by dessimus

8/24/2026 at 6:56:47 PM

> Why are we still depending on HTTP/DNS based interfaces that are easily taken down by people wanting to limit knowledge?

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.

by dessimus

8/24/2026 at 6:47:57 PM

BBSes were the first, of course. In particular, Libgen, Sci-Hub and others can be traced back through several generations of libraries to the SU.BOOKS FidoNet echo conference created in the early 90's.

by orbital-decay

8/24/2026 at 11:55:48 PM

Yes and I remember a thriving community of IRC DCC file servers. I used them back in the day to read books on my palm pilot before wink existed.

by wolvoleo

8/24/2026 at 5:55:45 PM

I wouldn’t include YouTube given how only Google is allowed to index it

by mips_avatar

8/24/2026 at 3:22:22 PM

Incredible website. Really one of the dreams of the internet realised, the ability to access all knowledge at your fingertips.

by Synaesthesia

8/24/2026 at 3:33:00 PM

I was blown away when I paid to get an API key for it. The process is intricate and state of the art.

by simlevesque

8/24/2026 at 5:34:00 PM

What's the process like? I wasn't aware there was a paid API key.

by linksbro

8/24/2026 at 5:58:03 PM

You buy an Amazon gift card as a gift and use the email Anna's Archive provide you as the recipient. The email is unique to you so they know when you paid them.

by simlevesque

8/24/2026 at 3:43:02 PM

Probably the greatest achievement of modern society, a rebirth of the Library of Alexandria. Of course, only private for-business corporations are allowed to steal the world's knowledge, apparently, and only to be able to monetise it. There's something deeply wrong with our civilization that Anna's Archive is punished while companies like OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Anthropic, etc are just ... ignored when they do things like destructively digitise books or pirate things.

by Yokolos

8/24/2026 at 3:48:16 PM

Didn’t they have a default judgment against them because they didn’t show up to court? Do they even know who runs it?

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.

by throwatdem12311

8/24/2026 at 3:26:37 PM

Anna's Archive is a gift to humanity

by puppycodes

8/24/2026 at 6:15:10 PM

Exactly. if AI gets a pass on stealing all of the world's information and gets a pass why shouldn't we get to enjoy the same benefits?

by weaksauce

8/24/2026 at 3:31:23 PM

Exactly. All libraries are worthy of being supported and grown. I make no distinction between a physical dead-tree library and a digital library.

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.

by nekusar

8/24/2026 at 3:38:33 PM

> 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

by MYEUHD

8/24/2026 at 3:42:03 PM

Amazon maybe? Kindle Unlimited. In some ways Audible with audiobooks. Which actually has lot of entrants though they tend to limit listening time on large part of their portfolio.

by Ekaros

8/24/2026 at 3:44:58 PM

Libby very much exists, you just need to sign up through your local library.

by arrosenberg

8/24/2026 at 9:43:18 PM

The problem with Libby is finding a local library that has a good selection. Mine does not, and my state does not have the feature of being able to get a library card from any library in the state. I would have to buy a membership to a non-local library, which can be surprisingly difficult to do if what you care about is a large selection of ebooks.

by devilbunny

8/24/2026 at 3:43:13 PM

I believe you can get access to a lot of digital books with a library card online. Not something I have personally done, so can't really give details.

by copper4eva

8/24/2026 at 5:34:14 PM

Kobo Plus: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/plus

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.

by BeetleB

8/24/2026 at 4:51:31 PM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyster_(company)

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.

by avarun

8/24/2026 at 6:07:09 PM

Yeah I like reading somewhat obscure history books- no public library carries those and they're extremely expensive if you can find them.

Usually funded by universities and foundations anyway because there's no real commercial market.

by TitaRusell

8/24/2026 at 4:09:07 PM

Because you have to pay a ton more for a lot of digital copies of books if you're doing any kind of lending and you're competing with existing libraries. So you both have higher costs (e.g. you have to pay more for a digital file that may have DRM, be required to self destruct after a certain number of uses, doesn't allow multiple lends at a time, etc.) and your prospective consumers have a free option so convincing them to pay is going to be difficult.

The economics aren't there.

by Mezzie

8/24/2026 at 7:12:10 PM

Public libraries lend DVDs and Blu-Rays yet Netflix still exists.

by Ajedi32

8/24/2026 at 9:59:27 PM

Netflix has a larger market base (far more people watch TV and movies than read books, particularly at a level high enough to justify a subscription) and a market base that is far less likely to already be aware of the free alternative (most serious readers of the sort that go through that amount of books are already aware of their local libraries, whereas serious movie/TV watchers are less likely to be so).

Additionally, modern Netflix is a streaming company, and even DVD Netflix was sending the materials directly to your house, which is a differentiator versus the library, whose materials need to be picked up. There's a convenience factor as an incentive to pay. Library streaming exists, but it's awful - very limited library and very limited watches - versus Netflix where once you sub you can watch as much as you want.

by Mezzie

8/24/2026 at 3:53:24 PM

I consider libraries, public schools and maybe even public fire departments in the list of things that could never be proposed today if they didn't already exist.

by hydrogen7800

8/24/2026 at 5:04:23 PM

Public libraries pay for their books

by te_chris

8/24/2026 at 8:40:30 PM

I don't understand why there is so much love for Anna's archive here. I feel like I'm getting whiplash because there is so much hate for AI companies training and profiting off of the worlds knowledge without licensing it. And yet, a site that directly facilitates that by taking payments from AI companies is lauded as this amazing and honorable thing. Can someone help me understand what im missing?

In general I don't have many qualms with modern piracy, it just seems very hypocritical and I'm confused.

by dominick-cc

8/24/2026 at 8:49:36 PM

AI companies turn public data into closed commercial products. They are allowed to profit off your copyrighted data, but only they get to profit from their own models.

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.

by pibaker

8/24/2026 at 11:31:15 PM

> Can someone help me understand what im missing?

One directly threatens the livelihoods of the commenters here, the other doesn't ;-)

by keeda

8/24/2026 at 3:49:47 PM

And Google owes 20 decillion dollars to the Russian government. Who cares either way.

by shaky-carrousel

8/24/2026 at 5:14:37 PM

I only wish they allowed browsing journals by year and volume. Libgen allowed that but war in Ukraine broken libgen. It lives but as a much shadier alter egos that does not support all that original libgen supported.

by srean

8/24/2026 at 6:59:19 PM

Rembember to seed torrent kids

by profstasiak

8/24/2026 at 4:20:17 PM

So when are Nvidia, Facebook, and everyone else going to chip in and pay up?

by cloudie78

8/24/2026 at 4:28:18 PM

Did you miss that they are huge corporations that the law doesn't apply to?

by outside1234

8/24/2026 at 4:32:15 PM

if this is true. what does this say about "rule of law"? is it all fiction?

by kingleopold

8/24/2026 at 5:16:54 PM

You mean how anthropic lost a court case and now they're being made to pay?

by gruez

8/24/2026 at 6:39:48 PM

they are paying from the revenue, they gained ton of valuation and revenue because of books? if you do that, you lose most of your life

by kingleopold

8/24/2026 at 7:18:56 PM

Even in the infamous Aaron Swartz case he was offered 6 months in prison as a plea bargain. Even ignoring the difference in crime (torrenting vs CFAA), no one was going to "lose most of your life".

by gruez

8/24/2026 at 5:01:44 PM

Like all things with society, it exists so long as we constantly create it. If you slack off many things will vanish faster than you think.

by nemomarx

8/24/2026 at 6:02:43 PM

I don’t get it. I am not a corp. i can download books from AA (who does the law apply to exactly?)

by bethekidyouwant

8/24/2026 at 3:41:19 PM

"owes" seems like a wrong word here

by NooneAtAll3

8/24/2026 at 8:38:37 PM

I wonder what would happen if Annas archive announced

In response to the 340M fine, .... "We have set up a LLM and are deleting all our books ? "

by asdefghyk

8/24/2026 at 3:31:30 PM

"If you own someone $340, that's your problem. If you owe someone $340,000,000, that's there problem."

Might as well be a trillion dollars as it's never getting paid.

by dcchambers

8/24/2026 at 3:45:58 PM

"when you're $100,000 in debt, it's your problem. But when you're $1 million in debt, it's the bank's" - Rosalie Goes Shopping (1989)

by qwertox

8/24/2026 at 3:57:32 PM

An old variation:

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."

by a4isms

8/24/2026 at 4:36:04 PM

the flintstones?

by ivberrOg

8/24/2026 at 5:14:24 PM

I chose the names from The Flintstones, although the joke is not from the show.

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.

by a4isms

8/24/2026 at 3:32:31 PM

Anna's Archive is what TV told me in the 2000s that the future was. An online database with all published books one click away. Far from the dystopian reality than the corporate internet has become.

by Frieren

8/24/2026 at 8:32:09 PM

when I read title . "Annas archive owes $340 million absolutely first thing that came to mind is " How much do all these Ai companies owe for their unauthorised use of books and other media?"

by asdefghyk

8/24/2026 at 7:32:18 PM

What are current domains? I tried the ones from article but got redirected to spam

by gitowiec

8/24/2026 at 11:59:14 PM

Wikipedia usually has the most recent domains for sites like this. There's even a browser extension[1] that uses an `.idk` TLD to say "Look up the latest URL from this site's Wikipedia article".

[1] https://github.com/aaronjanse/dns-over-wikipedia

by wlonkly

8/24/2026 at 7:33:00 PM

.gd works for me

by barnabee

8/24/2026 at 3:45:26 PM

Unfortunately it’s blocked in Germany

by sajithdilshan

8/24/2026 at 4:32:04 PM

only the local providers in Germany are forced to block it via DNS - 8.8.8.8 to the rescue

by xiconfjs

8/24/2026 at 7:20:32 PM

Tor Browser is handy, if simply changing your DNS isn't enough

by barnabee

8/24/2026 at 6:00:20 PM

Just make them owe $134 Trillion or whatever the evaluation was years ago suggested by the RIAA for their estimation of 'damages' for music piracy. It's about as meaningful.

by theideaofcoffee

8/24/2026 at 6:35:14 PM

taking shots against the King?

better not miss!

by coolThingsFirst

8/24/2026 at 5:59:55 PM

Thanks for reminding me I need to download some books for the holidays!

by expedition32

8/25/2026 at 1:23:46 AM

> U.S. courts can’t reach domains registered beyond their jurisdiction. That’s likely to increase calls for site-blocking legislation, a measure the industry has long favored and that remains high on the political agenda in the United States.

Eventually US will have its own great firewall like China.

Politics is about powergrab and what we’ve seen is more and more power grab.

It’s likely the billionaires are able to buy the govt goons to pass the laws that allow them to be the gatekeepers.

Anthropic, OpenAI and the model builders massively benefited from the archived information. Distill entirety of archived human knowledge.

by nojvek

8/24/2026 at 3:49:54 PM

Just wished they didn't sell bulk access for LLM training.

by tokai

8/24/2026 at 7:45:53 PM

"owes"

by plusfour

8/24/2026 at 3:25:27 PM

Might as well say "Annas Archive OWES ELEVENTY HUNDRED BILLIONTY-TRILLIONTY INFINITY DOLLARS!!!!!111" ala elementary school playground make-believe.

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.

by nekusar

8/24/2026 at 5:45:09 PM

> I remember when RIAA was shaking down 15 year olds for $7000 for a single Metallica download from Napster.

Why didn't Metallica's fans rebel? That would have stopped it quickly and set a precedent and example for the rest.

by mmooss

8/24/2026 at 6:31:12 PM

Many of us did, and I certainly still do, but there obviously weren't enough of us rebelling to convince them of how reprehensible it is to sue your own fans and sic the guns of the state on them.

by npongratz

8/24/2026 at 10:07:57 PM

> sue your own fans

What an incredible strategy - and it worked! And in something that's entertainment and fandom-driven; it's not like the fans need a medication, job, or their auto warranty. How pathetic. The day rock'n'roll died.

by mmooss

8/24/2026 at 6:06:17 PM

Because they are a bunch of mask wearing vaccine lovers obviously

by bethekidyouwant

8/24/2026 at 4:49:12 PM

> elementary school playground make-believe

Oh yeah? Well, my dad works at Anna's Archive.

by brcmthrowaway

8/24/2026 at 3:28:27 PM

[flagged]

by palmotea

8/24/2026 at 3:56:53 PM

People can be predisposed towards something, and then have a tipping point brought by periods of great stress

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

by tetris11

8/24/2026 at 4:07:01 PM

> The man was accused of plagiarism, and there was no final verdict on if he did.

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.

by sejje

8/24/2026 at 4:55:34 PM

> accused of plagiarism

Weird way to spell "lied about nearly every facet of his life and anyone who questioned it was aggressively accused of being racist."

by KennyBlanken

8/24/2026 at 3:39:30 PM

Sure. That he was facing 35 years in prison for his “crimes“ had nothing to with his suicide.

by kenanfyi

8/24/2026 at 5:17:21 PM

Please educate yourself about how the US criminal justice system actually works, especially around plea deals. Also especially around sentencing for white collar crimes in terms of what white collar criminals are actually sentenced to, and what is typically taken into consideration by judges during sentencing phases (like, say, mental health issues.)

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.

by KennyBlanken

8/24/2026 at 5:54:19 PM

Please educate YOURSELF about criminal actions by a company is a fine (read: cost of doing business), whereas criminal actions by a person get years/decades long prison time and life-long ramifications after the actual punishment.

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.

by nekusar

8/24/2026 at 3:50:18 PM

If only you were able to take your perspective one step farther. Why did he commit suicide?

by Catloafdev

8/24/2026 at 6:49:42 PM

> If only you were able to take your perspective one step farther. Why did he commit suicide?

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.

by palmotea

8/24/2026 at 4:03:48 PM

Because something was wrong in his brain and he couldn't handle the stress of his situation.

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.

by sejje

8/24/2026 at 3:43:06 PM

Why did he commit suicide?

by NegativeLatency

8/24/2026 at 3:36:15 PM

"We are going to jail you for half or more of your life, restrict any medicines you might be on, treat you in deplorable conditions, constitute you as a slave of the state if we decide so". And there is no parole in federal prisons.

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.

by nekusar

8/24/2026 at 4:01:49 PM

JSTOR didn't want the criminal charges

by sejje

8/24/2026 at 5:51:21 PM

But Carmen Ortiz did.

by rpdillon

8/24/2026 at 3:56:17 PM

The feds are not JSTOR now are they? Your discourse is disgusting and only weakens the cause.

by tokai

8/24/2026 at 6:22:25 PM

I started typing out something but they're foaming at the mouth and wildly ignorant about nearly everything ranging from the basics of how the US criminal trial system works, PACER fee policies, the fact that prosecutors spent a year negotiating with Schwartz over a plea deal with a final offer of 6 months...a deal he refused against the advice of friends, family, his partner,

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.

by KennyBlanken

8/24/2026 at 3:27:15 PM

Reminder for me to make another donation.

Piracy is morally justified at this point.

by surgical_fire

8/24/2026 at 8:08:18 PM

   The term "piracy" is used by record companies to demonize sharing and cooperation by equating them to kidnaping, murder and theft.[1]

[1] https://stallman.org/articles/end-war-on-sharing.html

by Insimwytim

8/24/2026 at 3:29:58 PM

I wonder by if the US considers this “supporting a terrorist organization”.

by voakbasda

8/24/2026 at 3:31:52 PM

Donate a significant amount of money, and you can get a free trip to the new gulag in El Salvador. Or maybe gitmo.

by walrus01

8/24/2026 at 3:31:28 PM

Don't give the government any ideas

by no_input

8/24/2026 at 3:50:26 PM

Hardly a new idea: Trumplestiltskin suggested during this term that we should start detaining Americans who expressed their dissent against the government.

by voakbasda

8/24/2026 at 4:40:09 PM

I wonder if the EU or UK does.

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.

by drstewart

8/24/2026 at 4:05:38 PM

Maybe.

Thankfully I don't live in the US, and likely won't set foot there ever again.

by surgical_fire

8/24/2026 at 4:36:16 PM

[flagged]

by drstewart

8/24/2026 at 7:18:22 PM

My labor allowed me to buy my house.

If anything, I was heavily underpaid.

by surgical_fire

8/24/2026 at 9:36:52 PM

Nope, it was FAANG, as you admitted.

You're underpaid now at your euro job, that's a guarantee.

by drstewart

8/24/2026 at 10:18:12 PM

I am where I want to be.

I also have no desire to return.

by surgical_fire

8/25/2026 at 3:31:58 AM

No one wants you to

by drstewart

8/24/2026 at 3:44:43 PM

US probably considers anything impairing profits, stock prices, or enterprise value terrorist activity at this point.

by toomuchtodo

8/24/2026 at 3:47:48 PM

Yeah, truthfully. This type of article is generally a nice nudge to donate.

by pelagicAustral

8/24/2026 at 3:24:11 PM

[dead]

by T3RMINATED

8/24/2026 at 3:31:12 PM

I really don't understand why HackerNews gets hard for Anna's Archive but you never see other illegal download websites praised here.

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.

by iLoveOncall

8/24/2026 at 3:35:48 PM

how's Anna make money? I know they offered to share the database for ai training (which I would criticize, that's very shady) but do they have donations or something

it doesn't seem like it would be high revenue at least

by nemomarx

8/24/2026 at 3:37:24 PM

The same as most private Torrent tracker: via premium accounts masquerading as donations.

Anna's Archive is very limited in performance if you don't pay.

by iLoveOncall

8/24/2026 at 3:42:57 PM

That's not how most established private torrent trackers operate? Account privileges are usually granted according to tenure, number of uploads and ratio requirements.

by jbaiter

8/24/2026 at 3:57:17 PM

Not that the other guy is right, but most established private torrent trackers absolutely allow you to bypass requirements if you "donate."

by KennyBlanken

8/24/2026 at 4:32:56 PM

> 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

by HDThoreaun

8/24/2026 at 3:47:16 PM

Anyone paying for Annas Archive is a moron. It takes more time to find the right book/file than it does for the download, which is usually under ~5MB, to finish.

by KennyBlanken

8/24/2026 at 4:20:56 PM

I doubt most dontators think of it as "paying for Anna's Archive" - I pay to contribute to the institution more than for the minor convenience of the fast download links. I'd still donate even if I got nothing extra in return.

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

by branon

8/24/2026 at 11:57:09 PM

I've seen support here for the pirate party and other things like pirate bay.

by wolvoleo

8/24/2026 at 7:22:36 PM

I praise all pirates and leakers

Maybe you can own (some) things, you can't own information

by barnabee

8/24/2026 at 3:57:32 PM

Can't talk for all of HN, but I for one hereby praise most/all piracy websites. Anna's Archive is great, and Rutracker is also great.

It's not a competition, and being a moral saint isn't a good KPI; being a net positive for society is.

by animuchan

8/24/2026 at 3:33:00 PM

As a hacker News viewer I'm for other illegal download sites as well.

If you just Google 'free media heck yeah' you'll see a great deal of them!

by the_real_cher

8/24/2026 at 3:34:01 PM

Yeah me too, but I don't claim that they're a moral good.

by iLoveOncall

8/24/2026 at 3:47:18 PM

It depends on what you consider to be a moral good. Some people feel that the world's information is getting locked down in the name of profit to the detriment of humankind. AA is providing knowledge to people who would otherwise not be able to get it. From that viewpoint, it's immoral to try to shut AA down.

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.

by beej71

8/24/2026 at 6:01:34 PM

I personally don't care about the morality, I'm just pointing out an absurd double standard.

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.

by iLoveOncall

8/24/2026 at 6:38:49 PM

I agree that it's not grey at all, but because they're both so obviously good (particularly labs releasing open weight models). It's great that there are organizations making it ~free for anyone in the world to obtain information instantly. On the contrary, our policy of restricting something that naturally can be duplicated an unlimited number of times for free is obviously morally bad. People should be incentivized to create new ideas, not rent old ones for a century.

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?

by ndriscoll

8/24/2026 at 3:41:14 PM

They provide the world with an invaluable service at the expense of their freedom. Seems incredibly noble and good to me. Especially considering the current climate.

by goolz

8/24/2026 at 6:07:44 PM

They're a for profit organization and you're falling for their propaganda.

by iLoveOncall

8/24/2026 at 6:46:40 PM

Propaganda to what end? Are you referring to anything in particular?

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?

by branon

8/24/2026 at 6:55:21 PM

No, just that they shouldn't claim that they have a vertous mission and that this is what your money is going towards.

by iLoveOncall

8/24/2026 at 7:28:57 PM

Freeing all information is virtuous, though…

by barnabee

8/24/2026 at 10:21:07 PM

Do you need to follow the law to have virtue? There's a correct answer to that question btw.

by zen928

8/24/2026 at 4:01:48 PM

We don't have to have the same exact moral systems of course, but this is curious: if we (collectively!) support the thing, why not claim it's good?

by animuchan

8/24/2026 at 4:27:26 PM

I think the reason why it shouldn't be claimed as a moral good is pretty obvious - authors deserve to get paid for their work. I certainly can't claim I stand on a bedrock of morality as I've used it from time to time, but even though I don't have the money that a lot of HN commenters do I make sure to not use it for small-time authors. Even really successful authors I'll only use it about 50% of the time.

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.

by Auracle

8/24/2026 at 5:55:08 PM

> 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.

by rpdillon

8/24/2026 at 7:30:46 PM

> authors deserve to get paid for their work

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

by barnabee

8/24/2026 at 4:57:30 PM

Personally I would say copyright should last somewhere less than 10 years. On the basis that business decisions about whether to fund a book/film/whatever today isn't based on earnings 10 years from now.

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.

by benj111

8/24/2026 at 6:17:32 PM

it "Owes" just like Anthropic and OpenAI "Own" their models trained on the worlds collective IP.

by cyanydeez