Anna's Archive: An Update from the Team

I spent a small fortune on a record collection. Then the record format was abandoned and it was all CDs. I spent a small fortune re-buying that same record collection, insofar as the records were even available as CDs. Then we went all digital (yes, I know CDs were already digital) and it became MP3s. So I ripped my CD collection and assigned them to a box in my attic. I will not be spending money on spotify or whatever other service to listen to stuff that I already have.

Movies... I spent a small fortune on a movie collection. Then I moved countries and to my surprise found that my movies wouldn't play anymore. So I ripped the DVDs to digital media and played them using open source software. This saved a small fortune and was more convenient as well. I think I still have the DVDs.

I spent a large fortune on books. Thousands of them. Typically read once, a much smaller number read multiple times. So I gave away my books, except for a few hundred that I still keep. I support the authors that I like by buying their books but I read on screens not on paper because my eyesight sucks and on screens I can set the font to whatever I want rather than to what the publisher thought was optimal.

There is no way the media companies are going to guilt trip me over any of this, besides that I read both Janis Ian and Courtney Love's pieces on the recording industry.

Copyright is great, it has enabled lots of people to earn a living creating content. But it has also become a weapon in an ever more absurd war between consumers and middle men, the producers caught in some uncomfortable position in the background.

What's interesting is that the middlemen brought this all on themselves: they equated buying a physical copy of a production with licensing IP, but the general public didn't think that way at all: they bought a book, they bought a record, they bought a movie. And passing on what you've bought when you no longer need it was and still is such an ingrained part of our culture that it felt really weird to have restrictions placed on what you could do with stuff you bought and paid for. So when the format changed from physical to nothing (bits) plenty of people felt that this was not quite what we had agreed to, after all we were paying for the medium as much as we were paying for the content so how come we paid the same or even more as before? And now we paid and got something that we could no longer share with others. No way to easily pass that e-book to someone else (talk about malicious compliance), no way to send the song you just paid for through Spotify or iTunes to someone else to let them hear it after you are done with it. You don't own the medium any more so therefore you own nothing at all.

And those publishers and movie producers are all laughing to the bank whilst doing nothing at all except for playing bank.

I follow the newsletter from Borderlands Books in San Francisco. I usually buy one book off their best seller list a month (sometimes I’ll stop in and buy three or four)

I’ve recently started using my local library’s mobile app and I love it. (I typically use this for re-reading or audiobooks for plane trips) I’m tempted to donate my entire bookshelf to the library and let them store and maintain it for me :-p

The difficult bit is working out what percentage of pirated copies are actually replacing a sale that would have happened if the content wasn't available to pirate. The more dramatic industry numbers like to claim it's 100%, which is ridiculous. It's certainly more than 0%, though.

I'd assume that for your indie game, there were a lot of people who wound up thinking "I would play this if it's free, but I wouldn't spend $X" on it. Adding successful DRM wouldn't have done anything to them but drive them away, and reduce the amount of buzz the game received. But then, particularly in the indie game space, maybe trading away a lot of buzz for a couple hundred more full-price game sales would have been completely worth it...

This is where the concept of services like Xbox Game Pass seem to be landing. Once someone has paid their fairly-small-amount each month, every game is now "free". Much like fairly-cheap streaming music basically stopped music piracy from being mainstream, cheap game-services might have the same impact on the game industry.

Though, much like streaming music, whether it turns out to be economically viable for the average game studio is certainly a question.

(For the sake of completeness: I don't pirate anything, so I have nothing to justify here.)

Your story sounds like "World of Goo," which reported a 90% piracy rate from comparing unique IP addresses to number sold. Despite that, they didn't quit and recently released "World of Goo 2" still DRM free.

Shouldn't need to justify piracy. There is a million and one reasons to pirate, very little reasons to pay.

Just pirate everything imo.

If you haven't read it, The Long Ride by Lloyd Sumner is (as I remember it) an excellent read.

Let me give you an example.

Some Lovecraft letters were translated into french some weeks ago. Great reading! There, Lovecraft gives his opinion about the litterature and art of his time.

And he mentions Nicolas Roerich. No idea who this guy was, but hey pretty interesting painter (thank god Google Images!). Ok, let's check on AA if there is a definitive book about his art.

No luck, but that very same guy wrote many books about Hindouism and eastern asia. After a few downloads on AA, no big deal, I am not so fond of them. Except for one that I knew nothing about (the name is Altai Himalaya, and I have absolutely no clue why this one is picking my attention, but it does).

That's definitely what I call serendipity.

And that thing happens a lot when you have a full access to whatever content is available. [and you are curious by nature]

In the end, retrospectively, such widespread access permits serendipity at a level that is absurdly miraculous !

That’s exactly how I do it. I enjoy reading DRM-free epubs on my Kobo, and whenever I finished a book I enjoyed, I buy it from the local sci-fi bookshop. I buy about 90% of all books I read.

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To be fair, the theory with the whole coin thing is solid, and I'd say it should count as something to be proud of even if in reality it gets tainted by speculative investments.

> ability to fund shadow libraries without fear of censorship

Bitcoin is much worse than cash in that regard

Might need more than a few as the price would tank if his wallets came out of dormancy.

What is the status on I2P these days? I used to run a lot of stuff on it. It was a lot of fun. It was like this cozy alternative development of internet, where things still felt like 1997.

"Scihub stopped updating the papers in 2022"

True but it matters a lot less in many fields because things have been moving to arXiv and other open access options, anyway. The main time I need sci-hub is for older articles. And that's a huge advantage of sci-hub--they have things like old foreign journal articles even the best academic libraries don't have.

As for mirroring it all, $2200 is beyond my budget too, but it would be nothing for a lot of academic departments, if the line item could be "characterized" the right way. To me it has been a bit of a nuisance working with libgen down the last couple months, like the post mentioned, and I would have loved for a local copy. I don't see it happening, but if libgen/sci-hub/annas archive goes the way of napster/scour, many academics would be in a serious fix.

A lot of these are (relatively large) pdfs, right?

I wonder how much space it is as highly compressed, deduplicated, plain text files.

Does the sum of human scientific knowledge fit on a large hard drive?

> the consequences for others.

The only people facing consequences are the license-holders. Online lending libraries aren't missing a copy now that AA archived it, and there's not really a substantial cost to the hosters in network bandwidth.

Am I missing something here? As a user I don't empathize with anyone but the archivers.

The OP is referring to the ongoing legal struggles the IA is facing wrt. to their version of an online library (with digital book lending).

Allegedly, some companies with deep pockets have paid them for access to their collection. The collection turns out to be useful for training LLMs.

You can donate to get access to faster download mirrors. I'd guess this is the main source of their revenue.

https://annas-archive.org/donate

If #1 is a reference to a famous quote from Steward Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, it's only part of the quote. The rest is relevant:

> On the one hand you have—the point you’re making Woz—is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable—the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have these two things fighting against each other

He stated later more succinctly:

> Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away

> They are literally burning down giant commercial buildings in Europe.

Who is, and which buildings?

What are social security numbers if not just another bit of information that wants to be free?

Or perhaps you are saying that people that have an interest in the availability of particular information should have some control on that information's freedom...

People can do good things and bad things simultaneously. Unless me supporting the good things directly enables also the bad things, I don't see a reason to throw out the good thing.

was the alternative for the pirate bay people jailtime?

Can you expand more on any links between Russia and Anna’s? I’m not joining the downvote brigade on this one without asking.

> Information should be free

I'm sick and tired of this misquote; as it was merely an observation of trends, and was never meant to be a moral maxim or mandate. If you truly believe information needs to be free as a moral mandate, share your company's source code first.

That site has a list of shadow libraries, whether they are still operating, and where to find them.

IMO, Scihub and the ebook parts of AA should be considered differently and not conflated.

In particular, Scihub is in opposition to the parasitic international publishers who dominate and control scientific publishing for profit, mostly on the backs of science generated by academia and other not-in-it-for-the-profit folks.

In contrast, downloading ebooks may, in some cases, lead to individual authors being hit in the pocket, in a profession it’s already hard to make a living from.

(I wish we’d figured out a better way to organise book publishing without publishing companies getting in the way and taking their large slice, allowing authors to profit more directly.)

The law only benefits the most popular authors, otherwise it protects publishers primarily.

I made the assumption everything relates to scientific papers that have been made public or were taxpayer funded.

IIRC it was shown that piracy increases sales for books.

For example, if you pirated an ebook and liked it, you'd likely buy a physical copy.

My comment made the assumption that everything in Anna's archive is the result of taxpayer-funded or public research.

Depends. I've seen some in favor and some against. Academics who have their papers paywalled by publishing entities against their own wills are generally for it.

That is a very nice thought, have been told the Europeans seem to do this to a much higher degree:)

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Yeah, usually, have also read that the only ones to make music on Spotify are major artists. They take a huge chunk of the the money distributed to musicians. At least for me, have never heard of any musician making a living off of their Spotify sales, not even close.

And Bandcamp does seem nice, wish it took off more.

And yes, I do completely agree with you that there are some big positives with today's music landscape. The rise of Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) to create your own music was a revolution, as is youtube for getting your music to the masses. Seems like a ton of musicians got their break from this these days... ...So as we talk, am thinking, maybe piracy has become a unimportant aspect of the music industry?? Hmm... Well, one aspect is missing, the seasoned engineers, producers, marketers and managers who can get your music created, promoted and performed all without the musician's needing to learn all this themselves. It really is a lot of work!

Definitely... and think about your comment, it's probably what we've all heard, that the teens/twenties is the target demographic for the music industry, as they're the one who go out and buy things. Yeah, I don't buy that much music these days, maybe a few songs and albums per year (and I'm in music!).

I do agree that youtube has made it much easier to self-promote, and that today's model has replaced the old one and is doing decently. Still, the at least by the numbers, the music industry is still smaller than it used to be. Unfortunately, money is a powerful resource, and it's not like the music industry took everything and completely screwed over the musicians. They helped struggling musicians survive, giving them a chance to make it, while taking care of a lot of the non-music-related tasks that are actually very time consuming - promotion, lining up performances, lining up interviews, learning the successful strategies for giving a band a chance to succeed, networking... It is really another job in itself and is very difficult.

Labels still do this today, but it's just the number of opportunities for musicians is smaller.

Although, again, do agree that youtube (and somewhat spotify from what I've heard) has made a huge difference. I've heard a few times that Youtube is probably one of the best resources for self promoting music, but being good at making videos on youtube is not easy to do well and is also another job in itself.

Always been the case. I have a late boomer early Gen x friend, who will insist that music was better back in the day, and that everyone was listening to Zeppelin and such, and nothing else. You can pull up the billboard charts for any year he waxes about and read off the top n, and rarely if ever find a track from the bands he claimed "everyone listened to."

Survivorship bias is and always has been real. If you don't believe me, think about the last time you heard Tubthumping from Chumbawumba on the radio or in a commercial

Appreciate your view, and am no expert at this, but as you mentioned, the numbers do speak for themselves. Yeah, it isn't just "the good old days," we all who followed the music industry saw a huge decline in revenue in the 2000's (it was catastrophic and was as punch to the gut). It just kept going down year after year. And as you mentioned, if you adjust for inflation, the size if the industry is still smaller than it used to be...

...Also, it seems like it depends on where you look for yearly revenue. At least this research article is more like what I saw (although, not sure what numbers are correct): https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-Recorded-Music-In...

Regardless, yeah, the music industry took a huge hit, and is looking better these days with streaming (which saved it), but it's still not great.

>And that's the thing: if the prices are too high, in the absence of piracy, most people are going to just do without. There's no lost sale when someone decides to do without rather than pay a price they thing is unreasonable.

Agreed, if prices are too high, yes, they'll do with out. But in the past, on average, it seems like most people did actually purchase CD's and DVD's, me included. Most of us had quite a sizable collection, and would routinely visit music stores to pay $20 to buy a CD, just because they liked one or two songs (and that's in 90's money). Yes, the music industry took a lot of the share of revenue, but that industry still is what promoted and supported the musicians.

Interesting question:)

And you have any evidence for your bet, or it's just a gut feeling?

In most industries pirates are the people who spend most money on stuff (in absence of convenient distribution)