Anna’s Archive: Open-source data library
annas-archive.org
annas-archive.org
It's a bit like using emulators to read text from the screen using OCR.
David K Levine; Michele Boldrin - Against Intellectual Monopoly (2008)
> So-called intellectual property is in fact an "intellectual monopoly" that hinders rather than helps the competitive free market regime that has delivered wealth and innovation to our doorsteps
Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (1975)
~ E.F. Schumacher
“Small is Beautiful is E. F. Schumacher's stimulating and controversial study of world economies.
This remarkable book is as relevant today and its themes as pertinent and thought-provoking as when it was first published thirty years ago.
Small is Beautiful looks at the economic structure of the Western world in a revolutionary way.
Schumacher maintains that Man's current pursuit of profit and progress, which promotes giant organisations and increased specialisation, has in fact resulted in gross economic inefficiency, environmental pollution and inhumane working conditions.
Schumacher challenges the doctrine of economic, technological and scientific specialisation and proposes a system of Intermediate Technology, based on smaller working units, communal ownership and regional workplaces utilising local labour and resources.”
Under conditions of extremely free markets firms profits are reduced due to competition, consumers capture immediate value, but the sectors remain stagnant. An example are many service industries.
This also applies to open source software. it is by its nature extremely competitive and as a result almost all value is captured by its users. This is great at any given point in time, but it also means that open source software is constantly underfunded, and research is in fact ironically driven by surpluses of large firms.
Blender seems to be showing a different path?
Do you know which schumpter book he write this in?
> In his earlier view (emphasized in The Theory of Economic Development, originally published in 1912), Schumpeter highlighted the function of entrepreneurs who is carrying out new combinations. He viewed the occurrence of discontinuous and “revolutionary” change as the core of “economic development” which breaks the economy out of its static mode (“circular flow”) and sets it on a dynamic path of fits and starts. Three decades later, in his Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1942), Schumpeter took the view that dynamic capitalism was executed to fail because the very efficiency of capitalist enterprise would lead to monopolistic structures and the disappearance of the entrepreneur
Which seems to be more or less spot on, except that 'the entrepreneur' also includes the lucky few that end up with the new monopolies.
that «fail» refers to the spirit of entrepreneur-iality, i.e. the dynamism centered on innovation. Schumpeter was called (by Joan Robinson) «Marx with the adjectives changed»: his idea was that innovation be "the driving force of capitalism", but since efficiency creates bloat, the lean becomes heavy, the dynamism becomes bureaucracy, the "entrepreneur" becomes a """manager""" (an insulting label in Sch.), capitalism proceeds towards atrophy and finally transforms into socialism. In Schumpeter, "entrepreneur" means "the dynamic innovator"; the monopolistic phase is that of the heavy bureaucracies - that would be the failure. The Schumpeterian school (Sch. died in 1950 - crucial time) deals consequently with "why socialism did not happen".
If it was you that hit my parent post: I only reported that quote to help the poster asking for a bibliography - the paragraph contains reference to the two main books, with short descriptions left to the writing researcher (my own competence on Schumpeter is minimal). I am not personally defending their theories.
Willing to confuse cause with effect for a moment, is it true that innovation has mainly been the child of centralized monopolies competing under their respective wartime governments? ...mayyybe... but much of what they did militarily was built on the back of peacetime (or at least freelance) amateur discoveries by their respective member bodies.
That's actually why, supposedly, America "won" the cold war. We promoted the birth of Mom's Garage Engineering.
[edit: Strike. "Engineering your home PC in your mom's garage" is what I meant to say. And clearly, that more than any military/industrial/monopolistic program has made America the dominant power in the global technocracy today.]
Let us not forget that the surplus need not be astronomical to create innovation - e.g. some innovative design comes from a shop¹, some comes from very expensive prototyping. Still surplus, but on remote points in the scale.
(¹Think of the Rietveld Meubel Makerij - in the picture, Gerrit Rietveld is sitting on the prototype of what will become the "Rood blauwe stoel" - https://www.spectrumdesign.nl/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/ger... )
If the circulation of tools is curbed, surely the freedom to progress is limited. Comparatively in outcomes to other scenarios, that is to be analyzed. But surely a reply to Schumpeter should be found in Levine and Boldrin: their work is explicit part of the discussion against competing theories.
Or maybe you mean great greater than life concepts like the press, the Web or vaccines have been invented by big monopolistic entities?
Or do you mean unicorns like Google, Amazon and Facebook were born out of monopoly?
We might still see examples of this, but in the more than 70 years since Schumpeter developed his theories, the financial sector as well as state spending (military budget, infrastructure, public research, pension funds, etc.) expanded a lot. So there are many other sources for large capital needs available today.
Presumably there are NBER papers etc arguing this to death, but I don’t know the literature.
> Cloudflare does not accept anonymous payments, so we can only use their free plan. This means that we can’t use their load balancing or failover features. We therefore implemented this ourselves at the domain level. On page load, the browser will check if the current domain is still available, and if not, it rewrites all URLs to a different domain.
Are there any free and open source tools for load balancing that rival Cloudflare’s paid offerings?
https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=Special:Newpages
Thanks kindly for your work
what preferential treatment is that
https://annas-archive.org/md5/224c5b1195fd2fb4650c3b75c2908d...
I think only the high-speed direct downloads require logging-in but other downloads and torrents are freely available.
The Internet Archive include books still in copyright, which can be read by "borrowing" them virtually.
Reminder: based on the idea that "if the library holds a physical copy it can lend an electronic view over it, respecting the same principle of the physical object, i.e. one user per item per period (i.e. one user per use instance)". Such principle is being fought.
"It's open because we violated copyright and uploaded it in the open."
Call it what it is. Pirated books. People that must use them still will but at least now we'll know what it is.
You're missing the entire argument. The argument here is that they are not pirates, because copyright is stifles the spread of knowledge and should therefore be completely abolished.
Whether you get it or not is something different all together. But that's what people are fighting for.
I think a lot of good books never pay their authors much, at least in proportion to the effort that goes into researching and writing them. Scihub was also violating copyright, but academic paper authors don't get paid by publishers; they the journals. Lots of intellectual labor goes into producing a good where the author would much rather you read it without paying than buy it but not read it.
This is all to say, the publishers, who are perhaps no longer needed in the 21st century, are sales motivated, but there's at least a substantial category of authors who are not.
Bible Quran Shakespeare I'm sure many others
At inception, these databases were created to make academic content freely available which generally does not compensate the original publishers. But now it has been expanded to support the knowledge for free movement.
The legal status is questionable as creators can provide their own content to such libraries but their publishers might not agree to it.
Traffic management would make sense.
Actually, per the meaning of its own name, is /daring/ ("per-ya", ex PIE for "to try, risk").
...
2. Spread the word about Anna’s Archive on Twitter, Reddit, Tiktok, Instagram, at your local cafe or library, or wherever you go! We don’t believe in gatekeeping — if we get taken down we’ll just pop right up elsewhere, since all our code and data is fully open source."
Source: https://annas-archive.org/about
How is that a smart question? You very likely can’t name the "politicians who made this illegal" because haring others’ intellectual property without permission has been illegal by definition since the beginning of intellectual property.
The next question is why the courts would say that Anna’s archive is illegal, but Google is not.
There are some tests around encouraging copyright infringement, and Google is very careful to pass those tests despite providing extremely similar services over similarly-illegal sites.
The mental and legal gymnastics required for all this are fascinating. I suggest studying internet IP law.
That's similar one of Google's goals, and they do it (mostly) legally.
This is extremely valuable to anyone who ever needed a book but could not easily get it for whatever reason.
You're free to contact book clubs from all over the world to locate and trade paper ones with you if you're not in a hurry, but you obviously don't depend on getting the ressource fast, reliably or at all.
Like many would. Do not take libraries for granted - not even in "rich" countries.
If they offer internet access though, AND if projects like these are still around, the access to information is infinite.
Consider another argument: book bannings are a thing in the US again, a facist practice [0]. Making these banned books accessible to all despite the bans is a clear anti-facist statement and move.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/13/african-amer...
You may have missed a t-shirt photographed a couple of days ago, on a demonstrator, going along the lines of "We do not delegate education to the state" (oblivious of the principle that schools are there to fix the issue of faulty parental education, and conversely parents orient the children which are necessarily exposed to the world). it is from a group that demands censorship - it counts over 100'000 members. I understood they are also those who want the genitals of Achilles and Hector covered on Greek urns (or them urns hidden altogether from culture, "what is their use").
And of course, each similar group has a different set of "books to burn".
Buuut, apparently that violates some TOS and Amazon was terminating the accounts. So it's back to the shadow libs.
For destructive scanning, the obvious question is why you’d go through the trouble and not upload it to some sort of shadow libs.
I get the impression that the pendulum is rapidly swinging back to piracy as a moral imperative.
I was happy paying for HBO Max due to the high quality original content, but then they fired all the actors.
So, there was an implicit social contract (you produce tv/movies that generate revenue, we distribute it, and pay you for the next one), but now it has been broken.
From a customer perspective, paying the middle man, knowing the people that produced the product will not be paid is immoral.
(Yes, I know residuals exist. That’s not good enough.)
There are books on the archive that do exist in real life but are _extremely_ rare or may as well not exist.
I'm lucky enough to have a real dead tree library in my home but I still use ebooks heavily, and often duplicate books in both collections.