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Comment by BriggyDwiggs42 | Hacker News Reader

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BriggyDwiggs42

In a better world, the government would run something like libgen. That shit’s a public good.

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Have you been to your local library?

Hah! It’s a bit different but kind of the same.

LibGen manifests the idea that humanity and its progress are more important than copyright.

I wonder if Anthropic, OpenAI, or Meta.ai have spent much time looking at LibGen…

My positive experiences with libraries is exactly what I’m drawing on. It seems to me that if physical libraries can be made free to use, nothing prevents a digital equivalent other than lack of the same sort of funding.

There is a digital equivalent. Your local library allows you to borrow e-books or e-audio-books. (Probably.)

The apps are a bit janky, but they're there.

The apps are beyond janky compared to free PDFs and epubs delivered in seconds from libgen with no login.

Long live libgen - one of my favourite places on the ‘net.

The notion of 'borrowing' an e-book, which has no intrinsic limit to number of times it can be checked out or when it must be returned, is a joke.

Ah yes. The amazing service where you have to wait for someone else to finish reading an ebook before you are allowed to "borrow" it ... because reasons. Because obviously reading an ebook is not thread-safe.

As opposed to freely being able to download a PDF on-demand regardless of who else is reading it.

Those are missing many books because they only work at the whim of the publishers. Also they cost extra money to run which further limits them.

My library service has an e-book loan system. When I go to get an item - if they have it - it is often "unavailable to borrow". Ridiculous.

I don't need to use any janky apps to borrow a physical book though.

Have you lived in a developing country?

> Have you been to your local library?

Yes

> Hah! It’s a bit different but kind of the same.

It's much worse both in the content availability and ease of use, so not a bit different

I am pretty sure they do, this data is just too valuable. At least meta admitted using a dataset called "books3" which contains ~200k pirated ebooks for llama 1 and 2 [1]. Anna's archive provides datasets for LLM training, but who knows who they are working with..

I also wonder if google is using their own dataset from books.google.com .

[1] https://torrentfreak.com/meta-admits-use-of-pirated-book-dat...

LibGen is the library concept adapted to the digital age where copying is zero cost. It's what official government sponsored libraries should be providing today. Instead we have publishers controlling how libraries can distribute works digitally and on what devices the users can view them.

> LibGen manifests the idea that humanity and its progress are more important than copyright.

The only reason for copyright to exist in the first place is to further the progress of humanity. If it doesn't do that or even hinders it (and I tend to agree that it does) we should get rid of it.

I think this should apply to most essential services (and libgen absolutely is an essential service; others are E2EE messaging and E2EE cloud-hosting). After all, people like to imagine (and are often told) that taxes are not a ransom you pay to the ruling oligarchy, but almost a donation you almost willingly give away for the sake of maintaining public infrastructure.

But the key words are "a better world". I don't think this is really possible in, uh, this world. Imagining a world like that is a bit like a soviet utopian-fantasy book about the world of established communism. "Sounds Good, Doesn't Work".

To be fair, though, if "the government" you are talking about is the one of the USA, I thinks loc.gov is pretty great stuff. I mean, it's pretty shit compared to what somebody like "the Anna" could do with this amount of resources, and it isn't really made in a way to make researching, copying and saving stuff locally easy, but still, I'd love if every country maintained something like that (at least). Lots of relatively rare interesting stuff out there.

I don’t really agree it’s unachievable, just a matter of political will imo. All that would have to happen is enough public interest to outweigh publisher lobbying.

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