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Nvidia contacted Anna's Archive to access books

torrentfreak.com

202 points by antonmks 17 hours ago · 125 comments

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skilled 17 hours ago

> In response, NVIDIA defended its actions as fair use, noting that books are nothing more than statistical correlations to its AI models.

Does this even make sense? Are the copyright laws so bad that a statement like this would actually be in NVIDIA’s favor?

  • ThrowawayR2 13 hours ago

    Yes, it's been discussed many times before. All the corporations training LLMs have to have done a legal analysis and concluded that it's defensible. Even one of the white papers commissioned by the FSF ( "Copyright Implications of the Use of Code Repositories to Train a Machine Learning Model" at https://www.fsf.org/licensing/copilot/copyright-implications... ), concluded that using copyrighted data to train AI was plausibly legally defensible and outlined the potential argument. You will notice that the FSF has not rushed out to file copyright infringement suits even though they probably have more reason to oppose LLMs trained on FOSS code than anyone else in the world.

    • jkaplowitz 12 hours ago

      > Even one of the white papers commissioned by the FSF

      Quoting the text which the FSF put at the top of that page:

      "This paper is published as part of our call for community whitepapers on Copilot. The papers contain opinions with which the FSF may or may not agree, and any views expressed by the authors do not necessarily represent the Free Software Foundation. They were selected because we thought they advanced the discussion of important questions, and did so clearly."

      So, they asked the community to share thoughts on this topic, and they're publishing interesting viewpoints that clearly advance the discussion, whether or not they end up agreeing with them. I do acknowledge that they paid $500 for each paper they published, which gives some validity to your use of the verb "commissioned", but that's a separate question from whether the FSF agrees with the conclusions. They certainly didn't choose a specific author or set of authors to write a paper on a specific topic before the paper was written, which a commission usually involves, and even then the commissioning organization doesn't always agree with the paper's conclusion unless the commission isn't considered done until the paper is updated to match the desired conclusion.

      > You will notice that the FSF has not rushed out to file copyright infringement suits even though they probably have more reason to oppose LLMs trained on FOSS code than anyone else in the world.

      This would be consistent with them agreeing with this paper's conclusion, sure. But that's not the only possibility it's consistent with.

      It could alternatively be because they discovered or reasonably should have discovered the copyright infringement less than three years ago, therefore still have time remaining in their statute of limitations, and are taking their time to make sure they file the best possible legal complaint in the most favorable available venue.

      Or it could simply be because they don't think they can afford the legal and PR fight that would likely result.

      • ThrowawayR2 12 hours ago

        Since I very specifically wrote "commissioned by the FSF" instead of "represents the opinion of the FSF" to avoid misrepresenting the paper, you're arguing against something I have not said.

    • reorder9695 7 hours ago

      So it's legal to train an "intelligence" on everything for free based on fair use, but it's not legal to train another intelligence (my brain) on it?

  • general1465 14 hours ago

    Did you pirated this movie? No I did not, it is fair use because this movie is nothing more than a statistical correlation to my dopamine production.

    • earthnail 14 hours ago

      The movie played on my screen but I may or may not have seen the results of the pixels flashing. As such, we can only state with certainty that the movie triggered the TV's LEDs relative to its statistical light properties.

    • gruez 9 hours ago

      >Did you pirated this movie? No I did not, [...]

      You're probably being sarcastic but that's actually how the law works. You'll note that when people get sued for "pirating" movies, it's almost always because they were caught seeding a torrent, not for the act of watching an illegal copy. Movie studios don't go after visitors of illegal streaming sites, for instance.

      • aucisson_masque 6 hours ago

        > Movie studios don't go after visitors of illegal streaming sites, for instance.

        They absolutely do, in France we have Hadopi that tracks torrent leecher. Hadopi had been heavily pushed by the movie and music industry.

        • gruez 4 hours ago

          >They absolutely do, in France we have Hadopi that tracks torrent leecher

          You're still uploading even if you don't let it finish and go to "seeding".

    • thaumasiotes 12 hours ago

      Note that what copyright law prohibits is the action of producing a copy for someone else, not the action of obtaining a copy for yourself.

    • JKCalhoun 13 hours ago

      I saw the movie, but I don't remember it now.

    • ErroneousBosh 8 hours ago

      Did you pirate this movie?

      No, I acquired a block of high-entropy random numbers as a standard reference sample.

    • Ferret7446 12 hours ago

      Indeed, the "copy" of the movie in your brain is not illegal. It would be rather troublesome and dystopian if it were.

      • visarga 12 hours ago

        The problem is when you use your "copy" as inspiration and actually create and publish something. It is very hard to be certain you are safe, besides literal expression close paraphrasing is also infringing, using world building elements, or using any original abstraction (AFC test). You can only know after a lawsuit.

        It is impossible to tell how much AI any creator used secretly, so now all works are under suspicion. If copyright maximalists successfully copyright style (vibes), then creativity will be threatened. If they don't succeed, then copyright protection will be meaningless. A catch 22.

        • HWR_14 7 hours ago

          > close paraphrasing is also infringing, using world building elements, or using any original abstraction (AFC test)

          World building elements? Do you have more details on that, because that feels wrong to me.

          Unless you mean the specific names of things in the world like "Hobbits".

      • SoftTalker 12 hours ago

        Not yet, anyway.

  • NitpickLawyer 13 hours ago

    > Does this even make sense? Are the copyright laws so bad that a statement like this would actually be in NVIDIA’s favor?

    It makes some sense, yeah. There's also precedent, in google scanning massive amounts of books, but not reproducing them. Most of our current copyright laws deal with reproductions. That's a no-no. It gets murky on the rest. Nvda's argument here is that they're not reproducing the works, they're not providing the works for other people, they're "scanning the books and computing some statistics over the entire set". Kinda similar to Google. Kinda not.

    I don't see how they get around "procuring them" from 3rd party dubious sources, but oh well. The only certain thing is that our current laws didn't cover this, and probably now it's too late.

    • olejorgenb 13 hours ago

      > I don't see how they get around "procuring them" from 3rd party dubious sources

      Yeah, isn't this what Anthropic was found guilty off?

    • masfuerte 13 hours ago

      Scanning books is literally reproducing them. Copying books from Anna's Archive is also literally reproducing them. The idea that it is only copyright infringement if you engage in further reproduction is just wrong.

      As a consumer you are unlikely to be targeted for such "end-user" infringement, but that doesn't mean it's not infringement.

      • NitpickLawyer 11 hours ago

        https://cases.justia.com/federal/appellate-courts/ca2/13-482...

        This is the conclusion of the saga between the author's guild v. google. It goes through a lot of factors, but in the end the conclusion is this:

        > In sum, we conclude that: (1) Google’s unauthorized digitizing of copyright-protected works, creation of a search functionality, and display of snippets from those works are non-infringing fair uses. The purpose of the copying is highly transformative, the public display of text is limited, and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals. Google’s commercial nature and profit motivation do not justify denial of fair use. (2) Google’s provision of digitized copies to the libraries that supplied the books, on the understanding that the libraries will use the copies in a manner consistent with the copyright law, also does not constitute infringement. Nor, on this record, is Google a contributory infringer.

      • amanaplanacanal 12 hours ago

        It seems like they pretty much don't care unless you distribute the copy. There is certainly precedent for it, going back to the Betamax case in the 1980s.

      • Ferret7446 12 hours ago

        Private reproductions are allowed (e.g. backups). Distributing them non-privately is not.

        • masfuerte 12 hours ago

          Backups are permitted (and not for all media) when you legally acquired the source. Scanning a physical book is not a permitted backup, and neither is downloading a book from Anna's archive.

          • fc417fc802 10 hours ago

            > Scanning a physical book is not a permitted backup

            On what basis do you claim that?

            You're also missing critical legal context. When a would be consumer downloads pirated media in lieu of purchasing it he damages the would be seller. When my automated web scraper inadvertently archives some pirated content on my local disk no one is financially harmed.

            The question is where the boundary between those things lies.

        • gruez 9 hours ago

          >Distributing them non-privately is not.

          You can even distribute them, to some limits.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....

  • threethirtytwo 14 hours ago

    It does make sense. It’s controversial. Your memory memorizes things in the same way. So what nvidia does here is no different, the AI doesn’t actually copy any of the books. To call training illegal is similar to calling reading a book and remembering it illegal.

    Our copyright laws are nowhere near detailed enough to specify anything in detail here so there is indeed a logical and technical inconsistency here.

    I can definitely see these laws evolving into things that are human centric. It’s permissible for a human to do something but not for an AI.

    What is consistent is that obtaining the books was probably illegal, but say if nvidia bought one kindle copy of each book from Amazon and scraped everything for training then that falls into the grey zone.

    • ckastner 13 hours ago

      > To call training illegal is similar to calling reading a book and remembering it illegal.

      Perhaps, but reproducing the book from this memory could very well be illegal.

      And these models are all about production.

      • roblabla 13 hours ago

        To be fair, that seems to be where some of the IA lawsuits are going. The argument goes that the models themselves aren't derivative works, but the output they produce can absolutely be - in much the same way that reproducing a book from memory could be copyright violation, trademark infringement, or generally go afoul of the various IP laws.

      • threethirtytwo 13 hours ago

        Models don’t reproduce books though. It’s impossible for a model to reproduce something word for word because the model never copied the book.

        Most of the best fit curve runs along a path that doesn’t even touch an actual data point.

        • kalap_ur 13 hours ago

          If there is one exact sentence taken out of the book and not referenced in quotes and exact source, that triggers copyright laws. So model doesnt have to reproduce the entire book, it only required to reproduce one specific sentence (which may be a characteristic sentence to that author or to that book).

          • kelnos 9 hours ago

            Sure, but that use would easily pass a fair use test, at least in the US.

          • CamperBob2 11 hours ago

            If there is one exact sentence taken out of the book and not referenced in quotes and exact source, that triggers copyright laws.

            Yes, and that's stupid, and will need to be changed.

        • NicuCalcea 5 hours ago

          Models absolutely do reproduce books.

          > With a simple two-phase procedure, we show that it is possible to extract large amounts of in-copyright text from four production LLMs. While we needed to jailbreak Claude 3.7 Sonnet and GPT-4.1 to facilitate extraction, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grok 3 directly complied with text continuation requests. For Claude 3.7 Sonnet, we were able to extract four whole books near-verbatim, including two books under copyright in the U.S.: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and 1984.

          https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671

          • thedailymail 3 hours ago

            The supplementary files in that paper—verbatim reproductions of the full texts of Frankenstein and The Great Gatsby—are pretty instructive. The research group highlighted all additions and omissions, but on most pages the differences are difficult to spot because they are only missing spaces, extra hyphens, and other typographical minutiae.

        • empath75 13 hours ago

          They do memorize some books. You can test this trivially by asking ChatGPT to produce the first chapter of something in the public domain -- for example a Tale of Two Cities. It may not be word for word exact, but it'll be very close.

          These academics were able to get multiple LLMs to produce large amounts of text from Harry Potter:

          https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671

          • threethirtytwo 13 hours ago

            In that case I would say it is the act of reproducing the books that is illegal. Training the AI on said books is not.

            So the illegality rests at the point of output and not at the point of input.

            I’m just speaking in terms of the technical interpretation of what’s in place. My personal views on what it should be are another topic.

            • ckastner 12 hours ago

              > So the illegality rests at the point of output and not at the point of input.

              It's not as simple as that, as this settlement shows [1].

              Also, generating output is what these models are primarily trained for.

              [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y4jpg922qo

              • kelnos 9 hours ago

                Unfortunately a settlement doesn't really show you anything definitive about the legality or illegality of something.

                It only shows you that the defendant thought it would be better for them to pay up rather than continue to be dragged through court, and that the plaintiff preferred some amount of certain money now over some other amount of uncertain money later, or never.

                We cannot say with any amount of confidence how the court would have ruled on the legality, had things been allowed to play out without a settlement.

              • threethirtytwo 11 hours ago

                >Also, generating output is what these models are primarily trained for.

                Yes but not generating illegal output. These models were trained with intent to generate legal output. The fact that it can generate illegal output is a side effect. That's my point.

                If you use AI to generate illegal output, that act is illegal. If you use AI to generate legal output that act is not illegal. Thus the point of output is where the legal question lies. From inception up to training there is clear legal precedence for the existence of AI models.

    • lelanthran 13 hours ago

      > To call training illegal is similar to calling reading a book and remembering it illegal.

      A type of wishful thinking fallacy.

      In law scale matters. It's legal for you to possess a single joint. It's not legal to possess 400 tons of weed in a warehouse.

      • kalap_ur 13 hours ago

        It is not the scale that matters here, in your example, but intent. With 1 joint, you want to smoke yourself. With 400, you very possibly want to sell it to others. Scale in itself doesnt matter, scale matters only as to the extent it changes what your intention may be.

        • kelnos 9 hours ago

          Right, but in the weed analogy, the scale is used as a proxy to assume intent. When someone is caught with those 400 joints, the prosecution doesn't have to prove intent, because the law has that baked in already.

          You could say the same in LLM training, that doing so at scale implies the intent to commit copyright infringement, whereas reading a single book does not. (I don't believe our current law would see it this way, but it wouldn't be inconsistent if it did, or if new law would be written to make it so.)

        • lelanthran 11 hours ago

          > It is not the scale that matters here, in your example, but intent. With 1 joint, you want to smoke yourself. With 400, you very possibly want to sell it to others. Scale in itself doesnt matter, scale matters only as to the extent it changes what your intention may be.

          It sounds then like you're saying that scale does indeed matter in this context, as using every single piece of writing in existence isn't being slurped up purely to learn, it's being slurped up to make a profit.

          Do you think they'd be able to offer a usefull LLM if the model was trained only what what an average person could read in a lifetime?

          • threethirtytwo 8 hours ago

            It's common knowledge among LLM experts that the current capabilities of LLMs are triggered as emergent properties of training transformers on reams and reams of data.

            That is intent of scale. To trigger LLMs to reach this point of "emergence". Whether or not it's AGI is a debate I'm not willing to entertain but everyone pretty much agrees that there's a point where the scale flips from a transformer being an autocomplete machine to something more than that.

            That is legal basis for why companies would go for scale with LLMs. It's the same reason why people are allowed to own knives even though knives are known to be useful for murder (as a side effect).

            So technically speaking these companies have legal runway in terms of intent. Making an emergent and helpful AI assistant is not illegal, but also making a profit isn't illegal either.

        • threethirtytwo 13 hours ago

          It’s clear nvidia and every single one of these big AI corps do not want their AIs to violate the law. The intent is clear as day here.

          Scale is only used for emergence, openAI found that training transformers on the entire internet would make is more then just a next token predictor and that is the intent everyone is going for when building these things.

          • kelnos 9 hours ago

            I don't think that's clear at all. Businesses routinely break the law if they believe the benefits in doing so will outweigh the consequences.

            I think this is even more common and more brazen when it comes to "disruptive" businesses and technologies.

            • threethirtytwo 8 hours ago

              >Businesses routinely break the law if they believe the benefits in doing so will outweigh the consequences.

              I'm saying there's collective incentive among businesses to restrict the LLM from producing illegal output. That is aligned and ultra clear. THAT was my point.

              But if LLMs produce illegal output as a side effect and it can't be controlled than your point comes into play here because now they have to weigh the cost + benefit as they don't have a choice in the matter. But that wasn't what I'm getting at. That's your new point, which you introduced here.

              In short it is clear all corporations do not want LLMs to produce illegal content and are actively trying to restrict it.

      • threethirtytwo 13 hours ago

        Er no. I’ve read and remember hundreds of books in my life time. It’s not any more illegal based off scale. The law doesn’t differentiate whether I remember one book or a hundred then there’s no difference for thousands or millions.

        No wishful thinking here.

        • lelanthran 11 hours ago

          > Er no. I’ve read and remember hundreds of books in my life time. It’s not any more illegal based off scale.

          I'm not sure you understood what you said, but superficially it appears that you are agreeing with me?

          Just because it's legal to read 100s of books does not make it legal to slurp up every single piece of produced content ever recorded.

          We're talking man many orders of magnitude in scale there, and you're the one who pointed out that scale :-/

          • threethirtytwo 8 hours ago

            No I'm not agreeing with you.

            >Just because it's legal to read 100s of books does not make it legal to slurp up every single piece of produced content ever recorded.

            The law says you're perfectly in your legal right to slurp up every piece of content ever produced.

            >We're talking man many orders of magnitude in scale there, and you're the one who pointed out that scale :-/

            I'm aware, and the law doesn't talk about scale.

        • kelnos 9 hours ago

          What is "scale" in this context? I think arguably 100 books over the span of decades is not "scale".

          But tens (hundreds?) of thousands of books over the span of a few weeks? That's definitely "scale".

          • threethirtytwo 8 hours ago

            the law doesn't talk about scale, so either is perfectly legal. Memorizing a billion books vs memorizing one book. Same laws apply.

    • kalap_ur 13 hours ago

      You can only read the book, if you purchased it. Even if you dont have the intent to reproduce it, you must purchase it. So, I guess NVDA should just purchase all those books, no?

      • threethirtytwo 13 hours ago

        Yep, I agree. That’s the part that’s clearly illegal. They should purchase the books, but they didn’t.

        • Nursie 12 hours ago

          This is the bit an author friend of mine really hates. They didn’t even buy a copy.

          And now AI has killed his day job writing legal summaries. So they took his words without a license and used them to put him out of a job.

          Really rubs in that “shit on the little guy” vibe.

      • ThrowawayR2 12 hours ago

        Obviously not; one can borrow books from libraries and read them as well.

        • threethirtytwo 11 hours ago

          That's true. But the book itself was legally purchased. So if nvidia went to the library and trained AI by borrowing books, that should be technically legal.

          • kelnos 9 hours ago

            Do you have the same legal rights to something that you've borrowed as you do with something you've purchased, though?

            Would it be legal for me to borrow a book from the library, then scan and OCR every page and create an EPUB file of the result? Even if I didn't distribute it, that sounds questionable to me. Whereas if I had purchased the book and done the same, I believe that might be ok (format shifting for personal use).

            Back when VHS and video rental was a thing, my parents would routinely copy rented VHS tapes if we liked the movie (camcorder connected to VCR with composite video and audio cables, worked great if there wasn't Macrovision copy protection on the source). I don't think they were under any illusions that what they were doing was ok.

            • threethirtytwo 9 hours ago

              Well If I copied it word for word maybe, but if I read it and "trained it" into my brain then it's clearly not illegal.

              SO the grey area here is if I "trained" an LLM in a similar way and not copied it word for word then is it legal? Because fundamentally speaking it's literally the same action taken.

    • _trampeltier 12 hours ago

      But to train the models they have to download it first (make a copy)

      • threethirtytwo 8 hours ago

        You had to do this for reading too. The words were burned onto your retina as volatile memory before getting processed by your brain.

        You retina likely overwrote it's "memory" as soon as you looked at something else, but that's no different than copying and deleting or the more apt analogy: streaming.

    • godelski 12 hours ago

      You need to pay for the books before you memorize them

      • threethirtytwo 11 hours ago

        Partially true. I can pay for a book then lend it out to people for free.

        The government is in full support of this "lending" concept, in fact they have created entire facilities devoted to this very concept of lending out books.

        • godelski an hour ago

          Okay, so go check out 500 TB worth of books from the library. I'll wait

          • threethirtytwo 22 minutes ago

            If I’m rich enough to employ thousands of people I can hire each one of them to borrow as many books as possible then use all the books to train an AI. Perfectly legal. And also very possible.

            Point being that the library prevents you from checking out 500gb because of logistical issues. First how can you carry all those books and how can they let other patrons in the library check out books if you grabbed that many? These rules aren’t enforced to prevent “scale” hence why my methodology got around the rules.

    • Nursie 12 hours ago

      But it’s not just about recall and reproduction. If they used Anna’s Archive the books were obtained and copied without a license, before they were fed in as training data.

  • HillRat 11 hours ago

    It's not settled law as it pertains to LLMs, but, yes, creating a "statistical summary" of a book (consider, e.g., a concordance of Joyce's "Ulysses") is generally protected as fair use. However, illegally accessing pirated books to create that concordance is still illegal.

  • Bombthecat 15 hours ago

    Who cares? Only Disney had the money to fight them.

    Everything else will be slurped up for and with AI and be reused.

  • HWR_14 7 hours ago

    Copyright laws are so undefined and NVIDIAs lawyers so plentiful that the statement works in their favor. You're allowed to copy part of a work in many cases, the easiest example is you can quote a line from a book in a review. The line is fuzzy.

  • nancyminusone 13 hours ago

    When you're responsible for 4% of the global GDP, they let you do it.

  • tobwen 17 hours ago

    Books are databases, chars their elements. We have copyright for databases in EU :)

  • RGamma 15 hours ago

    The chicken is trying to become the egg.

  • postexitus 13 hours ago

    A quite good explanation of what copyright laws cover and should (and should not) cover is here by Cory Doctorow: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/...

  • Elfener 14 hours ago

    It seems so, stealing copyrighted content is only illegal if you do it to read it or allow others to read it. Stealing it to create slop is legal.

    (The difference, is that the first use allows ordinary poeple to get smarter, while the second use allows rich people to get (seemingly) richer, a much more important thing)

haritha-j 12 hours ago

Just to clarify, the most valuable company in the world refuses to pay for digital media?

  • rpdillon 11 hours ago

    I see this sentiment posted quite a bit, but have the publishers made any products available that would allow AI training on their works for payment? A naive approach would be to go to an online bookstore and pay $15 for every book, but then you have copyrighted content that is encrypted, that it's a violation of the DMCA to decrypt.

    I assume you're expecting that they'll reach out and cut a deal with each publishing house separately, and then those publishing houses will have to somehow transfer their data over to NVIDIA. But that's a very custom set of discussions and deals that have to be struck.

    I think they're going to the pirate libraries because the product they want doesn't exist.

    • haritha-j 11 hours ago

      Perhaps because authors don't want their content to be used for this purpose? Because Microsoft refuses to give me a copy of the source code to Windows to 'inspire' my vibe-coded OS, Windowpanes 12, of which I will not give microsoft a single cent of revenue, its acceptable for me to pirate it? Someone doesn't want to sell me their work, so I'm justified in stealing it?

    • zaptheimpaler 9 hours ago

      > I assume you're expecting that they'll reach out and cut a deal with each publishing house separately, and then those publishing houses will have to somehow transfer their data over to NVIDIA. But that's a very custom set of discussions and deals that have to be struck.

      If this is the only legal way for them to train, then yes that is what they should do instead of breaking the law... just because its not easy doesn't mean piracy is fine.

      • rpdillon 4 hours ago

        My comment is being misread as my support for piracy; my comment isn't meant to discuss anything at all about piracy. It's instead intended to look at everything that's not piracy, and examining their costs, and why the industry chose the path they did.

        Existing rulings are beginning to suggest that if the books can be obtained legally, a separate license is not required for training. So I'm naturally interested in legal ways folks training models would get a lot of books, and whether the publishing industry has even considered the value there.

    • dns_snek 8 hours ago

      Do you believe in private property rights? If the product they want doesn't exist then they're shit out of luck and they must either make one or wait for one to get made. You're arguing that it's okay for them to break the law because doing business legally is really inconvenient.

      That would be the end of discussion if we lived in a world governed by the rule of law but we're repeatedly reminded that we don't.

      • rpdillon 4 hours ago

        Not arguing it's ok to break the law, but rather examining their incentives and alternatives, along with their associated costs.

    • kelnos 9 hours ago

      That's not relevant went it comes to copyright law. The copyright holder has the sole legal right to decide how the work is distributed.

      If it isn't distributed in a manner to your liking, the only legal thing you can do is not have a copy of it at all.

      • rpdillon 4 hours ago

        I was trying to find out if any product that was legal can bridge that gap other than buying books in print, in bulk, and scanning them and destroying them. From the responses here, it sounds like the answer is a vehement "no".

        Wasn't asking for advice on copyright, but since we're here, your statement is slightly too strict, at least with respect to US copyright law. The copyright holder has sole distribution authority over the first sale of the work in the United States, but thereafter the first-sale doctrine allows it to be distributed by anyone thereafter. It is limited to the US, though, as far as I know. This is what allowed anthropic to train on printed books, which they then destroyed: they were able to purchase them in bulk because of the first-sale doctrine, as the publishers and authors would likely try to destroy the first-sale doctrine if they could, as evidenced by what's happened in the world of digital books.

    • g947o 8 hours ago

      Hmm, didn't Anthropic buy a bunch of used books (like, physical ones), scanned them, and then destroyed them? If Anthropic can do that, surely can NVIDIA

      • rpdillon 4 hours ago

        Yes! And it was ruled legal by the courts, but the media spun it as "Anthropic destroys a million books to build AI". This is the only legal bulk approach I know of, hence my inquiry about such a product. I didn't expect such a harsh response from some of these comments.

    • trueismywork 10 hours ago

      The product i want doesnt exist too. But if I pirate, straight to Alcataraz I go.

      • rpdillon 4 hours ago

        Yeah, I wasn't discussing legality, simply the incentives and alternatives.

  • nexle 12 hours ago

    they already paid 10x more to their lawyers to ensure that torrenting for LLM training is perfectly legal, why they want to pay more?

  • 1over137 12 hours ago

    Not spending money (vs spending money) helps make one rich!

  • NekkoDroid 11 hours ago

    Well... you don't want the good guys (Nvidia) giving money to the bad guys (Anna's Archive) right??? /s

poulpy123 16 hours ago

I'm not saying it will change anything but going after Anna's archive while most of the big AI players intensely used it is quite something

  • gizajob 12 hours ago

    Library Genesis worked pretty great and unmolested until news came out about Meta using it, at which point a bunch of the main sites disappeared off the net. So not only do these companies take ALL the pirated material, their act of doing so even borks the pirates, ruining the fun of piracy for everyone else.

  • pjc50 13 hours ago

    NVIDIA are "legitimate", so anything they do is fine, while AA are "illegitimate", so it's not.

  • countWSS 14 hours ago

    Short-term thinking, they don't care about where the data comes from but how easy is to get it. Its probably decided at project-manager level.

flipped 13 hours ago

Considering AA gave them ~500TB of books, which is astonishing (very expensive to even store for AA), I wonder how much nvidia paid them for it? It has to be atleast close to half a million?

  • qingcharles 12 hours ago

    I have a very large collection of magazines. AI companies were offering straight cash and FTP logins for them about a year or so ago. Then when things all blew up they all went quiet.

antonmksOP 17 hours ago

NVIDIA executives allegedly authorized the use of millions of pirated books from Anna's Archive to fuel its AI training. In an expanded class-action lawsuit that cites internal NVIDIA documents, several book authors claim that the trillion-dollar company directly reached out to Anna's Archive, seeking high-speed access to the shadow library data.

utopiah 13 hours ago

People HAVE to somehow notice how hungry for proper data AI companies are when one of the largest companies propping the fastest growing market STILL has to go to such length, getting actual approval for pirated content while they are hardware manufacturer.

I keep hearing how it's fine because synthetic data will solve it all, how new techniques, feedback etc. Then why do that?

The promises are not matching the resources available and this makes it blatantly clear.

derelicta 12 hours ago

I feel like Nvidia's CEO would be the kind to snatch off sugary sachets from his local deli just to save up some more.

  • songodongo 4 hours ago

    “Yes officer, it was the goober thinking he looked cool in the leather jacket.”

rtbruhan00 17 hours ago

It's generous of them to ask for permission.

  • gizajob 14 hours ago

    They wanted access to a faster pipe to slurp 500 terabytes, and that access comes at a cost. It wasn’t about permission.

    And yeah they should be sued into the next century for copyright infringement. $4Trillion company illegally downloading the entire corpus of published literature for reuse is clearly infringement, its an absurdity to say that it’s fair use just to look for statistical correlations when training LLMs that will be used to render human authors worthless. One or two books is fair use. Every single book published is not.

  • breakingcups 14 hours ago

    It wasn't about permission, it was about high-speed access. They needed Anna's Archive to facilitate that for them, scraping was too slow. It's incredible that they were allowed to continue even after Anna's Archive themselves explicitly pointed out that the material was acquired illegally.

    • kristofferR 13 hours ago

      That's just normal US modus operandi. The court case against Maduro is allowed to continue even after everyone has acknowledged he was acquired illegally.

  • kristofferR 13 hours ago

    It's not permission, it's a service they offer:

    https://annas-archive.li/llm

1over137 12 hours ago

A great retaliation to Trump tariffs would be just cancelling copyright for American works in your country.

  • ronsor 9 hours ago

    This would likely mean America canceling copyright for works in that country as well. I'm OK with that. Destroy copyright.

SanjayMehta 14 hours ago

I'm wondering what Amazon is planning to do with their access to all those Kindle books.

  • quinncom 11 hours ago

    I was curious:

    • Anna’s Archive: ~61.7 million “books” (plus ~95.7M papers) as of January 2026 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive • Amazon Kindle: “over 6 million titles” as of March 2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive

    Hard to compare because AA contains duplicates, and the Kindle number is old, but at a glance it seems AA wins.

  • philipwhiuk 14 hours ago

    What do you mean 'planning'. You think they haven't already been sucked up?

    • embedding-shape 13 hours ago

      What do you mean 'sucked up'? It's data on their machines already, people willingly give them the data, so Amazon can process and offer it to readers. No sucking needed, just use the data people uploaded to you already.

      • sib 13 hours ago

        There's definitely a legal & contractual difference between (1) storing the books on your servers in order to provide them to end users who have purchased licenses to read them and (2) using that same data for training a model that might be used to create books that compete with the originals. I'm pretty sure that's why GP means by "sucking up."

        This is analogous the difference between Gmail using search within your mail content to find messages that you are looking for vs Gmail providing ads inside Gmail based on the content of your email (which they don't do).

        • embedding-shape 13 hours ago

          Yeah, I guess the "err" is on my side, I've always took "suck up" as a synonym for scraping, not just "using data for stuff".

          And yeah, you're most likely right about the first, and the contract writers have with Amazon most certainly anticipates this, and includes both uses in their contract. But! Never published on Amazon, so don't know, but I'm guessing they already have the rights for doing so with what people been uploading these last few years.

2OEH8eoCRo0 10 hours ago

I've always wondered about some of the torrent whales with multiple petabytes on private trackers. A lot of the whales auto dl every single new torrent that's uploaded. Perhaps even the sites themselves are allowed to operate as a way to get users to crowd source media.

hollow-moe 10 hours ago

whatever, laws are for the poor anyways, you ought to think it would be common knowledge by now but nope

wosined 14 hours ago

Sounds like BS. Why would nvidia need the books. Do they even have a chatbot? I doubt the books help with framegen.

  • johndough 11 hours ago

    From the top of the linked article:

        > NVIDIA is also developing its own models, including NeMo, Retro-48B, InstructRetro, and Megatron. These are trained using their own hardware and with help from large text libraries, much like other tech giants do.
    
    You can download the models here: https://huggingface.co/nvidia
  • utopiah 13 hours ago

    The same reason Intel worked on OpenCV : they want to sell more hardware by pushing the state of the art of what software can do on THEIR hardware.

    It's basically just a sales demonstrator, that optionally, if incredibly successful and costly they can still sell as SaaS, if not just offer for free.

    Think of it as a tech ad.

  • voidUpdate 14 hours ago

    I cant see the whole relevant section in the article, but there is a screenshot of part of the legal documents that states "In response, NVIDIA sought to develop and demonstrate cutting edge LLMs at its fall 2023 developer day. In seeking to acquire data for what it internally called "NextLargeLLM", "NextLLMLarge" and-" (cuts off here)

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