French Revolution is largely regarded as a tragedy. It led first to the Terror, and after that a series of new monarchies over the following century.
Revolutions in most countries have generally replaced one faction of the ruling class with a competing faction of the ruling class, with little actual change for the people.
> The Roman influence is limited mostly to place names. Otherwise Latin had basically disappeared from the island.
Recent research, namely an article by Lars Nooij & Peter Schrijver [0], suggests that a population speaking Latin/Romance may have remained present in Britain until the late first millennium. Granted, the effect of this local Latin would have been on Welsh more than English.
> I wish translations into contemporary English went further to preserve the etymology of certain words
This is how the Icelandic sagas were translated into English in the nineteenth century. Translators then almost always chose the English cognate of the Old Norse world, even if that English cognate was obsolete or its meaning had changed. Far from helping immerse readers in the medieval world, the effect (at least for modern sensibilities) is offputting and goofy, and in the twentieth century publishers like Penguin replaced those translations by new ones with a very different approach. More judicious use of the Germanic lexicon in English, à la Tolkien, provides a more appealing atmosphere of olden times.
The Bittorrent ecosystem is still very much around. I’m a cinephile who has a collection of nearly a thousand films in Blu-Ray image format, and 95% of that is off a tracker that is open even, not private.
And Soulseek is still known as the P2P source where you can find all kinds of obscure music.
> The Bittorrent ecosystem is still very much around.
The point is: When Napster was around, everyone was running it all the time from their dorm rooms; it was ubiquitous. Now most people run something like Spotify or Netflix instead; piracy is niche, streaming is ubiquitous.
I’m well aware of that societal change, but the OP asked about an “active filesharing app that’s still in use today”, and if there are Bittorrent communities with so many seeders that one can get almost any film in a matter of minutes, then that fits the definition.
Using Spotify or Netflix as the example of people getting cold to file sharing is odd. People use Spotify and Netflix because piracy is a service problem, and streaming apps made it a lot less friction is get music and video than running LimeWire.
Notably, Spotify did not exist and Netflix did not stream video until long after the Napster suit.
I’m a researcher who for years has been scanning my library’s holdings on my particular discipline for my own use, but also uploading the books to the shadow libraries for everyone else’s benefit. The revelation that LLMs are training on the shadow libraries has made me put a lot more effort into ensuring my scans are well-OCRed. The idea that I could eventually ask ChatGPT or whatever about obscure things in my field, and get useful output (of the "trust but verify" sort), is exciting.
> The idea that I could eventually ask ChatGPT or whatever about obscure things in my field, and get useful output (of the "trust but verify" sort), is exciting.
That's your idea, not the one they are going with.
Their idea is that you pay a fee to access any information that was freely available.
Your idea is tearing down of fences, their idea is gatekeeping. The two ideas are incompatible.
> Their idea is that you pay a fee to access any information that was freely available.
An LLM containing the information doesn’t take away from the book being available at the library.
It’s an additional way to access the information. A company charging a fee for it doesn’t stop you from going to the library if you want to.
> Your idea is tearing down of fences, their idea is gatekeeping. The two ideas are incompatible.
You act like the parent commenter is permanently stealing the book from the library and gifting it to a private training set.
Information being available from more places, even if some are paid, doesn’t mean gatekeeping.
There are also open weight LLMs that can be run locally. Some of these are being fine tuned for specific topics against topical datasets which is opening up even more interesting opportunities (this is exactly what the linked article is about)
Their idea is being able to get answers to questions which were difficult to answer before[0]. Of course they want to get paid for it. The information wasn’t available easily and not always[1] freely.
So should the original authors, no? That is, getting a share of that payment.
Something akin to the German GEMA could work, an entity that levies a usage fee on behalf of all copyright holders and re-distributes to its members, but on a global scale.
Well, not yet. It's a matter of organization, regulation and litigation.
I was thinking along the lines of concepts that already exist, such as the private copying levy [0]. It basically forces a blanket tax on a certain class of products, which then gets redistributed to members of a collecting society such as GEMA [1].
This way, you would force LLM model builders to effectively pay a tax by law. Since these models do not work at all without underlying content, make it proportionate. Let's say 50-70% to make it fair.
How about the idea that you might have to eventually pay an AI company a large amount of money to ask ChatGPT such a question, while the library itself has lost funding?
Library funding is a political stance that has only imaginary connection to whether people pay to ask things of ChatGPT. People can pay to talk to an AI and also government can fund libraries.
If people prefer to pay ChatGPT, rather than going to the library for free, and ChatGPT sources content from libraries, then sure that makes sense, especially if the information contained is of cultural relevance to the government.
It’s the same as asking “should you release open source software knowing that AI companies are training on them”. I could absolutely not care less, that’s not the point why I release my software to the public at all.
People are already not using libraries because they'd rather rot their brains on TikTok than read a book. (Also, for information lookup, the internet and search engines exist, and have for a while now.) This has no actual causal relation.
People is a broad term. Outside of major cities (where I live) libraries serve a very essential service for parents and their children and as a free communal space for the broader community. Our libraries are always full and a large part of the health of our area.
A recent executive order prohibits libraries (among other non-profits) from processing US passport applications. While county clerks (in my state) along with a small number of post office locations also offer this service, the libraries were doing it for free as opposed to charging $50-ish (like the post office or county clerks).
Why might the passport issue be important? The SAVE Act (passed the House of Representatives last year and sitting before the Senate) only permits 4 identification items to register to vote for Federal elections:
1 - A US Passport (costs about $100 to renew, about $150 for first time).
2 - A US Military ID that has proof of US citizenship (CAC cards show this with a white background behind your name - yellow or blue for contractors or non-US citizens). IDs for retirees don't show citizenship.
3 - A REAL ID compliant driving license that has proof of US citizenship. Also called "Enhanced Driving License", on the front it has a US flag and the back looks like the page on your passport with those funny letters. Only 5 states offer this as an extra $30-40 on top of the regular driving license fee.
4 - A REAL ID compliant driving license/ID and certified birth certificate and the names must match exactly. This means that 74 million women who took their husbands' name will not be voting in Federal Elections. Also, no transgender people can vote.
The SAVE Act also requires voter registration agencies to send voter rolls to DHS every month. And every month DHS can throw people off the voter rolls with no warning, no notice nor recourse. One can easily imagine this being done right before elections where people who registered for the "wrong" political party will be thrown off the rolls after the deadline to register.
Project 2025 wants to repeal the 19th Amendment. Throwing 74 million women off the voter rolls is just a start.
Yes. Library books do not hallucinate, and you get a large amount of information from a known source (i.e. the author). Unless the LLM is going to produce the entire text reliably its no substitute.
1. Being offered a service you would pay a lot of money for is a step forward. When people pay a large amount of money for something that means they wanted the thing more than the money. The link between ChatGPT and libraries being under threat seems a bit weak too.
2. The Chinese have been investing a lot into free models, they're perfectly good and keep improving; despite the best efforts of the US. They're even ramping into making their own hardware. Gemma 4 is pretty snappy too. It doesn't seem like there is much of a moat to this, my guess is there will be perfectly good local models if you want to avoid AI companies.
When people pay a large amount of money for something that means they wanted the thing more another thing. Money just provides the method to defer value transfer.
When the person paying the money is rich, the other thing they are foregoing is typically not a life necessity. When the person is poor, however, it typically is.
How good do you want it to be? For a close to ChatGPT today (April, 2026), you're still looking at a system with 7xH200+chassis, which will run you $300, or a GB200 NV72, which is $2-3 million. OTOH, a Qwen3.6 quantized model can be run on $10,000 (high end Mac) or $1,000 (Mac mini) worth of hardware. Even a Pixel 10 Pro cellphone ($1,000) can run useful models locally.
Go to Open Router, ask your own in investigative prompt that meets your needs to all the top open models. See how they do. Then notice if you can run any of those locally. Repeat at least once a month.
It can be quite expensive to get the models and machines to do this.
That's what the money pays for when the Comment above mentions
'that you might have to eventually pay an AI company a large amount of money to ask ChatGPT such a question'
Putting aside that it won't be a large amount of money For any particular query , that's how the AI companies see themselves, not as providers of information, but as providers of mechanisms that provide information. It is not selling the Information of others, it isn't selling information at all. They are selling the service of running the mechanism.
Some people might have to pay a large amount of money to ask a commercial LLM, but advances in this space mean that if I have the data myself on my own computer, or can download it from a shadow library, I might eventually be able to ask everything locally for free.
> while the library itself has lost funding
Libraries are inherent parts of universities. While their precise role evolves, do you think that they will just be done away with? Already a substantial amount of scholarship in disciplines other than my own has moved online (legally), and the library is still there.
A digital library needs almost no funding. With today's decentralized networking infrastructure such as BitTorrent and IPFS I bet it just exists forever.
To maintain the library still requires resources & effort to do so. It only appears to need no funding because the donators of said (disk space / bandwidth / dev effort) are subsidizing it in aid of a goal they believe in (i.e. the church model).
The way public libraries currently "lend" digital books is that they can only lend titles a certain amount of time before the library has to repurchase the title (or remove it from circulation).
> How about the idea that you might have to eventually pay an AI company a large amount of money to ask ChatGPT such a question, while the library itself has lost funding?
There are plenty of free models with RAG support. Why do you believe everything starts and ends with a major corporation charging a subscription?
How is any of that legal? Can you just take books from the library and then scan and upload digital copies? How do you deal with the ethics of this personally, stealing to make it easier for AI to steal so AI gets better? Does calling yourself a "researcher" make you feel like its actually something worthwhile you're doing?
> How do you deal with the ethics of this personally, stealing to make it easier for AI to steal so AI gets better?
If the obscure book/text is permanently lost forever under your stringent advice of "no stealing under any circumstances", would the "stealing" have saved it? If so, is it ethical to prevent others from accessing the book/text, under your guise of "preventing stealing"?
First, it's called infringement, not stealing. It's a custom defined term in a custom defined law.
Second, it is totally legal to read the book in a public library, for free, right now.
Third, laws can change. Current copyright law was pushed by one company (Disney) to +90years, to their benefit, and can be redesigned/pushed back by AI companies, for their benefit.
A 2 year copyright duration sounds like a good compromise.
As a researcher, the main worthwhile thing that I am doing is publishing research, but having all this prior scholarship at hand 24/7 definitely makes it easier to produce said publications. And if I have created a scan, why not help out my colleagues, too?
"Deal with the ethics", seriously? You might want to learn about how heavily shadow libraries are used across academia now. It’s no longer just disadvantaged scholars in the developing world relying on pirated scans because they don’t have good libraries. It’s increasingly everyone everywhere, because today’s shadow libraries can be faster and more convenient than even one’s own institution’s holdings. At conferences, if the presenter mentions a particularly interesting publication, you can sometimes watch several people in the room immediately open LibGen or Anna’s Archive on their laptop to download it right there and then.
The vast majority of writers do not recoup their investment, not due to piracy but due to a massive glut of works available.
I've published a couple of novels. They've sold far better than average, and yet not sold enough to be remotely worth it if I did it for the money. Piracy might have made a tiny dent, but the many millions of competing novels matters far more.
Anyone who has self published will have experienced that it is hard to even get people to read (as opposed to just download to hoard) your work even for free.
I think the current intellectual property system is flawed. Books are knowledge, and we shouldn't be able to limit the spread of knowledge. I imagine that books could be sold at the cost of printing, and there could be a QR code inside so that readers could freely donate money to the author if they enjoyed the book. Strangely enough, I imagine that with such a system, authors would be better paid.
> But I have friends who used to self publish some small esoteric fiction. This commonplace theft has basically made them stop
If you're writing for money, maybe. If you're writing for the love of writing, it won't.
More, you hear of authors who encourage their books to be made available without DRM, who know or silently encourage their books to end up on torrent / library sites. They want their books to be read.
Copyright is a property right, and property right is what we call a bourgeois legal right. It will cease to exist as productive force like AI develops.
Sure. There's a saying that Marxism is not the thought of Marx alone. Sam Altman is also just a representative of who contribute to and benefit from the AI community.
He didn't mention legality. The world is rigged, as you can see by head of state participating in both in running and cover up of history's largest CSE. Watch what people are doing in addition to what they are saying.
I for one am tremendously thankful for TFNA's efforts, since I get access to knowledge that I wouldn't have been able to before.
It's not stealing, it's uploading without the licence. Laws in many countries allow for the lawful download of such books, regardless of how they were uploaded.
Separately, aren't always sensible or right - slavery was legal, child marriage was legal, not paying taxes on billions of profits is legal while not paying taxes of £1000 is illegal, reporting Jews to Nazis was mandatory, etc, etc.
That's a slave mentality. You are aware that OpenAI charges money for other people's work and intelligence, right? Your own and that of other volunteer pirates and of the original authors as well. I don't get people like you at all.
I’ve already posted in this thread about how even if OpenAI charges money for its LLM trained on the literature, that doesn’t change the fact that the literature remains available to everyone through the shadow libraries, and advances in AI mean that one can increasingly work with it locally on one’s own computer.
Of course not, and many authors are already long dead. But if you knew anything about academic publishing, the authors almost invariably are happy to see their work out there freely available. It’s not as if they make any money from it, and the more eyes on their work, the better their chances of getting cited and thereby furthering their careers.
It is some publishers who would object on copyright grounds. But I get the sense that some publishers are already becoming resigned to the fact that most of their new ebook releases are ending up on the shadow libraries within only a few weeks, and Anna’s Archive has become the first place to look (even before one looks at whether one’s own institutional library has the book) for researchers around the world.
> banning the installation of non-Google/Apple approved operating systems (ex: GrapheneOS)
Do you have a link where I could read more about this? GrapheneOS is known for being the alternative Android where many bank apps in the EU still work, and this is the first I have heard that the age verification app definitely wouldn’t run on GrapheneOS.
Banks can be state-owned as well as private. Moreover, some countries have a particular bank that serves all citizens, even if they would not be able to bank elsewhere.
> I barely want my banks to know what I buy and to be responsible for my money. I really don't want them knowing everywhere I go online.
Bank ID systems, at least the ones I’m familiar with, don't work like that. Your bank confirms your identity to the authentication provider, and the authentication provider sends you on to the site you are logging into. The bank does not see the site you are visiting.
I think that even if there were a wide array of forum websites, the discussion culture would be very different than the old days. The majority of people's default device now is their phone, and that discourages the kind of longform text posts that were once common. You'd just have a million little Reddits.
And that's not to mention the deleterious effects on discourse of an upvote/downvote functionality, which wasn't part of old forum websites but today's forum software lets you implement it.
Revolutions in most countries have generally replaced one faction of the ruling class with a competing faction of the ruling class, with little actual change for the people.
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