This doesn't change things much, besides making domain name registration more difficult, but I continue to think this Spotify thing was a really dumb move on the part of Anna's Archive.
AA is providing a valuable service to tons of people who don't have access to these books otherwise. There's a strong argument to be made for the moral goodness of that -- that even if it's illegal, it's at least in the spirit of a public library. And they want to potentially jeopardize that to... release a bunch of music tracks, that are just entertainment and mostly widely available on YouTube already anyways? Major misstep.
Like, even if the same people are proud of scraping all these tracks and want to release them... at least do it under the name of a totally separate project? A separate domain, or just describe it and post the torrents somewhere else? Don't tie it to the AA site or identity. Don't tie things together when it creates no more benefit but does create more risk.
> So I understand the concern that this court decision threatens the future of some forms of archiving, digital preservation and librarianship. But the existing norms and repositories this threatens exist because people established those norms and archiving projects before now, in living memory, even in the face of threats and lectures about precedent and worries about legal gray areas.
> If you want to defend and protect "the many noble aspects of the archive", you have to remember that thirty years ago, those were imagined as impossible, impractical, and (whisper it) probably illegal. In both cases, it was Kahle's vision and approach that was -- apparently -- the only way it was going to get done.
This is about the Internet archive, but it applies to Anna's even better because Anna's is an ideologically motivated project. Yes they are taking a risk, but I imagine they consider it a worthwhile risk if it has a chance of helping them build the world they want — one where copyright does not exist as it does today.
Plus, it's not like Anna's got anything more to lose anyway. If they ever get caught the publishers are going to squeeze every single cent out of their pockets anyway, so how exactly is making spotify and record companies their enemies going to cause them extra harm?
> mostly widely available on YouTube already anyways
Problem is, when music disappears due to licensing nonsense, it generally disappears from all streaming services at the same time. Most music goes through only a few gigantic distributors / labels.
> potentially jeopardize
Nothing is in jeopardy if the operators remain completely anonymous, which it seems like they will.
> Nothing is in jeopardy if the operators remain completely anonymous, which it seems like they will.
If the 3 letter agencies want to track you down, it is highly unlikely that you could keep your anonymity. Unless you are also part of 3 letter agencies from NK, CN, RU etc.
Exactly. Governments that seem to have good intentions are enabling the self destruction of public data. I'm glad we have projects like AA to right this wrong.
And books aren't? What's the argument here? If it's that books serve a special purpose because they convey ideas and therefore it's a moral good to disseminate those ideas, you have to extend that to media beyond just the printed word. Music has that same potential (an even greater one, I would argue). It feels weird to pick and choose media like that.
This implies the only content with moral worth are those that teach knowledge or skills, and presumably only the kinds that are worthy for productivity and advancement or something. But one person's "just an entertaining story or just a silly hobby" is another's life-changing or mind-opening allegory, or therapeutic pursuit with little immediate "practical" value.
I can sort of see the original point; this appears to be a careless risk when there were other options, but I have to push back against the idea it's just some dumb music. It's still an artifact of humanity that's worth accessing and preserving as much as any other.
> This implies the only content with moral worth are those that teach knowledge or skills
This is not what OP said. He was talking about the "moral goodness of providing access to X, despite it being illlegal. He never said anything about the moral worth of X itself, let alone that Y had no moral worth.
> AA is providing a valuable service to tons of people who don't have access to these books otherwise. There's a strong argument to be made for the moral goodness of that -- that even if it's illegal, it's at least in the spirit of a public library.
Trying to imagine telling somebody writing about the history of music copyright that they can’t hear Ice Ice Baby, on account of they might enjoy it, which means it has no research merit.
This is the wrong way to look at things, the way YT is going then yt-dlp will be completely locked out within the next 3 years so essentially all that archive is about to be locked within Youtube.
Google Music had my own digitised records, and helped me move away from my physical media. Now I have to find another cd player since something broke in the one I dug out after they removed my shit. This whole ecosystem is rotten
We're only talking about music though. You can always literally just record the audio stream if you want. Or do that from free Spotify. Nothing's getting "locked" anywhere when it's just a simple stereo audio signal.
I don't think Anna's can get into any worse of a legal position by pirating more things. It's already the case that anyone involved in the project will be arrested on sight, have all of their property seized, and go to prison for life. Which is why they don't show up to court hearings. This isn't the kind of crime where they beg the judge for leniency, it's the kind where they expose how silly the state is for imposing completely unenforceable penalties against someone they don't know the identity of.
It might be that the "secret owner" had an obsession to liberalise the song field, like the book one, and erroneously thought he could get away indefinitely. Songs are not books as they are backed by much stronger, concentrated and dedicate to kill piracy capital.
Spotify's library has direct value in training ML models.
The value is in people controlling data. Any company with a data mote will always have an advantage, this damages the free and fair market on which capitalism is built.
Spotify has removed millions of songs over the years, so while the value to you, may be tiny, the value to the public is much larger than the marginal increase in risk to the project as a whole.
It should be under AA since it follows AA philosophy and benefits from AA's branding and brings more interested preservationinst parties who may be unaware of AA. Your strategy is the first step in divide and conquer, AA's is too big to fail
Trying to shut down a site by going after their domain names will always be a losing battle. As long as the link on their Wikipedia article keeps being updated, it'll remain easy to access. And it would be a pretty shocking attack on free speech if a U.S. court tried to order the Wikimedia Foundation to take that down; I suspect the public response would be similar to when the movie industry tried to get the AACS encryption key taken down in the 2000s.
His point is that you don't need a working domain name since the MCP can just hardcode the IPs of the servers or resolve them through any other method that isn't DNS.
Would be fairly easy for them to offer an onion service on which they publish the current list of domains, as one option among many, many options for distributing small strings on the internet in an uncensorable way.
Ideally it is common knowledge that the onion service exists, and then people can go look at the onion service and update Wikipedia based on what they see there.
If you are really interested we could try piping their [API](https://encyclopediaapi.com/products/index) to some printable format. Maybe we can even find a quality print on demand service or bind it by hand :)
1) It was in their name rather than a disconnected splinter group or name, and
2) They went off half cocked releasing the analysis and metadata with no music.
They should have held silent until the entirety of the music collection was ready to release, and it should have been a 'new' seemingly unaffiliated group.
Either the leaders' egos have inflated too big, or someone is trying to hurt the project by making intentional strategic errors. I don't see any good reason to release only metadata, cover art, and analysis in a blog post, and little or no music, under your group's name, unless you want a massive ego stroke!
For shame, and highly unprofessional, like modern UI devs who think an interface should change more often than once a decade (STOP BREAKING VISUO-MUSCLE MEMORY YOU TWITS! INTERFACES ARE THE HUMAN API!)...
> In addition to the damages award, Rakoff entered a permanent worldwide injunction
Because apparently U.S. courts and judges can do that. The more this is ignored by third-parties outside of the U.S., the better.
I'm not against international cooperation regarding common rules (I'm rather for), but the current context certainly doesn't designate the U.S. as a responsible custodian/enforcer of such rules.
It's infuriating but practically true. I had a few services that received illegitimate DMCA notices that I ignored. They were either blatantly fraudulent, automated junk or just not applicable to the law of the country where I'm hosting.
They escalated to either my hosting or my domain name provider, who then threatened to cut me off for not complying. No discussion with them would work in my favor. I had to comply with this BS. I got cut off several times for completely wrong reasons.
They don't care. It's not worth the legal risk for them. I'm not big enough.
It's completely legal to ignore a DMCA notice. These notices set up a procedure where you're definitely not liable, but it doesn't mean it's the only way to not be liable. You can also not be liable if you - for example - didn't do anything illegal.
Immediately makes me think of the vitriol here on HN for the UK trying to enforce their age verification law outside their borders. Will the principle stand, or will it reveal that "USA is always right" is a common held belief
It's wild to read "the U.S. Congress passed UIGEA to extend existing gambling laws into cyberspace. The law made processing payments for online gambling a crime" in the light of how prevalent online gambling is now in the US mainstream, with sports betting, Kalshi, Polymarket and so on.
This isn't a unique USA thing. Many countries will allow lawsuits against international entities if you can demonstrate harm within the jurisdiction.
Practically speaking it doesn't matter much when small countries do this because it doesn't mean much, other than maybe the owners of the country can't travel there any more. It hits headlines when the USA does it because being barred from traveling to the USA or working with US companies causes a lot of problems.
And even policing protects local monied interests.
One case was someone who used their bike as their vehicle put a tracker on it. Was stolen. Tracker dutifully said where it was. Went to police station, they did absolutely shit. They were handed the bike receipt, token receipt, and realtime log. They DGAF.
Years ago, worked at Walmart. They illegally edited my hours and thieved $100 and change. Put in police report, was told "CIVIL MATTER".
But if you stole $100 from a register, off to jail you go.
The laws protect monied interests and the elite, not the masses.
> Years ago, worked at Walmart. They illegally edited my hours and thieved $100 and change. Put in police report, was told "CIVIL MATTER"
Too late now, but for future reference for others: Wage theft reports should go to your state's department of labor. Every state is different but from what I've seen these offices have people who are hungry to catch real wage claims. Companies listen up when the state department of labor comes knocking.
Fortunately this would be handled by state government, which is cold comfort if you live in the half of the country that is governed by people who hate you for having the audacity to be poor.
I live in Indiana. MAGA governor, supermajority republican house, senate, and judges.
And, no, they do not care one bit about workers, renters, and the lower class. I'm solidly middle-upper class now. Home-morgage-r. Make remote 160k, which is amazing for the area.
I also live in 1 of 3 liberalish areas. Amazingly, theyre worse in things like FLOCK, taxation, gun rights, speech rights, jail decency (opposition to ACLU), and other amendment rights.
I dont sit in their pet issues. I dont matter. I likely won't ever matter.
Realistically, what did you want to happen? The cop to check the computer logs and see who changed your hours? Was it even someone in the store, or from corporate? Jurisdiction can get messy...
Proving someone intentionally changed your hours as opposed to a mistake or software bug is not the police's job. It quite literally is a civil crime and belongs in civil court, not criminal. I don't even think most police are trained in civil laws. (Atleast, not in my state?)
Catching someone who takes money out of a cash register is their job. That's textbook theft, a criminal activity.
I hate cops as much as the next guy, possibly more, but that just doesn't seem like their area
FWIW, the government is still (supposedly) working to resolve your issue...your tax dollars are still at work. Judge, Public Defender, blah blah blah....It's just not the job of a first responder
I'd vastly prefer the world where the untrained police actually stop getting involved in matters that they have no purpose being involved in, but to each their own I guess
> Immediately makes me think of the vitriol here on HN for the UK trying to enforce their age verification law outside their borders
The UK and US aren't unique in this regard. The concept of piracy has been commonly treated as a topic with universal jurisdiction that expands beyond borders, going back to the time when piracy meant people on boats in international waters. I'll be honest that I don't know if or how those laws correspond to digital piracy, but countries have long considered international piracy to be something their domestic courts can go after.
Practically speaking you can always choose to ignore it if you don't have offices or assets in that country and you're okay with never traveling there for the rest of your life. You also have to avoid countries with mutual extradition agreements because many countries will offer to extradite for certain crimes with the expectation that the other country will return the favor.
The UK age verification enforcement isn't a good comparison because the UK's overreach extends even to instances where UK citizens are geoblocked. Trying to enforce your country's laws on an operation in a different country which does not even serve your country is something else. For a recent example look at the online depression forum that is being threatened by the UK even though they've geoblocked UK users - Immediately makes me think of the vitriol here on HN for the UK trying to enforce their age verification law outside their borders
FWIW, "piracy" of copyrighted works and maritime piracy are completed unrelated legal concepts. Piracy in this context is just a rhetorical euphemism intended for moral framing, and doesn't have any meaningful legal import, notwithstanding that lawyers and judges use it like everybody else.
Relatedly, see Stallman's essay, Did You Say "Intellectual Property"? It's a Seductive Mirage: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html While courts understand "piracy" is euphemistic, the phrase "IPR" has been quite successful in shaping legal theories and jurisprudence.
> Please don't equivocate “the concept of piracy” as if copyright infringement has any relation to kidnapping and murder.
"Piracy" as a term for copying others' creative works dates back to the 1600s, and is in a 1736 dictionary:
> The term "piracy" has been used to refer to the unauthorised copying, distribution and selling of works in copyright.[8] In 1668 publisher John Hancock wrote of "some dishonest Booksellers, called Land-Pirats, who make it their practise to steal Impressions of other mens Copies" in the work A String of Pearls: or, The Best Things Reserved till Last by Thomas Brooks.[10]
You're saying there is a moral obligation to be incorrect.
If anything this is the type of mistake where it's never too late to make things right. 10 billion years could pass and you would still be doing people a favour by calling things by their names.
> To act shocked and offended that the term points to two different activities in 2026 is non-sensical: that ship has sailed long ago.
“Equivocation is a logical fallacy and rhetorical tactic that uses ambiguous language, specifically switching the meaning of a key term or phrase within an argument to make it appear valid when it is not. It involves using one word to mean two different things, often to intentionally deceive, evade, or create ambiguity.”
I think you're missing the point. Piracy, "digital" or real, has always been something that extended beyond borders. They are alleging this is probably due to governments doing said equivocation, in digital piracy case's, although I think it has more to do with the international treaties.
No, I'm certain that you are: “piracy” doesn't exist as a coherent umbrella term that contains both naval piracy and copyright infringement, and the latter has certainly not “always” been enforced beyond borders.
I don't understand why it makes you think of that, this is a completely different situation. If Anna's Archive were an upstanding site run by a known operator in compliance with UK law, I would definitely be highly critical of this ruling. But it's actually an anonymously run site that violates most countries' copyright laws and is blocked in the UK.
Like Open AI?[1] Or the United States government?[2] While this may not be what you intend, it seems you're suggesting that "upstanding" and "known" parties (i.e. participants with wealth and influence) ought to be above the law.
I don't see what wealth and influence have to do with it. I think that if Website X is owned by a resident of, operated within the borders of, and complies with the laws of Country A, Country B should not try to bully the operator into changing the site. They can order domestic ISPs to block it if they want, or they can not do that if their citizens value Internet freedom.
If the site doesn't comply with the laws of Country A, or if the website operator hides so nobody can figure out which country is Country A, then it's an entirely different story.
Copying intellectual property is not piracy. This term was co-opted by big industries to insure the cash cattle continue to pay. Piracy has a very specific sting to it. This was a deliberate choice. We don't call burglary "piracy", yet if we relax the definition enough to include IP theft, it is also piracy.
GabeN also had the wrong take in that it's a "supply problem" or whatever nonsense he said. GabeN is in fact an industry plant and owns one of the strictest IP protection platforms on the market. Why people buy on steam when they can ban you for almost anything and take everything you've ever rented (you dont own anything on steam). Thousands of dollars of games gone with a ban. In any normal world this would be tantamount to grand theft and a small business owner would actually face real prison time for it.
You can't "steal" something that isn't gone when it's stolen. If I walked into a house, took a necklace, and left an exact unaltered copy I'd at best be charged with a lesser crime that didn't include theft. But if you copy movies/music/software you're liable to have your entire life absolutely financially and possibly criminally ruined.
The government of the US is hardly a government for the people, by the people. It's strictly designed to enrich the few and consume "human resources".
>Copying intellectual property is not piracy. This term was co-opted by big industries to insure the cash cattle continue to pay.
Without weighing in on the merits or morals of copying intellectual property, the term 'piratical booksellers' was used in a British House of Commons speech by Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1841. (The speech itself is superb and well worth reading. I included one passage below.)
"At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot… Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create."
While I also find various approaches and reasons behind IP governance dumb, copying IP is piracy. In practice, copying some things is unlawful, regardless if we think it shouldn't be or if piracy once only referred to naval burglary.
If you copy a book in a bookstore, or leave a perfect synthetic copy of a natural diamond you take, you'll likely be charged with something. Digitally, that's much a clearer legal charge because copying is easier. So, neither is theft, but that doesn't make it lawful either.
There are valid reasons for enforcing IP rights digitally, because "all content should always be free" doesn't pay the bills when all you (can or want to) do is produce content. No existing society agrees that content producers should be subsidized, so in a society dependent on "earn for yourself", content producers shouldn't be punished.
But the punishment does exceed the severity of the "crime" by a lot, I agree.
Piracy started as a term directly related to theft. Its use in the modern age for copying is also an attempt to frame the activity as theft, even though there is no action that can reasonably described as theft. Copying leaves the original right where it was, so no theft has taken place. I'm not saying that violating copyright is OK, just that the terms we are using to describe the wrongness are willfully dishonest. The punishments are also not fit for the crime, but that's another matter entirely.
Look, I'm not even claiming that piracy is a good term for it, or that the association between theft and copying wasn't pushed in pro-IP campaigns. But for the past 20 (or 30?) years, piracy has been the word everyone uses for this type of activity.
My point is: even if you changed the word, and explained the difference to everyone who couldn't distinguish between (A) literal theft of a physical object, and (B) a replication of some sequences of binaries, you're still not addressing the real question.
And the real question is: Why shouldn't an author have an option to protect their IP, physically or digitally? What's the difference between copying a physical book and a digital book without author's approval, from the point-of-view of an author trying to get paid for every copy?
I'm personally a fan of alternatives to IP-based earnings and earning enforcement, but I don't see how that helps any author trying to make a living from their content in the world where there are very few alternatives.
My imperfect solution would be to implement some sort of compulsory licensing system that lets people copy at will for reasonable prices, and comes with a more sensible penalty system for violators. People should get paid for their work, but the system we have for that now sucks for everyone but the middlemen / IP squatters.
To call Steam one of the strictest IP protection platforms is so laughably innacurate, it's basically wrong. Its DRM is trivial to bypass (specially compared to others), and I have yet to see a case where they banned someone for something stupid in a way that made them lose access to their library.
Otherwise, I agree with the spirit of your comment.
Commissions, grants, advertisements, sponsorships, donations, teaching... There's already an enormous ecosystem of artists and authors who work outside of the copyright realm (blog writers, substackers, social media artists, youtube creators, soundcloud rappers) and who make money enough to pursue their passion and whose business model would be totally unchanged if copyright were abolished entirely tomorrow. When their work is downloaded or shared or copied or linked or edited or remixed they appreciate it and see it as a multiplication of their artistic impact.
It's not necessarily incompatible: authors can make money in ways that don't depend on enforcing IP or even the number of books sold. For example, Patreon, Kickstarter, government subsidies, payment for number of books written, grants, etc.
However, all those other ways are more difficult to set up, and can be risky for the funders, so IP enforcement is the least-worst solution.
> GabeN also had the wrong take in that it's a "supply problem" or whatever nonsense he said.
It is a supply problem. Steam regional pricing and game passes have demolished piracy in countries where people wouldn't have dreamed of paying for a game 15 years ago. And so did Netflix for a while with video, but then everyone had to jump on the bandwagon and now piracy is flourishing again.
This isn't so relevant but Steam is actually very annoying to use. No easy settings to disable some of the overlays. I played Final Fantasy 7 and it was some gimped out graphics version, although SE (Square Enix) is also a kind of litigious company
Steam only adds one overlay (which is pretty easy to toggle off). if you have another graphic change or overlay it's the devs or publisher who added it
There's a per game toggle for their UI overlay basically and you just need to uncheck a box
Last week, I set-up a navidrome (docker compose) server after tagging my files with MusicBrainz and beets. I serve it over a private network (tailnet) using tailscale serve. It works on all my devices and on iOS with an app called Nautiline. Nautiline has a feature where it will switch between my local network address and my tailnet address seamlessly. It was so simple, I can't actually believe it works. It has CarPlay support and everything. A few clicks and I'm jamming and scrobbling to MusicBrainz. My next goal is to have a local LLM generate smart playlists. Everyone who wants off Spotify, or the other streaming music giants should do this.
I’ve done the same and included on the same server the equivalent for every type of media: tv shows, movies, ebooks, audiobooks, even YouTube through a sophisticated proxy rotation pool. I have rid myself of every awful enshittified platform and I finally feel free from the bullshit.
Check out audiomuse-ai on GitHub for an open source song vector space embedding system that allows clustering and traversing a huge graph of similar songs, giving you really smart playlists and radios. Smart local LLM playlists are included.
Now I’m on to building a layer to take my song data and use it to query a bunch of apis to allow for “your favorite bands are playing near you” feature that isn’t sponsored.
Privacy friendly version of Last.fm for those that want to see a history of the things they've played.
I have a history that goes back almost 10 years at this point on a self hosted service.
I used to use last.fm, I switched to MusicBrainz last year. It has much better API access and I have a history of songs I've listened to since I was 17 in 2007. It's a time capsule, a tracker, a playlist generator and a record all-in-one. Scrobbling is just a word meaning 'to track listens'.
You can use it to generate recommendations in MusicBrainz for discovering new music.
I use it just because I like exploring how my tastes change over time.
After getting burned on faked/gamed ratings on a book trilogy where I had bought all three books before I started reading (they were terrible and I gave up during the second book), I now use Anna's archive to download a book and decide if I will pay for it later after reading at least some of it.
Same as Facebook: They got big by the Zuck sucking messages and content from MySpace - then Facebook afterwards lobbied to put laws in place to forbid this kind of 'interoperability' across platforms.
Youtube started out 'allegedly' by members of their team uploading pirated hollywood movies (because they had no content), posing as users to fall under the "user-content" policy to make the company not liable.
They are all breaking the rules all the way down, but when they make it, they know exactly what to do to fill the loopholes to prevent others to do to them what they did on others. That's big tech's ethics for you: Move fast and break things, then wall yourself in.
The YouTube thing doesn't sound right. They had a ¿10? minute video limit for a long time and it was really annoying to watch pirated stuff on there. Google Video had a lot of full movies before they bought YouTube and shut it down.
Still remember those times watching movies or documentaries by parts. Sometimes I started watching just to discover that part 8 was missing :(
edit: in previous years some anime communities uploaded episodes to photo sites. They chunked the episodes in small JPGs with the video data encrypted. Just download hundreds of photos, join them and you got the episode :)
I also remember how we (I?) used to hard link the /tmp/RANDOM.tmp files that youtube buffered into so the video parts don't get automatically unlinked and we could then stitch them back with ffmpeg or whatever buggy fork ubuntu had in its repos. Full Star wars in glorious 240p! (I had shitty internet.)
The good old days. Back when people called streaming what it really is (downloading) and exercised their god-given right to keep what was sent to them.
Airbnb did the same with Craigslist posts. Reddit did the same with Digg posts. OpenAI mastered the technique by stealing basically the entire Internet.
Did Zuck really take messages and content? I know they had a certain "interoperability tool" that conveniently only worked in one direction but I didn't know it went that far
My feeling is that Spotify couldn't care less about Anna's Archive. It's bad but doesn't hurt Spotify. Just like Steam, convenient distribution trumps piracy, always.
If you look at the plaintiffs, Spotify is number 8 on the list, where the rest are the usual suspects: major record labels and distributors. Seems like Spotify was dragged along because they are beholden to rights holders, and they have to show that they take this seriously, and do something about it.
Like, all together? I'd agree that copyright terms are often much too long, but if you write a book, I'm totally okay with you owning the rights to that and making money off of it for a while.
We need to split "a creation" and "a set of ideas used in creation"
You created entire book ? Sell it for 40 years, sure
But that should not apply to someone taking a tiny thing from it and making their own stuff around it, 10 years maybe.
This sounds flippant, but I agree with it, so I'll expand on it:
"Property" is a useful social tool for managing stuff that is scarce and which can't easily be shared. Food, tools, shelter, land, and so on. Property produces stability. People can count on having their stuff later, even if they're not using it at this instant. That lets them make longer-term plans, which, ideally, result in lots of different kinds of things becoming less scarce.
Ideas and information, however, are not scarce. Any number of brains and storage media can hold them simultaneously. That's not true of a pizza. But for a long time "intellectual property" worked pretty well because the copying of ideas and information required significant effort and materials. Books had to be typeset and printed. Music had to be stamped onto vinyl or written onto tape, which needed specialized equipment. All this made it so that we could pretend that ideas and information were scarce.
Now, that's not true anymore. Our technology has advanced to the point where the equipment for copying information is ubiquitous and unspecialized. We have to face the actual nature of information: It's not scarce. "Property" doesn't work on it anymore.
Which really does leave artists and authors and other intellectual producers in a bad spot, since the time and effort involved in creating stuff hasn't gone down. We have this kind of thing now where it either doesn't exist at all or it exists in such abundance that the adjective is unneeded. How do we economically incentivize something like that?
Personally, I lean towards the suspicion that for some kinds of things, mainly entertainment, we don't need to incentivize it anymore at all. People are not going to stop writing fiction and recording music just because it doesn't pay anymore.
The real jam is in non-fiction, because that costs of making that stuff are higher than just food and shelter for the producer while they're writing. Research often requires travel, experimentation, equipment, materials. How do these get paid for?
>"Property" is a useful social tool for managing stuff that is scarce and which can't easily be shared. Food, tools, shelter, land, and so on. Property produces stability. People can count on having their stuff later, even if they're not using it at this instant. That lets them make longer-term plans, which, ideally, result in lots of different kinds of things becoming less scarce.
Yep
Theres no scarcity to manage here and its more comical the further I look at it.
>Which really does leave artists and authors and other intellectual producers in a bad spot, since the time and effort involved in creating stuff hasn't gone down
Well it may have done with LLMs we arent 100% sure there yet.
>Personally, I lean towards the suspicion that for some kinds of things, mainly entertainment, we don't need to incentivize it anymore at all. People are not going to stop writing fiction and recording music just because it doesn't pay anymore.
You cant copy an experience, people will always pack out stadiums for live music. If musicians wont make music because oops it got added to the gestalt cultural heritage of mankind well they can jump in a lake. And I have talked with tons of authors who have full time jobs on the side. This will only really impact the top 5% or so of professional authors, and force them to be more productive too.
>The real jam is in non-fiction, because that costs of making that stuff are higher than just food and shelter for the producer while they're writing. Research often requires travel, experimentation, equipment, materials. How do these get paid for?
Being the first person who can manufacture something still gives you a decent first mover advantage. It doesn't mean you cant sell your goods at a profit, it just means you have to sell your goods with competition. So less profit. Likewise with Music and Fiction, lots of people want to be first, your first book will sell a lot of copies, the first pressing of your vinyl also.
Honestly it probably means more public sector RND funding is required and not much else.
"Intellectual property" is a hack we put together to make capitalism properly assign value to abstract ideas that we all agree have value, but are inherently devalued by free market forces.
Capitalism by itself is incapable of valuing art and ideas beyond the marginal cost of producing duplicates, which has been on a steady downward trend since the invention of the printing press.
Our economy is increasingly reliant on a class of product that is fundamentally incompatible with how capitalism works. Maybe rather than adding to the centuries old hack that is clearly falling apart, we need to rethink things from the ground up.
What an incredible shallow reading of "capitalism".
Capitalism doesn't "assign value" to anything. It can't assign value to anything.
The value of something is determined only by a transaction. It's not assigned.
The value of something is made apparent only after an exchanged is made. Otherwise there is no "inherent" or "assigned" value to anything. The value is made explicit only after a transaction is made.
Abstract ideas don't really have value. Silicon Valley/Tech, which is perhaps the most ardent and exemplary capitalist industries today, does not assign value to abstract ideas. It assigns value to execution/tangible action.
If there’s no copyright, there’s no closed source. You get their code, decompile/disassemble and reuse as you see fit.
You might argue that doesn't help much if they never distribute that code (only runs on their servers). Here’s the inconvenient truth: GPL already allows that. Anyone can take a GPL codebase, do any modifications they want, run it forever, and never contribute back. You’d need AGPL to forbid that. GPL is only concerned if you further distribute the modifications.
And how does that exactly stop Amazon, Google or Microsoft (heh) from running GPLd software in their data centers and raking in money for hosting products built by poor open source devs?
I'm not worried about Microsoft recompiling bash and redistributing it. Is that a realistic problem for you?
Awesome. If you think that is stopping anyone, here's a challenge for you:
GNU Bash is GPL. You can run Bash (and many other Linux commands) in Windows through Windows Subsystem for Linux. In fact, WSL is a nice example of Microsoft doing embrace & extend.
The challenge: find the Microsoft's published code for Bash.
WSL does not include bash. When you use bash from within WSL, it is using the version of bash that was included in the upstream distribution of linux you have installed. If you are using a Debian based image, to get the source code run the following:
My point exactly (notice I didn't say MS distributes bash - it doesn't, as you pointed out).
Bash being GPL doesn't stop MS from benefiting from it by providing it to WSL users which make WSL more valuable for them. It also (as we talked in the other comment) doesn't prevent Amazon from running a database and charging people for it.
So what's this great advantage of GPL that it would make it worthwhile to keep the entire copyright system just so we could still have GPL?
If you dig around in its origin, GPL was concieved as a tool to "fight system from within system". If there's no system, you don't have to fight the system.
Then why did you ask for something if you knew it didn't exist???
Overall I think you are mistaken about the purpose of the GPL. It does not, nor has it ever intended to prohibit commercial activities. RMS and FSF have been pretty clear about this for many decades. And in fact, they are against the idea of licenses that prohibit commercial use.
The reason that large successful projects like Linux are so capable is not because it has a price tag of zero (and it often does not), but because of the feedback loop created by the viral-nature of the software license.
The vast majority of Linux is not a volunteer project -- but software developed by commercial software engineers who are being paid by a company to write software. Before copyleft, the idea that they would voluntarily share source code was laughable. The only reason they do is because they are legally required to do so.
This viral nature of copyleft creates a positive feedback loop:
1. Company uses software because it is free and solves a problem
2. they need a modification so they make it
3. they contribute back to the project because it is required by the copyright license
4. the project becomes more valuable at solving more problems that other companies have
5. Go to step 1
Breaking this feedback loop would put companies back to their natural state of not sharing. The result is that the software landscape would start to look a lot like the 80s and 90s again.
Without copyright, copyleft would not exist. And without copyleft, Linux would have been a hobby OS that died out in the early 90s. We'd be using things like Windows Server, Unix, etc. And to protect their business in the absence of copyright, they'd have heavy DRM schemes, obfuscation, cryptographic licensing, etc.
This entire comment is completely backwards. Linux gained momentum first, then it was adopted by the wider industry.
It's much easier to upstream your desired changes than maintain a separate fork (closed or otherwise) long-term. Additionally, many of the contributors have been using it for own servers, not required to contribute back.
Things like NVidia and other closed drivers show you can bolt a non-open part to the GPL code if you try enough.
> And without copyleft, Linux would have been a hobby OS that died out in the early 90s. We'd be using things like Windows Server, Unix, etc.
This ignores the entire existence of FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD.
> they'd have heavy DRM schemes, obfuscation, cryptographic licensing
This ignores the existence of heavy DRM schemes, obfuscation, kernel-level anticheat spyware, criminalisation of copyright-circumvention schemes, etc.
At this point, I think you're just trolling, so I'll stop here.
> It's much easier to upstream your desired changes than maintain a separate fork (closed or otherwise) long-term. Additionally, many of the contributors have been using it for own servers, not required to contribute back.
Then why is ~75% of the kernel from corporate commits today? You think large tech companies just started to become coincidentally generous with the advent of Linux?
> This ignores the entire existence of FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD.
The BSD are quite niche in install base and highly rely on GPL'd ports from Linux.
And, by far the most popular OS in the BSD family tree is MacOS, which is primarily closed source.
> This ignores the existence of heavy DRM schemes, obfuscation, kernel-level anticheat spyware, criminalisation of copyright-circumvention schemes, etc.
I'm not ignoring it, I'm telling you that would be more common, if you remove the all of the other mechanisms by which a company could choose. Without any legal controls whatsoever, the only option to control the use of a company's software would be through technical means. Removing other options would be incentivizing this.
Why? People are currently free to release all intellectual rights to what they release, so in theory these is already a intellectual property right free marketplace and people that want to create under that model creating.
Lengths just have to be reasonable, comparable to time in production (median of salaried employee-hours / median # of employees over the period) of the average item in a class. The vast majority of the private value is captured well within that time. It also keeps people honest and discourages rentseeking that isn't tied to labor.
Ownership of intellectual property still matters, but right to copy&modify shouldn't last that long. It isn't hard to imagine another system of IP rights that provide value to the creator but not to the expense of society. Disney used public domain to build it's foundation then pulled up the ladder. Disney's market cap is lower than the damage longer copyright has caused, it's already been trillions, hundreds of trillions looking into the near future.
I think land ownership should be abolished. That'll never happen for a lot of reasons, but it's highly unethical in my opinion. Ignoring who the land was stolen from to begin with, I also feel that it's looting the future, land ownership often being generational and severely kneecapping society from making better, more productive use of a finite resource as its needs change over time.
I do not think intellectual property should be abolished outright, because I can't think of a reliable incentive structure constructed entirely from the social interest. I do think it, particularly copyright, should be severely curtailed, however. Companies exclusively controlling huge swaths of popular culture for 90 years or whatever basically amounts to theft from the public commons, in my opinion. If you're going to replace folk culture with Mickey Mouse, then we ought to own a bit of that, more quickly than is being done.
I have no issue with personal property and actually think it should be strengthened. Consider the right to repair; the right to run the software we choose on the devices we ostensibly own; the erosion of our ability to freely trade, share, and preserve increasingly digital products; stronger enforcement of Magnusson-Moss; infringements of our privacy in an online world; and so on.
> the operators of the site remain unidentified. The judgment [...] orders Anna’s Archive to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, that includes valid contact information for the site and its managing agents
They already removed the files when the lawsuit was filed.
Obviously, they're not paying the $322 million. The amount doesn't matter because they're not paying anything. What it does enable is seizing their domain names and any other resources that are hosted by companies in the US jurisdiction.
Aren't they widely believed to be Russian? They've been running for long enough that they're almost certainly in a non-extradition jurisdiction and know to stay there.
However, many countries are not that important. The US, EU, and China don't care which countries they have good relations with. And then there are countries like Saudi Arabia, which the US, EU, and China all need.
Well I didn’t exactly make some kind of claim of “no grievance ever,” I’m just saying that it’s not that hard to find countries that have good relationships with the US, China, and EU all at once.
Example: most member states within the RCEP trade agreement (e.g., Australia)
India
Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru.
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, and Turkey all deliberately hedge relations between blocs.
Japan and South Korea are heavily economically intertwined (not conflict-free obviously)
China hates India.
China hates Japan even more.
China sometimes hates South Korea.
The US hates Mexico (and flip flops when presidents do)
America imposed a dictatorship on Chile.
The US has threatened Brazil recently.
The US has also threatened military action against Colombia this year.
Places like Singapore, Nigeria, and Kenya are just irrelevant on the global stage. Singapore is great for money laundering and nobody sees them as a threat to their own sovereignty due to being a tiny little island that's completely dependent on its neighbors for food and water. When you're a big country with a big economy, you get enemies merely by existing.
The US does not hate Mexico, the right wing party just pretends to hate them in order to appeal to their racist voter base. “Hate” doesn’t result in a broad free trade agreement where over 80% of auto parts manufactured in Mexico are sold to the US and companies like GM assemble the Silverado there.
China hates Japan? Where is your PlayStation made? If China hates them so much where are the economic sanctions or restrictions? I certainly agree that there are disputes and negative public perceptions between the countries, but their economies are heavily intertwined.
We also probably have to exclude threats made by Donald Trump from the discussion since he threatens obvious allies and is generally mentally unstable. Remember how he threatened to annex Canada? Canada is obviously an ally but our fucking moron president doesn’t know that.
Nigeria has over 240 million people, it’s not irrelevant on the global stage. All the African countries I mentioned are of great interest as they reach a developed state.
Fun fact: the Nigerian film industry grossed $6.4 billion in 2024, while the US domestic gross box office was $8.6 billion in the same year.
Calling Singapore irrelevant on the global stage is also laughable. 28th largest GDP in the world, 8th largest per capita. It’s not a Caribbean money laundering center where there’s no local economy. They refine oil, they’re ranked number 2 in biotechnology, 1st in broadband download speeds, 4th in global innovation index, 1st in economic competitiveness,
the list goes on.
Sure, but also the EU is comparably as weak over its member states as the US Federal government was over American states in the Articles of Confederation era. This is how Hungary was able to paralyse the collective response against Russia.
Nevertheless, extraditions based on international mandates are usually respected (terms and conditions may apply, see Greece or Italy). Wanted people often go to Serbia nowadays, to give a successful example.
Indeed. But I did write "will find friendly arms in China and Europe", and Greece, Italy, and indeed Serbia, are in Europe.
The whole continent != nation thing is clearer with the EU != Europe (due to the EU not even being a nation yet) than with the American nation != The Americas.
Even then, don't underestimate rules-lawyering of laws: I wish to suggest that the USA is going down the path of "rogue state", and that extradition treaties may have clauses (either explicitly in treaty text* or implicitly via the European Convention on Human Rights) protecting individuals from the risk of a death penalty, which may end up getting invoked due to the US having the death penalty.
Article 13 (``Capital punishment'') provides that when an offense for which extradition is sought is punishable by death under the laws in the requesting State but not under the laws in the requested State, the requested State may grant extradition on condition that the death penalty shall not be imposed or, if for procedural reasons such condition cannot be complied with by the requesting State, on condition that if imposed the death penalty shall not be carried out.
If there's a loss of trust that the US will honour its obligations, and in other cases besides extradition this has already happened, what then?
> Russia after Putins fall will do everything to please other countries, to get back to good terms
This is pretty obviously not true? Russia's not going to try to please the us or most European countries, and many fugitives in Russia only angered those countries.
Perhaps US may extradite some ordinary US citizens, but for example when some member of the US military kills in another country someone by driving drunk, USA will immediately smuggle him from that country, so that he will not stand trial in a foreign court for his crime.
That's not how politics necessarily works. Russia oil and already existing infrastructure into Europe means that Europe has huge incentives to continue trading eventually.
That's also better than Russia focusing delivering their resources to China for good.
There's unlikely to be any thaw within Putin's lifetime. Putin is 73. What happens after that? Opportunity to be a clean slate.
Before the war, upper-class Russians had it good. Freedom of movement to the West. Russian money was popular in Europe, now it's got a Chernobyl toxic glow to it. It wouldn't be so bad to go back to 2010 Russia before Putin threw all of that away on territorial expansion and irridentism.
We've got army block, FSB block, technocrats, bureaucrats and oligarchs. The usual (more or less) story.
The real problem is - we don't have system that scales horizontally. So when Putin goes people will have to deal with the vertical system he created for himself.
The problem here is this "for himself" part.
For this system to work you will have to be a new Putin (at least for some time) and for this you will have to enforce your decisions and shape your new system. Top to bottom.
Best thing that can happen to Russian (realistically) is that the power will be given to technocrats.
They are not neccesarily more liberal, but they have real education, they do understand a thing or to about economics, open borders, sharing of knowledge etc.
They won't be able to quickly change Russia, but given some time they can reshape it step by step.
Alas - we have FSB and Army blocks, high level of corruption and millions of people who see people like Putin as the best choice. They don't need progress and responsibility. They need their empire back even if they are just peasants with serfdom included.
Slightly OT: How is it possible that the operators are unidentified? Surely someone must own the domain and pay upkeep for that? Wouldn't that expose at least one of them?
Yes your honor, we've identified one Big Bird of 123 Sesame St as being affiliated with the operators of the site based on the registration data.
The only reason you have to tell the truth is if you want to reduce the risk of arbitrarily losing control of the domain, such as having a chance to contest any abuse reports that might be filed against you.
What does "finding them" even means in this context? There are many hacker organizations located in Russia that are much worse than Anna's Archive. From my understanding those also operate websites / platforms to offer services.
Well clearly that’s false?
Not all crypto transactions are traceable for example. And since they haven’t found them, that seems to disprove your statement doesn’t it?
ultimately it will depend on their opsec. i do think it shows that opsec strategies and tech can have a use case that is not morally bad (at least not in a straightforward way). so the good research done in this field is actually justified
They will never see a single cent from that, AA will continue to rotate domains and nothing was accomplished, except for spotify's legal team which earned easy money arguing against empty chair in court.
Maybe it's not about the money primarily. There are enough parties out there that want the people behind Anna's archive behind bars and I'm afraid this will end the same way as for the Pirate Bay guys in the best case and like it ended for Aaron Schwartz in the worst.
> piratebay continues to be the -to my knowledge- biggest public tracker out there
It has been compromised for more than a decade. The site is impossible to navigate without an adblocker due to malicious redirect ads and most of the major torrents are being monitored by rights management companies who will notify the user’s ISP of suspected infringement.
All public torrents are monitored by the movie studios, that has nothing to do with how The Pirate Bay is run. Users can just hop jurisdictions with a VPN and use these public torrents without ever getting any complaint letters.
If the operators of Anna's Archive live somewhere like Russia or China, there's a good chance nothing will ever come of any of this legal action. Anna's Archive's biggest challenge is just maintaining availability of infrastructure.
If they were not physically in Russia or similar country out of the jurisdiction of the court, then they have likely moved to one or operate from one.
At this point, the court is just a willing instrument of corporate anger and assistant to help vent their frustration. The secondary purpose, is to erode rights and privacy, for a continual surveillance state and gain as much control over the DNS infrastructure as possible.
Chevron hired a private prosecutor who was friends with the judge who took the case, to prosecute Donziger after he won a case outside of the US against Chevron.
That’s a big if. My bet is that they are in Central or Northern Europe, just like the Pirate Bay people. Unlikely anyone in Russia or China would care to offer a service primarily to the benefit of the western world. I bet there are similar sites in the Runet or behind the Great Firewall we don't even know about and that simply don't bother catering to us.
Yep. You can also see that in the design language and the written English on their sites and blog posts. Something created by people with a Russian or Chinese background would approach a myriad of little things differently.
What are you on about? rutracker, libgen, sci-hub, z-lib are all Russian/ex-Soviet projects and cater heavily to westerners. I'm 99% sure archive.is and anna's-archive are also in this category.
Z-library was/is very likely run by Russians. They were even arrested by FBI, but escaped. Archive.is is likely run by a Russian. LibGen was run by Russians.
They are all not Anna's Archive and one is not like the other. Z-library, LibGen maybe, Archive.is might be eastern Europe but almost certainly not Russia. Just because it's advantageous in some cases to appear Russian or Chinese doesn't mean it is true. Some are better in their camouflage others like https://migflash.com/ not so much.
There is no "strong case" in this article. Yeah the guy linked to it has a slavic name and likely speaks Russian. Guess what? That's true for most of eastern Europe you
will find plenty of people matching these criteria all over the rest of Europe.
> Unlikely anyone in Russia or China would care to offer a service primarily to the benefit of the western world.
Russians are huge on the piracy scene and have been for decades, primarily because it’s an effective way for the Russian Federation to thumb their nose at the Americans. China has more than a billion people in it. I’m sure between the two of them there is at least one person that identifies with citizen of the world style liberalism (and, if I could venture to be an optimist, probably a lot more than one).
They are almost certainly being financed by the AI lobby as they have been open about providing API access to companies training AI in exchange for “donations.”[1][2][3] Having all of this data available online for free gives those looking for training data plausible deniability. It would turn into a huge legal headache if OpenAI had scraped Spotify directly, but if they launder it through a third party they can at least try to argue they weren’t responsible for the infringement.
Spotify got started doing the same thing, though.[4]
[2]: https://annas-archive.gl/blog/duxiu-exclusive.html (“We’re looking for some company or institution to help us with OCR and text extraction for a massive collection we acquired, in exchange for exclusive early access. After the embargo period, we will of course release the entire collection.”)
[3]: https://annas-archive.gl/donate (“Enterprise-level donation or exchange for new collections (e.g. new scans, OCR’ed datasets). […] We welcome large donations from wealthy individuals or institutions. For donations over $5,000, please contact us directly at Contact email.”)
[4]: https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files... (“Rumors that early versions of Spotify used ‘pirate’ MP3s have been floating around the Internet for years. People who had access to the service in the beginning later reported downloading tracks that contained ‘Scene’ labeling, tags, and formats, which are the tell-tale signs that content hadn’t been obtained officially.”)
Or you know, MegaUpload. Raided at his home, while congress was trying to pass a bill, that allowed them to... stop online piracy... apparently, they REALLY needed that bill in order to do so.
First and foremost, I feel like Spotify is scummy. I don't like what they did when they were founded, I don't like what they do to artists.
I hate the hyperscalers being in this business (Google, Apple, Amazon) as that's another thing they do that devalues an otherwise healthy market. Bringing in outside business division revenues to dump on another market's prices is ecologically unhealthy for optimal capitalism and healthy competition.
On the one hand, while I want cheap media, I also want artists to make money. While Spotify puts real price pressure on artists, piracy brings artists absolutely nothing at all.
I get Gabe's value prop with Valve. Make the service easy, cheap, convenient, good, and piracy begins to diminish.
But if there are cheap services and cheap avenues (that still underpay artists), why then switch to a mode that pays artists nothing at all?
Do Bandcamp. Buy merch. Do something to support the artists. I feel like paying piracy services is the opposite of that.
But ethical quandary - doesn't Anna's Archive also support spreading research papers, etc.?
Complicated feelings.
I wish we had better ways to pay originators of things. Art, music, authors, researchers, ICs, ...
I feel like studios and middlemen and companies themselves are entities that exist because rewarding work or value or happiness at the site of exchange is hard/intangible.
I’d love to see a streaming service where my payment goes to artists I listen to.
Spotify pays 70% of their music revenue to publishers based on the total number of listens. All revenue is put together and split based on the global numbers. Which means that niche band I like will get next to nothing. Instead if they account for 50% of my listening time in one month, they should get 35% of what I paid to Spotify that month. Unfortunately big labels will never agree to that.
If you and I both pay $10/mo to listen to Spotify, and we are the only subscribers. If I listen to 1 song by Sabrina Carpenter, and you listen to 99 songs by Taylor Swift. Then of our $20 (after Spotify's share) 1% of the money will go to Sabrina and 99% of the money will go to Taylor. Because Taylor was played 99x more than Sabrina. Even though for both of us as users, our respective artist was 100% of our listening.
It doesn't calculate your amount of listening and determine the payout based on that. All listens are pooled together and all subscription money is pooled together. And the payout is determined based on that.
No, because let's say OP pays USD 10 and listens to only one song one time -- obviously, Linkin Park In the end -- right now, the payout is almost nothing.
Not all listens show the same intention. If I go to the barbershop and they're playing Spotify top-40 playlists running all day long, that is very different from me actively choosing what I want to listen to for a few hours a months while I'm listening in my car, or putting on Friends Per Second while doing the dishes.
My $7/mo should be going to the artists I actually chose to listen to, not the stuff that droned passively for hours in background environments. Particularly when I'm actually a high margin customer for Spotify; the cost to them of my subscription is low since I spend so little time on the service. That makes it all the more galling that my subscription cost is mostly going to Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran.
I mean, I understand and agree, and I'm pretty sure that Spotify Premium users are very skewed towards less mainstream tastes, so I agree it would be better for smaller artists and would probably change the power balance (well, if we forget that music labels exist).
But yeah, if as others pointed out you were to give 70% of your subscription cost to the artist that composed/performed the single track you listened this month, it would be very different.
At the end of the day, indies need to be on Spotify much more than Spotify needs them there. But for mainstream artists, it's the opposite; so the representatives of top-40 artists are the ones dictating the terms of how the system works for everyone, and unsurprisingly the system they've settled on is one that seems fair enough as long as you don't think too deeply about it, but ensures that the biggest slice of the pie goes to themselves.
To play the devil's advocate, if we do this, your favorite artist will get paid less if you listen to others using Spotify radio shuffle feature vs if you stay on the artist page and only listen to that one artist?
Well, if I listen to a shuffle radio then the artists I listen to will get paid, right? Which I’m fine with, it’s not that I want to support one specific artist (I can buy their album or merch if that’s my goal), I just want the money I pay to go to artists I listen to, not to the people from top charts that I don’t care about
That sounds like the intended effect. I think the objection is that the user's payment is being diluted by all the other listeners. Someone who listens to spotify constantly is going to influence the payouts much more than someone who listens to it occasionally, even though they are paying the same amount to spotify and the latter user might have only subscribed to listen to one band.
100 people subscribe to spotify and listen for 100 hours a month each, for $10 a month. You listen to your favourite artist for 50 hours and other stuff for 50 hours. No-one else listens to your favourite artist.
I assume that if this is band is treated as the "average"
Total listening hours = 100 * 100 = 10,00.
Total money: 100 * 10 = $1,000.
They get: 50 / 10,000 * $1,000 = $5
That seems fair? Obviously some bands won't have negotiating power when they first start and might get less, or some get more, but that feels like how the industry always worked, and not something to do with spotify?
You don't see the problem because you're using the same number of hours for everyone. When you have some accounts using 500 hours and others using 50 there are problems. And the 500 hour account is more likely on autopilot and reinforcing whatever's already popular.
Let’s say I listen to 10h a month of a single artist, nothing else. So 100% of my payment (minus Spotify take) should go to that artist.
Let’s say you listen 90h to another artist, and nothing else.
In the current model both artists are put together, 100h and let’s say $20 to split. Your artist gets 90% because they’ve been listened to for 90h, so they get $18 and my artist gets $2
In my model my artist gets $10 because they get 100% of what I pay and your artist gets $10 because they get 100% of what you pay.
The unfairness comes when you spend an abnormal amount of time listening. If you listen less than the average user then the bands you like won't be getting x% of your money that lines up with your listening habits.
I always thought it was a really cool idea to bridge the spotify streaming idea with local style purchasing, so say 10$ a month and the user gets ~3$ per month of that to "buy" media. so it defaults initially to their most played artist unless they indicate they want to buy something in particular instead.
Artists get big cuts when people buy their music, and if people decide to cancel their paid subscription, they still have the bought media available with no predatory gating like spotify uses to try to coerce people to resubscribing.
Not sure if you're aware, but it's the labels, not Spotify:
> It pays roughly two-thirds of every dollar it generates from music, with nearly 80% allocated to recording royalties and about 20% to publishing, though how much artists and songwriters ultimately receive depends on their agreements with rights holders, which Spotify does not control. [0]
Spotify is frantically trying to escape the record label's death grip (hence podcasts), because they know they can squeeze it for just about anything with licensing deals. It's a terrible business model! Spotify keeps a third for their costs (& finally some profit in the past year or two), ie. about the same that Apple takes from App Store for basically nothing[1].
How the record labels convinced the world that Spotify is the bad guy here is beyond belief.
Wow. This is certainly a take. Two things:
1. Spotify has had a policy for a couple years now of not paying artists who generate less than 1,000 streams per year PER song. So if I get 999 streams on each of my 50 songs every year, I get nothing from Spotify.
2. Major labels own major stakes in Spotify. They are one and the same.
Ad. 1, I’m not saying Spotify is perfect, though in this case I would not be surprised if the algorithm was mandated by the record labels as the industry standard.
Ad 2, you’ll be surprised to hear the labels only held cumulative 20% stake up to the IPO and all of them subsequently wound it down. Their stake is now insignificant.
However, they had, have, and will always have, enormous leverage due to licensing-they’re monopolists and Spotify can either agree to whatever the terms are, or shut itself down.
Imagine if Netflix never started producing original content. They’d be at mercy of others or, more probably, already dead. Music doesn’t work that way and Spotify can’t just generate a bunch of pop hits to avoid paying the labels. They are trying to do that with podcasts.
Spotify here is the victim as much as the artists.
> Not sure if you're aware, but it's the labels, not Spotify:
*not only Spotify
They had plenty of problems from people abusing their system to steal listens from actual artists.
Their system is basically "one big bucket of listens" - if your song gets listens, you get money. So if you pay your sub, and listen to say 5 niche musicians only, it still all goes mostly to the most popular songs.
Now you might already notice the flaw here - if you say, make a bunch of bots that just listen to songs to boost their revenue, not only your sub doesn't pay artists you listen, but also to fraudulent ones.
Then there was problems with using fake collaboration tags, AI music to hijack artist profiles, and few others.
> Their system is basically "one big bucket of listens" - if your song gets listens, you get money. So if you pay your sub, and listen to say 5 niche musicians only, it still all goes mostly to the most popular songs.
That's basically how radio is accounted for in royalties, as well.
With Spotify knowing exactly who listened to what, it could be more precise (and arguably more susceptible to the fraud), but tbh what they do is standard (compulsory licensing) industry practice.
With radio, everyone that listens to a particular station is listening to roughly the same mix of songs, and they're "paying" (by listening to ads) on a per-hour basis.
If either of those was true with spotify, the unfairness would go away.
But when different listeners are paying very different amounts per hour, any correlation between payment amount and preferred content causes problems.
Whenever an actual artist reveals their earnings, it’s absolutely pitiful.
A quick search suggests a very steep drop off from the top earners.
‘At 100 million streams, artists can earn approximately $300,000-$500,000 in gross royalties. However, the actual amount reaching the artist varies dramatically based on their contracts. Major label artists receive $90,000-$150,000 after the label’s cut, while independent artists could keep $255,000-$425,000 after distributor fees.’
https://rebelmusicz.com/how-much-do-artists-make-on-spotify/
As an academic, I am happy to see my work on Anna's Archive. Unless your book goes gangbusters, few humanities scholars make any real money from publications, and maybe the 5-10 biggest names in my field make something might get something like ~$40k at signing, and maybe a few thousand more from book sales. So far, I've netted $326 from my first book. But that doesn't matter! We publish because we want our work out there in the world, not because we think it might make us money.
On the other hand, I have no idea who runs Anna's Archive. I wouldn't be surprised if it were backdoor funded by AI companies who want the data available for scraping. Maybe that explains the Spotify debacle?
> piracy brings artists absolutely nothing at all.
This has historically been unclear. Lots of artists make more money from touring and merchandise than from record sales, and piracy is likely to boost those.
In a similar vein, the recent thread on bootleg recordings - with both the article and the comments suggesting a more complicated relationship between piracy and band warnings.
True to an extent, but records are great promotional tool, and rather expensive to make if you don't want it to sound like poop. Perhaps something like $10-25k on the very low end for something half-way "serious", and that's assuming you're not going all Chinese Democracy and can actually cut the thing in a week or so. Then it has to mixed, mastered, art prepared, etc.
Most small-medium time artists can't afford to front all the expenses. If no one buys the records, no record company will give the band an advance. Even if most records don't really generate any direct profit for the band, getting the production bankrolled is a pretty big benefit.
people that get their music from AA would never buy it or pay spotify for it, so the "loss" is completely imaginary. same goes for movies, videogames etc
in some sense yes, as long as there are sources of good enough cheaper alternatives millions of people won't ever pay for Spotify (or even use the free version with ads, but the free-with-ads version is in itself a good enough for many many many people), but of course in a vacuum with only Spotify people would probably pay for it!
though the determination of damages is usually completely all over the map (and usually skews high to serve a punitive purpose, though I doubt it has any real deterrent effect).
If I like an artist I buy a physical copy of the album.
I just brought Light Years on cassette by Nas.
I’m an hobbyist musician and I’m going to sell actual cassettes and donate the profits. I’m never going to get the 500 million streams you need to make money off Spotify
I've always liked China's business model for music. In China, all music is free to stream and download. Musicians make their money the more traditional way, through performances, merchandise, promotions/advertising, etc.
Global distribution. For $40/year. That was fucking unheard of 20 years ago. Spotify is the best thing that ever happened to artists. Don't let the mediocre one's who blame their lack of success on Spotify fool you. They don't make money because they likely suck and can't book dates because no one wants to see them.
Finally the correct take on spotify. Artists were 100% fucked before spotify, streaming saved them. Now we have more artists making money than ever, but since most of them arent really successful they whine and whine when they'd be making nothing 20 years ago.
> why then switch to a mode that pays artists nothing at all? Do Bandcamp. Buy merch. Do something to support the artists.
I don't like this perspective because it puts the onus on the individual consumer. Many people who listen to music struggle to make ends meet. They do not have the extra money to afford buying albums off of bandcamp, yet they are contributing members of society and they deserve to be able to listen to music.
Meanwhile there are billions of dollars floating around in the music industry. Spotify absolutely has the spare cash to pay their artists more; they just choose not to.
As much as I love the idea of Gabe's "piracy is a service issue" philosophy, I think the real truth is likely that piracy is an issue of capitalism and wealth inequality.
Sure, why not? Current US music revenue is $6/mo per US taxpayer. For less than half the cost of Spotify you could 5x the income going to musicians if you skipped the middleman and magically just paid them directly. That doesn't seem like a bad deal.
No one 'deserves' to listen to music. It's not a right. It's a luxury that you can either afford or you can't. FM radio is still around for those people.
>>> ...piracy brings artists absolutely nothing at all.
I'm not sure about that. A related situation is software piracy. There was a long time period when it was easy for people to get "free" copies of software titles such as a major word processing program, by copying them at work and bringing them home. This might not really have hurt the vendor of the software, because they still sold lots of copies to businesses. But it effectively kept anybody from bringing a less feature rich but lower priced alternative to the market. Some of the companies whose works were copied became effective monopolies.
Another way of putting it was that the software had two price tiers: A paid tier for businesses and a free tier that kept competitors out of the market. Had anybody done this deliberately, it might have been considered "dumping."
Music piracy may have a similar effect of creating a moat for the big labels and players who can diversify their income streams, while preventing small-scale acts from offering an acceptable but lower priced alternative.
>I get Gabe's value prop with Valve. Make the service easy, cheap, convenient, good, and piracy begins to diminish.
>But if there are cheap services and cheap avenues (that still underpay artists), why then switch to a mode that pays artists nothing at all?
Spotify cancelled my package, and keeps sending me offers to rejoin at twice the price (actually more than that, it was a joint account with my wife, so its like 2.5 times if we were both to start paying again). Every time I listen to spotify without the package I get 3 ads to 1 song. Sometimes 2 ads when its generous.
I would have probably paid my spotify tax on time every month without thinking about it. But now I hate them to pieces.
It seems like my options are:
1. Sign up for a service without the all of music I want to listen to.
2. Sign up for a service thats as scummy as spotify but hasnt quite enshittified yet.
3. Download all the mp3s from my spotify playlists and listen to them locally without the weird payment/advertising apparatus in between.
The entire record industry is scum and Spotify is just a part of that. It can just die a swift death, would be for the best. Bandcamp is much better. Much lower barrier to entry for everyone and it has my favorite artists.
> First and foremost, I feel like Spotify is scummy. I don't like what they did when they were founded, I don't like what they do to artists.
> While Spotify puts real price pressure on artists,
You know that Spotify doesn't pay artists, right? That Spotify pays 70% of its revenue to rights holders before it sees a single cent itself? And that it's rights holders who pay artists?
I wish the angry pitchfork mob for once managed to attack the actual culprits: the Big Four. Nope, that day will never come.
Considering the currently don’t pay small time artists a dime so they can funnel more money to the record labels that own them, they are still a piracy outfit.
I guess I'm a little surprised that they felt this release was too hot. I'm not really surprised at the response from the music industry, but rather I thought AA was more confident in their opsec/safety from this sort of threat.
I would assume it's moreso they don't want to lose their domains too quickly. Though they've only given one sentence to go off, so it's hard to speculate.
Extra? I thought they were clearly violating IP law to begin with. Unless I misunderstand this is "water is wet" territory (both the judgment as well as what Anna's Archive did).
Water isn't wet, but it does "wet" other things. Wetness is the degree to which a liquid contacts and adheres to a solid surface, so it's makes no sense to say that water is wet.
Just because you disagree with a law doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. You anti copyright shills are exhausting... Why can't you try to attract people to your side to eventually instead effect some real change? Do you just take that much pleasure in being an edgelord that your cause be damned?
Different burden of proof. Why waste years trying to get server logs that may not exist when you can get a quick win? It's not about the money anyway. It's about the PR and whatever justification they can derive along the way.
I read somewhere that Spotify initially seeded their db with pirated music! Now they go after anyone following their suit! It’s like a mafia’s boss that became mayor and is suddenly tough on crime, without acknowledging his past history!
It's exactly the same. "The secret ingredient is crime...", then once the coffers are full use the cash to legitimate their presence into a legal offering.
It's not as much of a hoodwink as you would think however, it's everywhere and has been the same throughout history.
East India Company, Facebook, and even more recently Uber. Uber is the most readily documented.
In Australia (and I'm almost certain else where, but I'll talk about Brisbane, Queensland explicitly), Uber were illegal for years and just paid the fines to the local authorities when pegged. And continued to do so until they became legal.
It's a confronting and candid example of "money fixes all problems". The truth of this continues to bother me, the older and maybe not wiser I become, the more twisted I am from feeling disenfranchised, jaded and cynical from this truth.
The world fundamentally operates very differently at the macro level where money is counted in 10 or more digits than the micro level where most of us here sit. Witnessing the average person struggle to home and feed them selves on a countries median wage. While organisations wash their sins with coffers and pivot into unicorns and technical behemoths.
I almost think this Spotify stuff is an op, just like I think the archive.org covid library was an op. Just pulling these targeted orgs into stupid decisions that will leave most of the public unsympathetic, in order to justify more law enforcement resources to go after them.
When I imagine AA going offline for stupid pop music piracy, it makes me angry. They're basically where virtually all of the old archive.org material landed, and nobody else is mirroring it. 95% of it can't be purchased; you either dl it from AA, or do an interlibrary loan through libraries that barely exist anymore, or if you live in some little and/or poor country, you just don't get to read it.
The material in our history of nonfiction writing represents a far wider range of opinion than we're allowed to have right now. Eliminating all of it at once (as libraries throw books away and/or close down), and commercially reissuing approved and reedited things as ebooks (that can be edited again, and again) is a nightmare future. Maybe it's even an optimistic nightmare future - we'll just be expected to accept what the AI says.
Perhaps one day we will invent a technology that allows computers to connect to each other directly, and share information freely across some sort of distributed network.
I am struggling to see how exactly this is even considered piracy. Nobody was going to stream music in low quality off a slow AA server anyway. It's archival.
Not sure how I feel. Anna’s Archive turned into a profit-seeking beast a long time ago. They’re also rolling in it thanks to he massive deals to “license” the content to AI companies.
It has been proven through at least Snowden files that multiple world governments have been working for decades now to operate as many tor nodes as they can in the hopes of decloaking as much traffic as possible, should they need to go after specific people.
I don't think it's safe to say this is virtually impossible. They have more money and resources than you can fathom.
Even if they don't currently have enough nodes to catch a certain person... should it become more important for them to do so, they could always quickly increase that number on short notice to try to increase the chances of tracking them down as needed.
Governments need tor to work to keep their spy network safe. Running a bunch of nodes to ensure the system is online makes sense for intelligence agencies, no traffic sniffing required.
At this point everyone who cares about anna's archive already knows about anna's archive.
If the goal is to eventuallu get their domain siezed (forcing them to get a new one and confusing existing users), they probably don't view this as a waste.
Fair point, I kinda agree, though I do think they were mostly know for books and music is a whole new sector they entered with a different niche altogether
Screw AA for doing that spotify stunt - spotify disabled all API access except for paid accounts due to that. AA's greed and mass theft ruined a good thing.
Who's greedy? The people who put something out on the internet for free, or the people who stopped letting people access that same thing, unless they paid them money?
"But Spotify pays the musicians!" some people might scream. While true, it is a pitiful, insulting amount.
The example that hit me the hardest was Dr. Dre, whose albums were streamed 1.5 million times and earned him $4345.
1.5 million is a platinum record album by industry standards in the US, UK, Canada and France.
$4345 isn't even enough to pay a month of rent in New York, where the court case was done.
Anna's Archive is not the ones you can blame for greed.
I wrote a Spicetify plugin to show information about a song’s genres, but unfortunately the public API endpoint it was using -- as well as many other endpoints -- was removed after their changes, even for Premium users.
I used libgen quite a lot; new books were hard to find there, but many old books were available. Then libgen was kind of eliminated by the mega-corporation alliance. The latter is very hypocritical - see Meta and others sniffing off data to train for AI.
Anna's Archive kind of semi-replaced libgen (a few libgen mirrors are sometimes back up but then disappear again) but for various reasons I don't quite like Anna's Archive as much; the UI is imo also more confusing.
Now the mega-corporations decided to kill off Anna's Archive. Personally I don't use or "need" music; if I need a good song I use yt-dlp on youtube and get it these days. Many years ago napster. But this has also stopped, sort of; I rarely get new songs, mostly because they are often really just ... bad. Or, I don't need them locally anyway as I could listen to them in the background on youtube (which kind of makes you wonder why the mega-corporations really fight freedom providers such as Anna's Archive; and before that the noble pirates from piratebay and so forth).
So I think the following is IMO by far the biggest problem, no matter one's personal opinion:
"Rakoff entered a permanent worldwide injunction covering ten Anna’s Archive domains: annas-archive.org, .li, .se, .in, .pm, .gl, .ch, .pk, .gd, and .vg."
To me this is blatant dictatorship and censorship. I really do not want these private de-facto entities disguised as "public courts" to restrict any of us here. I want to decide the information I can access, at all times, without restriction. So that they can abuse people in, say, the USA and deny them easy access to these useful resources, is criminal behaviour by such corporation courts. We need to change this globally - and I believe it will eventually happen. Right now this may still be a minority opinion, but keep in mind that years ago, the right to repair movement was framed by corporations as evil. More recently they are even winning in court cases, see the most recent John Deere case and requirement to open up access when people purchased hardware.
Eventually I think freedom to information will win. Good luck to Anna's Archive and others.
> So I think the following is IMO by far the biggest problem, no matter one's personal opinion:
>
> "Rakoff entered a permanent worldwide injunction covering ten Anna’s Archive domains: annas-archive.org, .li, .se, .in, .pm, .gl, .ch, .pk, .gd, and .vg."
Legally speaking, the Southern District of New York can say whatever it likes, and Libera, Sweden, India, St-Pierre-et-Miquelon, Greenland, Switzerland, Pakistan, Grenada, and the British Virgin Islands are free to ignore what the US says. They all have national sovereignty over their respective ccTLDs, and of them, most are not going to simply accept the US telling them what to do considering recent geopolitical missteps.
Yes and: Our current intellectual property regime is indefensible.
Yes and: Gatekeeping megacorp's profits continue to rise, while creators are screwed.
The original intent of copyright protection in the USA was to encourage production of culture. (Ditto patents for knowledge.) That sounds fantastic. I support that.
> Now the mega-corporations decided to kill off Anna's Archive.
You can still torrent the books from library genesis if they succeed. It would be a bit of an effort, but free books are currently the only positive thing (for me) in the internet.
How do people safely download from these torrent sites? Isn't there a risk that you'll download something you wouldn't want on your computer? Yet I hear of many people actively using them, so there must be more to it.
It's easy for others to see what you're downloading: https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com. So if you're unsure if the torrent is legitimate, I'd probably avoid it.
When you download the torrent file, you're trusting that the provider of the torrent file, anna's archive in this case, is giving you legitimate files. Although I'm not sure how you would disguise undesirable files like viruses as ebooks; the file format would be a giveaway.
Given the context, they're probably referring to epubs. Files could contain just generic malicious javascript or malware that attempts to exploit vulnerabilities in specific ereaders.
Which imperial power do you suppose it was who quietly took over ThePirateBay and major trackers and now uses them for that exact purpose, as one of their many tools to create botnets that are then used to attack Western sites, helping to drive the adoption of CloudFlare and the like?
It's a treasure trove of knowledge. A true priceless gem. Enjoy it while it lasts.
If you want to help keep the site's content alive in a decentralized way, just buy $20,000 worth of hard drives and a very big internet pipe and start downloading their torrents.
Otherwise if you're broke like me, donate and/or leech every valuable book on every subject you can think of from their servers, while you're able to do so, and keep them stored safely offline. Buy only server grade hard drives and use them gently. Buy backup drives and use a ZFS mirror.
In either case, get an older tape drive and some tapes, and learn about tar, lzip, par2, mt-st. Get multiple tape drives if possible (for spares) and make sure your written tapes are readable in all of them. Store the tapes and hardware properly and securely.
Eventually Anna's Archive will be shut down. It's only a matter of time. It will be a great tragedy for humanity, akin to the day the Library of Alexandria was burned down. Until that happens, people who care need to do all they can to help save anything and everything of value while it's still online.
"Anything truly good and useful that is put on the internet, especially if it's of large benefit to humanity, will eventually be shut down and replaced with some watered down paywalled garbage, if anything at all." - kdhaskjdhadjk's Law
...and add a bunch of other restrictions like limiting API access to premium users, ludicrously increasing the cap for acceptance into the extended quota programme (250k MAU), and so on and so on.
So the most fucked in this situation are neither Spotify nor Anna's Archive, but anyone trying to build anything on top of what was up until this point the most straightforward to use API in the music industry, which annoys me to no end.
Cool, feel free to create a website that does as much as lists track names and let me know how long will you survive before your hosting provider gets flooded with bullshit DMCA notices and shuts you down.
I'm not talking about downloading music, I'm not even talking about some custom player for reproducing music, I'm talking about just putting say a list of songs from a playlist as plain text online.
Because I don't disagree with that premise at all but am forced to play by these bullshit rules? I wish I didn't have to, but if I want my website to exist and continue to have any sort of audience, I have to play by those bullshit rules. The alternative to no API access isn't "more decentralisation", the alternative is absolutely no human curation what so ever, as that process tends to require some sort of API-powered tools to wade through the (nowadays >30% AI-generated) noise.
Here's like the dumbest use case: say you have a hundred artists you wanted to follow and be notified whenever they release any new music, without any of it slipping through the cracks because of "the algorithm" and without any sort of preference towards the most mainstream subset of those 100 artists. Once you already have an established brand and have crossed some sort of an arbitrary, almost always non-transparent threshold of clout, there are dozens of ways for you to do that. Hell, Apple will reach out to pay you to plug into their API and use their embed above everyone else's. But while you're a nobody, even this trivial use case from a technical perspective is made virtually impossible because you can't get access to any sort of API to simply plug into.
Anyways, not much of a problem to me any more as I can easily prove my side project reaches a six figure amount of people every month with no advertising, but I promise you it would be a problem to you if you ever decided to try build anything even remotely music-related.
It's centralized because there's a few big labels that own a lot...but otherwise it's such a commodity that you can go to any streaming service and you more or less have the same catalog.
Anna's Archive went public with their announcement late December, Spotify started communicating this API lockdown mid-January. I have no evidence to back that up, but judging purely by the timing, it sure seems like these two events are connected and something Spotify did reluctantly to appease the big labels.
Yes stealing other peoples things to 'give them away' is very noble. The meta data is useless to me. I can no longer build an app on top of Spotify's API because they've had to lock it down.
There is nothing open about that. You own none of it. Only usable within their walled off platforms.
Want to build an alternative player? Can’t do that. Support new or alternative hardware? Sorry, no API access. Want to record them onto a tape/CD/SD card? Forbidden. Want to play songs at your neighborhood party? Illegal. Use them for a funny video? Nope. Even sharing lyrics gets you a DMCA takedown request.
I really hate people using terms like "theft" or "piracy" to refer to the act of artificially-limited copying. Copying something does not take anything away from the person you're copying from inherently. Theft does. And piracy is like theft, but with murder and kidnapping too.
Also curious about the payment methods. That's usually what is targeted when they want to shut someone down. Surprised to see so many different ones still supported.
Ok so they trace the domain purchase to some drug addict in Russia who got offered $100 to buy it. Then what? Wait for them to leave the country then nab them? They will be waiting a long time.
Default judgments are pernicious and should not exist.
If the other party to a lawsuit is unwilling or unable to put up a defense, the case should still be judged on its merits and put to basic tests of fairness and propriety.
As things stand, default judgment "winners" basically get everything they ask for automatically, which is not justice. Especially as it's quite common for people and small businesses to be unwilling/unable to defend themselves in court for various reasons, especially cost.
I agree, especially after seeing recently how ICE and CBP were arresting people in the US while they were reporting to their immigration agents, the legal thing they were supposed to do, and ultimately being deported, despite legally being in the US and not having commited any crimes. Going to court is dangerous. No one deserves a free pass just because AA did a no-call no-show.
So, let us assume AA could or would pay Spotify for "profits lost".
Now that we know AA's abduction of files were the files that actually received playtime, we would immediately see a lot of music artists embursed, yes?
Honestly the only organization of the past few years to deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. And I truly don’t mean this in any hyperbolic way, but believe that this organization has done the most to enable human collaboration and thus enable a precursor to peace and progress and prosperity.
Then go ahead and use one. Of course, most projects in this regard try to tackle multiple things (e.g. Tor), including DNS, but there are projects like OpenNIC that take on DNS alone if you prefer. As usual, the mass majority won't adopt these, but they are ready to use for anyone who wants them.
The operators are likely based in Russia, and the US has no jurisdiction there. As a result, they can simply ignore any US actions and continue their operations.
This doesn't change things much, besides making domain name registration more difficult, but I continue to think this Spotify thing was a really dumb move on the part of Anna's Archive.
AA is providing a valuable service to tons of people who don't have access to these books otherwise. There's a strong argument to be made for the moral goodness of that -- that even if it's illegal, it's at least in the spirit of a public library. And they want to potentially jeopardize that to... release a bunch of music tracks, that are just entertainment and mostly widely available on YouTube already anyways? Major misstep.
Like, even if the same people are proud of scraping all these tracks and want to release them... at least do it under the name of a totally separate project? A separate domain, or just describe it and post the torrents somewhere else? Don't tie it to the AA site or identity. Don't tie things together when it creates no more benefit but does create more risk.
Your points remind me of an old post on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41454990
especially the following parts
> So I understand the concern that this court decision threatens the future of some forms of archiving, digital preservation and librarianship. But the existing norms and repositories this threatens exist because people established those norms and archiving projects before now, in living memory, even in the face of threats and lectures about precedent and worries about legal gray areas.
> If you want to defend and protect "the many noble aspects of the archive", you have to remember that thirty years ago, those were imagined as impossible, impractical, and (whisper it) probably illegal. In both cases, it was Kahle's vision and approach that was -- apparently -- the only way it was going to get done.
This is about the Internet archive, but it applies to Anna's even better because Anna's is an ideologically motivated project. Yes they are taking a risk, but I imagine they consider it a worthwhile risk if it has a chance of helping them build the world they want — one where copyright does not exist as it does today.
Plus, it's not like Anna's got anything more to lose anyway. If they ever get caught the publishers are going to squeeze every single cent out of their pockets anyway, so how exactly is making spotify and record companies their enemies going to cause them extra harm?
> mostly widely available on YouTube already anyways
Problem is, when music disappears due to licensing nonsense, it generally disappears from all streaming services at the same time. Most music goes through only a few gigantic distributors / labels.
> potentially jeopardize
Nothing is in jeopardy if the operators remain completely anonymous, which it seems like they will.
> Nothing is in jeopardy if the operators remain completely anonymous, which it seems like they will.
If the 3 letter agencies want to track you down, it is highly unlikely that you could keep your anonymity. Unless you are also part of 3 letter agencies from NK, CN, RU etc.
I couldn't be more relieved that RIAA is a four letter agency
Reminds me of internet archive’s emergency library that they felt magically didn’t have to follow the law because of COVID.
Some folks out there seem to have their otherwise good intentions sort of trend into self destructive waters.
Anna's Archive pretty explicitly doesn't give a shit about the law.
Except they do and posted this weird (and racist) national security narrative about llms and copyright reform
https://annas-archive.gl/blog/ai-copyright.html
Exactly. Governments that seem to have good intentions are enabling the self destruction of public data. I'm glad we have projects like AA to right this wrong.
> that are just entertainment
And books aren't? What's the argument here? If it's that books serve a special purpose because they convey ideas and therefore it's a moral good to disseminate those ideas, you have to extend that to media beyond just the printed word. Music has that same potential (an even greater one, I would argue). It feels weird to pick and choose media like that.
> And books aren't?
Yes, since there are non-fiction books. A book about computer architecture is less „just entertainment“ than a Spotify song.
This implies the only content with moral worth are those that teach knowledge or skills, and presumably only the kinds that are worthy for productivity and advancement or something. But one person's "just an entertaining story or just a silly hobby" is another's life-changing or mind-opening allegory, or therapeutic pursuit with little immediate "practical" value.
I can sort of see the original point; this appears to be a careless risk when there were other options, but I have to push back against the idea it's just some dumb music. It's still an artifact of humanity that's worth accessing and preserving as much as any other.
> This implies the only content with moral worth are those that teach knowledge or skills
This is not what OP said. He was talking about the "moral goodness of providing access to X, despite it being illlegal. He never said anything about the moral worth of X itself, let alone that Y had no moral worth.
> AA is providing a valuable service to tons of people who don't have access to these books otherwise. There's a strong argument to be made for the moral goodness of that -- that even if it's illegal, it's at least in the spirit of a public library.
Don't many public libraries have other things other than printed books, including music?
Trying to imagine telling somebody writing about the history of music copyright that they can’t hear Ice Ice Baby, on account of they might enjoy it, which means it has no research merit.
>mostly widely available on YouTube already
This is the wrong way to look at things, the way YT is going then yt-dlp will be completely locked out within the next 3 years so essentially all that archive is about to be locked within Youtube.
Google Music had my own digitised records, and helped me move away from my physical media. Now I have to find another cd player since something broke in the one I dug out after they removed my shit. This whole ecosystem is rotten
We're only talking about music though. You can always literally just record the audio stream if you want. Or do that from free Spotify. Nothing's getting "locked" anywhere when it's just a simple stereo audio signal.
Now you’re at the mercy of YouTube etc’s compression, and having to decompress it for a worse output
I don't think Anna's can get into any worse of a legal position by pirating more things. It's already the case that anyone involved in the project will be arrested on sight, have all of their property seized, and go to prison for life. Which is why they don't show up to court hearings. This isn't the kind of crime where they beg the judge for leniency, it's the kind where they expose how silly the state is for imposing completely unenforceable penalties against someone they don't know the identity of.
It's about weight and money of people going after you. No one else has more money and muscle to throw at than music/movie industry
It might be that the "secret owner" had an obsession to liberalise the song field, like the book one, and erroneously thought he could get away indefinitely. Songs are not books as they are backed by much stronger, concentrated and dedicate to kill piracy capital.
And as a result Spotify has restricted their public API; which has limited the functionality of third-party-apps and Spicetify plugins.
They were always going to do that.
should have AI trained on them like Suno.
There is a very fine line between dumb and provacative.
I'm kind of curious how long it will be before people start publishing copyrighted works on the TrumpCoin block chain. :-)
Spotify's library has direct value in training ML models.
The value is in people controlling data. Any company with a data mote will always have an advantage, this damages the free and fair market on which capitalism is built.
Spotify has removed millions of songs over the years, so while the value to you, may be tiny, the value to the public is much larger than the marginal increase in risk to the project as a whole.
It should be under AA since it follows AA philosophy and benefits from AA's branding and brings more interested preservationinst parties who may be unaware of AA. Your strategy is the first step in divide and conquer, AA's is too big to fail
Trying to shut down a site by going after their domain names will always be a losing battle. As long as the link on their Wikipedia article keeps being updated, it'll remain easy to access. And it would be a pretty shocking attack on free speech if a U.S. court tried to order the Wikimedia Foundation to take that down; I suspect the public response would be similar to when the movie industry tried to get the AACS encryption key taken down in the 2000s.
who updates wikipedia with the new domains? how do they know the new ones?
They are published on the old ones. The old ones don't all get shut down simultaneously.
So old school! They gonna release an MCP?
No idea how an MCP is relevant to the discussion, it still needs a working domain name to talk to the service.
But, https://github.com/iosifache/annas-mcp
His point is that you don't need a working domain name since the MCP can just hardcode the IPs of the servers or resolve them through any other method that isn't DNS.
Would be fairly easy for them to offer an onion service on which they publish the current list of domains, as one option among many, many options for distributing small strings on the internet in an uncensorable way.
the beauty of wikipedia as dns is its easy access, are there similarly easily accessible uncensorable ways?
Ideally it is common knowledge that the onion service exists, and then people can go look at the onion service and update Wikipedia based on what they see there.
Also onion doesn't require a domain register
While true, most people don’t (and won’t ever) know how to use it. But enough will to keep Wikipedia updated I suppose.
Does it matter? It's not illegal to update an article with a new domain.
Yes it does matter. Users need to know that the updated URL is correct and trustworthy.
This is Wikipedia.
For that type of publishing please use Encyclopedia Britannica.
You will get the url in the 2027 edition on print.
Oh how I wish the print editions were still being released.
If you are really interested we could try piping their [API](https://encyclopediaapi.com/products/index) to some printable format. Maybe we can even find a quality print on demand service or bind it by hand :)
AA screwed the pooch two ways...
1) It was in their name rather than a disconnected splinter group or name, and
2) They went off half cocked releasing the analysis and metadata with no music.
They should have held silent until the entirety of the music collection was ready to release, and it should have been a 'new' seemingly unaffiliated group.
Either the leaders' egos have inflated too big, or someone is trying to hurt the project by making intentional strategic errors. I don't see any good reason to release only metadata, cover art, and analysis in a blog post, and little or no music, under your group's name, unless you want a massive ego stroke!
For shame, and highly unprofessional, like modern UI devs who think an interface should change more often than once a decade (STOP BREAKING VISUO-MUSCLE MEMORY YOU TWITS! INTERFACES ARE THE HUMAN API!)...
> In addition to the damages award, Rakoff entered a permanent worldwide injunction
Because apparently U.S. courts and judges can do that. The more this is ignored by third-parties outside of the U.S., the better.
I'm not against international cooperation regarding common rules (I'm rather for), but the current context certainly doesn't designate the U.S. as a responsible custodian/enforcer of such rules.
Cory Doctorow made a whole CCC speech about this.
His talks are all fantastic
https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification...
It's infuriating but practically true. I had a few services that received illegitimate DMCA notices that I ignored. They were either blatantly fraudulent, automated junk or just not applicable to the law of the country where I'm hosting.
They escalated to either my hosting or my domain name provider, who then threatened to cut me off for not complying. No discussion with them would work in my favor. I had to comply with this BS. I got cut off several times for completely wrong reasons.
They don't care. It's not worth the legal risk for them. I'm not big enough.
So in the end, the US CAN indeed do that.
Did you engage any lawyer/solicitor? Companies don't care about individuals, but they do fear lawyers.
My experience with lawyers helping me respond to other lawyers is "Stop interacting with that person".
Unless I'm spending way more money, I'd expect any company to fire me as a client as fast as legally possible if I threatened them with a lawyer.
Anna's Archive has clearly discovered, by trial and error, which hosts work and which don't.
"DMCA ignored hosting" isn't even illegal. Ignoring a liability shield doesn't make you actually liable
The US, or any nation state?
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So if you're fraudulently accused of wrongdoing that makes you a criminal?
Nice, nice....
My interpretation was "if they'll serve criminals, they won't care if someone accuses you of a crime".
But that doesn't apply to cloudflare hosting so it still comes across as a pointless snipe.
In this case, yes. Ignoring invalid dmca requests is not a legal way to deal with them.
What od you mean it's not legal?
If I don't live in the US and/or didn't do whatever the fraudulent DMCA notice accused me of doing, why do I have to process it?
Remember the context.
It's completely legal to ignore a DMCA notice. These notices set up a procedure where you're definitely not liable, but it doesn't mean it's the only way to not be liable. You can also not be liable if you - for example - didn't do anything illegal.
Receiving illegitimate DMCA notices is not the same as hosting criminal services.
Immediately makes me think of the vitriol here on HN for the UK trying to enforce their age verification law outside their borders. Will the principle stand, or will it reveal that "USA is always right" is a common held belief
USA claiming global jurisdiction over internet copyright matters goes back a long way. The case that "radicalized" me was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd. , which was 25 years ago!
The other such case establishing global financial jurisdiction, often cited by cryptocurrency adopters, is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg - "Pokerstars".
It's wild to read "the U.S. Congress passed UIGEA to extend existing gambling laws into cyberspace. The law made processing payments for online gambling a crime" in the light of how prevalent online gambling is now in the US mainstream, with sports betting, Kalshi, Polymarket and so on.
This isn't a unique USA thing. Many countries will allow lawsuits against international entities if you can demonstrate harm within the jurisdiction.
Practically speaking it doesn't matter much when small countries do this because it doesn't mean much, other than maybe the owners of the country can't travel there any more. It hits headlines when the USA does it because being barred from traveling to the USA or working with US companies causes a lot of problems.
The laws of the US have always been crafted to protect the interests of the elite, not the industrious.
Sure has.
And even policing protects local monied interests.
One case was someone who used their bike as their vehicle put a tracker on it. Was stolen. Tracker dutifully said where it was. Went to police station, they did absolutely shit. They were handed the bike receipt, token receipt, and realtime log. They DGAF.
Years ago, worked at Walmart. They illegally edited my hours and thieved $100 and change. Put in police report, was told "CIVIL MATTER".
But if you stole $100 from a register, off to jail you go.
The laws protect monied interests and the elite, not the masses.
> Years ago, worked at Walmart. They illegally edited my hours and thieved $100 and change. Put in police report, was told "CIVIL MATTER"
Too late now, but for future reference for others: Wage theft reports should go to your state's department of labor. Every state is different but from what I've seen these offices have people who are hungry to catch real wage claims. Companies listen up when the state department of labor comes knocking.
used to be the case before the government was gutted.
Fortunately this would be handled by state government, which is cold comfort if you live in the half of the country that is governed by people who hate you for having the audacity to be poor.
In places like Florida probably this department runs a blacklist of people who complained to be distributed across HRs.
Florida got rid of that department in 2002.
I live in Indiana. MAGA governor, supermajority republican house, senate, and judges.
And, no, they do not care one bit about workers, renters, and the lower class. I'm solidly middle-upper class now. Home-morgage-r. Make remote 160k, which is amazing for the area.
I also live in 1 of 3 liberalish areas. Amazingly, theyre worse in things like FLOCK, taxation, gun rights, speech rights, jail decency (opposition to ACLU), and other amendment rights.
I dont sit in their pet issues. I dont matter. I likely won't ever matter.
Same game, different team.
This is under state jurisdiction, not federal.
Life makes a lot more sense when you realize the government, or at least this government, doesn't actually care about you.
Realistically, what did you want to happen? The cop to check the computer logs and see who changed your hours? Was it even someone in the store, or from corporate? Jurisdiction can get messy...
Proving someone intentionally changed your hours as opposed to a mistake or software bug is not the police's job. It quite literally is a civil crime and belongs in civil court, not criminal. I don't even think most police are trained in civil laws. (Atleast, not in my state?)
Catching someone who takes money out of a cash register is their job. That's textbook theft, a criminal activity.
I hate cops as much as the next guy, possibly more, but that just doesn't seem like their area
FWIW, the government is still (supposedly) working to resolve your issue...your tax dollars are still at work. Judge, Public Defender, blah blah blah....It's just not the job of a first responder
I want the same if the company had called the cops for a theft of $100 from a drawer.
If the company's rep calls, I go to jail.
If I call, diddly shit happens.
I'd vastly prefer the world where the untrained police actually stop getting involved in matters that they have no purpose being involved in, but to each their own I guess
> Immediately makes me think of the vitriol here on HN for the UK trying to enforce their age verification law outside their borders
The UK and US aren't unique in this regard. The concept of piracy has been commonly treated as a topic with universal jurisdiction that expands beyond borders, going back to the time when piracy meant people on boats in international waters. I'll be honest that I don't know if or how those laws correspond to digital piracy, but countries have long considered international piracy to be something their domestic courts can go after.
Practically speaking you can always choose to ignore it if you don't have offices or assets in that country and you're okay with never traveling there for the rest of your life. You also have to avoid countries with mutual extradition agreements because many countries will offer to extradite for certain crimes with the expectation that the other country will return the favor.
The UK age verification enforcement isn't a good comparison because the UK's overreach extends even to instances where UK citizens are geoblocked. Trying to enforce your country's laws on an operation in a different country which does not even serve your country is something else. For a recent example look at the online depression forum that is being threatened by the UK even though they've geoblocked UK users - Immediately makes me think of the vitriol here on HN for the UK trying to enforce their age verification law outside their borders
FWIW, "piracy" of copyrighted works and maritime piracy are completed unrelated legal concepts. Piracy in this context is just a rhetorical euphemism intended for moral framing, and doesn't have any meaningful legal import, notwithstanding that lawyers and judges use it like everybody else.
Relatedly, see Stallman's essay, Did You Say "Intellectual Property"? It's a Seductive Mirage: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html While courts understand "piracy" is euphemistic, the phrase "IPR" has been quite successful in shaping legal theories and jurisprudence.
EDIT: The correct word here isn't euphemism, but dysphemism. TIL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysphemism
Please don't equivocate “the concept of piracy” as if copyright infringement has any relation to kidnapping and murder.
> Please don't equivocate “the concept of piracy” as if copyright infringement has any relation to kidnapping and murder.
"Piracy" as a term for copying others' creative works dates back to the 1600s, and is in a 1736 dictionary:
> The term "piracy" has been used to refer to the unauthorised copying, distribution and selling of works in copyright.[8] In 1668 publisher John Hancock wrote of "some dishonest Booksellers, called Land-Pirats, who make it their practise to steal Impressions of other mens Copies" in the work A String of Pearls: or, The Best Things Reserved till Last by Thomas Brooks.[10]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement#%22Pira...
To act shocked and offended that the term points to two different activities in 2026 is non-sensical: that ship has sailed long ago.
What ship?
You're saying there is a moral obligation to be incorrect.
If anything this is the type of mistake where it's never too late to make things right. 10 billion years could pass and you would still be doing people a favour by calling things by their names.
> To act shocked and offended that the term points to two different activities in 2026 is non-sensical: that ship has sailed long ago.
“Equivocation is a logical fallacy and rhetorical tactic that uses ambiguous language, specifically switching the meaning of a key term or phrase within an argument to make it appear valid when it is not. It involves using one word to mean two different things, often to intentionally deceive, evade, or create ambiguity.”
I think you're missing the point. Piracy, "digital" or real, has always been something that extended beyond borders. They are alleging this is probably due to governments doing said equivocation, in digital piracy case's, although I think it has more to do with the international treaties.
No, I'm certain that you are: “piracy” doesn't exist as a coherent umbrella term that contains both naval piracy and copyright infringement, and the latter has certainly not “always” been enforced beyond borders.
I've been against the UK trying to shove its regulations everywhere and I'm just as against the US doing it.
I don't understand why it makes you think of that, this is a completely different situation. If Anna's Archive were an upstanding site run by a known operator in compliance with UK law, I would definitely be highly critical of this ruling. But it's actually an anonymously run site that violates most countries' copyright laws and is blocked in the UK.
>an upstanding site run by a known operator
Like Open AI?[1] Or the United States government?[2] While this may not be what you intend, it seems you're suggesting that "upstanding" and "known" parties (i.e. participants with wealth and influence) ought to be above the law.
1. https://www.artificialintelligence-news.com/news/study-claim...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_copyrighted_works_by_th...
I don't see what wealth and influence have to do with it. I think that if Website X is owned by a resident of, operated within the borders of, and complies with the laws of Country A, Country B should not try to bully the operator into changing the site. They can order domestic ISPs to block it if they want, or they can not do that if their citizens value Internet freedom.
If the site doesn't comply with the laws of Country A, or if the website operator hides so nobody can figure out which country is Country A, then it's an entirely different story.
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Copying intellectual property is not piracy. This term was co-opted by big industries to insure the cash cattle continue to pay. Piracy has a very specific sting to it. This was a deliberate choice. We don't call burglary "piracy", yet if we relax the definition enough to include IP theft, it is also piracy.
GabeN also had the wrong take in that it's a "supply problem" or whatever nonsense he said. GabeN is in fact an industry plant and owns one of the strictest IP protection platforms on the market. Why people buy on steam when they can ban you for almost anything and take everything you've ever rented (you dont own anything on steam). Thousands of dollars of games gone with a ban. In any normal world this would be tantamount to grand theft and a small business owner would actually face real prison time for it.
You can't "steal" something that isn't gone when it's stolen. If I walked into a house, took a necklace, and left an exact unaltered copy I'd at best be charged with a lesser crime that didn't include theft. But if you copy movies/music/software you're liable to have your entire life absolutely financially and possibly criminally ruined.
The government of the US is hardly a government for the people, by the people. It's strictly designed to enrich the few and consume "human resources".
>Copying intellectual property is not piracy. This term was co-opted by big industries to insure the cash cattle continue to pay.
Without weighing in on the merits or morals of copying intellectual property, the term 'piratical booksellers' was used in a British House of Commons speech by Thomas Babington Macaulay in 1841. (The speech itself is superb and well worth reading. I included one passage below.)
"At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot… Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create."
https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...
While I also find various approaches and reasons behind IP governance dumb, copying IP is piracy. In practice, copying some things is unlawful, regardless if we think it shouldn't be or if piracy once only referred to naval burglary.
If you copy a book in a bookstore, or leave a perfect synthetic copy of a natural diamond you take, you'll likely be charged with something. Digitally, that's much a clearer legal charge because copying is easier. So, neither is theft, but that doesn't make it lawful either.
There are valid reasons for enforcing IP rights digitally, because "all content should always be free" doesn't pay the bills when all you (can or want to) do is produce content. No existing society agrees that content producers should be subsidized, so in a society dependent on "earn for yourself", content producers shouldn't be punished.
But the punishment does exceed the severity of the "crime" by a lot, I agree.
Piracy started as a term directly related to theft. Its use in the modern age for copying is also an attempt to frame the activity as theft, even though there is no action that can reasonably described as theft. Copying leaves the original right where it was, so no theft has taken place. I'm not saying that violating copyright is OK, just that the terms we are using to describe the wrongness are willfully dishonest. The punishments are also not fit for the crime, but that's another matter entirely.
Look, I'm not even claiming that piracy is a good term for it, or that the association between theft and copying wasn't pushed in pro-IP campaigns. But for the past 20 (or 30?) years, piracy has been the word everyone uses for this type of activity.
My point is: even if you changed the word, and explained the difference to everyone who couldn't distinguish between (A) literal theft of a physical object, and (B) a replication of some sequences of binaries, you're still not addressing the real question.
And the real question is: Why shouldn't an author have an option to protect their IP, physically or digitally? What's the difference between copying a physical book and a digital book without author's approval, from the point-of-view of an author trying to get paid for every copy?
I'm personally a fan of alternatives to IP-based earnings and earning enforcement, but I don't see how that helps any author trying to make a living from their content in the world where there are very few alternatives.
My imperfect solution would be to implement some sort of compulsory licensing system that lets people copy at will for reasonable prices, and comes with a more sensible penalty system for violators. People should get paid for their work, but the system we have for that now sucks for everyone but the middlemen / IP squatters.
I'm pretty sure piracy also includes threats to phisical security by the pirates. No such thing here. Let's not dilute the meaning of the word.
> If I walked into a house, took a necklace, and left an exact unaltered copy I'd at best be charged with a lesser crime that didn't include theft
Idk what law books you've been reading but this isn't true.
To call Steam one of the strictest IP protection platforms is so laughably innacurate, it's basically wrong. Its DRM is trivial to bypass (specially compared to others), and I have yet to see a case where they banned someone for something stupid in a way that made them lose access to their library.
Otherwise, I agree with the spirit of your comment.
I never understand these positions. How do authors make money selling books if someone can legally copy it and give it out for free?
Commissions, grants, advertisements, sponsorships, donations, teaching... There's already an enormous ecosystem of artists and authors who work outside of the copyright realm (blog writers, substackers, social media artists, youtube creators, soundcloud rappers) and who make money enough to pursue their passion and whose business model would be totally unchanged if copyright were abolished entirely tomorrow. When their work is downloaded or shared or copied or linked or edited or remixed they appreciate it and see it as a multiplication of their artistic impact.
It's not necessarily incompatible: authors can make money in ways that don't depend on enforcing IP or even the number of books sold. For example, Patreon, Kickstarter, government subsidies, payment for number of books written, grants, etc.
However, all those other ways are more difficult to set up, and can be risky for the funders, so IP enforcement is the least-worst solution.
I dunno, the same way they did for decades with public libraries?
Did you take an argument that it's not theft and change the words?
Unlike theft, the word piracy is fine. Nobody thinks you're talking about ships, and the "specific sting" is negligible.
> GabeN also had the wrong take in that it's a "supply problem" or whatever nonsense he said.
It is a supply problem. Steam regional pricing and game passes have demolished piracy in countries where people wouldn't have dreamed of paying for a game 15 years ago. And so did Netflix for a while with video, but then everyone had to jump on the bandwagon and now piracy is flourishing again.
This isn't so relevant but Steam is actually very annoying to use. No easy settings to disable some of the overlays. I played Final Fantasy 7 and it was some gimped out graphics version, although SE (Square Enix) is also a kind of litigious company
Steam only adds one overlay (which is pretty easy to toggle off). if you have another graphic change or overlay it's the devs or publisher who added it
There's a per game toggle for their UI overlay basically and you just need to uncheck a box
Last week, I set-up a navidrome (docker compose) server after tagging my files with MusicBrainz and beets. I serve it over a private network (tailnet) using tailscale serve. It works on all my devices and on iOS with an app called Nautiline. Nautiline has a feature where it will switch between my local network address and my tailnet address seamlessly. It was so simple, I can't actually believe it works. It has CarPlay support and everything. A few clicks and I'm jamming and scrobbling to MusicBrainz. My next goal is to have a local LLM generate smart playlists. Everyone who wants off Spotify, or the other streaming music giants should do this.
Fabulous! Now just imagine if it supported video too... It would be some kind of... VideoLAN!
How are you feeding the client Lidarr, soularr?
soulseek, manually downloading files.
I’ve done the same and included on the same server the equivalent for every type of media: tv shows, movies, ebooks, audiobooks, even YouTube through a sophisticated proxy rotation pool. I have rid myself of every awful enshittified platform and I finally feel free from the bullshit.
Check out audiomuse-ai on GitHub for an open source song vector space embedding system that allows clustering and traversing a huge graph of similar songs, giving you really smart playlists and radios. Smart local LLM playlists are included.
Now I’m on to building a layer to take my song data and use it to query a bunch of apis to allow for “your favorite bands are playing near you” feature that isn’t sponsored.
> ...scrobbling to MusicBrainz...
Forgive the out of touch questions, but, doing what? And why?
Privacy friendly version of Last.fm for those that want to see a history of the things they've played. I have a history that goes back almost 10 years at this point on a self hosted service.
I see, thanks. What do you use the history for? Is it just curiosity about your own evolving interests, or do you have some other use for it?
I used to use last.fm, I switched to MusicBrainz last year. It has much better API access and I have a history of songs I've listened to since I was 17 in 2007. It's a time capsule, a tracker, a playlist generator and a record all-in-one. Scrobbling is just a word meaning 'to track listens'.
You can use it to generate recommendations in MusicBrainz for discovering new music. I use it just because I like exploring how my tastes change over time.
Have you tried Narjo as an alternative client?
After getting burned on faked/gamed ratings on a book trilogy where I had bought all three books before I started reading (they were terrible and I gave up during the second book), I now use Anna's archive to download a book and decide if I will pay for it later after reading at least some of it.
Seems like quite an eager purchase. Could you not have borrowed one of them from the library?
That’s what they did by downloading it from the Anna’s Archive.
Ironic, since Spotify started by pirating music[0]
[0] https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files...
Same as Facebook: They got big by the Zuck sucking messages and content from MySpace - then Facebook afterwards lobbied to put laws in place to forbid this kind of 'interoperability' across platforms.
Youtube started out 'allegedly' by members of their team uploading pirated hollywood movies (because they had no content), posing as users to fall under the "user-content" policy to make the company not liable.
They are all breaking the rules all the way down, but when they make it, they know exactly what to do to fill the loopholes to prevent others to do to them what they did on others. That's big tech's ethics for you: Move fast and break things, then wall yourself in.
The YouTube thing doesn't sound right. They had a ¿10? minute video limit for a long time and it was really annoying to watch pirated stuff on there. Google Video had a lot of full movies before they bought YouTube and shut it down.
Still remember those times watching movies or documentaries by parts. Sometimes I started watching just to discover that part 8 was missing :(
edit: in previous years some anime communities uploaded episodes to photo sites. They chunked the episodes in small JPGs with the video data encrypted. Just download hundreds of photos, join them and you got the episode :)
Remember this :)
I also remember how we (I?) used to hard link the /tmp/RANDOM.tmp files that youtube buffered into so the video parts don't get automatically unlinked and we could then stitch them back with ffmpeg or whatever buggy fork ubuntu had in its repos. Full Star wars in glorious 240p! (I had shitty internet.)
The good old days. Back when people called streaming what it really is (downloading) and exercised their god-given right to keep what was sent to them.
Wild to see the usenet/uuencoding model reproduced on the web w/ jpegs.
Then with the raise of rapidshare, megaupload, etc that JPG thing stopped.
Wow, how did that work? Steganography?
I think it was 15 minutes? Or maybe it was upped to 15 mins? But yes, it was super annoying when part n of something was missing.
Airbnb did the same with Craigslist posts. Reddit did the same with Digg posts. OpenAI mastered the technique by stealing basically the entire Internet.
Same as Crunchyroll with pirated anime fansubs.
Did Zuck really take messages and content? I know they had a certain "interoperability tool" that conveniently only worked in one direction but I didn't know it went that far
https://youtu.be/cBHouBDjqsc?si=Huil8xJys3VkYbGU
Anthropic and OpenAI have entered the chat
My feeling is that Spotify couldn't care less about Anna's Archive. It's bad but doesn't hurt Spotify. Just like Steam, convenient distribution trumps piracy, always.
If you look at the plaintiffs, Spotify is number 8 on the list, where the rest are the usual suspects: major record labels and distributors. Seems like Spotify was dragged along because they are beholden to rights holders, and they have to show that they take this seriously, and do something about it.
I vividly the scene release metadata still showing up in their player. I probably have screenshots of it somewhere...
Also, Anna's Archive hasn't actually released the mp3 files. Only the metadata.
"Intellectual property" as an idea has to go away
Like, all together? I'd agree that copyright terms are often much too long, but if you write a book, I'm totally okay with you owning the rights to that and making money off of it for a while.
We need to split "a creation" and "a set of ideas used in creation"
You created entire book ? Sell it for 40 years, sure But that should not apply to someone taking a tiny thing from it and making their own stuff around it, 10 years maybe.
> But that should not apply to someone taking a tiny thing from it and making their own stuff around it, 10 years maybe
Totally agree with that idea.
Yes all together.
This sounds flippant, but I agree with it, so I'll expand on it:
"Property" is a useful social tool for managing stuff that is scarce and which can't easily be shared. Food, tools, shelter, land, and so on. Property produces stability. People can count on having their stuff later, even if they're not using it at this instant. That lets them make longer-term plans, which, ideally, result in lots of different kinds of things becoming less scarce.
Ideas and information, however, are not scarce. Any number of brains and storage media can hold them simultaneously. That's not true of a pizza. But for a long time "intellectual property" worked pretty well because the copying of ideas and information required significant effort and materials. Books had to be typeset and printed. Music had to be stamped onto vinyl or written onto tape, which needed specialized equipment. All this made it so that we could pretend that ideas and information were scarce.
Now, that's not true anymore. Our technology has advanced to the point where the equipment for copying information is ubiquitous and unspecialized. We have to face the actual nature of information: It's not scarce. "Property" doesn't work on it anymore.
Which really does leave artists and authors and other intellectual producers in a bad spot, since the time and effort involved in creating stuff hasn't gone down. We have this kind of thing now where it either doesn't exist at all or it exists in such abundance that the adjective is unneeded. How do we economically incentivize something like that?
Personally, I lean towards the suspicion that for some kinds of things, mainly entertainment, we don't need to incentivize it anymore at all. People are not going to stop writing fiction and recording music just because it doesn't pay anymore.
The real jam is in non-fiction, because that costs of making that stuff are higher than just food and shelter for the producer while they're writing. Research often requires travel, experimentation, equipment, materials. How do these get paid for?
>"Property" is a useful social tool for managing stuff that is scarce and which can't easily be shared. Food, tools, shelter, land, and so on. Property produces stability. People can count on having their stuff later, even if they're not using it at this instant. That lets them make longer-term plans, which, ideally, result in lots of different kinds of things becoming less scarce.
Yep
Theres no scarcity to manage here and its more comical the further I look at it.
>Which really does leave artists and authors and other intellectual producers in a bad spot, since the time and effort involved in creating stuff hasn't gone down
Well it may have done with LLMs we arent 100% sure there yet.
>Personally, I lean towards the suspicion that for some kinds of things, mainly entertainment, we don't need to incentivize it anymore at all. People are not going to stop writing fiction and recording music just because it doesn't pay anymore.
You cant copy an experience, people will always pack out stadiums for live music. If musicians wont make music because oops it got added to the gestalt cultural heritage of mankind well they can jump in a lake. And I have talked with tons of authors who have full time jobs on the side. This will only really impact the top 5% or so of professional authors, and force them to be more productive too.
>The real jam is in non-fiction, because that costs of making that stuff are higher than just food and shelter for the producer while they're writing. Research often requires travel, experimentation, equipment, materials. How do these get paid for?
Being the first person who can manufacture something still gives you a decent first mover advantage. It doesn't mean you cant sell your goods at a profit, it just means you have to sell your goods with competition. So less profit. Likewise with Music and Fiction, lots of people want to be first, your first book will sell a lot of copies, the first pressing of your vinyl also.
Honestly it probably means more public sector RND funding is required and not much else.
It's even more absurd now when the big AI companies train their LLMs on torrented books.
Don't you know that it's okay to steal IP (and skirt laws in general) when you're a big company with lots of money?
One torrent is a crime, breaking all the laws by downloading terabytes of books and processing them is a trillion dollar business.
The torrenting was the only thing they were found to have done wrong, which makes sense.
"Intellectual property" is a hack we put together to make capitalism properly assign value to abstract ideas that we all agree have value, but are inherently devalued by free market forces.
Capitalism by itself is incapable of valuing art and ideas beyond the marginal cost of producing duplicates, which has been on a steady downward trend since the invention of the printing press.
Our economy is increasingly reliant on a class of product that is fundamentally incompatible with how capitalism works. Maybe rather than adding to the centuries old hack that is clearly falling apart, we need to rethink things from the ground up.
What an incredible shallow reading of "capitalism".
Capitalism doesn't "assign value" to anything. It can't assign value to anything.
The value of something is determined only by a transaction. It's not assigned.
The value of something is made apparent only after an exchanged is made. Otherwise there is no "inherent" or "assigned" value to anything. The value is made explicit only after a transaction is made.
Abstract ideas don't really have value. Silicon Valley/Tech, which is perhaps the most ardent and exemplary capitalist industries today, does not assign value to abstract ideas. It assigns value to execution/tangible action.
Their point is that market forces push the value down to the marginal cost of copying.
This complaint about "determining" versus "assigning" value is not important. And copyright does follow execution, not the abstract idea.
mostly effects the poor and ignorant so considered a minor issue
Yes, and the real piracy happens in the courtrooms, done by the "rights holders" without so much as a courtesy spit.
Don’t you mean as a law? Ideas should be free.
No as a concept. Assigning ownership to specific bit patterns is absurd.
So, anyone should be able to sell something called "Coca Cola"?
Nitpick: that’s trademark, not copyright. While it’s bundled under IP, it’s a different beast altogether.
The above claim was in fact regarding “intellectual property”. If you break it down, there are plenty of IP rights which make a lot of sense.
Here’s one for copyright:
“Do you think any corporation should be allowed to make closed source forks of GPL software?”
If there’s no copyright, there’s no closed source. You get their code, decompile/disassemble and reuse as you see fit.
You might argue that doesn't help much if they never distribute that code (only runs on their servers). Here’s the inconvenient truth: GPL already allows that. Anyone can take a GPL codebase, do any modifications they want, run it forever, and never contribute back. You’d need AGPL to forbid that. GPL is only concerned if you further distribute the modifications.
Next one?
A lack of copyright does not mean secrets cannot exist. In fact, it would heavily incentivize it.
> Anyone can take a GPL codebase, do any modifications they want, run it forever, and never contribute back.
Only privately or over a network, but it prohibits distribution of binaries without source. This is the primary reason the GPL exists.
And how does that exactly stop Amazon, Google or Microsoft (heh) from running GPLd software in their data centers and raking in money for hosting products built by poor open source devs?
I'm not worried about Microsoft recompiling bash and redistributing it. Is that a realistic problem for you?
It doesn't, neither the GPL nor any mainstream license prohibit commercial hosting... not even AGPL. Nobody said it did.
Here’s the convenient truth: GPL doesnt allow distributing the binary without distributing the code. Next one?
Awesome. If you think that is stopping anyone, here's a challenge for you:
GNU Bash is GPL. You can run Bash (and many other Linux commands) in Windows through Windows Subsystem for Linux. In fact, WSL is a nice example of Microsoft doing embrace & extend.
The challenge: find the Microsoft's published code for Bash.
WSL does not include bash. When you use bash from within WSL, it is using the version of bash that was included in the upstream distribution of linux you have installed. If you are using a Debian based image, to get the source code run the following:
You can also reference the website of the distribution you have chosen to install, e.g. https://packages.ubuntu.com/noble/bashMy point exactly (notice I didn't say MS distributes bash - it doesn't, as you pointed out).
Bash being GPL doesn't stop MS from benefiting from it by providing it to WSL users which make WSL more valuable for them. It also (as we talked in the other comment) doesn't prevent Amazon from running a database and charging people for it.
So what's this great advantage of GPL that it would make it worthwhile to keep the entire copyright system just so we could still have GPL?
If you dig around in its origin, GPL was concieved as a tool to "fight system from within system". If there's no system, you don't have to fight the system.
> notice I didn't say MS distributes bash
Then why did you ask for something if you knew it didn't exist???
Overall I think you are mistaken about the purpose of the GPL. It does not, nor has it ever intended to prohibit commercial activities. RMS and FSF have been pretty clear about this for many decades. And in fact, they are against the idea of licenses that prohibit commercial use.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html
The point of GPL is to enforce a specific worldview of developer freedoms through the application of copyleft.
I'm trying to understand the actual harm you think would come to free software if in fact there were no copyright, hence no GPL.
The reason that large successful projects like Linux are so capable is not because it has a price tag of zero (and it often does not), but because of the feedback loop created by the viral-nature of the software license.
The vast majority of Linux is not a volunteer project -- but software developed by commercial software engineers who are being paid by a company to write software. Before copyleft, the idea that they would voluntarily share source code was laughable. The only reason they do is because they are legally required to do so.
This viral nature of copyleft creates a positive feedback loop:
1. Company uses software because it is free and solves a problem
2. they need a modification so they make it
3. they contribute back to the project because it is required by the copyright license
4. the project becomes more valuable at solving more problems that other companies have
5. Go to step 1
Breaking this feedback loop would put companies back to their natural state of not sharing. The result is that the software landscape would start to look a lot like the 80s and 90s again.
Without copyright, copyleft would not exist. And without copyleft, Linux would have been a hobby OS that died out in the early 90s. We'd be using things like Windows Server, Unix, etc. And to protect their business in the absence of copyright, they'd have heavy DRM schemes, obfuscation, cryptographic licensing, etc.
This entire comment is completely backwards. Linux gained momentum first, then it was adopted by the wider industry.
It's much easier to upstream your desired changes than maintain a separate fork (closed or otherwise) long-term. Additionally, many of the contributors have been using it for own servers, not required to contribute back.
Things like NVidia and other closed drivers show you can bolt a non-open part to the GPL code if you try enough.
> And without copyleft, Linux would have been a hobby OS that died out in the early 90s. We'd be using things like Windows Server, Unix, etc.
This ignores the entire existence of FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD.
> they'd have heavy DRM schemes, obfuscation, cryptographic licensing
This ignores the existence of heavy DRM schemes, obfuscation, kernel-level anticheat spyware, criminalisation of copyright-circumvention schemes, etc.
At this point, I think you're just trolling, so I'll stop here.
> It's much easier to upstream your desired changes than maintain a separate fork (closed or otherwise) long-term. Additionally, many of the contributors have been using it for own servers, not required to contribute back.
Then why is ~75% of the kernel from corporate commits today? You think large tech companies just started to become coincidentally generous with the advent of Linux?
> This ignores the entire existence of FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD.
The BSD are quite niche in install base and highly rely on GPL'd ports from Linux.
And, by far the most popular OS in the BSD family tree is MacOS, which is primarily closed source.
> This ignores the existence of heavy DRM schemes, obfuscation, kernel-level anticheat spyware, criminalisation of copyright-circumvention schemes, etc.
I'm not ignoring it, I'm telling you that would be more common, if you remove the all of the other mechanisms by which a company could choose. Without any legal controls whatsoever, the only option to control the use of a company's software would be through technical means. Removing other options would be incentivizing this.
What a dumb question. Got any more?
Intellectual property isn’t about bit patterns.
Why? People are currently free to release all intellectual rights to what they release, so in theory these is already a intellectual property right free marketplace and people that want to create under that model creating.
Lengths just have to be reasonable, comparable to time in production (median of salaried employee-hours / median # of employees over the period) of the average item in a class. The vast majority of the private value is captured well within that time. It also keeps people honest and discourages rentseeking that isn't tied to labor.
Ownership of intellectual property still matters, but right to copy&modify shouldn't last that long. It isn't hard to imagine another system of IP rights that provide value to the creator but not to the expense of society. Disney used public domain to build it's foundation then pulled up the ladder. Disney's market cap is lower than the damage longer copyright has caused, it's already been trillions, hundreds of trillions looking into the near future.
for shame, you stole that idea: :)
https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/bm1umw/in...
"property" as an idea has to go away
I agree in fractions.
I think land ownership should be abolished. That'll never happen for a lot of reasons, but it's highly unethical in my opinion. Ignoring who the land was stolen from to begin with, I also feel that it's looting the future, land ownership often being generational and severely kneecapping society from making better, more productive use of a finite resource as its needs change over time.
I do not think intellectual property should be abolished outright, because I can't think of a reliable incentive structure constructed entirely from the social interest. I do think it, particularly copyright, should be severely curtailed, however. Companies exclusively controlling huge swaths of popular culture for 90 years or whatever basically amounts to theft from the public commons, in my opinion. If you're going to replace folk culture with Mickey Mouse, then we ought to own a bit of that, more quickly than is being done.
I have no issue with personal property and actually think it should be strengthened. Consider the right to repair; the right to run the software we choose on the devices we ostensibly own; the erosion of our ability to freely trade, share, and preserve increasingly digital products; stronger enforcement of Magnusson-Moss; infringements of our privacy in an online world; and so on.
No private person should be taxed for the space he needs to occupy to survive, that is slavery to the state! Return to allodial titles!
Who was the land stolen from?
*Conquered. All's fair in love and war.
this won't actually change anything right?
> the operators of the site remain unidentified. The judgment [...] orders Anna’s Archive to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, that includes valid contact information for the site and its managing agents
They already removed the files when the lawsuit was filed.
Obviously, they're not paying the $322 million. The amount doesn't matter because they're not paying anything. What it does enable is seizing their domain names and any other resources that are hosted by companies in the US jurisdiction.
Aren't they widely believed to be Russian? They've been running for long enough that they're almost certainly in a non-extradition jurisdiction and know to stay there.
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Please which countries, though? China? The EU? The US? All of them have conflicting interests and you can't please all three.
However, many countries are not that important. The US, EU, and China don't care which countries they have good relations with. And then there are countries like Saudi Arabia, which the US, EU, and China all need.
If you're bad at governing you can't please all three.
Please do tell us of that mythical leader who is so good at governing that no other country has ever had a grievance with them?
Well I didn’t exactly make some kind of claim of “no grievance ever,” I’m just saying that it’s not that hard to find countries that have good relationships with the US, China, and EU all at once.
Example: most member states within the RCEP trade agreement (e.g., Australia)
India
Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru.
Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, and Turkey all deliberately hedge relations between blocs.
Japan and South Korea are heavily economically intertwined (not conflict-free obviously)
Singapore
South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt
China hates India. China hates Japan even more. China sometimes hates South Korea. The US hates Mexico (and flip flops when presidents do) America imposed a dictatorship on Chile. The US has threatened Brazil recently. The US has also threatened military action against Colombia this year.
Places like Singapore, Nigeria, and Kenya are just irrelevant on the global stage. Singapore is great for money laundering and nobody sees them as a threat to their own sovereignty due to being a tiny little island that's completely dependent on its neighbors for food and water. When you're a big country with a big economy, you get enemies merely by existing.
The US does not hate Mexico, the right wing party just pretends to hate them in order to appeal to their racist voter base. “Hate” doesn’t result in a broad free trade agreement where over 80% of auto parts manufactured in Mexico are sold to the US and companies like GM assemble the Silverado there.
China hates Japan? Where is your PlayStation made? If China hates them so much where are the economic sanctions or restrictions? I certainly agree that there are disputes and negative public perceptions between the countries, but their economies are heavily intertwined.
Same deal with India. China’s largest trade partner, larger than the US. Here’s an article where Chinese officials are glowing about India: https://www.timesnownews.com/business-economy/economy/china-...
We also probably have to exclude threats made by Donald Trump from the discussion since he threatens obvious allies and is generally mentally unstable. Remember how he threatened to annex Canada? Canada is obviously an ally but our fucking moron president doesn’t know that.
Nigeria has over 240 million people, it’s not irrelevant on the global stage. All the African countries I mentioned are of great interest as they reach a developed state.
Fun fact: the Nigerian film industry grossed $6.4 billion in 2024, while the US domestic gross box office was $8.6 billion in the same year.
Calling Singapore irrelevant on the global stage is also laughable. 28th largest GDP in the world, 8th largest per capita. It’s not a Caribbean money laundering center where there’s no local economy. They refine oil, they’re ranked number 2 in biotechnology, 1st in broadband download speeds, 4th in global innovation index, 1st in economic competitiveness, the list goes on.
Bold claims with no backing. Always bet on russian antagonism.
Or apathy. The combo is extremely spicy.
I'm sure this time it won't turn into a imperialistic dictatorship.
Many of them.
Way things are going, I suspect that many of people who are wanted by the American government will find friendly arms in China and Europe.
(Perhaps even there I'm optimistic about Russia wanting to normalise relations? Or existing?)
I don't think with the EU, the EU bases its identity on rules for the better or worse.
Sure, but also the EU is comparably as weak over its member states as the US Federal government was over American states in the Articles of Confederation era. This is how Hungary was able to paralyse the collective response against Russia.
Nevertheless, extraditions based on international mandates are usually respected (terms and conditions may apply, see Greece or Italy). Wanted people often go to Serbia nowadays, to give a successful example.
Indeed. But I did write "will find friendly arms in China and Europe", and Greece, Italy, and indeed Serbia, are in Europe.
The whole continent != nation thing is clearer with the EU != Europe (due to the EU not even being a nation yet) than with the American nation != The Americas.
Even then, don't underestimate rules-lawyering of laws: I wish to suggest that the USA is going down the path of "rogue state", and that extradition treaties may have clauses (either explicitly in treaty text* or implicitly via the European Convention on Human Rights) protecting individuals from the risk of a death penalty, which may end up getting invoked due to the US having the death penalty.
* https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/agreement... and https://www.congress.gov/treaty-document/109th-congress/14/d...
If there's a loss of trust that the US will honour its obligations, and in other cases besides extradition this has already happened, what then?Assuming "Russia" cares to and can find out who is running Anna.
> Russia after Putins fall will do everything to please other countries, to get back to good terms
This is pretty obviously not true? Russia's not going to try to please the us or most European countries, and many fugitives in Russia only angered those countries.
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Russians will get extradited right after French citizens in France or Lebanese in Lebanon.
It's honestly astonishing the US is cucked enough to betray their own citizens up for trial by foreign court. Plenty of places won't do that.
Perhaps US may extradite some ordinary US citizens, but for example when some member of the US military kills in another country someone by driving drunk, USA will immediately smuggle him from that country, so that he will not stand trial in a foreign court for his crime.
And we would be stupid to give them as access to cheese afterward. They had that chance and blew it.
There is unlikely to be any thaw within our lifetimes.
That's not how politics necessarily works. Russia oil and already existing infrastructure into Europe means that Europe has huge incentives to continue trading eventually.
That's also better than Russia focusing delivering their resources to China for good.
There's unlikely to be any thaw within Putin's lifetime. Putin is 73. What happens after that? Opportunity to be a clean slate.
Before the war, upper-class Russians had it good. Freedom of movement to the West. Russian money was popular in Europe, now it's got a Chernobyl toxic glow to it. It wouldn't be so bad to go back to 2010 Russia before Putin threw all of that away on territorial expansion and irridentism.
Putin is a Russian moderate. Anyone who pays attention to Russian politics prays for his good health and long life.
Difficult to imagine a less moderate policy than starting a war which gets hundreds of thousands of Russians killed. Starting a nuclear war?
Losing hundreds of thousands in war vs hundreds of thousands (or more) in labour camps.
Putting a bullet in your skull for accessing a blocked internet resource vs just blocking the resource or paying a fine.
Honestly I can name many things that can be different.
Well for starters he might try and conquer Greenland.
The nuclear war is the immoderate Russians.
Except for the fact that the US started this war with the 2014 coup and the progressive arming of Ukraine.
The main opposition party in Russia is the Communist party. Their leader was one of the first to call for a general mobilisation.
Where can I learn more?
Nothing to learn about, really.
We've got army block, FSB block, technocrats, bureaucrats and oligarchs. The usual (more or less) story.
The real problem is - we don't have system that scales horizontally. So when Putin goes people will have to deal with the vertical system he created for himself.
The problem here is this "for himself" part.
For this system to work you will have to be a new Putin (at least for some time) and for this you will have to enforce your decisions and shape your new system. Top to bottom.
Best thing that can happen to Russian (realistically) is that the power will be given to technocrats.
They are not neccesarily more liberal, but they have real education, they do understand a thing or to about economics, open borders, sharing of knowledge etc.
They won't be able to quickly change Russia, but given some time they can reshape it step by step.
Alas - we have FSB and Army blocks, high level of corruption and millions of people who see people like Putin as the best choice. They don't need progress and responsibility. They need their empire back even if they are just peasants with serfdom included.
That's the funny thing of course. I don't understand who this show really is for
I imagine the record companies and shareholders.
It would look bad if they did nothing, so a few 100k on legal theatre is worth it for them. Now they can say it's the US courts that are powerless.
Probably the people involved getting paid hefty fees for the whole thing.
Slightly OT: How is it possible that the operators are unidentified? Surely someone must own the domain and pay upkeep for that? Wouldn't that expose at least one of them?
Yes your honor, we've identified one Big Bird of 123 Sesame St as being affiliated with the operators of the site based on the registration data.
The only reason you have to tell the truth is if you want to reduce the risk of arbitrarily losing control of the domain, such as having a chance to contest any abuse reports that might be filed against you.
It’s well established if the US wants to they can find them and crypto can be traced.
Same question though how are they paying for the domain, assuming this is on the plaintiff to trace
What does "finding them" even means in this context? There are many hacker organizations located in Russia that are much worse than Anna's Archive. From my understanding those also operate websites / platforms to offer services.
Well clearly that’s false? Not all crypto transactions are traceable for example. And since they haven’t found them, that seems to disprove your statement doesn’t it?
Not really this is civil case not the full weight of a state behind it
> crypto can be traced
Anna's Archive exclusively uses Monero, which can't be by design
This is presumably the real target of the lawsuit: the domain operators. There will likely be injunctions taking down the domains.
Some of the Anna domains have been taken down a few weeks ago.
Several domains previously used by Anna have been lost.
I assume that they may have been seized as a consequence of this trial.
there are ways to buy domains using crypto and being completely anonymous.
ultimately it will depend on their opsec. i do think it shows that opsec strategies and tech can have a use case that is not morally bad (at least not in a straightforward way). so the good research done in this field is actually justified
"the operators of the site remain unidentified." I laughed at this quite a bit.
They will never see a single cent from that, AA will continue to rotate domains and nothing was accomplished, except for spotify's legal team which earned easy money arguing against empty chair in court.
BTW, you can donate and get faster downloads: https://annas-archive.gl/donate
Just donated in honor of this. Up yours spotify!
Maybe it's not about the money primarily. There are enough parties out there that want the people behind Anna's archive behind bars and I'm afraid this will end the same way as for the Pirate Bay guys in the best case and like it ended for Aaron Schwartz in the worst.
Fwiw, piratebay continues to be the -to my knowledge- biggest public tracker out there, with basically every media production available.
And I think that was his point. They may ruin some people's life's... but aside from that, they achieve nothing.
Just visited two nights ago and was pleasantly surprised to see domains active with fresh magnets. The people are returning to nature.
It never stopped!
> basically every media production available.
not sure why you made this claim as its not at all germane to the discussion but this isn't even remotely true.
> piratebay continues to be the -to my knowledge- biggest public tracker out there
It has been compromised for more than a decade. The site is impossible to navigate without an adblocker due to malicious redirect ads and most of the major torrents are being monitored by rights management companies who will notify the user’s ISP of suspected infringement.
All public torrents are monitored by the movie studios, that has nothing to do with how The Pirate Bay is run. Users can just hop jurisdictions with a VPN and use these public torrents without ever getting any complaint letters.
Those are just crappy replicas of 'The Pirate Bay'. Full of annoying junk ads. 1337x is probably the biggest public tracker.
and even 1337x is too annoying to use at times compared to RuTracker
yeah, rutracker is to my knowledge the biggest and "cleanest" semi-public tracker.
If the operators of Anna's Archive live somewhere like Russia or China, there's a good chance nothing will ever come of any of this legal action. Anna's Archive's biggest challenge is just maintaining availability of infrastructure.
If they were not physically in Russia or similar country out of the jurisdiction of the court, then they have likely moved to one or operate from one.
At this point, the court is just a willing instrument of corporate anger and assistant to help vent their frustration. The secondary purpose, is to erode rights and privacy, for a continual surveillance state and gain as much control over the DNS infrastructure as possible.
You really ought to read about what happened to Steven Donziger. One of the most corrupt cases I've ever heard of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Donziger
For folks who don't feel like clicking through:
Chevron hired a private prosecutor who was friends with the judge who took the case, to prosecute Donziger after he won a case outside of the US against Chevron.
That’s a big if. My bet is that they are in Central or Northern Europe, just like the Pirate Bay people. Unlikely anyone in Russia or China would care to offer a service primarily to the benefit of the western world. I bet there are similar sites in the Runet or behind the Great Firewall we don't even know about and that simply don't bother catering to us.
Yep. You can also see that in the design language and the written English on their sites and blog posts. Something created by people with a Russian or Chinese background would approach a myriad of little things differently.
What are you on about? rutracker, libgen, sci-hub, z-lib are all Russian/ex-Soviet projects and cater heavily to westerners. I'm 99% sure archive.is and anna's-archive are also in this category.
I see your point for most of these but why rutracker? It is entirely in Russian.
Z-library was/is very likely run by Russians. They were even arrested by FBI, but escaped. Archive.is is likely run by a Russian. LibGen was run by Russians.
They are all not Anna's Archive and one is not like the other. Z-library, LibGen maybe, Archive.is might be eastern Europe but almost certainly not Russia. Just because it's advantageous in some cases to appear Russian or Chinese doesn't mean it is true. Some are better in their camouflage others like https://migflash.com/ not so much.
There's at least a strong case that Archive.is is Russian run:
https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-...
There is no "strong case" in this article. Yeah the guy linked to it has a slavic name and likely speaks Russian. Guess what? That's true for most of eastern Europe you will find plenty of people matching these criteria all over the rest of Europe.
> Unlikely anyone in Russia or China would care to offer a service primarily to the benefit of the western world.
Russians are huge on the piracy scene and have been for decades, primarily because it’s an effective way for the Russian Federation to thumb their nose at the Americans. China has more than a billion people in it. I’m sure between the two of them there is at least one person that identifies with citizen of the world style liberalism (and, if I could venture to be an optimist, probably a lot more than one).
Not necessarily. More cheerful examples exist, usually outside the west:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan
They are almost certainly being financed by the AI lobby as they have been open about providing API access to companies training AI in exchange for “donations.”[1][2][3] Having all of this data available online for free gives those looking for training data plausible deniability. It would turn into a huge legal headache if OpenAI had scraped Spotify directly, but if they launder it through a third party they can at least try to argue they weren’t responsible for the infringement.
Spotify got started doing the same thing, though.[4]
[1]: https://annas-archive.gl/blog/llms-txt.html (“Making an enterprise-level donation will get you fast SFTP access to all the files, which is faster than torrents.”)
[2]: https://annas-archive.gl/blog/duxiu-exclusive.html (“We’re looking for some company or institution to help us with OCR and text extraction for a massive collection we acquired, in exchange for exclusive early access. After the embargo period, we will of course release the entire collection.”)
[3]: https://annas-archive.gl/donate (“Enterprise-level donation or exchange for new collections (e.g. new scans, OCR’ed datasets). […] We welcome large donations from wealthy individuals or institutions. For donations over $5,000, please contact us directly at Contact email.”)
[4]: https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files... (“Rumors that early versions of Spotify used ‘pirate’ MP3s have been floating around the Internet for years. People who had access to the service in the beginning later reported downloading tracks that contained ‘Scene’ labeling, tags, and formats, which are the tell-tale signs that content hadn’t been obtained officially.”)
Or you know, MegaUpload. Raided at his home, while congress was trying to pass a bill, that allowed them to... stop online piracy... apparently, they REALLY needed that bill in order to do so.
> like it ended for Aaron Schwartz in the worst.
They’ll… be offered 4 months in prison, or 6 months with an opportunity to ask the judge for less?
I don’t know about you, but to me that seems way more chill than how the TPB guys were treated!
> > like it ended for Aaron Schwartz in the worst.
>They’ll… be offered 4 months in prison, or 6 months with an opportunity to ask the judge for less?
Surely the implication is that they'll end up being found dead, as happened to Aaron Swartz.
Is the implication then that Aaron Swartz was murdered?
I don't know how to feel about any of this.
First and foremost, I feel like Spotify is scummy. I don't like what they did when they were founded, I don't like what they do to artists.
I hate the hyperscalers being in this business (Google, Apple, Amazon) as that's another thing they do that devalues an otherwise healthy market. Bringing in outside business division revenues to dump on another market's prices is ecologically unhealthy for optimal capitalism and healthy competition.
On the one hand, while I want cheap media, I also want artists to make money. While Spotify puts real price pressure on artists, piracy brings artists absolutely nothing at all.
I get Gabe's value prop with Valve. Make the service easy, cheap, convenient, good, and piracy begins to diminish.
But if there are cheap services and cheap avenues (that still underpay artists), why then switch to a mode that pays artists nothing at all?
Do Bandcamp. Buy merch. Do something to support the artists. I feel like paying piracy services is the opposite of that.
But ethical quandary - doesn't Anna's Archive also support spreading research papers, etc.?
Complicated feelings.
I wish we had better ways to pay originators of things. Art, music, authors, researchers, ICs, ...
I feel like studios and middlemen and companies themselves are entities that exist because rewarding work or value or happiness at the site of exchange is hard/intangible.
I’d love to see a streaming service where my payment goes to artists I listen to.
Spotify pays 70% of their music revenue to publishers based on the total number of listens. All revenue is put together and split based on the global numbers. Which means that niche band I like will get next to nothing. Instead if they account for 50% of my listening time in one month, they should get 35% of what I paid to Spotify that month. Unfortunately big labels will never agree to that.
But, unless they put some thresholds on minimum listens, isn't basically the same thing what they do and what you propose?
35% of 1 is the same as 0.000000035 of 10.000.000
If you and I both pay $10/mo to listen to Spotify, and we are the only subscribers. If I listen to 1 song by Sabrina Carpenter, and you listen to 99 songs by Taylor Swift. Then of our $20 (after Spotify's share) 1% of the money will go to Sabrina and 99% of the money will go to Taylor. Because Taylor was played 99x more than Sabrina. Even though for both of us as users, our respective artist was 100% of our listening.
It doesn't calculate your amount of listening and determine the payout based on that. All listens are pooled together and all subscription money is pooled together. And the payout is determined based on that.
No, because let's say OP pays USD 10 and listens to only one song one time -- obviously, Linkin Park In the end -- right now, the payout is almost nothing.
With OP proposal, they would get USD 7.
no. if you listen only to niche musicians, all of the fee goes to most popular one regardless.
It also promotes botting, as spotify only counts listens, bot listening a ton to a fraudulent artist will siphon money away from essentially everyone.
"Money only goes to artists you listen" would be very good change
Not all listens show the same intention. If I go to the barbershop and they're playing Spotify top-40 playlists running all day long, that is very different from me actively choosing what I want to listen to for a few hours a months while I'm listening in my car, or putting on Friends Per Second while doing the dishes.
My $7/mo should be going to the artists I actually chose to listen to, not the stuff that droned passively for hours in background environments. Particularly when I'm actually a high margin customer for Spotify; the cost to them of my subscription is low since I spend so little time on the service. That makes it all the more galling that my subscription cost is mostly going to Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran.
I mean, I understand and agree, and I'm pretty sure that Spotify Premium users are very skewed towards less mainstream tastes, so I agree it would be better for smaller artists and would probably change the power balance (well, if we forget that music labels exist). But yeah, if as others pointed out you were to give 70% of your subscription cost to the artist that composed/performed the single track you listened this month, it would be very different.
At the end of the day, indies need to be on Spotify much more than Spotify needs them there. But for mainstream artists, it's the opposite; so the representatives of top-40 artists are the ones dictating the terms of how the system works for everyone, and unsurprisingly the system they've settled on is one that seems fair enough as long as you don't think too deeply about it, but ensures that the biggest slice of the pie goes to themselves.
It would be better.
If my listening is to Ed Sheeran for 9 hours a day and I pay $10, spotify take $3 for a platform fee, and Ed should get 10% of the rest - $7
If your listening is to Dave Smith for 1 hour a day and you pay $10, spotify take $3 for a platform fee, and Dave should get 10% of the rest - $7
That would be a fair way of distributing the revenue
But it's not. Instead Ed Sheeran gets 90% of listens and Dave Smith 10%, the listen pot is $14, so Ed gets $12.60 and Dave gets $1.40
To play the devil's advocate, if we do this, your favorite artist will get paid less if you listen to others using Spotify radio shuffle feature vs if you stay on the artist page and only listen to that one artist?
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
If you listen to the artist less then they will receive less of your money. What's the issue you're seeing there?
Well, if I listen to a shuffle radio then the artists I listen to will get paid, right? Which I’m fine with, it’s not that I want to support one specific artist (I can buy their album or merch if that’s my goal), I just want the money I pay to go to artists I listen to, not to the people from top charts that I don’t care about
That sounds like the intended effect. I think the objection is that the user's payment is being diluted by all the other listeners. Someone who listens to spotify constantly is going to influence the payouts much more than someone who listens to it occasionally, even though they are paying the same amount to spotify and the latter user might have only subscribed to listen to one band.
How bout this: artists whose songs are played on shuffle only get a small percentage compared to those who users play on purpose.
I'm not sure I follow your logic.
100 people subscribe to spotify and listen for 100 hours a month each, for $10 a month. You listen to your favourite artist for 50 hours and other stuff for 50 hours. No-one else listens to your favourite artist.
I assume that if this is band is treated as the "average" Total listening hours = 100 * 100 = 10,00. Total money: 100 * 10 = $1,000. They get: 50 / 10,000 * $1,000 = $5
That seems fair? Obviously some bands won't have negotiating power when they first start and might get less, or some get more, but that feels like how the industry always worked, and not something to do with spotify?
You don't see the problem because you're using the same number of hours for everyone. When you have some accounts using 500 hours and others using 50 there are problems. And the 500 hour account is more likely on autopilot and reinforcing whatever's already popular.
Why is that unfair? Do the maths for me please?
Let’s say I listen to 10h a month of a single artist, nothing else. So 100% of my payment (minus Spotify take) should go to that artist.
Let’s say you listen 90h to another artist, and nothing else.
In the current model both artists are put together, 100h and let’s say $20 to split. Your artist gets 90% because they’ve been listened to for 90h, so they get $18 and my artist gets $2
In my model my artist gets $10 because they get 100% of what I pay and your artist gets $10 because they get 100% of what you pay.
The difference is 50/50 vs 90/10 split
Ah right, I get it now, thanks.
The unfairness comes when you spend an abnormal amount of time listening. If you listen less than the average user then the bands you like won't be getting x% of your money that lines up with your listening habits.
Why is that unfair? Do the maths for me please?
I always thought it was a really cool idea to bridge the spotify streaming idea with local style purchasing, so say 10$ a month and the user gets ~3$ per month of that to "buy" media. so it defaults initially to their most played artist unless they indicate they want to buy something in particular instead.
Artists get big cuts when people buy their music, and if people decide to cancel their paid subscription, they still have the bought media available with no predatory gating like spotify uses to try to coerce people to resubscribing.
Listening is no longer profitable. Artists cannot sell listening. What they can sell are live performances.
Digital music just becomes marketing for live performances.
> I don't like what they do to artists
Not sure if you're aware, but it's the labels, not Spotify:
> It pays roughly two-thirds of every dollar it generates from music, with nearly 80% allocated to recording royalties and about 20% to publishing, though how much artists and songwriters ultimately receive depends on their agreements with rights holders, which Spotify does not control. [0]
Spotify is frantically trying to escape the record label's death grip (hence podcasts), because they know they can squeeze it for just about anything with licensing deals. It's a terrible business model! Spotify keeps a third for their costs (& finally some profit in the past year or two), ie. about the same that Apple takes from App Store for basically nothing[1].
How the record labels convinced the world that Spotify is the bad guy here is beyond belief.
--
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/sofiachierchio/2026/01/28/spoti...
[1] Certainly app store costs are nothing when compared to the infrastructure that Spotify needs.
Wow. This is certainly a take. Two things: 1. Spotify has had a policy for a couple years now of not paying artists who generate less than 1,000 streams per year PER song. So if I get 999 streams on each of my 50 songs every year, I get nothing from Spotify. 2. Major labels own major stakes in Spotify. They are one and the same.
Ad. 1, I’m not saying Spotify is perfect, though in this case I would not be surprised if the algorithm was mandated by the record labels as the industry standard.
Ad 2, you’ll be surprised to hear the labels only held cumulative 20% stake up to the IPO and all of them subsequently wound it down. Their stake is now insignificant.
However, they had, have, and will always have, enormous leverage due to licensing-they’re monopolists and Spotify can either agree to whatever the terms are, or shut itself down.
Imagine if Netflix never started producing original content. They’d be at mercy of others or, more probably, already dead. Music doesn’t work that way and Spotify can’t just generate a bunch of pop hits to avoid paying the labels. They are trying to do that with podcasts.
Spotify here is the victim as much as the artists.
If you dont get 1000 streams per year your are not a professional musician
There are 10s of thousands of pro musicians who don’t generate 1000 streams per year on many of the songs in their back catalog.
And the premise of your statement is that only pro musicians deserve to be compensated for their work. That’s a pretty messed up world view.
> Not sure if you're aware, but it's the labels, not Spotify:
*not only Spotify
They had plenty of problems from people abusing their system to steal listens from actual artists.
Their system is basically "one big bucket of listens" - if your song gets listens, you get money. So if you pay your sub, and listen to say 5 niche musicians only, it still all goes mostly to the most popular songs.
Now you might already notice the flaw here - if you say, make a bunch of bots that just listen to songs to boost their revenue, not only your sub doesn't pay artists you listen, but also to fraudulent ones.
Then there was problems with using fake collaboration tags, AI music to hijack artist profiles, and few others.
> Their system is basically "one big bucket of listens" - if your song gets listens, you get money. So if you pay your sub, and listen to say 5 niche musicians only, it still all goes mostly to the most popular songs.
That's basically how radio is accounted for in royalties, as well.
With Spotify knowing exactly who listened to what, it could be more precise (and arguably more susceptible to the fraud), but tbh what they do is standard (compulsory licensing) industry practice.
With radio, everyone that listens to a particular station is listening to roughly the same mix of songs, and they're "paying" (by listening to ads) on a per-hour basis.
If either of those was true with spotify, the unfairness would go away.
But when different listeners are paying very different amounts per hour, any correlation between payment amount and preferred content causes problems.
Spotify paid out ten billion dollars to artists in 2024. This is not small potatoes - total 2024 music industry merchandise sales was around $14b.
These big platform payouts matter a lot.
Correction: to record labels.
When you read artists' blog posts you can see they get peanuts. Not due to Spotify - due to the recording deals.
If you want an exhaustive but eye-opening account of all of the details, I recommend "All you need to know about the music business" by Don Passman.
This is the artists fault for signing with the labels. The labels own their music, of course they get the payment.
Whenever an actual artist reveals their earnings, it’s absolutely pitiful.
A quick search suggests a very steep drop off from the top earners.
‘At 100 million streams, artists can earn approximately $300,000-$500,000 in gross royalties. However, the actual amount reaching the artist varies dramatically based on their contracts. Major label artists receive $90,000-$150,000 after the label’s cut, while independent artists could keep $255,000-$425,000 after distributor fees.’ https://rebelmusicz.com/how-much-do-artists-make-on-spotify/
As an academic, I am happy to see my work on Anna's Archive. Unless your book goes gangbusters, few humanities scholars make any real money from publications, and maybe the 5-10 biggest names in my field make something might get something like ~$40k at signing, and maybe a few thousand more from book sales. So far, I've netted $326 from my first book. But that doesn't matter! We publish because we want our work out there in the world, not because we think it might make us money.
On the other hand, I have no idea who runs Anna's Archive. I wouldn't be surprised if it were backdoor funded by AI companies who want the data available for scraping. Maybe that explains the Spotify debacle?
A lot of this has to do with the fact that many more people want to create music, than the number of artists that people want to listen to.
So there’s a heavy supply/demand imbalance, and distribution/discovery thrives there.
> piracy brings artists absolutely nothing at all.
This has historically been unclear. Lots of artists make more money from touring and merchandise than from record sales, and piracy is likely to boost those.
> Lots of artists make more money from touring and merchandise than from record sales, and piracy is likely to boost those.
Reminder of the recent "The truth that haunts the Ramones: 'They sold more T-shirts than records'":
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47473673
In a similar vein, the recent thread on bootleg recordings - with both the article and the comments suggesting a more complicated relationship between piracy and band warnings.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47765604
True to an extent, but records are great promotional tool, and rather expensive to make if you don't want it to sound like poop. Perhaps something like $10-25k on the very low end for something half-way "serious", and that's assuming you're not going all Chinese Democracy and can actually cut the thing in a week or so. Then it has to mixed, mastered, art prepared, etc.
Most small-medium time artists can't afford to front all the expenses. If no one buys the records, no record company will give the band an advance. Even if most records don't really generate any direct profit for the band, getting the production bankrolled is a pretty big benefit.
people that get their music from AA would never buy it or pay spotify for it, so the "loss" is completely imaginary. same goes for movies, videogames etc
This is bad epistemology. Incentives change the behavior on the edges.
in some sense yes, as long as there are sources of good enough cheaper alternatives millions of people won't ever pay for Spotify (or even use the free version with ads, but the free-with-ads version is in itself a good enough for many many many people), but of course in a vacuum with only Spotify people would probably pay for it!
though the determination of damages is usually completely all over the map (and usually skews high to serve a punitive purpose, though I doubt it has any real deterrent effect).
If I like an artist I buy a physical copy of the album.
I just brought Light Years on cassette by Nas.
I’m an hobbyist musician and I’m going to sell actual cassettes and donate the profits. I’m never going to get the 500 million streams you need to make money off Spotify
I've always liked China's business model for music. In China, all music is free to stream and download. Musicians make their money the more traditional way, through performances, merchandise, promotions/advertising, etc.
That’s basically the US model as well now.
> I don't like what they do to artists.
Global distribution. For $40/year. That was fucking unheard of 20 years ago. Spotify is the best thing that ever happened to artists. Don't let the mediocre one's who blame their lack of success on Spotify fool you. They don't make money because they likely suck and can't book dates because no one wants to see them.
Finally the correct take on spotify. Artists were 100% fucked before spotify, streaming saved them. Now we have more artists making money than ever, but since most of them arent really successful they whine and whine when they'd be making nothing 20 years ago.
Yep. If you can't make it with Spotify and all the social media channels available, you definitely wouldn't have made it before all of this stuff.
> why then switch to a mode that pays artists nothing at all? Do Bandcamp. Buy merch. Do something to support the artists.
I don't like this perspective because it puts the onus on the individual consumer. Many people who listen to music struggle to make ends meet. They do not have the extra money to afford buying albums off of bandcamp, yet they are contributing members of society and they deserve to be able to listen to music.
Meanwhile there are billions of dollars floating around in the music industry. Spotify absolutely has the spare cash to pay their artists more; they just choose not to.
As much as I love the idea of Gabe's "piracy is a service issue" philosophy, I think the real truth is likely that piracy is an issue of capitalism and wealth inequality.
There would be no money floating around the music business, spare or otherwise, if no one paid for music
I guess you could fund it with taxes?
Sure, why not? Current US music revenue is $6/mo per US taxpayer. For less than half the cost of Spotify you could 5x the income going to musicians if you skipped the middleman and magically just paid them directly. That doesn't seem like a bad deal.
> yet they are contributing members of society and they deserve to be able to listen to music
By the same token, artists are contributing members of society and they deserve a host of things, including enough to make a living.
You can't demand one group's output as a right for everyone else unless you also grant them rights in return.
No one 'deserves' to listen to music. It's not a right. It's a luxury that you can either afford or you can't. FM radio is still around for those people.
>>> ...piracy brings artists absolutely nothing at all.
I'm not sure about that. A related situation is software piracy. There was a long time period when it was easy for people to get "free" copies of software titles such as a major word processing program, by copying them at work and bringing them home. This might not really have hurt the vendor of the software, because they still sold lots of copies to businesses. But it effectively kept anybody from bringing a less feature rich but lower priced alternative to the market. Some of the companies whose works were copied became effective monopolies.
Another way of putting it was that the software had two price tiers: A paid tier for businesses and a free tier that kept competitors out of the market. Had anybody done this deliberately, it might have been considered "dumping."
Music piracy may have a similar effect of creating a moat for the big labels and players who can diversify their income streams, while preventing small-scale acts from offering an acceptable but lower priced alternative.
>I get Gabe's value prop with Valve. Make the service easy, cheap, convenient, good, and piracy begins to diminish.
>But if there are cheap services and cheap avenues (that still underpay artists), why then switch to a mode that pays artists nothing at all?
Spotify cancelled my package, and keeps sending me offers to rejoin at twice the price (actually more than that, it was a joint account with my wife, so its like 2.5 times if we were both to start paying again). Every time I listen to spotify without the package I get 3 ads to 1 song. Sometimes 2 ads when its generous.
I would have probably paid my spotify tax on time every month without thinking about it. But now I hate them to pieces.
It seems like my options are:
1. Sign up for a service without the all of music I want to listen to.
2. Sign up for a service thats as scummy as spotify but hasnt quite enshittified yet.
3. Download all the mp3s from my spotify playlists and listen to them locally without the weird payment/advertising apparatus in between.
So far 3 makes the most sense to me.
The entire record industry is scum and Spotify is just a part of that. It can just die a swift death, would be for the best. Bandcamp is much better. Much lower barrier to entry for everyone and it has my favorite artists.
> First and foremost, I feel like Spotify is scummy. I don't like what they did when they were founded, I don't like what they do to artists.
> While Spotify puts real price pressure on artists,
You know that Spotify doesn't pay artists, right? That Spotify pays 70% of its revenue to rights holders before it sees a single cent itself? And that it's rights holders who pay artists?
I wish the angry pitchfork mob for once managed to attack the actual culprits: the Big Four. Nope, that day will never come.
[dead]
Didn't Spotify initially use pirated music to develop its system?
Considering the currently don’t pay small time artists a dime so they can funnel more money to the record labels that own them, they are still a piracy outfit.
Does anyone know the status of this whole release. The metadata was hosted, and now not hosted. I saw a torrent leaked of unpopular tracks.
No statements or blogs from AA explaining the metadata removal, or an updated release timeline.
Can anyone say more?
They did describe why briefly on reddit, saying it drew too much attention: https://torrentfreak.com/images/aaconf.png
I guess I'm a little surprised that they felt this release was too hot. I'm not really surprised at the response from the music industry, but rather I thought AA was more confident in their opsec/safety from this sort of threat.
I would assume it's moreso they don't want to lose their domains too quickly. Though they've only given one sentence to go off, so it's hard to speculate.
Extra problems with the copyright industry for no benefit.
Hope the owner's OpSec was good enough and we won't hear about their unmasking.
They have a 500k[1] reward for finding OPSEC failures, so I think they have the basics down.
[1]https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv...
No way Anna’s archive has $500k
Why not? Are they going to scam the person who completes the Google Books bounty for 200k?
Extra? I thought they were clearly violating IP law to begin with. Unless I misunderstand this is "water is wet" territory (both the judgment as well as what Anna's Archive did).
Extra, because with the piracy of music they bought into equation members of (and implicitly) the recording industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recording_Industry_Association...
Water isn't wet, but it does "wet" other things. Wetness is the degree to which a liquid contacts and adheres to a solid surface, so it's makes no sense to say that water is wet.
I do not see any law being violated by Anna's Archive in the slightest.
Just because you disagree with a law doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. You anti copyright shills are exhausting... Why can't you try to attract people to your side to eventually instead effect some real change? Do you just take that much pleasure in being an edgelord that your cause be damned?
Just use it to train / tune a LLM. Apparently, everything becomes legal if you only put the stuff into the right kind of software.
That's at least what many people like to argue here on HN.
Anna's wants[1] companies to train on their data.
[1] https://annas-archive.gl/blog/ai-copyright.html
Thanks a lot, that's an interesting read and they make an interesting case.
I would have thought all big AI companies used Anna's Archive, but apparently only some of the US based companies used them.
hmm you are right, I too wish the same brother
300M come from: Statutory damages for circumvention of a technological measure for 120,000 music files
22M come from: Statutory damages for willful copyright infringement for 148 sound recordings from Sony, Warner and UMG.
Why is it only 148 sound recording with infringed copyright when the 'circunvention' is for 120,000?
Different burden of proof. Why waste years trying to get server logs that may not exist when you can get a quick win? It's not about the money anyway. It's about the PR and whatever justification they can derive along the way.
I read somewhere that Spotify initially seeded their db with pirated music! Now they go after anyone following their suit! It’s like a mafia’s boss that became mayor and is suddenly tough on crime, without acknowledging his past history!
It's exactly the same. "The secret ingredient is crime...", then once the coffers are full use the cash to legitimate their presence into a legal offering.
It's not as much of a hoodwink as you would think however, it's everywhere and has been the same throughout history.
East India Company, Facebook, and even more recently Uber. Uber is the most readily documented.
In Australia (and I'm almost certain else where, but I'll talk about Brisbane, Queensland explicitly), Uber were illegal for years and just paid the fines to the local authorities when pegged. And continued to do so until they became legal.
It's a confronting and candid example of "money fixes all problems". The truth of this continues to bother me, the older and maybe not wiser I become, the more twisted I am from feeling disenfranchised, jaded and cynical from this truth.
The world fundamentally operates very differently at the macro level where money is counted in 10 or more digits than the micro level where most of us here sit. Witnessing the average person struggle to home and feed them selves on a countries median wage. While organisations wash their sins with coffers and pivot into unicorns and technical behemoths.
I think AA should have stuck to book piracy. Nobody really cares about that.
Internet archive lost a massive case about book piracy. Anthropic had to pay I believe 1.4 billion because they engaged in some book piracy.
They should have made more of an effort on audiobooks - until then myanonamouse will do.
I almost think this Spotify stuff is an op, just like I think the archive.org covid library was an op. Just pulling these targeted orgs into stupid decisions that will leave most of the public unsympathetic, in order to justify more law enforcement resources to go after them.
When I imagine AA going offline for stupid pop music piracy, it makes me angry. They're basically where virtually all of the old archive.org material landed, and nobody else is mirroring it. 95% of it can't be purchased; you either dl it from AA, or do an interlibrary loan through libraries that barely exist anymore, or if you live in some little and/or poor country, you just don't get to read it.
The material in our history of nonfiction writing represents a far wider range of opinion than we're allowed to have right now. Eliminating all of it at once (as libraries throw books away and/or close down), and commercially reissuing approved and reedited things as ebooks (that can be edited again, and again) is a nightmare future. Maybe it's even an optimistic nightmare future - we'll just be expected to accept what the AI says.
Perhaps one day we will invent a technology that allows computers to connect to each other directly, and share information freely across some sort of distributed network.
One can dream!
It's more that the book market is not dominated by only a few big conglomerates.
Yes it is, at least 80% of the book market in the US is controlled by 5 companies: Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, Hachette, and HarperCollins.
I am struggling to see how exactly this is even considered piracy. Nobody was going to stream music in low quality off a slow AA server anyway. It's archival.
Not sure how I feel. Anna’s Archive turned into a profit-seeking beast a long time ago. They’re also rolling in it thanks to he massive deals to “license” the content to AI companies.
Libgen was a much better option.
Profit-seeking? That seems like a stretch.
Also how do you know they have any "massive deals"? Do they publish details about the money they receive?
Can't lose a fight against someone who can't catch you.
Sounds like Anna won. Someone else had to spend a bunch of money on a lawsuit against a ghost.
They have lost a few domain names.
For instance, they previously had a Swedish domain, which was taken down, together with a few others, possibly as a consequence of this lawsuit.
Hopefully they will succeed to keep the others.
If they lose them they will create new ones, and someone will update the wikipedia page with the active URL(s).
Worst case scenario they could solely rely on Tor URLs, which would be virtually impossible to shut down.
> virtually impossible to shut down
It has been proven through at least Snowden files that multiple world governments have been working for decades now to operate as many tor nodes as they can in the hopes of decloaking as much traffic as possible, should they need to go after specific people.
I don't think it's safe to say this is virtually impossible. They have more money and resources than you can fathom.
Even if they don't currently have enough nodes to catch a certain person... should it become more important for them to do so, they could always quickly increase that number on short notice to try to increase the chances of tracking them down as needed.
Governments need tor to work to keep their spy network safe. Running a bunch of nodes to ensure the system is online makes sense for intelligence agencies, no traffic sniffing required.
It's legal and chill when openai and anthropic pirates all of our content. But heaven forbid an outsider does it. RIP Aaron Swartz
Barbra Streisand effect for them, free PR, and lots of money wasted for the other side
At this point everyone who cares about anna's archive already knows about anna's archive.
If the goal is to eventuallu get their domain siezed (forcing them to get a new one and confusing existing users), they probably don't view this as a waste.
Not every lawsuit is the Streisand effect.
Fair point, I kinda agree, though I do think they were mostly know for books and music is a whole new sector they entered with a different niche altogether
Fair point, i had no idea they were involved with music before this.
Screw AA for doing that spotify stunt - spotify disabled all API access except for paid accounts due to that. AA's greed and mass theft ruined a good thing.
Who's greedy? The people who put something out on the internet for free, or the people who stopped letting people access that same thing, unless they paid them money?
"But Spotify pays the musicians!" some people might scream. While true, it is a pitiful, insulting amount.
The example that hit me the hardest was Dr. Dre, whose albums were streamed 1.5 million times and earned him $4345.
1.5 million is a platinum record album by industry standards in the US, UK, Canada and France.
$4345 isn't even enough to pay a month of rent in New York, where the court case was done.
Anna's Archive is not the ones you can blame for greed.
I wrote a Spicetify plugin to show information about a song’s genres, but unfortunately the public API endpoint it was using -- as well as many other endpoints -- was removed after their changes, even for Premium users.
I used libgen quite a lot; new books were hard to find there, but many old books were available. Then libgen was kind of eliminated by the mega-corporation alliance. The latter is very hypocritical - see Meta and others sniffing off data to train for AI.
Anna's Archive kind of semi-replaced libgen (a few libgen mirrors are sometimes back up but then disappear again) but for various reasons I don't quite like Anna's Archive as much; the UI is imo also more confusing.
Now the mega-corporations decided to kill off Anna's Archive. Personally I don't use or "need" music; if I need a good song I use yt-dlp on youtube and get it these days. Many years ago napster. But this has also stopped, sort of; I rarely get new songs, mostly because they are often really just ... bad. Or, I don't need them locally anyway as I could listen to them in the background on youtube (which kind of makes you wonder why the mega-corporations really fight freedom providers such as Anna's Archive; and before that the noble pirates from piratebay and so forth).
So I think the following is IMO by far the biggest problem, no matter one's personal opinion:
"Rakoff entered a permanent worldwide injunction covering ten Anna’s Archive domains: annas-archive.org, .li, .se, .in, .pm, .gl, .ch, .pk, .gd, and .vg."
To me this is blatant dictatorship and censorship. I really do not want these private de-facto entities disguised as "public courts" to restrict any of us here. I want to decide the information I can access, at all times, without restriction. So that they can abuse people in, say, the USA and deny them easy access to these useful resources, is criminal behaviour by such corporation courts. We need to change this globally - and I believe it will eventually happen. Right now this may still be a minority opinion, but keep in mind that years ago, the right to repair movement was framed by corporations as evil. More recently they are even winning in court cases, see the most recent John Deere case and requirement to open up access when people purchased hardware.
Eventually I think freedom to information will win. Good luck to Anna's Archive and others.
> So I think the following is IMO by far the biggest problem, no matter one's personal opinion: > > "Rakoff entered a permanent worldwide injunction covering ten Anna’s Archive domains: annas-archive.org, .li, .se, .in, .pm, .gl, .ch, .pk, .gd, and .vg."
Legally speaking, the Southern District of New York can say whatever it likes, and Libera, Sweden, India, St-Pierre-et-Miquelon, Greenland, Switzerland, Pakistan, Grenada, and the British Virgin Islands are free to ignore what the US says. They all have national sovereignty over their respective ccTLDs, and of them, most are not going to simply accept the US telling them what to do considering recent geopolitical missteps.
Yes and: Our current intellectual property regime is indefensible.
Yes and: Gatekeeping megacorp's profits continue to rise, while creators are screwed.
The original intent of copyright protection in the USA was to encourage production of culture. (Ditto patents for knowledge.) That sounds fantastic. I support that.
> Now the mega-corporations decided to kill off Anna's Archive.
You can still torrent the books from library genesis if they succeed. It would be a bit of an effort, but free books are currently the only positive thing (for me) in the internet.
I'm sure they are very worried about this right now
You don't win in courts against people who bought the law. No reason to fight there.
How do people safely download from these torrent sites? Isn't there a risk that you'll download something you wouldn't want on your computer? Yet I hear of many people actively using them, so there must be more to it.
It's easy for others to see what you're downloading: https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com. So if you're unsure if the torrent is legitimate, I'd probably avoid it.
When you download the torrent file, you're trusting that the provider of the torrent file, anna's archive in this case, is giving you legitimate files. Although I'm not sure how you would disguise undesirable files like viruses as ebooks; the file format would be a giveaway.
Malformed files that are designed to exploit known (or unknown) parsing vulnerabilities in whatever ebook reading software
How is a video file a risk? If you mean a game, then yes, you may get a virus.
Given the context, they're probably referring to epubs. Files could contain just generic malicious javascript or malware that attempts to exploit vulnerabilities in specific ereaders.
So how does one find this archive and how can it be kept alive in a decentralized way? I’m not super familiar with it.
Ironically thanks to Putin piracy sites have safe harbour in Russia.
Someone in the Kremlin understands "bread and games" and they're not very receptive for sob stories from Hollywood.
Plus they can probably use them to inject malware and god knows what else.
Which imperial power do you suppose it was who quietly took over ThePirateBay and major trackers and now uses them for that exact purpose, as one of their many tools to create botnets that are then used to attack Western sites, helping to drive the adoption of CloudFlare and the like?
Hint: Not Russia.
Hint #2: Not China.
Hint #3: Not North Korea, Iran, or Syria.
annas-archive.gl
It's a treasure trove of knowledge. A true priceless gem. Enjoy it while it lasts.
If you want to help keep the site's content alive in a decentralized way, just buy $20,000 worth of hard drives and a very big internet pipe and start downloading their torrents.
Otherwise if you're broke like me, donate and/or leech every valuable book on every subject you can think of from their servers, while you're able to do so, and keep them stored safely offline. Buy only server grade hard drives and use them gently. Buy backup drives and use a ZFS mirror.
In either case, get an older tape drive and some tapes, and learn about tar, lzip, par2, mt-st. Get multiple tape drives if possible (for spares) and make sure your written tapes are readable in all of them. Store the tapes and hardware properly and securely.
Eventually Anna's Archive will be shut down. It's only a matter of time. It will be a great tragedy for humanity, akin to the day the Library of Alexandria was burned down. Until that happens, people who care need to do all they can to help save anything and everything of value while it's still online.
"Anything truly good and useful that is put on the internet, especially if it's of large benefit to humanity, will eventually be shut down and replaced with some watered down paywalled garbage, if anything at all." - kdhaskjdhadjk's Law
Spotify was also forced to remove 60 or so endpoints from their API: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...
...and add a bunch of other restrictions like limiting API access to premium users, ludicrously increasing the cap for acceptance into the extended quota programme (250k MAU), and so on and so on.
So the most fucked in this situation are neither Spotify nor Anna's Archive, but anyone trying to build anything on top of what was up until this point the most straightforward to use API in the music industry, which annoys me to no end.
That's a very long list. The API is now basically useless.
Music should not be centralized.
Cool, feel free to create a website that does as much as lists track names and let me know how long will you survive before your hosting provider gets flooded with bullshit DMCA notices and shuts you down.
I'm not talking about downloading music, I'm not even talking about some custom player for reproducing music, I'm talking about just putting say a list of songs from a playlist as plain text online.
You responded with why it isn't decentralized, not why it shouldn't be decentralized.
Because I don't disagree with that premise at all but am forced to play by these bullshit rules? I wish I didn't have to, but if I want my website to exist and continue to have any sort of audience, I have to play by those bullshit rules. The alternative to no API access isn't "more decentralisation", the alternative is absolutely no human curation what so ever, as that process tends to require some sort of API-powered tools to wade through the (nowadays >30% AI-generated) noise.
Here's like the dumbest use case: say you have a hundred artists you wanted to follow and be notified whenever they release any new music, without any of it slipping through the cracks because of "the algorithm" and without any sort of preference towards the most mainstream subset of those 100 artists. Once you already have an established brand and have crossed some sort of an arbitrary, almost always non-transparent threshold of clout, there are dozens of ways for you to do that. Hell, Apple will reach out to pay you to plug into their API and use their embed above everyone else's. But while you're a nobody, even this trivial use case from a technical perspective is made virtually impossible because you can't get access to any sort of API to simply plug into.
Anyways, not much of a problem to me any more as I can easily prove my side project reaches a six figure amount of people every month with no advertising, but I promise you it would be a problem to you if you ever decided to try build anything even remotely music-related.
It's centralized because there's a few big labels that own a lot...but otherwise it's such a commodity that you can go to any streaming service and you more or less have the same catalog.
Forced?
Anna's Archive went public with their announcement late December, Spotify started communicating this API lockdown mid-January. I have no evidence to back that up, but judging purely by the timing, it sure seems like these two events are connected and something Spotify did reluctantly to appease the big labels.
Yep, the API is now basically useless and you can't use it in production. All because of some anonymous greedy dickheads.
Get the metadata from Anna. At least now it's freely available.
Also it's unfair to call Anna greedy. There can't be much money in giving stuff away for free.
Yes stealing other peoples things to 'give them away' is very noble. The meta data is useless to me. I can no longer build an app on top of Spotify's API because they've had to lock it down.
Have you considered blaming Spotify or the music industry instead for how ridiculously closed the entire system is?
$10 a month for all the music every recorded. Free with ads. How much more open can they make it?
There is nothing open about that. You own none of it. Only usable within their walled off platforms.
Want to build an alternative player? Can’t do that. Support new or alternative hardware? Sorry, no API access. Want to record them onto a tape/CD/SD card? Forbidden. Want to play songs at your neighborhood party? Illegal. Use them for a funny video? Nope. Even sharing lyrics gets you a DMCA takedown request.
I really hate people using terms like "theft" or "piracy" to refer to the act of artificially-limited copying. Copying something does not take anything away from the person you're copying from inherently. Theft does. And piracy is like theft, but with murder and kidnapping too.
Do you mean the stock holders of the major labels?
No the artists.
That's what happens when people abuse a public good.
Pillage libraries for LLM training data, then sue them and shut them down for archiving a different format. Cool.
Annas Archive still has lots of mirrors and can switch domains if its ever taken down
I hope AA will make an onion version in addition to the unstable domain switching.
How are the mainteners stay anonymous while buying many domains and servers?
Also curious about the payment methods. That's usually what is targeted when they want to shut someone down. Surprised to see so many different ones still supported.
It's not hard. You could just pay someone else to buy the domain for you.
You need many that are willing to risk themselves going to jail. I don't think that's their method.
Ok so they trace the domain purchase to some drug addict in Russia who got offered $100 to buy it. Then what? Wait for them to leave the country then nab them? They will be waiting a long time.
If you had a way to pay them I'm sure some someone in a poor country would take the offer. Pretty sure that's how this goes down.
They don't really risk anything cause they can just leave the angry emails about piracy on read.
You can buy domains anonymously, e.g. flokinet.is
I support AA. Lawyers can't solve this, sorry.
How to sue a ghost?
Remember, only big tech is allowed to pirate
Default judgments are pernicious and should not exist.
If the other party to a lawsuit is unwilling or unable to put up a defense, the case should still be judged on its merits and put to basic tests of fairness and propriety.
As things stand, default judgment "winners" basically get everything they ask for automatically, which is not justice. Especially as it's quite common for people and small businesses to be unwilling/unable to defend themselves in court for various reasons, especially cost.
I agree, especially after seeing recently how ICE and CBP were arresting people in the US while they were reporting to their immigration agents, the legal thing they were supposed to do, and ultimately being deported, despite legally being in the US and not having commited any crimes. Going to court is dangerous. No one deserves a free pass just because AA did a no-call no-show.
Don't have to pirate books via torrent anymore. All the LLMs did read them. Ask them to write it back, in their full integrity. haha
So, let us assume AA could or would pay Spotify for "profits lost".
Now that we know AA's abduction of files were the files that actually received playtime, we would immediately see a lot of music artists embursed, yes?
Well... hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Watch the Spotify DOCU.
Interesting point. What does the law say about it? With all these damages awarded here, who exactly has been damaged?
Companies Spotify rent music from
Right, OpenAI stole everything that wasn't nailed down and nothing happened
How can you sue someone without knowing who they are?
How can you sue someone without serving them?
Demoniac move by Spotify
Honestly the only organization of the past few years to deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. And I truly don’t mean this in any hyperbolic way, but believe that this organization has done the most to enable human collaboration and thus enable a precursor to peace and progress and prosperity.
> Not long after the lawsuit was filed, the shadow library removed the Spotify listing for their torrents page.
> The site’s operator, Anna’s Archivist, hoped that these removals would motivate the music industry to back down
lol
lmao even
never give these greedy corps even an inch. It won't work
Happy to have dropped Spotify years ago.
Should have named it AI archive. Then it would be free to violate copyrights.
It must feel good to be able to say fuck off to the American justice system.
Ok. Now what?
One or two dementia Truths penned by media bribers/donors and the world moves on.
Now, try to collect it.
Fuck Spotify
I keep saying this (and I keep getting voted to oblivion) but we really need an alternative to DNS.
Then go ahead and use one. Of course, most projects in this regard try to tackle multiple things (e.g. Tor), including DNS, but there are projects like OpenNIC that take on DNS alone if you prefer. As usual, the mass majority won't adopt these, but they are ready to use for anyone who wants them.
I'll be honest - I've never heard of this! Thanks for the info.
IP addresses.
https://letsencrypt.org/2025/07/01/issuing-our-first-ip-addr...
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The operators are likely based in Russia, and the US has no jurisdiction there. As a result, they can simply ignore any US actions and continue their operations.
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Compared to Anthropic's $1.5 billion, that's still too little.
Would have been $135B if it was to go to trial. They settled since they knew that they would lose the case.
How does that work exactly? "I'll give you 1% of what I owe you, if you leave me alone."
Settled with whom, if nobody showed up to represent AA?
Commercial music & movie industries are extensions of state sponsored propaganda. That is why they go to such lengths to defend their "products".
Source:
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Conspiracy garbage
Don't let any inconvenient facts prevent you from consuming mass media.