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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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/
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.
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
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).
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Russia after Putins fall will do everything to please other countries, to get back to good terms (for sanctions, trade, debt markets, selling oil) and all people in Russia betting on not being extradited will have a rude awakening.
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
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.
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.
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).
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
...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.
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.
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
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
265 comments:
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!
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.
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.
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.
Not necessarily. More cheerful examples exist, usually outside the west:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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
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).
> 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
> 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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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...
> 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.
https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-a-post-american-enshittification...
His talks are all fantastic
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.
You should consider Cloudflare. They don't care if you use their services for criminal purposes.
So if you're fraudulently accused of wrongdoing that makes you a criminal?
Nice, nice....
In this case, yes. Ignoring invalid dmca requests is not a legal way to deal with them.
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.
This is under state jurisdiction, not federal.
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.
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.
Life makes a lot more sense when you realize the government, or at least this government, doesn't actually care about you.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I never understand these positions. How do authors make money selling books if someone can legally copy it and give it out for free?
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.
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.
I dunno, the same way they did for decades with public libraries?
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
Fabulous! Now just imagine if it supported video too... It would be some kind of... VideoLAN!
"Intellectual property" as an idea has to go away
"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.
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.
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.
mostly effects the poor and ignorant so considered a minor issue
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.
Intellectual property isn’t about bit patterns.
"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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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.
Russia after Putins fall will do everything to please other countries, to get back to good terms (for sanctions, trade, debt markets, selling oil) and all people in Russia betting on not being extradited will have a rude awakening.
Please which countries, though? China? The EU? The US? All of them have conflicting interests and you can't please all three.
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?
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.
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.
Except for the fact that the US started this war with the 2014 coup and the progressive arming of Ukraine.
The nuclear war is the immoderate Russians.
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?
Several domains previously used by Anna have been lost.
I assume that they may have been seized as a consequence of this trial.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
hmm you are right, I too wish the same brother
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I hope AA will make an onion version in addition to the unstable domain switching.
Annas Archive still has lots of mirrors and can switch domains if its ever taken down
Demoniac move by Spotify
How are the mainteners stay anonymous while buying many domains and servers?
You can buy domains anonymously, e.g. flokinet.is
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.
I'm sure they are very worried about this right now
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
Pillage libraries for LLM training data, then sue them and shut them down for archiving a different format. Cool.
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.
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.
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.
That's what happens when people abuse a public good.
That's a very long list. The API is now basically useless.
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.
Do you mean the stock holders of the major labels?
It's legal and chill when openai and anthropic pirates all of our content. But heaven forbid an outsider does it. RIP Aaron Swartz
You don't win in courts against people who bought the law. No reason to fight there.
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.
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
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.
Fuck Spotify
Commercial music & movie industries are extensions of state sponsored propaganda. That is why they go to such lengths to defend their "products".
Source:
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.
> 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.
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.
Ok. Now what?
One or two dementia Truths penned by media bribers/donors and the world moves on.
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.
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."