https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41454990

especially the following parts

> So I understand the concern that this court decision threatens the future of some forms of archiving, digital preservation and librarianship. But the existing norms and repositories this threatens exist because people established those norms and archiving projects before now, in living memory, even in the face of threats and lectures about precedent and worries about legal gray areas.

> If you want to defend and protect "the many noble aspects of the archive", you have to remember that thirty years ago, those were imagined as impossible, impractical, and (whisper it) probably illegal. In both cases, it was Kahle's vision and approach that was -- apparently -- the only way it was going to get done.

This is about the Internet archive, but it applies to Anna's even better because Anna's is an ideologically motivated project. Yes they are taking a risk, but I imagine they consider it a worthwhile risk if it has a chance of helping them build the world they want — one where copyright does not exist as it does today.

Plus, it's not like Anna's got anything more to lose anyway. If they ever get caught the publishers are going to squeeze every single cent out of their pockets anyway, so how exactly is making spotify and record companies their enemies going to cause them extra harm?

Problem is, when music disappears due to licensing nonsense, it generally disappears from all streaming services at the same time. Most music goes through only a few gigantic distributors / labels.

> potentially jeopardize

Nothing is in jeopardy if the operators remain completely anonymous, which it seems like they will.

Some folks out there seem to have their otherwise good intentions sort of trend into self destructive waters.

And books aren't? What's the argument here? If it's that books serve a special purpose because they convey ideas and therefore it's a moral good to disseminate those ideas, you have to extend that to media beyond just the printed word. Music has that same potential (an even greater one, I would argue). It feels weird to pick and choose media like that.

This is the wrong way to look at things, the way YT is going then yt-dlp will be completely locked out within the next 3 years so essentially all that archive is about to be locked within Youtube.

The value is in people controlling data. Any company with a data mote will always have an advantage, this damages the free and fair market on which capitalism is built.

Spotify has removed millions of songs over the years, so while the value to you, may be tiny, the value to the public is much larger than the marginal increase in risk to the project as a whole.

It should be under AA since it follows AA philosophy and benefits from AA's branding and brings more interested preservationinst parties who may be unaware of AA. Your strategy is the first step in divide and conquer, AA's is too big to fail

I'm kind of curious how long it will be before people start publishing copyrighted works on the TrumpCoin block chain. :-)

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.

Forgive the out of touch questions, but, doing what? And why?

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.

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.

[1]https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv...

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.

It's not as much of a hoodwink as you would think however, it's everywhere and has been the same throughout history.

East India Company, Facebook, and even more recently Uber. Uber is the most readily documented.

In Australia (and I'm almost certain else where, but I'll talk about Brisbane, Queensland explicitly), Uber were illegal for years and just paid the fines to the local authorities when pegged. And continued to do so until they became legal.

It's a confronting and candid example of "money fixes all problems". The truth of this continues to bother me, the older and maybe not wiser I become, the more twisted I am from feeling disenfranchised, jaded and cynical from this truth.

The world fundamentally operates very differently at the macro level where money is counted in 10 or more digits than the micro level where most of us here sit. Witnessing the average person struggle to home and feed them selves on a countries median wage. While organisations wash their sins with coffers and pivot into unicorns and technical behemoths.

Also how do you know they have any "massive deals"? Do they publish details about the money they receive?

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.

"But Spotify pays the musicians!" some people might scream. While true, it is a pitiful, insulting amount.

The example that hit me the hardest was Dr. Dre, whose albums were streamed 1.5 million times and earned him $4345.

1.5 million is a platinum record album by industry standards in the US, UK, Canada and France.

$4345 isn't even enough to pay a month of rent in New York, where the court case was done.

Anna's Archive is not the ones you can blame for greed.

"DMCA ignored hosting" isn't even illegal. Ignoring a liability shield doesn't make you actually liable

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.

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

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".

And I think that was his point. They may ruin some people's life's... but aside from that, they achieve nothing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan

Spotify got started doing the same thing, though.[4]

[1]: https://annas-archive.gl/blog/llms-txt.html (“Making an enterprise-level donation will get you fast SFTP access to all the files, which is faster than torrents.”)

[2]: https://annas-archive.gl/blog/duxiu-exclusive.html (“We’re looking for some company or institution to help us with OCR and text extraction for a massive collection we acquired, in exchange for exclusive early access. After the embargo period, we will of course release the entire collection.”)

[3]: https://annas-archive.gl/donate (“Enterprise-level donation or exchange for new collections (e.g. new scans, OCR’ed datasets). […] We welcome large donations from wealthy individuals or institutions. For donations over $5,000, please contact us directly at Contact email.”)

[4]: https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files... (“Rumors that early versions of Spotify used ‘pirate’ MP3s have been floating around the Internet for years. People who had access to the service in the beginning later reported downloading tracks that contained ‘Scene’ labeling, tags, and formats, which are the tell-tale signs that content hadn’t been obtained officially.”)

They’ll… be offered 4 months in prison, or 6 months with an opportunity to ask the judge for less?

I don’t know about you, but to me that seems way more chill than how the TPB guys were treated!

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.

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.

On the other hand, I have no idea who runs Anna's Archive. I wouldn't be surprised if it were backdoor funded by AI companies who want the data available for scraping. Maybe that explains the Spotify debacle?

So there’s a heavy supply/demand imbalance, and distribution/discovery thrives there.

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.

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

Global distribution. For $40/year. That was fucking unheard of 20 years ago. Spotify is the best thing that ever happened to artists. Don't let the mediocre one's who blame their lack of success on Spotify fool you. They don't make money because they likely suck and can't book dates because no one wants to see them.

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.

I'm not sure about that. A related situation is software piracy. There was a long time period when it was easy for people to get "free" copies of software titles such as a major word processing program, by copying them at work and bringing them home. This might not really have hurt the vendor of the software, because they still sold lots of copies to businesses. But it effectively kept anybody from bringing a less feature rich but lower priced alternative to the market. Some of the companies whose works were copied became effective monopolies.

Another way of putting it was that the software had two price tiers: A paid tier for businesses and a free tier that kept competitors out of the market. Had anybody done this deliberately, it might have been considered "dumping."

Music piracy may have a similar effect of creating a moat for the big labels and players who can diversify their income streams, while preventing small-scale acts from offering an acceptable but lower priced alternative.

>But if there are cheap services and cheap avenues (that still underpay artists), why then switch to a mode that pays artists nothing at all?

Spotify cancelled my package, and keeps sending me offers to rejoin at twice the price (actually more than that, it was a joint account with my wife, so its like 2.5 times if we were both to start paying again). Every time I listen to spotify without the package I get 3 ads to 1 song. Sometimes 2 ads when its generous.

I would have probably paid my spotify tax on time every month without thinking about it. But now I hate them to pieces.

It seems like my options are:

1. Sign up for a service without the all of music I want to listen to.

2. Sign up for a service thats as scummy as spotify but hasnt quite enshittified yet.

3. Download all the mp3s from my spotify playlists and listen to them locally without the weird payment/advertising apparatus in between.

So far 3 makes the most sense to me.

> 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.

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.

Capitalism doesn't "assign value" to anything. It can't assign value to anything.

The value of something is determined only by a transaction. It's not assigned.

The value of something is made apparent only after an exchanged is made. Otherwise there is no "inherent" or "assigned" value to anything. The value is made explicit only after a transaction is made.

Abstract ideas don't really have value. Silicon Valley/Tech, which is perhaps the most ardent and exemplary capitalist industries today, does not assign value to abstract ideas. It assigns value to execution/tangible action.

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.