This doesn't change things much, besides making domain name registration more difficult, but I continue to think this Spotify thing was a really dumb move on the part of Anna's Archive.
AA is providing a valuable service to tons of people who don't have access to these books otherwise. There's a strong argument to be made for the moral goodness of that -- that even if it's illegal, it's at least in the spirit of a public library. And they want to potentially jeopardize that to... release a bunch of music tracks, that are just entertainment and mostly widely available on YouTube already anyways? Major misstep.
Like, even if the same people are proud of scraping all these tracks and want to release them... at least do it under the name of a totally separate project? A separate domain, or just describe it and post the torrents somewhere else? Don't tie it to the AA site or identity. Don't tie things together when it creates no more benefit but does create more risk.
> So I understand the concern that this court decision threatens the future of some forms of archiving, digital preservation and librarianship. But the existing norms and repositories this threatens exist because people established those norms and archiving projects before now, in living memory, even in the face of threats and lectures about precedent and worries about legal gray areas.
> If you want to defend and protect "the many noble aspects of the archive", you have to remember that thirty years ago, those were imagined as impossible, impractical, and (whisper it) probably illegal. In both cases, it was Kahle's vision and approach that was -- apparently -- the only way it was going to get done.
This is about the Internet archive, but it applies to Anna's even better because Anna's is an ideologically motivated project. Yes they are taking a risk, but I imagine they consider it a worthwhile risk if it has a chance of helping them build the world they want — one where copyright does not exist as it does today.
Plus, it's not like Anna's got anything more to lose anyway. If they ever get caught the publishers are going to squeeze every single cent out of their pockets anyway, so how exactly is making spotify and record companies their enemies going to cause them extra harm?
> mostly widely available on YouTube already anyways
Problem is, when music disappears due to licensing nonsense, it generally disappears from all streaming services at the same time. Most music goes through only a few gigantic distributors / labels.
> potentially jeopardize
Nothing is in jeopardy if the operators remain completely anonymous, which it seems like they will.
> Nothing is in jeopardy if the operators remain completely anonymous, which it seems like they will.
If the 3 letter agencies want to track you down, it is highly unlikely that you could keep your anonymity. Unless you are also part of 3 letter agencies from NK, CN, RU etc.
I don't think Anna's can get into any worse of a legal position by pirating more things. It's already the case that anyone involved in the project will be arrested on sight, have all of their property seized, and go to prison for life. Which is why they don't show up to court hearings. This isn't the kind of crime where they beg the judge for leniency, it's the kind where they expose how silly the state is for imposing completely unenforceable penalties against someone they don't know the identity of.
Exactly. Governments that seem to have good intentions are enabling the self destruction of public data. I'm glad we have projects like AA to right this wrong.
And books aren't? What's the argument here? If it's that books serve a special purpose because they convey ideas and therefore it's a moral good to disseminate those ideas, you have to extend that to media beyond just the printed word. Music has that same potential (an even greater one, I would argue). It feels weird to pick and choose media like that.
This implies the only content with moral worth are those that teach knowledge or skills, and presumably only the kinds that are worthy for productivity and advancement or something. But one person's "just an entertaining story or just a silly hobby" is another's life-changing or mind-opening allegory, or therapeutic pursuit with little immediate "practical" value.
I can sort of see the original point; this appears to be a careless risk when there were other options, but I have to push back against the idea it's just some dumb music. It's still an artifact of humanity that's worth accessing and preserving as much as any other.
> This implies the only content with moral worth are those that teach knowledge or skills
This is not what OP said. He was talking about the "moral goodness of providing access to X, despite it being illlegal. He never said anything about the moral worth of X itself, let alone that Y had no moral worth.
> AA is providing a valuable service to tons of people who don't have access to these books otherwise. There's a strong argument to be made for the moral goodness of that -- that even if it's illegal, it's at least in the spirit of a public library.
Trying to imagine telling somebody writing about the history of music copyright that they can’t hear Ice Ice Baby, on account of they might enjoy it, which means it has no research merit.
This is the wrong way to look at things, the way YT is going then yt-dlp will be completely locked out within the next 3 years so essentially all that archive is about to be locked within Youtube.
Google Music had my own digitised records, and helped me move away from my physical media. Now I have to find another cd player since something broke in the one I dug out after they removed my shit. This whole ecosystem is rotten
We're only talking about music though. You can always literally just record the audio stream if you want. Or do that from free Spotify. Nothing's getting "locked" anywhere when it's just a simple stereo audio signal.
It might be that the "secret owner" had an obsession to liberalise the song field, like the book one, and erroneously thought he could get away indefinitely. Songs are not books as they are backed by much stronger, concentrated and dedicate to kill piracy capital.
Trying to shut down a site by going after their domain names will always be a losing battle. As long as the link on their Wikipedia article keeps being updated, it'll remain easy to access. And it would be a pretty shocking attack on free speech if a U.S. court tried to order the Wikimedia Foundation to take that down; I suspect the public response would be similar to when the movie industry tried to get the AACS encryption key taken down in the 2000s.
His point is that you don't need a working domain name since the MCP can just hardcode the IPs of the servers or resolve them through any other method that isn't DNS.
Would be fairly easy for them to offer an onion service on which they publish the current list of domains, as one option among many, many options for distributing small strings on the internet in an uncensorable way.
Ideally it is common knowledge that the onion service exists, and then people can go look at the onion service and update Wikipedia based on what they see there.
If you are really interested we could try piping their [API](https://encyclopediaapi.com/products/index) to some printable format. Maybe we can even find a quality print on demand service or bind it by hand :)
Last week, I set-up a navidrome (docker compose) server after tagging my files with MusicBrainz and beets. I serve it over a private network (tailnet) using tailscale serve. It works on all my devices and on iOS with an app called Nautiline. Nautiline has a feature where it will switch between my local network address and my tailnet address seamlessly. It was so simple, I can't actually believe it works. It has CarPlay support and everything. A few clicks and I'm jamming and scrobbling to MusicBrainz. My next goal is to have a local LLM generate smart playlists. Everyone who wants off Spotify, or the other streaming music giants should do this.
I’ve done the same and included on the same server the equivalent for every type of media: tv shows, movies, ebooks, audiobooks, even YouTube through a sophisticated proxy rotation pool. I have rid myself of every awful enshittified platform and I finally feel free from the bullshit.
Check out audiomuse-ai on GitHub for an open source song vector space embedding system that allows clustering and traversing a huge graph of similar songs, giving you really smart playlists and radios. Smart local LLM playlists are included.
Now I’m on to building a layer to take my song data and use it to query a bunch of apis to allow for “your favorite bands are playing near you” feature that isn’t sponsored.
Privacy friendly version of Last.fm for those that want to see a history of the things they've played.
I have a history that goes back almost 10 years at this point on a self hosted service.
> 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.
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.
1) It was in their name rather than a disconnected splinter group or name, and
2) They went off half cocked releasing the analysis and metadata with no music.
They should have held silent until the entirety of the music collection was ready to release, and it should have been a 'new' seemingly unaffiliated group.
Either the leaders' egos have inflated too big, or someone is trying to hurt the project by making intentional strategic errors. I don't see any good reason to release only metadata, cover art, and analysis in a blog post, and little or no music, under your group's name, unless you want a massive ego stroke!
For shame, and highly unprofessional, like modern UI devs who think an interface should change more often than once a decade (STOP BREAKING VISUO-MUSCLE MEMORY YOU TWITS! INTERFACES ARE THE HUMAN API!)...
> 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 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.
451 comments
AA is providing a valuable service to tons of people who don't have access to these books otherwise. There's a strong argument to be made for the moral goodness of that -- that even if it's illegal, it's at least in the spirit of a public library. And they want to potentially jeopardize that to... release a bunch of music tracks, that are just entertainment and mostly widely available on YouTube already anyways? Major misstep.
Like, even if the same people are proud of scraping all these tracks and want to release them... at least do it under the name of a totally separate project? A separate domain, or just describe it and post the torrents somewhere else? Don't tie it to the AA site or identity. Don't tie things together when it creates no more benefit but does create more risk.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41454990
especially the following parts
> So I understand the concern that this court decision threatens the future of some forms of archiving, digital preservation and librarianship. But the existing norms and repositories this threatens exist because people established those norms and archiving projects before now, in living memory, even in the face of threats and lectures about precedent and worries about legal gray areas.
> If you want to defend and protect "the many noble aspects of the archive", you have to remember that thirty years ago, those were imagined as impossible, impractical, and (whisper it) probably illegal. In both cases, it was Kahle's vision and approach that was -- apparently -- the only way it was going to get done.
This is about the Internet archive, but it applies to Anna's even better because Anna's is an ideologically motivated project. Yes they are taking a risk, but I imagine they consider it a worthwhile risk if it has a chance of helping them build the world they want — one where copyright does not exist as it does today.
Plus, it's not like Anna's got anything more to lose anyway. If they ever get caught the publishers are going to squeeze every single cent out of their pockets anyway, so how exactly is making spotify and record companies their enemies going to cause them extra harm?
> mostly widely available on YouTube already anyways
Problem is, when music disappears due to licensing nonsense, it generally disappears from all streaming services at the same time. Most music goes through only a few gigantic distributors / labels.
> potentially jeopardize
Nothing is in jeopardy if the operators remain completely anonymous, which it seems like they will.
> Nothing is in jeopardy if the operators remain completely anonymous, which it seems like they will.
If the 3 letter agencies want to track you down, it is highly unlikely that you could keep your anonymity. Unless you are also part of 3 letter agencies from NK, CN, RU etc.
Some folks out there seem to have their otherwise good intentions sort of trend into self destructive waters.
https://annas-archive.gl/blog/ai-copyright.html
> that are just entertainment
And books aren't? What's the argument here? If it's that books serve a special purpose because they convey ideas and therefore it's a moral good to disseminate those ideas, you have to extend that to media beyond just the printed word. Music has that same potential (an even greater one, I would argue). It feels weird to pick and choose media like that.
> And books aren't?
Yes, since there are non-fiction books. A book about computer architecture is less „just entertainment“ than a Spotify song.
I can sort of see the original point; this appears to be a careless risk when there were other options, but I have to push back against the idea it's just some dumb music. It's still an artifact of humanity that's worth accessing and preserving as much as any other.
> This implies the only content with moral worth are those that teach knowledge or skills
This is not what OP said. He was talking about the "moral goodness of providing access to X, despite it being illlegal. He never said anything about the moral worth of X itself, let alone that Y had no moral worth.
> AA is providing a valuable service to tons of people who don't have access to these books otherwise. There's a strong argument to be made for the moral goodness of that -- that even if it's illegal, it's at least in the spirit of a public library.
>mostly widely available on YouTube already
This is the wrong way to look at things, the way YT is going then yt-dlp will be completely locked out within the next 3 years so essentially all that archive is about to be locked within Youtube.
But, https://github.com/iosifache/annas-mcp
For that type of publishing please use Encyclopedia Britannica.
You will get the url in the 2027 edition on print.
Check out audiomuse-ai on GitHub for an open source song vector space embedding system that allows clustering and traversing a huge graph of similar songs, giving you really smart playlists and radios. Smart local LLM playlists are included.
Now I’m on to building a layer to take my song data and use it to query a bunch of apis to allow for “your favorite bands are playing near you” feature that isn’t sponsored.
> ...scrobbling to MusicBrainz...
Forgive the out of touch questions, but, doing what? And why?
> 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.
[0] https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files...
1) It was in their name rather than a disconnected splinter group or name, and
2) They went off half cocked releasing the analysis and metadata with no music.
They should have held silent until the entirety of the music collection was ready to release, and it should have been a 'new' seemingly unaffiliated group.
Either the leaders' egos have inflated too big, or someone is trying to hurt the project by making intentional strategic errors. I don't see any good reason to release only metadata, cover art, and analysis in a blog post, and little or no music, under your group's name, unless you want a massive ego stroke!
For shame, and highly unprofessional, like modern UI devs who think an interface should change more often than once a decade (STOP BREAKING VISUO-MUSCLE MEMORY YOU TWITS! INTERFACES ARE THE HUMAN API!)...
> 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
BTW, you can donate and get faster downloads: https://annas-archive.gl/donate
Just donated in honor of this. Up yours spotify!