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Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight
- microcode 6mo agoI 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.
- bstsb 6mo agothis 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
- LarsKrimi 6mo agoThat's the funny thing of course. I don't understand who this show really is for
- Zealotux 6mo agoProbably the people involved getting paid hefty fees for the whole thing.
- RobotToaster 6mo agoI 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.
- pjc50 6mo agoAren'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.
- KingOfCoders 6mo ago[flagged]
- throwawaysleep 6mo agoAnd 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.
- bulbar 6mo agoThat'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.
- pjc50 6mo agoThere'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.
- NoahZuniga 6mo ago> 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.
- nannal 6mo agoBold claims with no backing. Always bet on russian antagonism.
- actionfromafar 6mo ago
- marand23 6mo agoSlightly 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?
- fc417fc802 6mo agoYes 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.
- zaphirplane 6mo agoIt’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
- bulbar 6mo agoWhat 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.
- nothinkjustai 6mo agoWell 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?
- zaphirplane 6mo agoNot really this is civil case not the full weight of a state behind it
- 6mo ago
- ibic 6mo ago"the operators of the site remain unidentified." I laughed at this quite a bit.
- negura 6mo agoultimately 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
- Aurornis 6mo agoThey 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.
- mhitza 6mo agoExtra problems with the copyright industry for no benefit. Hope the owner's OpSec was good enough and we won't hear about their unmasking.
- lifecodes 6mo agohmm you are right, I too wish the same brother
- fc417fc802 6mo agoExtra? 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).
- mhitza 6mo agoExtra, 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_of_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recording_Industry_Association...
- shevy-java 6mo agoI do not see any law being violated by Anna's Archive in the slightest.
- bulbar 6mo agoJust 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.
- Cider9986 6mo agoAnna's wants[1] companies to train on their data. [1] https://annas-archive.gl/blog/ai-copyright.html https://annas-archive.gl/blog/ai-copyright.html
- el_io 6mo agoOk. Now what?
- swarnie 6mo agoOne or two dementia Truths penned by media bribers/donors and the world moves on.
- randomtoast 6mo agoThe 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.
- Ragnarork 6mo ago> 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.
- BiteCode_dev 6mo agoIt'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.
- buccal 6mo ago[flagged]
- ndsipa_pomu 6mo agoReceiving illegitimate DMCA notices is not the same as hosting criminal services.
- subscribed 6mo agoSo if you're fraudulently accused of wrongdoing that makes you a criminal? Nice, nice....
- HDThoreaun 6mo agoIn this case, yes. Ignoring invalid dmca requests is not a legal way to deal with them.
- eur0pa 6mo agoI'm sure they are very worried about this right now
- shevy-java 6mo agoI 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.
- thequux 6mo ago> 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.
- hirako2000 6mo agoCan't lose a fight against someone who can't catch you.
- mothballed 6mo agoSounds like Anna won. Someone else had to spend a bunch of money on a lawsuit against a ghost.
- adrian_b 6mo agoThey 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.
- hirako2000 6mo agoIf 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.
- ranger_danger 6mo ago> 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.
- HDThoreaun 6mo ago
- input_sh 6mo agoSpotify was also forced to remove 60 or so endpoints from their API: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/references/changes/february-2026 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.
- chakintosh 6mo agoThat's a very long list. The API is now basically useless.
- gloflo 6mo agoMusic should not be centralized.
- dewey 6mo agoIt'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.
- input_sh 6mo agoCool, 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.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
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- comrade1234 6mo agoAfter 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.
- brailsafe 6mo agoSeems like quite an eager purchase. Could you not have borrowed one of them from the library?
- wiseowise 6mo agoThat’s what they did by downloading it from the Anna’s Archive.
- brailsafe 6mo agoI guess I'm often a little surprised at how quickly people jump into things without trying them first; the method is somewhat incidental, except for the fact we have tax funded institution for borrowing books. I'll buy a book with little more than a recommendation, but I'm not inclined to buy a full series, or every book by a certain author up-front even if I had read the first one. Kind of like how some people will buy a full ski kit before ever having tried it.
- nclin_ 6mo agoPillage libraries for LLM training data, then sue them and shut them down for archiving a different format. Cool.
- scotty79 6mo agoYou don't win in courts against people who bought the law. No reason to fight there.
- cxplay 6mo agoCompared to Anthropic's $1.5 billion, that's still too little.
- rvz 6mo agoWould have been $135B if it was to go to trial. They settled since they knew that they would lose the case.
- andai 6mo agoHow does that work exactly? "I'll give you 1% of what I owe you, if you leave me alone."
- ricardobeat 6mo agoSettled with whom, if nobody showed up to represent AA?
- hmokiguess 6mo agoBarbra Streisand effect for them, free PR, and lots of money wasted for the other side
- bawolff 6mo agoAt 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.
- hmokiguess 6mo agoFair 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
- bawolff 6mo agoFair point, i had no idea they were involved with music before this.
- erelong 6mo ago[flagged]
- randomNumber7 6mo agoIt's even more absurd now when the big AI companies train their LLMs on torrented books.
- giwook 6mo agoDon'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?
- wiseowise 6mo agoOne torrent is a crime, breaking all the laws by downloading terabytes of books and processing them is a trillion dollar business.
- protocolture 6mo agoThe torrenting was the only thing they were found to have done wrong, which makes sense.
- layer8 6mo agoDon’t you mean as a law? Ideas should be free.
- bjourne 6mo agoNo as a concept. Assigning ownership to specific bit patterns is absurd.
- kube-system 6mo agoSo, anyone should be able to sell something called "Coca Cola"?
- krabat 6mo agoSo, 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.
- andai 6mo agoInteresting point. What does the law say about it? With all these damages awarded here, who exactly has been damaged?
- PunchyHamster 6mo agoCompanies Spotify rent music from
- downrightmike 6mo agoRight, OpenAI stole everything that wasn't nailed down and nothing happened
- crumpled 6mo agoDoes 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?
- Gander5739 6mo agoThey did describe why briefly on reddit, saying it drew too much attention: https://torrentfreak.com/images/aaconf.png https://torrentfreak.com/images/aaconf.png
- squigz 6mo agoI guess I'm a little surprised that they felt this release was too hot. I'm not really surprised at the response from the music industry, but rather I thought AA was more confident in their opsec/safety from this sort of threat.
- Gander5739 6mo agoI would assume it's moreso they don't want to lose their domains too quickly. Though they've only given one sentence to go off, so it's hard to speculate.
- hayleox 6mo agoTrying 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.
- 6thbit 6mo agowho updates wikipedia with the new domains? how do they know the new ones?
- gruez 6mo agoDoes it matter? It's not illegal to update an article with a new domain.
- mercanlIl 6mo agoYes it does matter. Users need to know that the updated URL is correct and trustworthy.
- tossandthrow 6mo agoThis is Wikipedia. For that type of publishing please use Encyclopedia Britannica. You will get the url in the 2027 edition on print.
- paweladamczuk 6mo agoOh how I wish the print editions were still being released.
- fenykep 6mo agoIf you are really interested we could try piping their [API](https://encyclopediaapi.com/products/index 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 :)
- 6thbit 6mo ago300M 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?
- badlibrarian 6mo agoDifferent 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.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 6mo agoIronic, since Spotify started by pirating music[0] [0] https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files-some-from-pirate-bay-170509/ https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files...
- mentalgear 6mo agoSame 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.
- NDlurker 6mo agoThe 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.
- sebastiansm7 6mo agoStill 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 :)
- andai 6mo agoWow, how did that work? Steganography?
- SilverElfin 6mo agoSo how does one find this archive and how can it be kept alive in a decentralized way? I’m not super familiar with it.
- TitaRusell 6mo agoIronically 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.
- EA-3167 6mo agoPlus they can probably use them to inject malware and god knows what else.
- kdhaskjdhadjk 6mo agoWhich 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.
- kdhaskjdhadjk 6mo agoannas-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
- TitaRusell 6mo agoI think AA should have stuck to book piracy. Nobody really cares about that.
- mentalgear 6mo agoIt's more that the book market is not dominated by only a few big conglomerates.
- presbyterian 6mo agoYes it is, at least 80% of the book market in the US is controlled by 5 companies: Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, Hachette, and HarperCollins.
- HDThoreaun 6mo agoInternet archive lost a massive case about book piracy. Anthropic had to pay I believe 1.4 billion because they engaged in some book piracy.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- pessimizer 6mo agoI 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.
- progbits 6mo agoThey 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 https://annas-archive.gl/donate Just donated in honor of this. Up yours spotify!
- echelon 6mo agoI 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.
- damsta 6mo agoFuck Spotify
- worldsavior 6mo agoHow are the mainteners stay anonymous while buying many domains and servers?
- andai 6mo agoAlso 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.
- zarzavat 6mo agoIt's not hard. You could just pay someone else to buy the domain for you.
- worldsavior 6mo agoYou need many that are willing to risk themselves going to jail. I don't think that's their method.
- kingstnap 6mo agoIf you had a way to pay them I'm sure some someone in a poor country would take the offer. Pretty sure that's how this goes down. They don't really risk anything cause they can just leave the angry emails about piracy on read.
- zarzavat 6mo agoOk so they trace the domain purchase to some drug addict in Russia who got offered $100 to buy it. Then what? Wait for them to leave the country then nab them? They will be waiting a long time.
- Gander5739 6mo agoYou can buy domains anonymously, e.g. flokinet.is
- randomeel 6mo agoAnnas Archive still has lots of mirrors and can switch domains if its ever taken down
- measurablefunc 6mo agoCommercial music & movie industries are extensions of state sponsored propaganda. That is why they go to such lengths to defend their "products".
- ranger_danger 6mo agoSource:
- measurablefunc 6mo ago[flagged]
- nathanmills 6mo agoConspiracy garbage
- measurablefunc 6mo agoDon't let any inconvenient facts prevent you from consuming mass media.
- _-_-__-_-_- 6mo agoLast 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.
- andai 6mo agoFabulous! Now just imagine if it supported video too... It would be some kind of... VideoLAN!
- antinomicus 6mo agoI’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.
- QGQBGdeZREunxLe 6mo agoHow are you feeding the client Lidarr, soularr?
- _-_-__-_-_- 6mo agosoulseek, manually downloading files.
- danparsonson 6mo ago
- ComputerGuru 6mo agoNot 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.
- squigz 6mo agoProfit-seeking? That seems like a stretch. Also how do you know they have any "massive deals"? Do they publish details about the money they receive?
- dmantis 6mo agoI hope AA will make an onion version in addition to the unstable domain switching.
- sergiotapia 6mo agoIt's legal and chill when openai and anthropic pirates all of our content. But heaven forbid an outsider does it. RIP Aaron Swartz
- owlcompliance 6mo agoHow 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.
- jansommer 6mo agoIt's easy for others to see what you're downloading: https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com. So if you're unsure if the torrent is legitimate, I'd probably avoid it.
- Gander5739 6mo agoWhen 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.
- DauntingPear7 6mo agoMalformed files that are designed to exploit known (or unknown) parsing vulnerabilities in whatever ebook reading software
- bethekidyouwant 6mo agoHow is a video file a risk? If you mean a game, then yes, you may get a virus.
- avtar 6mo agoGiven the context, they're probably referring to epubs. Files could contain just generic malicious javascript or malware that attempts to exploit vulnerabilities in specific ereaders.
- ofou 6mo agoDemoniac move by Spotify
- aucisson_masque 6mo agoIt must feel good to be able to say fuck off to the American justice system.
- ricardobeat 6mo agoHappy to have dropped Spotify years ago.
- crazygringo 6mo agoThis 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.
- whywhywhywhy 6mo ago>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.
- crazygringo 6mo agoWe'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.
- girvo 6mo agoNow you’re at the mercy of YouTube etc’s compression, and having to decompress it for a worse output
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
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- meitham 6mo agoI read somewhere that Spotify initially seeded their db with pirated music! Now they go after anyone following their suit! It’s like a mafia’s boss that became mayor and is suddenly tough on crime, without acknowledging his past history!
- LilBytes 6mo agoIt's exactly the same. "The secret ingredient is crime...", then once the coffers are full use the cash to legitimate their presence into a legal offering. It's not as much of a hoodwink as you would think however, it's everywhere and has been the same throughout history. East India Company, Facebook, and even more recently Uber. Uber is the most readily documented. In Australia (and I'm almost certain else where, but I'll talk about Brisbane, Queensland explicitly), Uber were illegal for years and just paid the fines to the local authorities when pegged. And continued to do so until they became legal. It's a confronting and candid example of "money fixes all problems". The truth of this continues to bother me, the older and maybe not wiser I become, the more twisted I am from feeling disenfranchised, jaded and cynical from this truth. The world fundamentally operates very differently at the macro level where money is counted in 10 or more digits than the micro level where most of us here sit. Witnessing the average person struggle to home and feed them selves on a countries median wage. While organisations wash their sins with coffers and pivot into unicorns and technical behemoths.
- A_D_E_P_T 6mo agoDefault judgments are pernicious and should not exist. If the other party to a lawsuit is unwilling or unable to put up a defense, the case should still be judged on its merits and put to basic tests of fairness and propriety. As things stand, default judgment "winners" basically get everything they ask for automatically, which is not justice. Especially as it's quite common for people and small businesses to be unwilling/unable to defend themselves in court for various reasons, especially cost.
- lattrommi 6mo agoI agree, especially after seeing recently how ICE and CBP were arresting people in the US while they were reporting to their immigration agents, the legal thing they were supposed to do, and ultimately being deported, despite legally being in the US and not having commited any crimes. Going to court is dangerous. No one deserves a free pass just because AA did a no-call no-show.
- drob518 6mo agoNow, try to collect it.
- chris_wot 6mo agoI keep saying this (and I keep getting voted to oblivion) but we really need an alternative to DNS.
- nathanmills 6mo agoThen go ahead and use one. Of course, most projects in this regard try to tackle multiple things (e.g. Tor), including DNS, but there are projects like OpenNIC that take on DNS alone if you prefer. As usual, the mass majority won't adopt these, but they are ready to use for anyone who wants them.
- chris_wot 6mo agoI'll be honest - I've never heard of this! Thanks for the info.
- incompatible 6mo agoIP addresses. https://letsencrypt.org/2025/07/01/issuing-our-first-ip-address-certificate https://letsencrypt.org/2025/07/01/issuing-our-first-ip-addr...
- panny 6mo agoShould have named it AI archive. Then it would be free to violate copyrights.
- NooneAtAll3 6mo ago> Not long after the lawsuit was filed, the shadow library removed the Spotify listing for their torrents page. > The site’s operator, Anna’s Archivist, hoped that these removals would motivate the music industry to back down lol lmao even never give these greedy corps even an inch. It won't work
- Ms-J 6mo ago[dead]
- ____tom____ 6mo agoHow can you sue someone without knowing who they are? How can you sue someone without serving them?
- dnnddidiej 6mo agoHow to sue a ghost?
- trashface 6mo agoScrew AA for doing that spotify stunt - spotify disabled all API access except for paid accounts due to that. AA's greed and mass theft ruined a good thing.
- LucasOe 6mo agoI wrote a Spicetify plugin to show information about a song’s genres, but unfortunately the public API endpoint it was using -- as well as many other endpoints -- was removed after their changes, even for Premium users.
- lattrommi 6mo agoWho's greedy? The people who put something out on the internet for free, or the people who stopped letting people access that same thing, unless they paid them money? "But Spotify pays the musicians!" some people might scream. While true, it is a pitiful, insulting amount. The example that hit me the hardest was Dr. Dre, whose albums were streamed 1.5 million times and earned him $4345. 1.5 million is a platinum record album by industry standards in the US, UK, Canada and France. $4345 isn't even enough to pay a month of rent in New York, where the court case was done. Anna's Archive is not the ones you can blame for greed.
- diebillionaires 6mo agoI support AA. Lawyers can't solve this, sorry.
- 0xAgentKitchen 6mo agoDon't have to pirate books via torrent anymore. All the LLMs did read them. Ask them to write it back, in their full integrity. haha
- bni 6mo agoRemember, only big tech is allowed to pirate
- rustcleaner 6mo agoAA screwed the pooch two ways... 1) It was in their name rather than a disconnected splinter group or name, and 2) They went off half cocked releasing the analysis and metadata with no music. They should have held silent until the entirety of the music collection was ready to release, and it should have been a 'new' seemingly unaffiliated group. Either the leaders' egos have inflated too big, or someone is trying to hurt the project by making intentional strategic errors. I don't see any good reason to release only metadata, cover art, and analysis in a blog post, and little or no music, under your group's name, unless you want a massive ego stroke! For shame, and highly unprofessional, like modern UI devs who think an interface should change more often than once a decade (STOP BREAKING VISUO-MUSCLE MEMORY YOU TWITS! INTERFACES ARE THE HUMAN API!)...
- lynguist 6mo agoHonestly the only organization of the past few years to deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. And I truly don’t mean this in any hyperbolic way, but believe that this organization has done the most to enable human collaboration and thus enable a precursor to peace and progress and prosperity.
- contextualman 6mo ago[dead]