I think in most cases ArchiveTeam's actions have been copyright-infringement on some level. They just don't care and find that keeping user content safe from unrepentant deletion to be more important.

If you've ever seen a Jason Scott talk, he isn't the sort of guy who gives a shit if you DMCA him while he's sucking up all of your bandwidth archiving your content two days before your servers shut down.

Also, DMCA takedown notices properly order certain kinds of intermediaries (not people who have consciously chosen to publish something) to stop facilitating access to allegedly infringing material. They're not properly directed to an alleged copyright infringer himself or herself, and they don't order people to stop downloading things, even if their reason for downloading is apparently to publish the information.

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

This is not to say that people don't send "DMCA notices" for anything and everything to anyone and everyone, but those notices are not following the law. (Also, a lawyer can always send a demand letter demanding that someone stop any behavior, but a properly-constructed DMCA notice gives the recipient an extra reason to follow it compared to a run-of-the-mill legal demand—"[a]n OSP who complies with the requirements for a given safe harbor is not liable for money damages", as Wikipedia puts it.)

Yeah, more likely you'd get a Cease-and-Desist. But once the ArchiveTeam publishes it, they'll likely get DMCA'd (though they've survived things like that before).

Not to mention that dying websites or recent acquires are likely to be able to have the legal muster to start threatening archivists.

> I'm sure SC serves up a lot of content per day, but how do you think they will react by suddenly having someone download all of their 900 TB or whatever it is in one day? How much will Archiveteam be contributing to SC's downfall by suddenly causing them a huge unexpected bill?

Obviously, there's more than just the bandwidth cost, but assuming they pay $0.02/GB for CDN traffic, we're talking about $18k. It's not nothing, but I doubt it'd change their outlook in any meaningful way.

I should add that the ArchiveTeam doesn't download everything in a day, but rather uses a distributed crawler (ArchiveTeam Warrior) run by volunteers. They rate-limit the crawling rate as needed in order not to overwhelm the site being archived.

That's making the incorrect assumption that all 900TB is hosted by the CDN... you typically only have a fraction of your content, known as your working set, in the CDN's working cache.

So you should factor in the bandwidth cost for CDN traffic AND origin pulls, which if you're serving from AWS (and not using CloudFront), is $0.08/GB.

The size of your working set also influences your overall CDN bill. Storage isn't free.

I'd expect their S3 data transfer pricing to be closer to the assumed $0.02 CDN price. The price available to the public goes down to $0.05 once you hit 200 TB, and AWS is known to give significant discounts to large clients.

The storage cost is a good point, and I don't know which CDN they use, but I expect the songs that weren't "hot" would be evicted from edge caches pretty fast, so that should be no significant increase.

To put things into perspective, an article from 2009 estimates that Spotify used 84TB of traffic per day[1], back when they had 5 million users. Soundcloud claims to have had 40 million registered users in 2013 and 175 million unique monthly listeners in 2014. These numbers aren't easy to compare, but either way I think it's safe to say that 900TB should be a small fraction of their monthly traffic, and shouldn't make a huge dent in their financials.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2009/oct/08/spot...

Is it just me, or is charging pennies per gigabyte usurious? If I paid even a penny per gig on my home internet, I'd have nearly a $150 bill just in gig charges, and I know I'm one of the lower bandwidth customers on my block.

Why stay with a host that bends you over a barrel for transit? Even Netflix doesn't use Amazon to deliver their data heavy content, as their pricing is pie in the sky high.

What block do you live on that 15TB is on the low end?

They replaced all lighting with streaming 1080p video.

I can only access it intermittently. Here is the google cache:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:eCl5VSB...

In response to your concerns; I think ArchiveTeam simply doesn't care. They are very firm in their convictions, and they don't exactly listen to requests to not archive things.[0]

If you're curious, here[1] is the initial discussion that AT had. People bring up copyright concerns.

[0]:http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:fmhU2zS...

[1]:http://archive.fart.website/bin/irclogger_log/archiveteam?da...

I'm having weird issues myself downloading my own tracks that are hosted on soundcloud. When I login as myself even though I have set my songs to be able to be downloaded I can't. For one song I was able to log off and log back in and download that one but I was unable to do it for another.