They have a page on their site explicitly offering AI companies direct, high-speed access to their archives in exchange for 5 figure sums of money. AI may or may not be their primary motivation but they're clearly on board with it.
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There is a certain irony in people providing copyrighted works for free justifying profiting from these copyrights on the basis that providing the works to others isn’t free.
They had many opportunities to get out ahead of it, and they squandered it trying to cling to album sales where 11/13 tracks were trash. They are in a bed of their own making.
Is this true? Can you show me where I can get DRM-free releases from Mountain Fever?
Better yet, can you add that information here? https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/DRM-free
https://mountainfever.com/colin-kathleen-ray/
While ALAC is an Apple proprietary format, it is DRM free and can be converted to FLAC using ffmeg. AAC is not an Apple format
https://web.archive.org/web/20070207234839/http://www.apple....
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/may/15/drm.apple
Caveat: CDs were 44.1/16 so if the original files had more bit depth, they would require downsampling. Technically lossy, but not "compression" per se. But AFAIK, iTunes was also 44.1/16.
The scheme you link to is intended to prevent further copies of CD-Rs but you can copy a CD you bought as often as you like.
Meanwhile, I pirate movies/TV on a regular basis for the reasons you gave. At one point, I was subbed to 5 services, and decided enough was enough. Cancelled all but Netflix and went back to torrenting anything they didn't have.
Spotify rotted my playlists because it didn't feel like updating a database row somewhere when some licensing agreement got updated. Apple will do the opposite: Rot your music collection by replacing songs with "identical" songs that aren't at all.
So I'm thinking it's time to buy music again.
I think what is more ironic is we somehow were comfortable being collectively conditioned (manufactured consent?) with the idea that you could lock up culture for 100 years or more just to enable maximum economic extraction from the concept of “intellectual property” and that to evade such insanity is wrong in some way. “You can just do things” after all.
Your savings account is just bits on a disk, yet presumably it represents value that you worked for and which belongs to you to do with what you wish.
That's another example of the shared delusion, since yes, we tell eachother it represents labor and resources, and the market engages in allocation somewhat efficiently, and so the money is a pretty accurate representation of the value of labor and the value of resources.
In reality, that's not true, because the most highly compensated jobs are some of the least valuable, such as investment bankers, landlords, or being born rich (which isn't even a job, but is compensated anyway). Rent seeking is one of the most highly compensated things you can do under this system, but also one of the most parasitic and least valuable things.
Your savings account's number is totally detached from accurately representing value. It's mostly a representation of where you were born.
This could also be true because the number of dollars in circulation is "just bits on a disk" that politicians can manipulate for various reasons.
Someone can work very hard and save their earnings, only to have the value diluted in the future. Isn't that also a delusion?
Yes, it is.
It's one of my pet peeves about the cryptocurrency movement vs neoliberal institutional types. "Bitcoin is juts bits on a disk!" is always answered with "well, dollars is too!" To which the institutionalist can only say, "no, that's different." But really, it isn't.
What the cryptocurrency people get wrong is that replacing one shared delusion with another isn't a useful path to go down.
Money isn't "only bits" it is also an encoding of social contracts
You use the word delusion like it also includes a) things everyone fully agree only exists in people's mind as intersubjective reality (no deceit going on really) and b) things you depend on for your survival.
You talk like getting rid of "delusions", as you call them, is a goal in itself. Why? It is part of human technology. (Just like math, which also only exist in people's minds.) Humans have had contracts since we were hunter gatherers in groups...
I would recommend Yuval Harari's "Sapiens" for you, you would probably like it. It talks about the history of "shared delusions" as you call them, as a critical piece for development of society.
Already read it. Counter: read "Debt, the first 5000 years" by Graeber for, finally, a non- "Chicago school of economics" take on the history of trade amongst humans.
Just to be clear, I agree the money abstraction is not working particularly well. And that in the age of computers something that is more directly linked to the underlying economy could have worked better. But what needs to replace it is a better and improved "delusion", not a lack of it.
Everyone always starts every future speculation assuming capitalism, or at least, currency. Isn't it worth challenging these core baseline assumptions? At the very least, the other ground is well covered, so we might come up with a little more interesting.
The political systems that get built on top of that are just a downstream effect of the incentives that arise. Communisim thinking it would be good to centralize the control, capitalism thinking it would be good allow the incentives to rule, marxism thinking the labor rules, etc.
What I do for work is SO far away from any sort of tangible production, it makes sense to have a way to just straight from Work -> Food, rather than 50-100 trades so I can eat everyday. Again, the choice to to have to trade at all, or to trade exactly what I want, when I want, is enable by currency.
You can make the argument things shouldn't be so easy, that I shouldn't be able to choose to go to play pinball and drink a vanilla milkshake at 11am, but if that's possible, currency (in whatever form you want) has to exist.
It doesn't matter whether you personally find some creative material to be worthless, or you personally think someone doesn't generate sufficient value to deserve their bank balance. The reason it doesn't matter is that societies cannot run on an individual's opinion about whether other people deserve ownership over what they legally own. Because if it did, that society would quickly disintegrate into anarchy.
Speaking personally, as someone who once was on course to make 9 figures and now makes a low 6, I think it's sort of a pathology to spend your time worrying about how much less you have than other people. What matters is whether you can be recognized for your work and earn from it. I don't care that some people just inherited what they have, while I had to struggle as a taxi driver and waiter and minimum wage intern. That's annoying, but it's not as bad as living in a society where I can't capture the value of what I produce creatively. Having ownership of my work is far more important to me than money.
There’s a commons problem at play here. Most habitual pirates couldn’t pay for what they are pirating even if they wanted to, so restricting their access just makes the world worse-off; but who is going to finance the creation of new content if everything is just reliant on completely optional donations?
The 100 year period is absurd and does nothing to incentivize art, but there are costs involved in production of these works. People are always going to make music and write books regardless of the economic outcome; far fewer are going to write technical manuals or act as qualified reporters without being compensated.
Seems questionable. You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days. In fact I often pirate things that I otherwise have access to via e.g. Amazon Prime.
> but who is going to finance the creation of new content if everything is just reliant on completely optional donations?
Well this is an appeal to consequences, right? It's probably true that increased protectable output is a positive of IP law, but that doesn't mean it's an optimal overall state, given the (massive) negatives. It's a local maxima, or so I would argue.
Plus it's a bit of a strange argument. It seems to claim that we must protect Disney from e.g. 'knock offs', and somehow if we didn't, nobody would be motivated to create things. But then who would be making the knock-offs and what would be motivating them?
I would guess the majority of people on earth don't even have good enough internet to pirate HD video, nor the technical skills to do it, so we're not really talking about global averages here.
> Without any* copyright law, any content that is generated effectively gets arbitraged out to the most efficient hosts and promoters. This might be a win for readers in the short term, but long-term tends towards commodification that simply won’t sustain specialized subject matter in the absence of a patronage model.
I don't think you understand my argument. I don't deny that this may be true. I deny that it is ipso facto the best outcome to have high-quality creator content, or whatever we are talking about here, at the cost of the massive benefits of free use. You might as well tell me New Jersey gas pumping laws lead to nicer service experiences, and getting rid of them would ruin that.
We can arbitrarily prop up any industry to make it cushy and a 'nice experience'. That doesn't make doing so the greatest overall good.
I would argue that even if all that we achieved with the abolition of IP law was the provision of cheap generic drugs, long out of research, it'd be worth far more than the YouTube creator economy.
Why is that the qualification you’re using? There are plenty of people in the developing world who have benefitted from access to e.g. LibGen who would never be able to afford to legally access the materials hosted there.
My point is that under the abolitionist model there is no financial incentive to create anything because the profits get arbitraged away by the most efficient copy services. This wouldn’t be relevant for saturated mediums like music or literature, but it does create a free rider problem in scenarios where the intellectual property has a high cost of production and not many people qualified to produce it (e.g. technical manuals, pharmaceutical research, well-produced films, etc.)
Pirates effectively have their usage subsidized by those who actually pay for the content. A huge amount of human potential is unlocked when works are freely available through legitimate platforms; neither of us are disputing this. The reason I can’t get on board with copyright abolitionism over copyright term reduction is because I don’t see how certain works will be produced at all under an abolitionist model that can only sustain itself via voluntary donations.
Maybe for you that's something you can afford. I can't. I just consume less music. Or sail the high seas if I really want something.
Long story short: workable solutions exist, it is entirely a question of political will and lack thereof.
Calling such things "shared delusions" is missing the point...it's not that it's wrong, but it is not a very useful way to look at it.
There is such a thing as intersubjective (as opposed to objective) reality. Physically it exists as a shared pattern in the brains of humans, but that is seldom useful to reflect on. Language wise much more convenient and useful to talk about copyright as something, you know, existing.
Everyone knows these are just human agreements... it is not exactly deep thinking to point it out.
You may not agree to some laws. You can then seek to have the laws overturned (I agree patents and copyright are... counterproductive, at this point). Luckily many parts of the world have democracy to decide what laws to force on people, as opposed to a dictator.
Making bits available isn't "taking artists ability to live in a financially viable way" any more than radio, LPs and player pianos was. If you are an artist who is trying to make art and live do more of that and don't waste peoples time arguing for copyright restricting other people's activity on websites like this one.
This was a different group of people but when some of the old LibGen domains got seized the FBI uploaded photos of the owners and the things they had spent their money on; a crappy old boat, what looked like a trailer in rural Siberia, and a vacation somewhere in the Mediterranean. It honestly read like sketch comedy, because the purchases didn’t appear remotely ostentatious.
Z-library also supposedly caps downloads at 5 per day and offers more and faster downloads to paying subscribers.
That is the opposite of being ideologically motivated unless your ideology happens to be 'capitalism'.
or they are totally immune to deanon / getting tracked down,
or they are stupid enough to allow their greed to become their downfall,
or this legend about underground warriors of light fighting against evil copyrighters is utter bullshit.
Very interesting, thank you. So using this for AI will just be a side effect.
And good point -- yup, can now definitely imagine apps building an interface to search and download. I guess I just wonder how seeding and bandwidth would work for the long tail of tracks rarely accessed, if people are only ever downloading tiny chunks.
Anyone who wants to listen to unlimited free music from a vast catalog with a nice interface can use YouTube/Google Music. If they don't like the ads they can get an ad blocker. Downloading to your own machine works well too.
Sounds like one of these: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/11/is-your-android-tv-strea...
Probably not your problem to play tech support for these people and explain why being part of a botnet is bad, but mildly concerning nonetheless!
Botnet infections occur primarily through one of two ways: Vulnerable devices exposed directly to the Internet, or app downloads and installs on persons computing devices.
The TV box appears to be a rare hardware version of convincing someone to bring something into their network that compromises it. Usually it’s a software package that they’re convinced to install which brings along the botnet infection
Regardless, it’s a weird and dangerous mentality to believe that being part of a botnet is a “who cares” level of concern. Having criminal traffic originate from your network is a problem, but they might also decide to exploit other vulnerabilities some day and start extracting even more from your internal network.
It may be relevant for those people, but I lost all interest in current TV or streaming stuff. I just watch youtube regularly. What's on is on; what is not on is not really important to me. My biggest problem is lack of time anyway, so I try to reduce the time investment if possible, which is one huge reason why I have zero subscriptions. I just could not keep up with them.
To get access to "all" TV content legally would be hundreds of dollars a month. And for many movies you must buy/rent each individually. And legal TV and movies are much more encumbered by DRM and lock in, limiting the way you can view them. (like many streaming apps removing AirPlay support, or limiting you to 720p in some browsers)
I think Spotify wins over pirating because of its relatively low cost and convenience. Pirating TV/Movies have increased as the cost to access them has.
What you say is still true of the Amazon and Apple offerings, though. Haven't tried Youtube Music, so can't comment on that.
https://liveforlivemusic.com/news/has-spotify-been-creating-...
It's virtually all popular music recently published commercially in the world.
It's missing large portions of bootlegs, old music, foreign music, radio shows, mixtapes and live streaming music to list a few prominent categories from music in my private archive of cultural works. Those categories, btw, are well represented by torrents on tracker sites.
One of them has come back recently. It's still listed as by the wrong artist (same name, but dead, vs. the active artist who actually performed it) but I'm not reporting it again because I suspect I may have made it disappear for a couple of years in doing so before.
It's kind of crap and disorganised after anything more than barely glancing at it really, must be infuriating for (or just not used by) people who actually are into it.
Until they decide to silence the artist you want to listen to because emperor god trump decides to unperson them.
Putting what music you listen to in the hands of a US corporation is such a dangerously stupid idea that it is amazing to me that there are people here who are OK with it.
>I think Spotify wins over pirating because of its relatively low cost and convenience
Spotify isn't "convenient" if you want to control and understand the media and software in your life. https://www.defectivebydesign.org/spotify
Thankfully Spotify isn't primarily a U.S company.
Anna’s archive business is stealing copyrighted content and selling access to it. It's not ideologically motivated.
What ideology is about pirating books and music where most of the people producing this stuff cannot afford to do it full-time? It's not like pirating movies, software and large videogame studios, which is still piracy, but they also make big money and they don't act all the time in the interests of the users.
Writers and musicians are mostly broken. If we sum the rising cost of living, AI generated content and piracy, there's almost no reward left for their work. Anna’s archive is contributing to the art and culture decadence. They sell you premium bandwidth for downloading and training your AIs on copyrighted content, so soon we can all generate more and more slop.
I always assumed the "Anna" in the name was for "Anarchist." My assumption about the archive is that they don't believe there's an ethical solution to the restriction of access to data that involves a capitalist market.
That is simply not true. Most artists do what they do without ever seeing any money for it.
How much media that the average person choses to consume is this 'free use' media? How much is media that artists chose to make money from?
By the way, I do know a lot of artists that just give their work away for free. Hell, any Burn is just a bunch of free art that usually gets lit on fire or destroyed after a week. There's also graffiti art which is uncompensated and usually painted over within a month.
I challenge you to ask 10 creative people in your life if they would stop doing whatever it is they do if they had a billion dollars.
No, probably not. Isn't it a shame we live in a world where we have the technology to automate all meaningful production, but people still need to justify their existence through often meaningless labor?
That said, I know artists that make the bare minimum to survive, on purpose, so they have more time to focus on art.
It's more about the viability of making any kind of living from one's creative work, not motivation to create. (Though for creative works with large upfront costs, eg films, ROI motivation is relevant for backers.)
Recommending to an individual to work on changing copyright from within the system is, IMO, naive.
There is not enough profit in that compared to the risk. They're also not exactly aggressive about it (there are groups which host mirrors who charge far more/finance it in the usual criminal way of getting people to install malware).
To me, there's a "motivation gap" between what they get out of this and the effort it takes, so there's some kind of "ideology". Whether it's 100% what they say it is, is another question.
For authors (books) ~70% of all the book sales go to the publisher, not the author (trad pub): https://reedsy.com/blog/how-much-do-authors-make/
For musicians: depending on how big a name you are and which publisher you chose, the publishers compensation ranges from 15% (small name/indy) to 60% (big name/Universal, Sony) https://www.careersinmusic.com/music-publishing/
This is an industry with profit maximising as its goal like every other industry. If artists are broke, first take a look at the publishers.
Before we had spotify we had grooveshark. Streaming pirated content came first, and everything old is new again.
So it's just yet another instance of enormous luck / annuit coeptis for the wealthy and powerful, then.
Such lucky bastards. Whatever happens, does so to their benefit, and all inconvenient questions about the nature of their luck automatically recede into the conspiracy theory domain.
And let's not forget that Anna's Archive is also the host to the world's largest pirate library of books and articles.
I wouldn’t be so sure. There are already tools to automatically locate and stream pirated TV and movie content automatic and on demand. They’re so common that I had non-technical family members bragging at Thanksgiving about how they bought at box at their local Best Buy that has an app which plays any movie or TV show they want on demand without paying anything. They didn’t understand what was happening, but they said it worked great.
> Definitely wondering if this was in response to desire from AI researchers/companies who wanted this stuff.
The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated. They’re definitely not doing this for AI companies.