No, not really. Just few days ago some elementary kid got hit in front of the school because he didn’t wait at red light, and now he is in hospital with broken leg and smashed toes. Driver was driving like 40km/h but she didn’t see the kid on time and panicked.
I am not blindly obeying all the rules, but if you do something illegal, there will be consequences. Like for torrenting, if you forget to open VPN, or forget to bind to correct network adapter, you will get a nice letter from lawyer within 2-3 weeks. If you ignore it, add 300-400 to initial amount. There are too many cases of it.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t even pirate stuff. I did and still doing for the content that I can’t get legally in my country, like the animes and tv shows, but I am using streaming sites with VPN, never torrenting and sharing anything. I even bought WinRAR, that should tell you something about my usage habits.
If my reply came across as supporting Spotify, then I’m sorry for wording it poorly. I wanted to specifically address the reply I quoted, which seemed to say that Spotify would be fine by all this music being available, by saying that I thought artists should get paid for their work. That’s all.
I would also recommend paying them as directly as possible, and since many artists either make it possible to buy their music or merchandise directly at concerts (as @nicotiu mentions), through their website, or through something like bandcamp (as I attempted to point to in my last reply).
Qobuz was simply meant an example, for someone that wanted to subscribe to a streaming service that paid better and allowed downloads (that might be used for self-hosting). I want to clarify that I didn’t mean it as a recommendation.
To that point, I’m quite familiar with PG despite the recency of this account’s creation. This thread was posted in the “off topic” section of the forum and didn’t seem to share privacy specific news, so I thought it was ok to bring up as an example of a semi-widespread streaming platform. I’m sorry, and I’ll try to find better examples in the future.
I agree with this, but I thought the applied example here (music taken from Spotify) concerned much content that isn’t difficult to access, either via streaming services or directly from the artists themselves. I also agree that piracy generally doesn’t appear to be as harmful as it’s made out to be, and that artists should be supported directly (as I attempted to point to in my reply, as well as now earlier in this one).
I just wanted to add the nuance to this discussion that I didn’t see it solely affecting Spotify, and that I thought people making things ought to be compensated fairly, in this case artists (which I agree Spotify doesn’t do either).
I’m very sorry for wording that poorly; the tone of this discussion has made me a little sad, so I’ll tab out of it now.
Fair enough, its possible I misunderstood your intentions as well.
Spotify will be fine. There is no reason to believe this will affect artists in any meaningful way, was my point. There is already a hundred other ways to pirate this music, people who did not want to pay for these songs were never going to in the first place.
Hot take: copyright law has already been made laughing stock by AI corporations in the US. I’d rather see such work open for everyone. This archive is going to be unwieldy for the layperson to utilize, but its existence allows us to see the vast array of music that may otherwise vanish. Those who want to support artists will find a way, and those who don’t will have already found the least friction to cost route (they will continue to use music streaming after this exists).
As Gabe Newell put it, piracy is a service problem. Spotify (and others) continue to fulfill that service, it just so happens it pays pennies to the dollar to the artists, and that Pandora’s box has already been opened.
Maybe I overestimate the “layperson” but the metadata is already widely available on debrid services. I think its fair to assume the music files will be as well once they are released. One can easily connect to those via webdav and download all the songs they want at high speeds. Avoiding having to download the 300TB torrent for the few GBs a single person might want.
The irony being someone is then paying a subscription to a debrid service instead of spotify for essentialy the same thing. Truly a service issue.
Generally speaking, music is already fairly well preserved. There are many music enthusiasts in the world who digitized their CD and LP collections, shared them through torrents or other digital means, and meticulously catalogued them.
However, these existing efforts have some major issues:
Over-focus on the most popular artists. There is a long tail of music which only gets preserved when a single person cares enough to share it. And such files are often poorly seeded.
If they are claiming to want to preserve less popular music, they should also preserve Bandcamp. There’s music in Bandcamp that is not available on Spotify because it’s much more indie oriented.
I see this as purely positive because it is focused on preservation and could help fund Anna’s in the future.
From the blog, “For now this is a torrents-only archive aimed at preservation, but if there is enough interest, we could add downloading of individual files to Anna’s Archive. Please let us know if you’d like this.” This release is mainly for preservation because it is torrents.
This wouldn’t be a preferred method for pirates because the release is low bitrate, the majority of the music is niche, and the availability of more convenient alternatives like cracked Spotify, ddl rippers from streaming services, Soulseek, and private trackers. Additionally, it is 100s of TBs so very few people would ever use it for making their own media server or something.
It won’t be used for piracy, it is a noble effort to preserve human culture.
Obviously this raises alarms for piracy, but isn’t ALL data preservation essentially “piracy” unless consent or a license is provided by the owner?
This seems like the same as the Internet Archive, but just for Spotify.
I understand the concerns, and I do wonder how forums mods feel about this being posted as music is famously an endless litigation nightmare.
I admire the effort behind this project. It is shocking just how fleeting internet history is, and I hate that we own nothing anymore unless we physically hold it in our hands (including a storage drive).
I think the main part that makes this less unethical is that the audio quality appears to be slightly better than potato. Anyone who wants to pirate music would surely seek out a better quality version.
Anyway, I hope physical media really does return into mainstream. It’s great to hold a tangible product you love, but it does get expensive, and convenience is the most powerful sales tactic for us all.
The Internet Archive provides a means redaction for copyright claims. I dont think this does so, therefore I think this collection goes on the darker side of gray IMHO. Its preservation that leans more on piracy.
The flip side is that now is the best time to archive it all because AI music slop has arrived and these slop is the worst version of AI song that will ever be. AI song will only get better from here on.
@Bhaelros is this a serious comment or are you just in your feelings about being downvoted? I have seen it before where people get to emotional about a thread and end up rage deleting their account so I am a bit concerened.
I think Bandcamp is less of a priority because the music is distributed with out any DRM, meaning if Bandcamp suddenly shut down one day, not all of that content would be lost because there would still be individuals who own the files themselves.
whats your point? Did you just now read the blog post? I literally quoted this in my first post.
I find this all a bit concerning, first you had that very odd post that you seem to have deleted, now you reposting things already said. Are you tracking?
My point is, they released metadata now and will release all the songs, which is piracy. I don’t understand your intentions about why you are glorifying piracy.
Nobody is glorifying piracy. Archiving media is a tool to prevent gatekeeping and censorship. This will be true no matter how many times you flag the post.
You seem to acting exceptionally chaotic today. Which makes me a bit hesitant to continue to respond.
I also find it sus you only seem to care about this issue and don’t have any history of being against all the other posts that have used archived media on the forum.
