Archiveteam are backing up SoundCloud • Hacker News Board

Re: Archiveteam are backing up SoundCloud

#151

Post by sp332 » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 2:50 PM UTC

chinathrow wrote: post #132

jacquesm wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but how is downloading any portion of artist's music not copyright infringement? I had the same issue with backing up Geocities when it went down. I figured better safe than sorry, established a very easy deletion procedure for the copyright holders and have received only a very small number of nastygrams compared to an absolutely enormous number of messages from people that were happy their content got saved. So a…

> So at a guess, yes it is copyright infringement, no, it will not lead to trouble because most people are able to recognize a good faith effort when they see it. A takedown notice from a few large commercial soundcloud users would probably be enough, no?

Each copyright owner can only request the takedown of their own content. They can't demand that you take the whole archive offline.

Re: Archiveteam are backing up SoundCloud

#152

Post by fvdessen » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 2:54 PM UTC

Why doesn't SoundCloud want my money ? There are no ads, and no paid plans for listeners. A lot of songs in my library disappear once the artist gets big and wants some cash from iTunes. I would have no problem paying for access to these songs but it's just not possible. I would also like to buy some band posters / t-shirts, vinyls, cds, show tickets etc, not possible either. It's like they are actively avoiding revenue streams. I don't get it.

Re: Archiveteam are backing up SoundCloud

#153

Post by cyphar » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 2:56 PM UTC

radarsat1 wrote: post #139

Their website seems to be down: I'm just wondering, are they downloading everything accessible through the player, or just songs marked "Download"? Even given that they could restrict themselves to songs marked okay to download, how much of that will be DJ mixes containing copyrighted songs? I'm just wondering because Soundcloud actually has support to specify your copyright terms, which does not default to "everyone…

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.

Re: Archiveteam are backing up SoundCloud

#154

Post by pfg » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 3:04 PM UTC

radarsat1 wrote: post #139

Their website seems to be down: I'm just wondering, are they downloading everything accessible through the player, or just songs marked "Download"? Even given that they could restrict themselves to songs marked okay to download, how much of that will be DJ mixes containing copyrighted songs? I'm just wondering because Soundcloud actually has support to specify your copyright terms, which does not default to "everyone…

> 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.

Re: Archiveteam are backing up SoundCloud

#155

Post by kpennell » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 3:08 PM UTC

fvdessen wrote: post #152

Why doesn't SoundCloud want my money ? There are no ads, and no paid plans for listeners. A lot of songs in my library disappear once the artist gets big and wants some cash from iTunes. I would have no problem paying for access to these songs but it's just not possible. I would also like to buy some band posters / t-shirts, vinyls, cds, show tickets etc, not possible either. It's like they are actively avoiding reve…

Wondering this too. Why don't they sell tracks directly? I'm always wondering what various tracks are in the house mixes I listen to and would love to add them to my cart right there.

Re: Archiveteam are backing up SoundCloud

#156

Post by skymt » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 3:09 PM UTC

fvdessen wrote: post #152

Why doesn't SoundCloud want my money ? There are no ads, and no paid plans for listeners. A lot of songs in my library disappear once the artist gets big and wants some cash from iTunes. I would have no problem paying for access to these songs but it's just not possible. I would also like to buy some band posters / t-shirts, vinyls, cds, show tickets etc, not possible either. It's like they are actively avoiding reve…

There is a paid plan: SoundCloud Go.

https://soundcloud.com/go

Re: Archiveteam are backing up SoundCloud

#157

Post by rsync » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 3:14 PM UTC

pas wrote: post #12

naturalgradient wrote: post #2

Archiveteam seems like a really cool project, what I was wondering (and couldn't find in the FAQ) is who is paying for all the storage? Is it donated by big tech companies?

Volunteers, no corps as far as I know. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_Team

rsync.net donated online storage for the original geocities backup efforts in 2009.

Re: Archiveteam are backing up SoundCloud

#158

Post by fgandiya » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 3:18 PM UTC

ipsum2 wrote: post #13

I'm interested in people's opinions on the legality of this. They mention "Archive Team considers the SoundCloud service in danger and, as it hosts a lot of original content, finds it important to prepare to save it selectively (a full grab would be too big and would raise concerns of mass copyright infringement).", but how is downloading any portion of artist's music not copyright infringement? I've written my own S…

It probably is and archive team just don't care...

Re: Archiveteam are backing up SoundCloud

#159

Post by modusoperandi » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 3:20 PM UTC

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #116

evook wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost certainly Google Drive unlimited.

I'm more interested in how they did this: > Not a home connection, just google abuse. GCE has ~40Gbit to each server and >400Gbit peering with amazon It sounds like they paid GCE for 900TB of data transfer?

There's no charge for ingress traffic. They spin up an instance in GCE and use youtube-dl or something else to scrape the site directly into an "unlimited" drive account (which is also free to transfer into).

Re: Archiveteam are backing up SoundCloud

#160

Post by chazzeromus » Mon, Jul 17, 2017, 3:28 PM UTC

naturalgradient wrote: post #93

chazzeromus wrote: post #77

Probably not an amazing and erudite source as others have posted but there's this tweet: https://twitter.com/chancetherapper/status/88592122075935539... Soundcloud is here to stay

I dont understand. Is this supposed to imply this rapper will somehow invest and personally try to ensure soundcloud will survive? Or did he call the CEO, the CEO told him 'Yes we will stay'? I mean what is he supposed to say? 'No, don't bother uploading new songs, we will run out of cash soon, thanks for the call'?

Hm that's a good point. I didn't consider the cynical approach to a CEO's reassurance, as obvious as it seems.