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How to become a pirate archivist (2022)

annas-blog.org

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Re: How to become a pirate archivist (2022)

#51

Post by al_borland »

carlosjobim wrote: post #45
ghaff wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because streaming in pretty much the distribution channel today. Even if they sell a few CDs at live shows, increasingly younger people don't even have a CD player. And very few people buy MP3s.

When the artists only get a couple hundred dollars per year from their streams, why even bother putting the music on Spotify? If your listeners don't want to buy your mp3s or CDs when that's the only option, then what's the point? Compare it to any other profession. Let's say a bricklayer decides to go work for a company. He works the entire year and builds houses for many people. Then he's paid a hundred dollars. He…

It’s advertising to drive people to concerts and merch.

Of course, generally people make music because they like making music, and streaming is a way to share it. If it connects with people, and they blow up, great. But if that’s the only drive they’ll probably have a bad time.

The same could be said about GitHub… why would anyone put their code up there for free, or work on these hobby projects, when they aren’t making money from it, or just get $100 in donations per year? It’s fun, the people enjoy it, they want to share the work they’ve done, and for some it’s a way to advertise themselves and what they can do.

Not everything needs to make someone a multimillionaire, especially in the arts.

Re: How to become a pirate archivist (2022)

#52

Post by matheusmoreira »

carlosjobim wrote: post #45
ghaff wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because streaming in pretty much the distribution channel today. Even if they sell a few CDs at live shows, increasingly younger people don't even have a CD player. And very few people buy MP3s.

When the artists only get a couple hundred dollars per year from their streams, why even bother putting the music on Spotify? If your listeners don't want to buy your mp3s or CDs when that's the only option, then what's the point? Compare it to any other profession. Let's say a bricklayer decides to go work for a company. He works the entire year and builds houses for many people. Then he's paid a hundred dollars. He…

Maybe they should start a patreon, a kickstarter for an album or something.

They clearly need new business models. Selling copies of infinitely abundant data in the age of networked computers just isn't gonna work out.

Re: How to become a pirate archivist (2022)

#54

Post by dpassens »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #50
austin-cheney wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have my own written SOPs for how I make personal back ups of commercial media I own (purchased licensed instance because you never really own it even after paying for access). In this case I enjoy maintaining a media archive but my choice of words provides a fully legal context. What I find interesting is the wildly differing approach to piracy between the RIAA and the MPAA. The music industry’s current approach is…

> The music industry’s current approach is to make their product as available everywhere as much as possible so that it requires far greater effort to pirate the media than to otherwise consume it. You consume it by going to youtube and playing the video. You "pirate" it by saving the youtube video. Passing the -x flag to youtube-dl will ignore the video and save just the audio. It's very little additional effort.

Regarding youtube-dl specifically, it's only very little additional effort if you're already comfortable using a terminal.

Re: How to become a pirate archivist (2022)

#55

Post by shrimp_emoji »

dpassens wrote: post #54
thaumasiotes wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The music industry’s current approach is to make their product as available everywhere as much as possible so that it requires far greater effort to pirate the media than to otherwise consume it. You consume it by going to youtube and playing the video. You "pirate" it by saving the youtube video. Passing the -x flag to youtube-dl will ignore the video and save just the audio. It's very little additional effort.

Regarding youtube-dl specifically, it's only very little additional effort if you're already comfortable using a terminal.

yt-dlp now. youtube-dl is dead. :p

Re: How to become a pirate archivist (2022)

#56

Post by criddell »

carlosjobim wrote: post #40

What kind of resources would it take to make a search index / crawl the content of the books and papers in Anna's Archive? This would be the most important project for information technology of this decade. They have torrent files of a few hundred gigabytes. Could crawling be done piece by piece on these files?

I'm not exactly sure what you have in mind, but even a laptop should be able to index a terabyte in a day or two.

Re: How to become a pirate archivist (2022)

#57

Post by kerkeslager »

beeboobaa wrote: post #47
vouaobrasil wrote: post #37

A lot of people will argue about the morality and legality of this sort of thing within the system, but I think this sort of thing is truly the result of rising pressures on society to be as efficient as possible in the domain of capitalistic activities. Of course, as a content creator myself, I do believe that there should be some sort of reward and protection for creating content. However, I also know that we have…

The thing is that countless of lives have been ruined by bigcorps for doing "piracy". But now the bigcorps see it as a way to gain more money and control over other's lifes, so suddenly doing piracy is totally fine and for the greater good! The worst part is that these individuals whose lives have been ruined weren't even harming anyone. Their operations were on such a small scale that it barely had any impact. But t…

> But now the bigcorps see it as a way to gain more money and control over other's lifes, so suddenly doing piracy is totally fine and for the greater good!

I'm definitely about as anti-corporation as you're going to find on HN, but I'm not sure I'm seeing what you're describing. It seems like bigcorps are definitely still fighting against piracy. At the moment, players like Anna's Archive appear to be winning because they've largely figured out technical means to bypass the legal problems, but I've been in this sphere for long enough to know you never really "win" this war--all you ever can do is carve out a temporary, limited space where knowledge is preserved and liberated. In fact, there are some pretty glaring weaknesses to stuff like Anna's Archive (which I'm not going to share here because I don't want to give anyone ideas) and I expect someone on the wrong side will figure those out in a decade at the most, and services like this will disappear.

Re: How to become a pirate archivist (2022)

#58

Post by rjbwork »

carlosjobim wrote: post #45
ghaff wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because streaming in pretty much the distribution channel today. Even if they sell a few CDs at live shows, increasingly younger people don't even have a CD player. And very few people buy MP3s.

When the artists only get a couple hundred dollars per year from their streams, why even bother putting the music on Spotify? If your listeners don't want to buy your mp3s or CDs when that's the only option, then what's the point? Compare it to any other profession. Let's say a bricklayer decides to go work for a company. He works the entire year and builds houses for many people. Then he's paid a hundred dollars. He…

I've seen a lot of concerts that I wouldn't have gone to if they didn't have their music on Spotify.

Re: How to become a pirate archivist (2022)

#59

Post by rmbyrro »

mistyq wrote: post #3

Doing something highly illegal and finding a "community" and sharing it with a "friend" would be a stupid move. Don't ever disclose your name if you do something like this, unless you are in a safe country.

I understand the psychological need, but I agree this is going to bite them at some point.

A "community" is the weakest link in their chain, it seems. Even if you get your OpSec 100% tight (very, very hard, if not impractical), the human factor is never securable.

Re: How to become a pirate archivist (2022)

#60

Post by kerkeslager »

vouaobrasil wrote: post #37

A lot of people will argue about the morality and legality of this sort of thing within the system, but I think this sort of thing is truly the result of rising pressures on society to be as efficient as possible in the domain of capitalistic activities. Of course, as a content creator myself, I do believe that there should be some sort of reward and protection for creating content. However, I also know that we have…

> Of course, as a content creator myself, I do believe that there should be some sort of reward and protection for creating content.

This is often the framing of the debate around piracy, but I think it's fundamentally incorrect. Numerous studies over the years have shown that pirates spend more money on media, not less. Media companies want to frame this as a debate about money because it seems logical that we should reward content creators, but it's fundamentally not a debate about money because if it were, content creators would have no reason to be unhappy about piracy.

In reality, the real issue is control. Media companies want to control how and when you consume media, and pirates want to control how and when they consume media. This war isn't just being fought in the piracy space either--it's part of the motivation behind the move to subscription streaming services and streaming protocol changes that no longer serve up video files.

Personally, that's exactly why I spend more money on media than my friends: I have an extensive CD collection (and a somewhat less-extensive BluRay collection) and if you do the math on that it's very clear that it would be cheaper for me to pay for literally every music streaming service than what I spend on CDs each month. I'm not going to give exact numbers, but the amount of money isn't even in the same ballpark. But my CDs don't disappear, I can rip them and play them on any of my devices, I can leaf through my CDs and rediscover something I had forgotten instead of having some algorithm push me toward the latest dictated hotness, etc.

And to be clear, I'm saying "media companies" here, not "content creators", because almost universally the content creators aren't the ones trying to exert control over the content they create. On the contrary, my #1 tip for pirating academic papers is to email the author and ask them for the paper--I've literally never received a "no" to literally hundreds of such emails I've sent. Music and movies are different because they're usually less of a one-person product and more of the money actually makes it to the content creators, but generally musicians I've talked to are not the ones restricting their media to one streaming platform or refusing to allow MP3 downloads, or refusing to release on physical media--that only ever happens when big media companies get involved.

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