Spotify won court order against Anna's Archive, taking down .org domain • Hacker News Board

Re: Spotify won court order against Anna's Archive, taking down .org domain

#31

Post by themafia » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 10:44 PM UTC

endofreach wrote: post #4

what‘s in it for spotify? i can‘t think of a single person who‘d stop paying for streaming services (music) in favour of going back to illegally download or (or even legally purchase) songs & managing their own library. m a y b e some devs would. but those thinking about it, wouldn‘t be stopped like that. i am thinking about it, yet i just renewed my subscription because i lack time & motivation to crawl down yet ano…

Cozy secondary relationships with music labels. Payola goes one way and industry demands go the other.

Since "owners" take such a big chunk (50%) of paid royalties for streaming there is a strong incentive to only play music that is "owned" by labels and not directly by artists and performers. Controlling the number of "spins" an song or album of theirs gets is still a huge concern of the labels.

Re: Spotify won court order against Anna's Archive, taking down .org domain

#32

Post by pluralmonad » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 10:45 PM UTC

parpfish wrote: post #13

snowmobile wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people are cancelling Spotify among my friends, even very "non-technical" folks. For me I've just gone back to radio or Youtube:ing a few songs for free here and there. Paying the cost of a lunch every month is just not worth it anymore for subscription services.

This is also a big party of why artists don’t earn shit. Spotify will never be able to pay out enough if people don’t think this music is worth paying for. They want access to every new album but refuse to pay how much a single new CD would have cost back in the day

Aside from all the middle men nibbling at artist take, its also a symptom of trading on fundamentally un-scarce resources. A better business model is selling access to the scarce things like the artist themselves. Trying to maintain stranglehold on a particular order of zeros and ones is always going to be tough.

Re: Spotify won court order against Anna's Archive, taking down .org domain

#33

Post by crazygringo » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 10:46 PM UTC

akersten wrote: post #7

But you can't even download the allegedly infringing material from the .org site. You can just read about it? So they're abusing the All Writs Act to take down a site that they think is related to some undetermined future nebulously bad thing for their business. If I wasn't on Anna's side before, I sure am now.

> that they think is related to some undetermined future nebulously bad thing

I mean, Anna's Archive was pretty clear about the future bad thing.

Spotify didn't "think", it wasn't just "related", nothing was "undetermined" or "nebulous".

Anna's Archive explicitly announced they were going to start distributing Spotify's music files. It's not even a case of hosting links to torrents but not seeding -- no, they were going to be doing the seeding too. You can't get more clear-cut than that.

I'm not taking anybody's side here, as to what copyright law ought to be, but Spotify isn't abusing the legal process here.

Re: Spotify won court order against Anna's Archive, taking down .org domain

#34

Post by holmesworcester » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 10:47 PM UTC

cdrnsf wrote: post #20

Pretty ironic considering they bootstrapped the service with pirated music. But they've never actually cared about music — they started as an ad platform and music was the cheapest option for them to attract eyeballs.

"Spotify" literally means "put ads on things".

It's not obvious to US English speakers but "spot" was ad industry jargon and became the word for "TV commercial" in several European languages. It's so gross that this ever slid through as a brand for a music app. We've descended so far...Music app branding started with Wesley Willis jokes!

Re: Spotify won court order against Anna's Archive, taking down .org domain

#35

Post by stock_toaster » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 10:47 PM UTC

xmonkee wrote: post #16

Technical question: I run my own Pi hole dns server. Is it possible to just add an A record for it? What are you guys doing to get around this?

There are some alternate domains listed on wikipedia [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive

Re: Spotify won court order against Anna's Archive, taking down .org domain

#36

Post by alessandroberna » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 10:47 PM UTC

Seems that the Spotify torrents are now unavailable until further notice. bummer

Re: Spotify won court order against Anna's Archive, taking down .org domain

#37

Post by eleventen » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 10:48 PM UTC

cdrnsf wrote: post #17

endofreach wrote: post #4

what‘s in it for spotify? i can‘t think of a single person who‘d stop paying for streaming services (music) in favour of going back to illegally download or (or even legally purchase) songs & managing their own library. m a y b e some devs would. but those thinking about it, wouldn‘t be stopped like that. i am thinking about it, yet i just renewed my subscription because i lack time & motivation to crawl down yet ano…

I run a Navidrome server I stream my own music from. I tag everything with Mp3tag and have a shell script to organize and upload the tagged files. Not all of the music I listen to regularly is on Spotify and their treatment of artists is abominable.

How much piracy do you do?

Re: Spotify won court order against Anna's Archive, taking down .org domain

#38

Post by walthamstow » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 10:49 PM UTC

franze wrote: post #15

Deezer has in its onboarding flow a pretty cool "get your lists from spotify" feature. from all liked/currated songs - a few thousands - it could not match about 2.

You can also download FLAC or 320k MP3 from Deezer with deemix.

Re: Spotify won court order against Anna's Archive, taking down .org domain

#39

Post by doesnt_know » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 10:50 PM UTC

parpfish wrote: post #13

snowmobile wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people are cancelling Spotify among my friends, even very "non-technical" folks. For me I've just gone back to radio or Youtube:ing a few songs for free here and there. Paying the cost of a lunch every month is just not worth it anymore for subscription services.

This is also a big party of why artists don’t earn shit. Spotify will never be able to pay out enough if people don’t think this music is worth paying for. They want access to every new album but refuse to pay how much a single new CD would have cost back in the day

Every entertainment market is saturated. Even if every creative endeavour stopped now, there would still be more freely available content to last more then any individual human life span.

Unless you’re the type of person that actively considers them a fan of something and goes out of their way to consume a specific niche, there isn’t much reason to pay much, or anything for entertainment.

Re: Spotify won court order against Anna's Archive, taking down .org domain

#40

Post by thenaturalist » Wed, Jan 21, 2026, 10:50 PM UTC

themafia wrote: post #22

I don't understand the sealing and ex-parte motions in this case. It looks completely corrupt. They're claiming that the archive would have released all the material publicly if they were allowed to know an injunction was about to be filed against them. Yet all those songs certainly have illegal copies already being distributed on the internet. So what was the actual harm being prevented here? I cannot understand how…

The harm being done is millions of dollars for VCs and music studios.

Billionaires and enterprises want to see consumers spending to return their investment.

The presence of other - dispersed - illegal material doesn’t diminish said returns too much, this central dump would have set precedent and had garnered massive attention.

This is the capitalist way.