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

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

#71

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.

> here is a strong incentive to only play music that is "owned" by labels and not directly by artists and performers.

Spotify has exactly zero music "directly by artists and performers". Even indie artists have to go through distributors and labels. Because without "owners" that own 60-80% of all world music, and that Spotify pays 70% of revenue to there would be no Spotify (or any music streaming service).

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

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. You can get more "clear cut" than that. You could rule when there were damages or law was actually broken. Committing a crime is not the same as saying you will co…

> Actually committing a crime is not the same as saying you will commit a crime. No, but it can have a lot of legal repercussions, like restraining orders, you can be arrested for making a threat, search warrants may be issued... and in the case of corporations, restraining orders and injunctions. Like here. This is all very standard stuff. There's absolutely nothing exceptional about the court process in this partic…

>On January 2, the music companies asked for a temporary restraining order, and the court granted it the same day.

That pretty much tells me all about what courts care about. Can't get TRO's when the government is attacking its people, but when there's a sniff of sharing music? Instant hammer.

EDIT: to answer a response I got about "courts aren't supposed to 'care'", that's the point of a TRO:

>To obtain a TRO, a party must convince the judge that they will suffer immediate irreparable injury unless the order is issued.

TRO's are rare and losing it just means you need to wait for the actual court case. That's why I'm making such a big deal of this. Getting a TRO the same day because maybe one day some website will have archives of music files just shows how out of touch the justice system is with tech.

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

#73
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.

Anna's Archive announced they intended to infringe on the label's copyrights by distributing their music without a license. The law allows the court "to prevent or restrain infringement of a copyright" (emphasis mine).

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/502#:~:text=Any%2...

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

#74

Can anyone recommend a music discovery service that isn't garbage? I fled to Spotify from Pandora because it kept recommending me the exact same songs, but now Spotify does basically the same thing. In the age of machine learning, I'm really surprised there aren't superhuman music recommendation algorithms. Or maybe there are, and these algorithms simply don't serve the corporate interests. But then where are the ope…

I've heard good things about Tidal (https://tidal.com) but it's not open source afaik.

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

#75

Can anyone recommend a music discovery service that isn't garbage? I fled to Spotify from Pandora because it kept recommending me the exact same songs, but now Spotify does basically the same thing. In the age of machine learning, I'm really surprised there aren't superhuman music recommendation algorithms. Or maybe there are, and these algorithms simply don't serve the corporate interests. But then where are the ope…

> In the age of machine learning, I'm really surprised there aren't superhuman music recommendation algorithms.

Because music is extremely hard to quantify. What do you quantify it on? See https://everynoise.com/ (the mess on the page is quantifying by just three or four out of 17 IIRC parameters) and their small doc on it: https://everynoise.com/EverynoiseIntro.pdf

And doing that at scale across hundreds of millions of users quickly becomes prohibitively expensive. So companies simplify, and reach for simpler solutions, unfortunately.

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

#76
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.

> think is related to some undetermined future nebulously bad thing for their business

The thing in question being "we copied all your data and are now gonna release it for free". I like what Anna's is doing, but come on! This is dishonest communication if I've ever seen it!

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

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Actually committing a crime is not the same as saying you will commit a crime. No, but it can have a lot of legal repercussions, like restraining orders, you can be arrested for making a threat, search warrants may be issued... and in the case of corporations, restraining orders and injunctions. Like here. This is all very standard stuff. There's absolutely nothing exceptional about the court process in this partic…

>On January 2, the music companies asked for a temporary restraining order, and the court granted it the same day. That pretty much tells me all about what courts care about. Can't get TRO's when the government is attacking its people, but when there's a sniff of sharing music? Instant hammer. EDIT: to answer a response I got about "courts aren't supposed to 'care'", that's the point of a TRO: >To obtain a TRO, a par…

Law is made of people and politics touches everything.

Even with separate of powers, lobbies make sure those they represent get good treatments.

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

#78

Can anyone recommend a music discovery service that isn't garbage? I fled to Spotify from Pandora because it kept recommending me the exact same songs, but now Spotify does basically the same thing. In the age of machine learning, I'm really surprised there aren't superhuman music recommendation algorithms. Or maybe there are, and these algorithms simply don't serve the corporate interests. But then where are the ope…

It seems like they all do the loop eventually.

I liked Tidal's recommendations.

I went back to last.fm, music stores, friends recommendations, and music/TV scores(a lot of good movie sound folks are amazing musicians).

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

#79

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…

> 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.

I mean, the archive themselves publicly stated their intention to release all the material, without reference to any injunction. So the implication is trivially true, as a logician would say.

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

#80

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…

Spotify cancelled my subscription. I started off with a Spotify partner subscription with my wife, which grandfathered into some other thing, like a family subscription, and then whatever I had got cancelled. Meanwhile I found a new local radio station has started playing 60% of what I like, some new (to me) joint venture thats a web first marketing company and they bought a bunch of radio stations to add local radio advertising to their list of services. Between spotify with ads, radio with ads, I am listening to radio, while planning out how to most easily go back to just having my favourites on my phone or maybe even an mp3 player.
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