Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight

torrentfreak.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 470 posts

Re: Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight

#201

Post by JoshuaDavid »

6thbit wrote: post #185
JoshuaDavid wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be fairly easy for them to offer an onion service on which they publish the current list of domains, as one option among many, many options for distributing small strings on the internet in an uncensorable way.

the beauty of wikipedia as dns is its easy access, are there similarly easily accessible uncensorable ways?

Ideally it is common knowledge that the onion service exists, and then people can go look at the onion service and update Wikipedia based on what they see there.

Re: Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight

#202

Post by weinzierl »

progbits wrote: post #128

They will never see a single cent from that, AA will continue to rotate domains and nothing was accomplished, except for spotify's legal team which earned easy money arguing against empty chair in court. BTW, you can donate and get faster downloads: https://annas-archive.gl/donate Just donated in honor of this. Up yours spotify!

Maybe it's not about the money primarily. There are enough parties out there that want the people behind Anna's archive behind bars and I'm afraid this will end the same way as for the Pirate Bay guys in the best case and like it ended for Aaron Schwartz in the worst.

Re: Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight

#204

Post by cm2012 »

senko wrote: post #200
echelon wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how to feel about any of this. First and foremost, I feel like Spotify is scummy. I don't like what they did when they were founded, I don't like what they do to artists. I hate the hyperscalers being in this business (Google, Apple, Amazon) as that's another thing they do that devalues an otherwise healthy market. Bringing in outside business division revenues to dump on another market's prices is ecolo…

> I don't like what they do to artists Not sure if you're aware, but it's the labels, not Spotify: > It pays roughly two-thirds of every dollar it generates from music, with nearly 80% allocated to recording royalties and about 20% to publishing, though how much artists and songwriters ultimately receive depends on their agreements with rights holders, which Spotify does not control. [0] Spotify is frantically trying…

Spotify paid out ten billion dollars to artists in 2024. This is not small potatoes - total 2024 music industry merchandise sales was around $14b.

These big platform payouts matter a lot.

Re: Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight

#205

Post by paulddraper »

echelon wrote: post #163
progbits wrote: post #128

They will never see a single cent from that, AA will continue to rotate domains and nothing was accomplished, except for spotify's legal team which earned easy money arguing against empty chair in court. BTW, you can donate and get faster downloads: https://annas-archive.gl/donate Just donated in honor of this. Up yours spotify!

I don't know how to feel about any of this. First and foremost, I feel like Spotify is scummy. I don't like what they did when they were founded, I don't like what they do to artists. I hate the hyperscalers being in this business (Google, Apple, Amazon) as that's another thing they do that devalues an otherwise healthy market. Bringing in outside business division revenues to dump on another market's prices is ecolo…

A lot of this has to do with the fact that many more people want to create music, than the number of artists that people want to listen to.

So there’s a heavy supply/demand imbalance, and distribution/discovery thrives there.

Re: Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight

#207

Post by senko »

cm2012 wrote: post #204
senko wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't like what they do to artists Not sure if you're aware, but it's the labels, not Spotify: > It pays roughly two-thirds of every dollar it generates from music, with nearly 80% allocated to recording royalties and about 20% to publishing, though how much artists and songwriters ultimately receive depends on their agreements with rights holders, which Spotify does not control. [0] Spotify is frantically trying…

Spotify paid out ten billion dollars to artists in 2024. This is not small potatoes - total 2024 music industry merchandise sales was around $14b. These big platform payouts matter a lot.

Correction: to record labels.

When you read artists' blog posts you can see they get peanuts. Not due to Spotify - due to the recording deals.

If you want an exhaustive but eye-opening account of all of the details, I recommend "All you need to know about the music business" by Don Passman.

Re: Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight

#208

Post by PunchyHamster »

senko wrote: post #200
echelon wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how to feel about any of this. First and foremost, I feel like Spotify is scummy. I don't like what they did when they were founded, I don't like what they do to artists. I hate the hyperscalers being in this business (Google, Apple, Amazon) as that's another thing they do that devalues an otherwise healthy market. Bringing in outside business division revenues to dump on another market's prices is ecolo…

> I don't like what they do to artists Not sure if you're aware, but it's the labels, not Spotify: > It pays roughly two-thirds of every dollar it generates from music, with nearly 80% allocated to recording royalties and about 20% to publishing, though how much artists and songwriters ultimately receive depends on their agreements with rights holders, which Spotify does not control. [0] Spotify is frantically trying…

> Not sure if you're aware, but it's the labels, not Spotify:

*not only Spotify

They had plenty of problems from people abusing their system to steal listens from actual artists.

Their system is basically "one big bucket of listens" - if your song gets listens, you get money. So if you pay your sub, and listen to say 5 niche musicians only, it still all goes mostly to the most popular songs.

Now you might already notice the flaw here - if you say, make a bunch of bots that just listen to songs to boost their revenue, not only your sub doesn't pay artists you listen, but also to fraudulent ones.

Then there was problems with using fake collaboration tags, AI music to hijack artist profiles, and few others.

Re: Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight

#209

Post by PunchyHamster »

darkwater wrote: post #175
arnvald wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d love to see a streaming service where my payment goes to artists I listen to. Spotify pays 70% of their music revenue to publishers based on the total number of listens. All revenue is put together and split based on the global numbers. Which means that niche band I like will get next to nothing. Instead if they account for 50% of my listening time in one month, they should get 35% of what I paid to Spotify that…

But, unless they put some thresholds on minimum listens, isn't basically the same thing what they do and what you propose? 35% of 1 is the same as 0.000000035 of 10.000.000

no. if you listen only to niche musicians, all of the fee goes to most popular one regardless.

It also promotes botting, as spotify only counts listens, bot listening a ton to a fraudulent artist will siphon money away from essentially everyone.

"Money only goes to artists you listen" would be very good change

Re: Anna's Archive loses $322M Spotify piracy case without a fight

#210

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

GolfPopper wrote: post #165
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why it makes you think of that, this is a completely different situation. If Anna's Archive were an upstanding site run by a known operator in compliance with UK law, I would definitely be highly critical of this ruling. But it's actually an anonymously run site that violates most countries' copyright laws and is blocked in the UK.

> an upstanding site run by a known operator Like Open AI?[1] Or the United States government?[2] While this may not be what you intend, it seems you're suggesting that "upstanding" and "known" parties (i.e. participants with wealth and influence) ought to be above the law. 1. https://www.artificialintelligence-news.com/news/study-claim... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_copyrighted_works_by_th...

I don't see what wealth and influence have to do with it. I think that if Website X is owned by a resident of, operated within the borders of, and complies with the laws of Country A, Country B should not try to bully the operator into changing the site. They can order domestic ISPs to block it if they want, or they can not do that if their citizens value Internet freedom.

If the site doesn't comply with the laws of Country A, or if the website operator hides so nobody can figure out which country is Country A, then it's an entirely different story.

Post reply on HN