Congrats! I’m sure the Spotify lawyers are gonna have some sleepless nights ahead.
Backing up Spotify
361–370 of 732 posts
Re: Backing up Spotify
#362Anna’s Archive has largely flown under the radar by focusing on books.
Even perceived involvement in music piracy puts a much bigger target on their back from far more aggressive actors (RIAA, major labels)
Re: Backing up Spotify
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Infra isn’t free. There is a certain irony in people providing copyrighted works for free justifying profiting from these copyrights on the basis that providing the works to others isn’t free.
Do you have evidence they are profiting? I'm genuinely curious how these kinds of archives sustain themselves.
I don’t think any of them are breaking even when you consider the maintenance costs, I just thought it was kind of funny considering the nature of the line of work they are in.
This was a different group of people but when some of the old LibGen domains got seized the FBI uploaded photos of the owners and the things they had spent their money on; a crappy old boat, what looked like a trailer in rural Siberia, and a vacation somewhere in the Mediterranean. It honestly read like sketch comedy, because the purchases didn’t appear remotely ostentatious.
Z-library also supposedly caps downloads at 5 per day and offers more and faster downloads to paying subscribers.
Re: Backing up Spotify
#364I wonder if they'll explore other music services as well. As I understand it, Deezer, Qobuz, and Tidal can all get ripped easily enough. Although I'm not sure if they rate limit downloads past a certain point.
I'm a bit sad that they chose to focus on music rather than audiobooks. Creating an archive of audiobooks seem like it would be more aligned with their mission.
Re: Backing up Spotify
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Infra isn’t free. There is a certain irony in people providing copyrighted works for free justifying profiting from these copyrights on the basis that providing the works to others isn’t free.
Cost recovery isn’t profit. Copyright is just a shared delusion, like most laws. They’re just bits on a disk we’re told are special for ~100 years (or whatever the copyright lockup length is in your jurisdiction), after which they’re no longer special (having entered the public domain). I think what is more ironic is we somehow were comfortable being collectively conditioned (manufactured consent?) with the idea that…
> that to evade such insanity is wrong in some way.
There’s a commons problem at play here. Most habitual pirates couldn’t pay for what they are pirating even if they wanted to, so restricting their access just makes the world worse-off; but who is going to finance the creation of new content if everything is just reliant on completely optional donations?
The 100 year period is absurd and does nothing to incentivize art, but there are costs involved in production of these works. People are always going to make music and write books regardless of the economic outcome; far fewer are going to write technical manuals or act as qualified reporters without being compensated.
Re: Backing up Spotify
#366I wonder if they'll explore other music services as well. As I understand it, Deezer, Qobuz, and Tidal can all get ripped easily enough. Although I'm not sure if they rate limit downloads past a certain point. I'm a bit sad that they chose to focus on music rather than audiobooks. Creating an archive of audiobooks seem like it would be more aligned with their mission.
The metadata is gold, but I was immediately curious why why wouldnt go for Tidal first. Though what ever they have on Spotify I think is unique.
Re: Backing up Spotify
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you share the name of that successor? I miss the old internet and would love to take a look.
It's Redacted.sh, a.k.a. RED. They have around three million torrents. But like What.CD, Redacted.sh is a private tracker, so you can't just jump in and see the content.
Thank you. I’m reading about them, cool project. I’ll try to join.
Re: Backing up Spotify
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
How they manage to transfer 300TB of data while remaining anonymous is also astonishing.
It's hard to imagine anything but physical egress for that kind of volume.
50 free accounts continually streaming music rack up 20 TB in a month. So that would take about 1.5 years. Our you use 750 accounts and do it in a month.
I would say it's weird they don't rate limit accounts but probably having a device play music pretty much all the time isn't even that rare of a use case.
Re: Backing up Spotify
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "iTunes going DRM free" was a big deal around 2008. https://web.archive.org/web/20070207234839/http://www.apple.... https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/may/15/drm.apple
I remember trying to use music I had bought in a slideshow that year and finding out that I couldn’t load tracks with DRM into the editor I was using; it was very frustrating.
A way to strip the DRM was built into the iTunes app - burn the song to a CD and rip it.
Re: Backing up Spotify
#370Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners, since Spotify itself is so convenient, and trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000's of tracks each sounds horrible. I wouldn’t be so sure. There are already tools to automatically locate and stream pirated TV and movie content automatic and on demand. They’re so common that I had non-t…
> The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated. Anna’s archive business is stealing copyrighted content and selling access to it. It's not ideologically motivated. What ideology is about pirating books and music where most of the people producing this stuff cannot afford to do it full-time? It's not like pirating movies, software and large videogame studios, which is still piracy, but they also make big money…
> Anna’s archive business is stealing copyrighted content and selling access to it.
There is not enough profit in that compared to the risk. They're also not exactly aggressive about it (there are groups which host mirrors who charge far more/finance it in the usual criminal way of getting people to install malware).
To me, there's a "motivation gap" between what they get out of this and the effort it takes, so there's some kind of "ideology". Whether it's 100% what they say it is, is another question.