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Comment by mlyle | Hacker News Reader

I disagree. A median value might be really misleading (you could have very high usage for 49% of the collection, and nothing for the rest). But assuming average means "mean..."

You might have a few hotspots, but there's a very tight upper bound on how many downloads of each item. Further, it argues that the overall collection has a very high research and preservation value compared to the total number of downloads.

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I don't agree. The size of the set is of paramount importance to that point. They can always bring the mean down by just adding more recordings to the set, to further obscure how popular the most popular recordings are. In a set of 10 billion, of course people aren't listening to most of them.

Quite clearly what the plaintiffs are afraid of is that there are a few very popular works in there that they could be making real money from. There's no way to know this from the mean alone.

They got 400 000 records in the collection, I don't think they're being dishonest here

That is far from the truth.

The companies have very successful legal departments. They go after the next lowest hanging fruit. They are just working, it's their job description to do this. This is why they will never stop, it never gets too absurd or overly unreasonable.

edit: Deleted fake example

This appears to be a hoax.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/metallica/

haha, that I was unable to tell the difference says a lot.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/aaaah

Even if all the traffic were from 100 pieces, that's a few thousand downloads per month. Let's talk about those specific pieces, then, instead of trying to obliterate an archive.

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