Forget spaceships; I just want my music | Hacker News Reader

Forget spaceships; I just want my music

jeffgeerling.com

271 pointspanzerboy158 comments

The beautifully written but not much known Rune Blades Of Celi ebooks no longer can be purchased, as the small publisher is just gone. Of course, the ones I purchased could no longer be downloaded. But want something bigger? Fine. The Wheel Of Time (is that large enough for you?) Complete Edition I bought for over a hundred dollars also can't be donwloaded any more. (And to be more on topic, one of my favorite artists have disappeared from Bandcamp and so did my purchases. And Bandcamp is better in this than others.)

You can download all these from torrent trackers.

Tell me true, if you can't buy them how on earth it is piracy to download them?

I got a free download of one of the more forgetful Terminator movies on....Universal? Can't get that back.

RCA Lyra protected music? Gone.

Paid $10 to Harvey Danger for 'Little by Little' and hey, I can still get it. That's a surprise.

> Tell me true, if you can't buy them how on earth it is piracy to download them?

People would argue that it's up to the seller whether they want to make their creations available. If I don't want to sell you something, then I'd entertain the argument that downloading it anyway is in some sense immoral or unethical.

But in your situation, you've already fucking bought it! It's as if you placed a pick-up order at the bookstore, showed up to pick up your books, and they told you to eat shit. In which case, acquiring it through other means is completely acceptable, morally and ethically.

I agree (or at least see the argument) if it's like the original creator who decided they want to keep their hands on the work (or maybe like if a company wants to withdraw one edition of a book to sell a new edition), but in cases where works are orphaned, or the rights are in limbo, or a huge corporation merges with another huge corporation and permanently deletes creators' works for a tax break, I don't think there's any real argument.

If I Johnny writer am like "Ok when I was 15 I thought that many consecutive slurs was funny, but now the alt-right is rallying around what was supposed to be satire, so I want it off the market" that's kind of reasonable. If James Writerson has classics that are kind of out of fashion and got converted to ebooks by Big Publisher™ which was then bought by Bigger Publisher™ who decides it's not worth the money to keep the classics on the market (but also refuses to release them back to the estate of James Writerson or to the general public), that's less reasonable.

Basing something like this on someone else's motive doesn't seem like the best idea to me because in most situations you can only guess the motive. So it ultimately just boils down to your assumptions.

If someone incidentally acquires a license to a product, quietly removes the product from the market, makes no announcement about some moral justification or about a new version coming out, and makes no movement for several years, I consider it acceptable to label that product "abandonware" and pirate it. If the license holder later comes out with a new version of the product, the right thing to do would probably be to buy it, if the pricing is reasonable. If they later come out and say "actually this product is (somehow, don't ask me how) unethical", I'll consider deleting it.

There's no way to get these things perfectly, but I also want to add that I don't consider it ethical to pirate things made by indie creators, or books (with the exception of textbooks), and that I'm probably unusually prone to outright buying new books or indie games or legal first-party mp3s of music, because I consider it a bit of a duty to support media that I appreciate or want to see more of.

At the end of the day, I think I do more to contribute to creators I appreciate than the average consumer, but I don't lose much sleep when I literally cannot access an old classic at a reasonable price and I flip a coin between "stealing it" or just doing something else. Nobody was going to get my money either way, and I only have so much patience and willingness to try to do things "the right way" before I decide they've made it unreasonably expensive or complicated on purpose and screw 'em.

Your reasoning begs the question: Why do you believe you have a right to access something that you can't (or aren't willing to) pay to access?

> People would argue that it's up to the seller whether they want to make their creations available. If I don't want to sell you something, then I'd entertain the argument that downloading it anyway is in some sense immoral or unethical.

I would say another key distinction is between "don't want to sell/can't sell" vs "don't want you to buy". In the former it may be because the owner does not want to go through the trouble of selling it or is no longer around to sell it. I know some people have given up because the effort to deal with "trolls" (particularly DMCA and fakes) has either turned their passion into a nightmare or it's not really their passion anymore and they don't want to deal with it.

> People would argue that it's up to the seller whether they want to make their creations available.

But this gets complicated. I wanted to post a song from a somewhat obscure '80s band on my website and so tracked them down and asked for permission.

One of them (the songwriter) responded to say that the band has never had the rights to the music on that album and, in fact, they don't even have a recording of it themselves. In his words "as far as I'm concerned, you can do whatever you want with that stuff". I posted the song and sent him a high-quality copy of the album it came from.

That's not complicated, though. The artist is not the seller. The artist already sold their rights. Whoever bought the rights is the seller. You might choose to disregard that because the artist said they don't care, but their opinion is meaningless, so it should not be the basis of your argument.

I was responding to this: "People would argue that it's up to the seller whether they want to make their creations available."

The use of the phrase "their creations" led to to think that the people being discussed here were the artists, not the rightsholders. Only the artists are the creators.

My argument is that this is complex because the system of legal rights is complex. The people that you think have them are often not the artists. I'm not actually seeing how you have argued against this -- have I misunderstood what you're saying?

I agree with your argument as stated here ("this is complex because the system of legal rights is complex"). I guess your example seemed to me to be an endorsement of relying on the creators opinion and not the rights-holder in cases where they are not the same, and I was arguing against that (assumed?) endorsement. The fact that the creators are not necessarily the sellers is at the heart of a lot of pro-piracy arguments and I've often seen it used as blanket justification for _any_ piracy, even in cases where the rights-holders and creators are the same entities, so I guess I'm a bit sensitive to it.

Side note: I used to co-run a small electronic record label, and almost all of the artists who we released music by were just ourselves (with a few exceptions made for close friends, who retained all rights to their music). Given our small size and low profile, it was shocking to see how quickly some of our releases were pirated. Sometimes albums would hit soulseek after we had only shipped out the first 30 or so CDs (and no MP3s). We weren't in it for the money... it was just a side-activity while we were still in school, and any money made was just funneled back into the label so we could release more music, so fortunately the piracy didn't affect us much as far as we cared. But it was still incredibly surprising.

> I guess your example seemed to me to be an endorsement of relying on the creators opinion and not the rights-holder in cases where they are not the same, and I was arguing against that (assumed?) endorsement.

I was not endorsing anything. My intent was to tell an interesting anecdote that illustrated the complexity of rights. Sorry for the confusion.

My personal attitude (not endorsing it, though!) is that the artists are the only people who really count. That's why I contacted them for permission. Beyond the artists, everything is just legalisms and how seriously to take their desires is a legal consideration, not an ethical one. My anecdote does indicate this in action pretty clearly, but it conflates that attitude with the main point I was making (that this stuff isn't simple).

I'm not sure what the difference is between one's personal attitude (voluntarily made public) and one's endorsement. IMO they are one in the same. I only bring this up because you've made the point to say you're not endorsing what you personally believe.

Why would the artists be the only people who really count, when they made an agreement to let the someone else handle the selling? Doesn't that by default mean that what the artist _wanted_ was to let someone else handle the selling?

> you've already fucking bought it!

To me, this is the baby that got thrown out with the bathwater in the whole NFT debacle.

Yes, yes just about the entire NFT thing was just the obvious financial scams you can’t pull off in the real economy anymore. But the idea of an independent way to show your receipts? I think that’s got some real value.

So you bought access to video X. Maybe on PlayStation (sorry). Maybe through a streaming service. Why does it matter how you get the bits that constitute video X? Why does it matter what software you use to consume those bits?

Unfortunately the answer is that IP rights treat the medium and the message as different things. You need that, to some extent, to encourage folks to package things well (eg 4k remaster an older movie). But what if we fixed that?

I want to live in a world where it’s obvious that I have a legal right to watch the Infinity Saga Supercut [0] when I have an active Disney+ subscription. And when I have the DVD of all the movies. And when I have a mix of BlueRay, dvd, digital purchases, movie channels, etc.

It should also be obviously ok for me to have the Infinity Saga stored locally, without DRM, and cached on a couple iPads. And if Infinity Saga is uploaded to YouTube, I should get to watch it with reduced or no ads.

[0] https://www.firstshowing.net/2021/the-infinity-saga-a-50-hou...

> Yes, yes just about the entire NFT thing was just the obvious financial scams you can’t pull off in the real economy anymore. But the idea of an independent way to show your receipts? I think that’s got some real value.

Sure. But who enforces that receipt? Who still hosts the data? The people who purchased those things on Playstation have the receipts, there's no confusion about that - it's just that a different agreement made prior to purchase between two other parties means you can't watch that stuff anymore.

Putting the receipts on the blockchain or whatever doesn't solve this problem at all.

> the ones I purchased

This is were you went wrong.

Incorrect. They actually purchased them and could download them, DRM-free. (At least if the other services listed are like Bandcamp.) You should archive them yourself after downloading. The fact that you can download them again from the server, or maybe stream them, is an additional service, it's not the thing itself.

That being said, when something is not sold anymore, I'd say it's fair game to torrent it or upload it wherever.

I disagree with the latter notion. If you hold the rights to something, it should be you who gets to make the shots on how - or whether or not at all - you would like to monetize said thing.

Perhaps you plan on taking a break for a couple of years and then sell the item again?

Just because someone else really wants your item, does not automatically give them the right to access it or make it available to others, if you as the rights holder disagree with that.

True, strictly speaking, and it's also what the law says. But I'd wager that >90% of the time that is not the case, and that often the rights holder is not even aware that they hold those rights.

Well, who knows? Even if that is the case, I would argue that the correct way to go about is to first talk to the rights holder and ask. One cannot just assume or wager.

There's little I can imagine that would warrant a third party to just go ahead and access/use the item of the rights holder the way they would like, just based on some assumption.

The largest part of the problem is figuring out who the rights holder is.

Where did you purchase The Wheel of Time complete edition from? I just checked and my downloads still work.

Reminder to archive all bandcamp purchases

https://github.com/easlice/bandcamp-downloader

I have a windows oriented “get past setup pain points” tutorial here: https://github.com/easlice/bandcamp-downloader/issues/21

For generating a cookie file, I suggest just using https://github.com/hrdl-github/cookies-txt I should really write up a full Linux and windows setup guide and submit it.

Likewise, people who use bandcamp are likely to use GOG, which also has purchase archiving tools available on GitHub. I’ve used https://github.com/Kalanyr/gogrepoc for a long time, but there are actually multiple projects now.

> Tell me true, if you can't buy them how on earth it is piracy to download them?

My daughter, doing a journalism course assignment, once asked Maddy Prior of Steeleye Span (not a _huge_ artist, but reasonably well known towards the end of last century) about this. Maddy's comment was basically the same. She'd rather you bought something legally, but if it's not available (some of their back catalogue had disappeared) then Maddy thought it was fine to 'pirate' it.

All of my Wheel of Time volumes are still there; I checked. Granted, barring fire or a really thorough or oddly specific burglar, they're not likely to go anywhere (although I suspect my son will devour them once he's mastered reading English and can reach that top shelf).

> one of my favorite artists have disappeared from Bandcamp and so did my purchases.

Always download the flac of the music you purchase on Bandcamp. Then your purchases won't ever go away.

The thing that really worries me and which no one seems to be talking about is the region locking of localisation for streaming content.

For context - we're a Polish family living in the UK(like 2 million other Polish people). We have a small child who loves Disney films, and because he is normally exposed to English(and speaks it fluently) I'd like him to at least watch cartoons in Polish. But Disney region locks most(not all, but majority) of Polish localisation to Poland only. When we visit Poland I can watch all Disney content in Polish on my UK account without any issue - but when we're in the UK these localisation options disappear. So Disney clearly has those options but chooses not to offer them.

So right now, at least we can still buy DVDs or have those shipped over. But it's clear that Disney wants to stop distribution of physical media - as they've already done in some regions.

What then for multilingual families? Just "suck it up" and don't have access to content in my language, because I don't happen to currently live in Poland?

For your situation specifically check out this site. I think there are some cartoons:

https://35mm.online/

That’s a fascinating perspective which I wasn’t aware of - locking of language localisation. Thanks for raising.

A few years ago I travelled to Romania for vacation, Netflix simply didn't let me play the content I downloaded at home on the flight back, and while I was there all of the subtitles in my language were not available

While there is the bigger picture to consider, my solution to get access to Swedish content for my then-partner while we were in the US was to use a VPN. Mullvad worked for local content, but if you still have friends/family back home, a tailscale exit node might work better, especially for Disney+.

would love a solution for this too

raising bi-lingual kids is much easier when you can give them second language media, and it doesn't seem like it would be an expensive flag for Disney to flip...

might even be an opportunity to rebrand themselves as educational...

I don't pay for Disney+ in Poland because they don't have Russian. Even though it's a native language of 1M+ immigrants and 99% of their content is translated. They probably just don't want my money, I have no other explanation.

Well so from what I understand at least part of it due to Disney selling off the rights to various translations to local companies(so for instance the translation to Lion King in Polish is owned by a local media company, not Disney, even though they obviously own the rights to the film), so they don't necessarily have automatic rights to distribute that translation worldwide without permission.

But on the other hand......it's Disney. They should be able to consolidate, buy those rights back, and distribute all localizations they have globally.

Yup. Sound right.

The time spent re-ripping my CD collection to FLAC, my DVD collection to MKV, etc, has been well spent. I can rapidly enough transcode from that to "Whatever I happen to need for where I'm listening to it," and our vehicles have quite the range of local music and audiobook content for road trips that doesn't rely on streaming anything.

You can get CDs for (usually) very little on eBay, same for DVDs, and I don't have to worry about the pissing matches between a corporate conglomerate that views me as "a wallet with eyeballs" and another one that views me as "eyeballs with a wallet" getting in the way.

Meanwhile, vinyl sales continue to skyrocket, and more and more people are interested in records, growing collections, refurbishing old equipment (both to produce and play records), etc. I expect these are rather heavily correlated, because in 50 years from now, nobody is going to be able to play any of the streaming "content" that flows around. "This is my grandparents favorite Spotify playlist" won't be a thing, but you can certainly go cruising through old photo albums, old record collections, etc.

I remain optimistic that we're in the starting phases of a rejection of the online [handwaves at everything digital consumer tech], and it's going to be aided greatly by stuff exactly like this. Profits and corporate pissing matches over "actually doing something people want to pay money for."

Google and Disney both seem to be demonstrating that once people lose trust in you, it's basically impossible to get it back. Nobody trusts a new Google product will last more than a year or two, which leads to it getting killed off for lack of use, and Disney/Pixar seem to have forgotten that the purpose of the entertainment industry is to "entertain the people who might want to see your movie." Other studios are doing fine, so there's clearly a demand, but Disney has been dropping an impressive string of box office bombs lately, because a lot of people no longer trust them.

Your optimism is unfounded. Gen Z thinks it's cool to own an album or two, but they're not building collections. Scrap booking is popular right now, but it's not quite the same thing as photo albums. Everything is ephemeral and by and large they're just fine with that.

They're physical things, interacted in the physical world, without any way for the companies involved to claw back the content, or to data-mine the scrapbook, your albums, etc, for listening data and such (though I imagine a smart TV with a mic will try).

That's a good direction to see movement in. They're not doing "online scrapbooks" or something. And given the long standing records of "What you said 15 years ago online is used to ruin you today," ephemeral, or "not online in the first place," makes a lot of sense.

I'm certainly glad my entire school experience wasn't logged in great detail...

> They're physical things, interacted in the physical world, without any way for the companies involved to claw back the content

Oh, there's ways. In the 90s, there was a rental scheme with sealed discs that would degrade in air to become unusable within a week. (At least that was upfront, if wasteful). I've had one at least CD rot from the inside, and it's a major issue for LaserDiscs. Careful material science could make this the norm.

Gen Z is young, have no money, have no optimism for the future, are completely un-technical when it comes to computers, but are EXTREMELY technical when it comes to understanding apps, social media, and weird frustrations like this one.

It remains to be seen once they enter the job market, and despite the cultural perspective inevitably many do succeed, and start making money.

I wouldn't be surprised if they absolutely do focus more on physical media. They are rejecting Instagram look-obsessive culture, and look fondly at what we did in the 2000s when every Party meant a 50-photo Facebook Photo dump, 49 of which would never be "good enough" to make it to Instagram these days.

Gen Z is already in the job market. The eldest are in their mid 20s.

"Everything is ephemeral and by and large they're just fine with that."

Today.

Young people being fine with that when they are still in flux is not a new thing. A 21-year-old being nostalgic is almost the basis for a comedy sketch more than a serious concern. I'm not yet convinced they've broken any human patterns when they're still fitting fairly comfortably into the existing patterns on that. If anything I'd bet they're going to discover a larger desire for a foundation than anyone else because the "default" ones have been ripped away and they can't just sort of settle into an existing one easily.

Photo albums and music recordings didn’t even exist until the 20th century. What did we do for tens of thousands of years before that?

Told stories.

And what is TikTok and Instagram at the end of the day? The modern means for telling stories.

The 20th century was an aberration of human history. We don’t need to cling to it.

Told stable stories, generally in a stable culture.

The 20th century is indeed an abberation; the 21st a bigger one.

I suspect what you're calling a stable story are the myths, legends, and lore that comprise a culture?

If so, I would argue those are cultural stories.

I was thinking more along the lines of family stories, personal stories, friends stories and things like that.

If not, then what is a stable story?

eBay aside, my city’s library has a shockingly large collection of CDs and DVDs! Although i guess that’s technically closer to piracy.

Music is very important to me. So important that I never dared to trust streaming services. Not only do they require an internet connection (something that is not always available), but if the service experiences downtime, license changes, etc., that music is not available.

If I'm going to spend my money on music, I'm going to spend it on music in a form that isn't reliant on the ongoing operation of some service somewhere. I want to add it to my collection so I can actually listen to it anytime and anywhere.

I collect portable music players and hi-fi gear. The music gives me great joy, but the hardware also gives me joy. I’m likely an outlier in this realm.

I pre-ordered my new Peter Gabriel I/0 album two months ago on CD and enjoyed the anticipation of waiting. I steadfastly avoided his digital pre-releases. I was not disappointed! It a great album and a beautiful sonic experience.

I took a couple of my favorite tracks and mixed it into my Peter Gabriel minidisc mix-tape. I have numerous portable players to choose from in my collection to listen on the go including a few beautifully designed personal CD players.

I travel internationally frequently and I’ve noticed TSA occasionally doesn’t know what a CD player is. At least the younger agents.

That last line tempts me to fly with an audio cassette player this holiday season

My previous TSA agent was thoroughly thrown by my (blade-removed) shavette while travelling with carry-on only. To the point I called out "Oh! Sorry, I already pulled the blade out." while they were examining it.

Shaving one's beard is an artform that I enjoy as much as a painter enjoys painting. What's the world coming to when there are people who do not know a shavette?

I wish I could do that, but unfortunately my music taste is so varied/fluid that it would take thousands of dollars and a full day's work to purchase and download all the music I listen to these days. And a couple years from now I'd need to do it all over again to update based on my new taste.

Anyone else here also still using LogitechMediaServer (and iPeng) to stream their own music?

Such an old system (written in Perl), but still runs great!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logitech_Media_Server https://github.com/Logitech/slimserver https://hub.docker.com/r/lmscommunity/logitechmediaserver

There are dozens of us! Dozens!

I threw that old thing (logitech squeezebox) in the recycling.

With how warm it was in standby I bet it cost more money in power bills than itself don'tcha know.

> Such an old system (written in Perl), but still runs great!

This is the kind of hardware I love. Stable over time, no dependencies. I moved all my music to squeezebox system in 2004 and everything works wonderfully today.

I was amazed to discover, a few months ago, that iPeng is still under active development!

I went to set the alarm on my Squeezebox Boom one night and the time picker widget was completely broken. By the next week they'd pushed out an update to fix it.

That kind of dedication in a developer is fantastic to see.

Logitech Media Server is very common in the Home Assistant world. I'm in the process of setting a server up now actually, and I've never used it before.

At least so far, Bandcamp has not changed after the sale (neither sale). You can still buy music, and try it out for multiple album streams before buying (unless the artist or label disable it, which is rare), and download as FLAC.

Granted, not always useful if what you want is from major labels, but still, keep in mind that there are options.

Wasn't there some recent article about how Bandcamp got acquired by a competitor and is more or less being left to rot on the vine?

I agree, the FLAC downloads are a major perk of it, and I'll happily buy music there. But I wouldn't trust it to be around long term at this point. It's too consumer-friendly to exist long term in this modern world we live in. :(

In the long term, everything is temporary. Enjoy the good stuff now while it's here!

In the long term, yes.

In the human lifespan terms, our digital stuff is a lot more stupidly temporary than it has any good reason to be, and physical media (especially in the realm of music) has rather outlasted it.

Records (vinyl) from 60 years ago still play perfectly fine with a cleaning, and CDs are holding up quite well too in general. Because my ability to play a record from the 1960s or 1970s is not dependent on the company that created it still being around, and being willing to license it to the company that delivers it for me to play it, at favorable contract terms, etc, etc, etc.

All true -- which is what makes Bandcamp such a treasure. Download the flac and you have it forever (or a reasonable approximation of that).

That's the thing: everything is temporary, but who gets to decide how temporary it is ? If it's you, fine; if it's not you for totally avoidable reasons, that's a problem.

Bandcamp doesn't need to change, it can just keep going. That's what I meant with "neither sale", because there were also some (if fewer) doomsayers for the epic sale.

It got sold. Nothing changed. And again, you own the music, if it stops existing that sucks, but only for the future, everything you bought, you still have.

And fwiw, I don't think anything for Bandcamp will change.

> And again, you own the music, if it stops existing that sucks, but only for the future, everything you bought, you still have.

Only if you downloaded the mp3s/flacs, and also backed them up.

Do people use BC in other ways? I mean, I guess technically, you could just keep streaming, but do people do that? I’d assume anyone using bandcamp cares about having the music actually available.

I think some people assume that it'll always be there to re-download. I certainly download things immediately, and stick it somewhere where it'll be backed up nightly.

Bought by EPIC, conducted layoffs to crush unionization attempts.

Bought by Epic Games then Epic sold to Songtradr, which is when the layoffs happened.

Nothing, neither for good nor for bad, has noticeably changed about Bandcamp in the 5+ years I've been using it. I'd call that "leaving it to rot" - but hey, at least it hasn't gotten any worse. If the new owners keep the course, it'll be okay.

> At least so far, Bandcamp has not changed after the sale (neither sale)

The second sale was just a couple months ago, and while you can still buy music and download it, it's not true that "nothing has changed" since then. There have been quite a lot of changes, just not on that one front. And it's only been two months, so it's way too early to conclude that Songtradr won't gut it more thoroughly.

Not much changed during the time Epic owned Bandcamp, sure, but that's because Epic only bought it in order to gain standing for their lawsuits with Apple. It didn't fit into their business strategy otherwise, so they had no need to mess with it - they literally just needed it to be a legal subsidiary as a pawn for an unrelated legal battle. The same is not true with Songtradr, which has its own motives and objectives that relate to Bandcamp's actual operations and business.

I know. Still don't expect any changes. Nothing has changed for any part of Bandcamp I cared about.

For what's it's worth, I use mp3caprice.com to download zipped music. The prices are pretty fair and I don't have to store another CD on the shelf. The bitrate is decent and I can find albums that aren't available anymore. The bonus for me is, since I subscribe to Mojo magazine, I can Youtube new artists and if I like them, go download the music.

That looks like piracy, but paying someone for it? Thanks, but I actually prefer to support the artists I listen to, and when I can’t afford to, or it’s impractical, to not pay those who prevent artists from getting money.

Where's your proof? Show it and I'll gladly quit buying from them.

If you think bands actually sell albums on one site for $2 that they sell for $10 everywhere else, then I guess you can just go and keep believing.

I just think it might be better to not support sites like that and instead torrent directly for free. No need to sealion.

> No need to sealion.

I'm lost. What do seals have to do with this? Is this a typo, or a turn of phrase I've never seen?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

Still waiting. Maybe you should go and look again in the comic strip you got the reference from?

You posted this four hours after my comment (above) which already provides two links which cast a clear doubt on the legality of mp3caprice.com. A quick web search returns dozens of links to people questioning the legality, and several of people or organisations giving good arguments as to why they are not.

If you want more proof, just look at mp3caprice.com itself. Where is the usual legal stuff like the procedure for reporting claimed infringement? Their single form of contact is a web form. Their privacy policy even lacks a way to contact them.

1. Your first site is a bunch of dudes spouting about something they don't like, big deal. Their ideas are not proof of any kind.

2. TorrentFreak is hardly a legitimate news source. A simple read of the Wikipedia page on them is pretty embarrassing.

3. Since mp3caprice is obviously not in the USA, they are not bound by our "legal stuff", which can be said of TorrentFreak also.

Expect no more from me. Have a great holiday!

Fine:

The International Intellectual Property Alliance's 2016 Special report on Ukraine:

https://iipa.org/files/uploads/2017/12/2016SPEC301UKRAINE.pd...

(page 4)

Or their entry on the EU's Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190617061827/http://trade.ec.e...

(page 19)

> According to the music industry Mp3va.com and Mp3caprice.com are popular unlicensed pay per download websites hosted allegedly in Ukraine, which provide mainly music.

> […]

> These sites claim to have a copyright licence for their business from the Ukrainian collecting society called AVTOR, which reportedly has no mandate to represent foreign rightholders.

I'm sure you'll come up with another rationalization, but your money is definitely not going to the artists (unless perhaps you are listening exclusively to Ukranian bands). Just be honest with yourself: you find mp3caprice.com's service convenient and are willing to pay them for it. Just don't pretend that it is the legal route.

If you actually wish to know if they are legal today (rather than just pretend they are), why not ask your national recording industry association? They'll know.

It's not too hard to figure out that this one of those cowboy sites operating from Ukraine¹ with quite dubious claims as to their legality:

https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/2412fb/the_web...

https://torrentfreak.com/riaa-and-mpaa-report-notorious-pira...

The gist seems that buying stuff there may be legal if you are Ukrainian or are actually in Ukraine, and quite probably isn't if you are anywhere else.

The RIAA certainly considers them shipless pirates. You are probably paying criminals, and almost certainly are not paying artists.

1: There seem to be a bunch of them, which smells a bit like a coordinated effort.

Yeah, I never understood this sort of thing.

I get paying to support artists and stay on the right side of the law/ethics.

I get downloading a copy of something without paying for a license because it's easier/unavailable to purchase/want to check it out first/it's free!!

But why pay for a bootleg copy?

Bandcamp has remained amazingly functional throughout all their ownership drama. I hope they somehow hold it together.

I buy mp3s so I will always have them. People think I am a crank- maybe so.

The difference with media today is that the control often stays in the hands of another party, often not the rights holder. I can accept that knowing that everything I buy I am just renting.

The thing that scares me is how a third party can make something effectively impossible to discover. In this generation that's done for profit. But you can imagine where that will lead when what everyone sees is curated in a way they aren't aware of.

There's like not one but multiple microgenres of music you could likely cobble together just out of working musicians' songs complaining about the music industry. In the modern world, probably the by-the-numbers majority of working artists in every medium can effectively self-publish to some degree or another, so as the intermediaries have grown more and more demanding and both creator- and consumer-hostile, they have also become less of a necessary evil for our ability to engage with the works creative people are putting out into the world. Piracy is the most natural and reasonable way to use current technology to consume media, and the massively successful propaganda campaigns to instill a folk belief that it's somehow wrong or doing harm are incredible, given how much quality of life for both the producers and consumers of the actual content is lost in the name of marginal gains in profitability and massive gains in control by intermediary conglomerates that are increasingly unnecessary. It is only by a combination of this mythology and the ever-tighter industry collusion with an increasingly authoritarian surveillance state to make laws to terrorize people who just want their music that this parasitic shape the industry has taken is surviving

To me, the notion that a transferrable market-monopoly ownership of intellectual rights to a creative work was ever about helping creators is the kind of ridiculous farce that people like economists can get away with because we've been trained to believe that fancy experts saying counterintuitive things about "incentives" must know something we don't, but even if you believe intellectual property has value, it is not of value for massive corporations to sit on a chokepoint between human beings and their access to their own cultural touchstones

The Chinese system of central libraries is better than copyright.

Imagine having every book ever written, for free, all your life.

Imagine authors and inventors being compensated twice what they are usually paid in the USA, while the corporate lawyers panhandle.

I know the lawyers would end up as party higher-ups still screwing us, but I can dream.

A central, government-run library only shifts censorship from "not profitable" to "not in line with authority". It's not automatically better, but it's the logical one anyway when there's a ruling State.

In a system like that, how do you decide which authors get paid what? Is it per check-out with a floor?

I'm genuinely curious.

It's great until you want to read that book about the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

I'm considering some kind of combination of autoloader feeding either Exact Audio Copy (which isn't set up for them) or dbpoweramp (which apparently is set up for them) to get metadata, then I guess I will have to pirate or rebuy discs when the AccurateRip indicates that there's some damage to the disc.

I've avoided iTunes and its descendants due to all of the horror stories about destroyed music libraries and music "helpfully" replaced in error. Similarly, I haven't signed up for any streaming music since I have an el-cheapo plan and these services sound like they tell you what to listen to.

I think having somewhat weird tastes in music and being particular about it has some overlap with having to seek technical solutions which are also not-mainsteam. I am reminded of Pictures for Sad Children, wherein a character's musical preference is "Whatever is on the radio, played a reasonable volume." and realize I am at the other end of that spectrum.

There are some highly opinionated open source tools that do this, like whipper. Getting it all working is.. a bit frustrating. I do wish that whipper had more knobs to tweak rather than being very opinionated in how it rips and what it outputs.

For fixing up metadata of your existing collection there is Picard.

https://github.com/whipper-team/whipper

https://picard.musicbrainz.org/

I've long thought about getting an old Bravo CD burning robot, and making it run "backwards". Always been a "I oughtta" project

> I've avoided iTunes and its descendants due to all of the horror stories about destroyed music libraries and music "helpfully" replaced in error.

At least on Windows (where iTunes currently still survives in its original form) and with no Apple Music or iTunes Match or whatever subscription to muddle things up, and with the option to let it manage the folder structure of my music library turned off I can't complain about it, though. It does what it's supposed to do and doesn't cause any problems.

Although I mostly keep using it for historical reasons, because I used to have an iPod, and when that got replaced by an Android phone, at that time the best solution for syncing music to it was to keep using iTunes together with some third party app which was able to not just sync the music, but also play counts and ratings, too.

I'm curious as to when exactly these takes are generally going to move from

"Please let me have the thing I want and reasonably should have"

to an open

"Eff it, the tech is here, I'm just taking copies now and you should too."

(not that I ought to support that sort of thing, since I am a lawyer and we have promulgated standards of professional behavior I shall tell all of you that that second thing is bad, very bad.)

I started Crossies to solve this problem. My plan was to store physical media for people, and give them remote access. When I heard about Murfie shutting down 4 years ago, I couldn't let it happen and had to get involved.

I'm passionate about media ownership. When people question what I'm doing, wonder why anybody would want CDs, or tell me I should just give up, I think about all the transient services and missing media. I'm in this for the long haul, and I'm not going to give up. Media ownership means something, and I'm fighting to make it a reality.

The other day I was listening to recorded live music on Internet Archive. One of the bands sounded like a lot of fun, so I looked them up online. And what do you know, they're touring and coming to my relatively small town in January. Bought two tickets for 70 bucks from the local venue so we could enjoy some live music. Maybe buy some T-shirts or CDs.

So well done, giving your live music away for free. Made you some money, and made me feel like we were doing it right for a change.

In a very strange way it's almost a return to the pre-VHS days (for video) and pre-vinyl days (for music). You could enjoy the content streamed to you over the airwaves but that was it.

In the order that they wanted you to hear it.

With unskippable ads.

There was very little time like that. Where you couldn't hold in your hands the content that you bought.

Radio broadcast becomes popular in 1920-1930. While records playing speed standardizes in the late 1920s. Say Wikipedia.The vinyl single and LP are later but you easily buy records long before vinyl. If anything, I don't know that there were paying streaming formats in early radio.

There was probably quite a bit of content that was played live on the radio - and not available as recordings. And it would have been pretty hardcore to make your own recording of the stream.

Glad to see this pop up, its been a weirdly big struggle for me as a new-ish parent.

For a while my ancient CD collection and healthy ecosystem of local used vinyl / CD stores had us in a nice routine in conjunction with youtube-dl and my posse of old Sony voice memo usb mp3 players.

Then youtube-dl wasn't a thing anymore (maybe it is again?)...

Then we had to get a new car (a Tacoma)...

No CD player, no aux cable.

I had really bad early experiences with apple music and Spotify not having stuff I wanted. Unclear artist support reputations also (Im no expert there). But it all had heavy Enshittification vibes early on IMHO.

Anyway somehow in my exhausted dad mental state I've concluded that buying albums on iTunes like a maniac is at least worth a try before augmenting my car to have an aux cable and / or peripheral CD player. I held off buying albums on iTunes literally until 2 months ago. Very strange but maybe working.

Anyway curious what other folks are doing as far as listening to music. This article was spot on but I needed a Solutions section...

Youtube-dl still functions quite well. You can even grab the CLI here: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl

And occasionally you can find one of their TLDs just by doing a search on DDG or Brave.

> Then youtube-dl wasn't a thing anymore (maybe it is again?)...

yt-dlp is definitely a thing: <https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp>

youtube-dl is still a thing, last commit was one week ago.

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/commits/master

How expensive is it to swap out the media player in your car for something with an aux port? Alternatively, does it not have a USB port?

Try an fm transmitter?

Plug it into a 12v socket (cigarette lighter socket) and plug the audio cable into the headphones jack. Tune the radio to the set frequency. Bob's your uncle.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=fm+transmitter+for+car&crid=XYUJ3...

A Bluetooth transmitter would have much better quality and not have to move around the spectrum manually. FM transmitters are a simple technology but in practice are worse than a classic compact cassette adapter.

Nobody else has said so, but most cars have USB ports you can plug a flash drive (or external SSD, in my case) in to for music.

It seems that we've entered the rent-seeking phase of corporate capitalism.

Why spend any extra time, money, or energy making new products or services when you can instead make more money doing nothing but using your outsized political and economic power to coerce and extort consumers instead.

At this point it's impossible to see how any new merger or acquisition isn't just another step in the wrong direction, handing over yet more power to a small few.

At what point is a company too large to effectively serve the public interest? How can we turn this process around and redistribute the economic power of these gigantic corporations?

> It seems that we've entered the rent-seeking phase of corporate capitalism.

Doctorow's word "Enshittification" (which, amazingly, has a rather filled in Wikipedia page now - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification ) captures it quite well.

> At what point is a company too large to effectively serve the public interest?

I use the term "maxium tribe size" to describe the human capability (or incapability) of extending compassion and understanding to a group. Companies don't fail. People fail within companies. People fail other people and hide behind "limited liability" and the sham that is corporate personhood.

Every person has a different MaxT. You may not feel the pain of violating this constraint yourself, but lots of people under you will suffer. You may actually feel GREAT, look at all the respect I have gained! I can make things happen, people listen to me... or now I can just ignore them...

You don't care because you are blinded by success.

Money and power are the worst poisons this world offers. It turns otherwise intelligent and caring people into awful piles of human effluence. It is IMPOSSIBLE to gain sufficient power to drive a company and not lose your sense of humanity. The idea that you will not violate your maximum tribe size in this exercise is insulting. You will quickly be insulated from the consequences of your actions, and no matter how depraved your behavior there will be a line of people congratulating and cheering you on because they desperately want to be the next person in line to enjoy the ride you are on.

The people driving enshittification are not human. They may share our genes but they are not part of our society or species anymore.

The sociologist's term for this is Dunbar's number: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number

It's about ~150 with some variance between individuals.

I'm developing this theory for a while now that we should break all corporations that are bigger than Dunbar's number: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31317641

A tiny musician withdrew their music, so I'm not sure how relevant breaking up mega firms is.

In cases like this, a creator puts their own music on a service like Amuse. They or that service (acting as their "publisher") removed it, which removes Apple's right to stream it.

Apple didn't take away this guy's Ladybug Music.

> A tiny musician withdrew their music, so I'm not sure how relevant breaking up mega firms is.

The later half of the post is about Sony's deal with Paramount ending, resulting in paid content being revoked from Playstation consoles.

Whether Sony refused to pay the previously-agreed upon rate, or Paramount decided to unreasonably increase what Sony was paying, we may never know, but both of those are definitely large enough for the commenter's remark to be relevant.

But Apple sure did market iMusic as a legitimate replacement for owned physical media while never mentioning the the fact you don't own it and it may disappear at any time. That fact is only mentioned buried somewhere in the EULA, and only popularized by people like the EFF and the victims.

This person didn't own this music in iTunes. They are using Apple Music, which is a subscription service that has a fluctuating catalog of music. Right now there are some 100 million songs.

Even with actually buying the music or whatever (and without DRM), it's interesting to consider that digital distribution means that things can be pulled from distribution from one moment to the next, without any warning. And the nature of digital distribution means that in that case there's no remaining stock still to be sold off which you could hunt down, and no second-hand market to speak of, either. So you're immediately down to either piracy, or else nothing…

I have access to 2 or 3 streaming services plus Spotify, which I haven't used in a long time because bittorrent content is always better and faster. Just get the files and play them wherever you want, however you want.

> Enshittification has reached new heights, as Sony just decided to yoink over a thousand seasons—that's right, seasons, not episodes—of Discovery shows from the PlayStation Store.

> But they're not just removing them from the store.

> They're removing them from people's libraries.

That's called fraud. Why in the world are we not prosecuting it?

Capitalism responds to demand. We have to stop paying for convenience and start demanding better. Save your money from Streaming, purchase used and physical only. Force the market to adapt to you.

The more power companies have to regulate their consumers, as well as the information available to them, the less responsive to demand they have to be. We are in a monopolized enough environment across multiple industries that we can't assume the dynamics of supply and demand work anything like an idealized "free market", if such a thing has ever existed

As an addendum to my statement: If the changes in demand do not result in a change in supply, then piracy is justified.

Soulseek STILL WORKS

igg-games.com

eztv.re

1337x.tw

sci-hub.se

libgen.rs

torrentfreak.com

opensubtitles.org

nyaa.si

So is thepiratebay.org .

Search using yandex.com they dont filter torrents like scroogle or bingbong

Pirate libraries are this generation's libraries.

Brought to you by DaShareZone!

Thanks, that's valuable

i expanded it for ya :D

Sharing is caring!

More: <https://old.reddit.com/r/Piracy/wiki/megathread>

The causative factor behind Doctorow's enshittification is these asshat companies controlling both the demand and the supply side.

Disintermediation killed the mom and pop music stores, streaming outright killed physical media. Kids starting university don't understand the concept of a file system; documents just live in the docs app, right?

Maybe we end up in a situation where there's no escape because the median user is held hostage by the lack of knowledge how the internet should have been.

No, capitalism responds to the richest. That's the foundation of Capitalism. To think that anything can be done if just everyone paid differently is the epitome of free-for-all lawless libertarianism.

How have purchases influenced copyright laws being pushed again and again as Disney demands ?

How have purchases changed improved working conditions? Biodiversity ? The climate ?

We can't buy a better future, because there'll always be someone richer than us. We need to build it directly and ban the illusion that is the market

Torrent and terabytes of data on hard disk ftw!

I still use whatever they call the service where my ripped CDs get uploaded to my Apple Music library. I have quite a few albums physically that their library lacks and it's been nice to be able to listen to them in my car.

Over the last 3 to 4 years though more and more of my music living in the cloud has gotten corrupted, to the point that something like 1 in 10 songs is unlistenable. The source material in my main library still plays fine, nothing wrong with it, but play it on any other device it pops and skips.

Doing some googling, I don't seem to be alone in this. It's honestly infuriating and has me potentially searching for some other service.

i've posted this reply, but i will copy paste it again here:

you know, my default stance is pirating is the way. i don't give a shit who "owns" the media. if it's in my harddisk, it should not go away unless I delete it or the system (fs / hw / what have you) is kill. good thing I don't enjoy entertainment like movies or music. but in the small chance I like it, I'd go to the store, get the disk, rip it or just torrent it.

but bro! that's immoral and you will suffer in hell!

nah bro, we're already in hell.

bro! them popos will catch your ass and put you in jail!

nah bro, if they don't know, it's not illegal.

> as Sony just decided to yoink over a thousand seasons—that's right, seasons, not episodes—of Discovery shows from the PlayStation Store

Didn't realize Sony owned Discovery, oh wait they don't. So it's actually Discovery who's licensing caused Sony to be legally obligated to remove the shows.

Sucks if you bought it but yeah just like the games in your Steam library you never actually owned it, you merely licensed it.

Sony shouldn't have sold shows to their customers without first negotiating contracts with the rightsholders ensuring Sony wouldn't have to renege.

And really, Netflix screwed the pooch on this one right at the start by not making licensing rights irrevocable.

They could have said, "we'll pay $0.XXX per stream" and media companies would have said, "yay, more money for old crap we don't care about any more" and that would have been that.

But because they didn't make it irrevocable, companies have been rug pulling customers ever since

> Sucks if you bought it but yeah just like the games in your Steam library you never actually owned it, you merely licensed it.

If you're lied to about a "sale" and it's really just a shitty rental, we have a different word for that: FRAUD.

And the action that Sony hacked devices and removed said content? It mirrors the individual form of this ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38614624 ), which is "horribly illegal". I argue it pales in comparison to Sony's actions.

It shouldn't be legal for a transfer of a revocable license to be described as "buying".

If you want a story about Sony and lawsuits for hacking devices, here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OtherOS

It doesn't matter whose fault it is. Companies are still stealing from the customers.

Content I have bought and downloaded should be as irrevocable as a book on my bookshelf.

"Licensed" is a made up word. Did I buy it? It's mine. Did I rent it? It's no longer mine after the rental period is over. End of story.

Licensed isn't any more made up than buy and rent, all words are made up.

Being able to articulate what exactly you are allowed to do with something you buy is a useful legal fiction, much like property rights, contracts, and all of the other useful legal fictions we enforce on the world.

It would all be fine if instead of "buy", the big yellow button said "License indefinitely, revocable at any time by us or by the people licensing it to us for any or no reason. If you download it, we reserve the right to reach into your device and delete it when we're done licensing it to you."

But people would probably be less likely to push the button, so I guess it's better to lie to customers about what they're paying for.

The true anarchism to the enshittification of the music services would be to just sing or whistle the songs.

I've heard rumours there are even analogue "musical instruments" which can be used (especially during Carnaval) to cover music...

- Download mp3

- Play on VLC.

Not complicated.

Download the MP3 from where? If you want a copy of a well known song, you might find one, but for something else you might struggle to find one. Your best bet is to buy used CDs and rip them yourself.

rutracker.org has many things archived

> Download the MP3 from where?

My guy, this has been solved for about 25 years.

Not everything is ripped and waiting to be downloaded…

If it's not available for download, it's not something I would be interested in :-) I understand that people are different.

The article clearly explained that this was not possible in their case.

It’s not that simple for the poster’s use case, which is “play whatever my kids want to hear while we’re in the car”

My kid is only 2 years old, but when he can understand the concept I will be sure to teach him that he doesn't have an arbitrarily large choice, he can only choose from within the options we have available.

Download MP3

Put on Plex/Jellyfin/Subsonic

Play in car

Buy MP3, download, burn CD, play in car. Kids can choose any CD that's in the car or regular radio.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com