How to become a pirate archivist (2022)
annas-blog.org
annas-blog.org
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive
> Anna's Archive is a search engine for shadow libraries.
> It describes itself as a project that aims to "catalog all the books in existence"
May they succeed at their noble goal.
What I find interesting is the wildly differing approach to piracy between the RIAA and the MPAA. The music industry’s current approach is to make their product as available everywhere as much as possible so that it requires far greater effort to pirate the media than to otherwise consume it. As a result piracy is rarer than it used to be and they are making more money than they used to. The movie industry still acts the way the music industry did in the 90s.
Exactly this. And not only they do more money with digital content, see how concerts are always full and prices skyrocketed due to the demand!
The movie industry has surely more costs that music one, _but_ they act like children who lost their toys. And the book industry isn't that far away too.. a lot of content is behind stupid DRMs and what happens if the license server disappears one day?
Minor nitpick, "when" the license server disappears one day. They have no reason to do right by their customers when they go out of business, break old infrastructure that "only a small percentage of users were using", or just feel like they can get away with it and sell you the same product again on their new platform.
It has happened before and it will happen again, modern video games are notorious for this, while you can still play multiplayer games from the early 00s.
And let's not get started with content being outright ripped from our digital products, such as soundtracks being removed from video games after their opaque licensing deals expire, even though you supposedly "own" them in your digital library. Or old movies & TV episodes being removed because they're politically incorrect in the current age.
There's a couple spreadsheets on their royalties for songs and their streaming revenue broken out by region, then by provider. It's for multiple items that get a couple million listens a year, one song has 7 million in one month in the UK, of which "she" sees 50% revenue. Totally payout for the 7 million month? 54 cents USD.
These are songs for a mid 00s - early 10s animated TV series.
Almost certainly one of the things that allows streaming to be priced in a range that's palatable for consumers is that most artists make less money than ever. At $50/month, it presumably wouldn't fly. As it is, it's probably priced in about the range that a lot of people spent on physical media in pre-Napster days. (And streaming seems not to be a money printing press for at least some of the streaming services either.)
ADDED: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/music-industry-revenues-by-...
Paid streaming is somewhat lower than peak CD but about the same as peak vinyl (inflation adjusted). There are peaks and valleys but consumer music spend hasn't changed that much over time.
Compare it to any other profession. Let's say a bricklayer decides to go work for a company. He works the entire year and builds houses for many people. Then he's paid a hundred dollars. He'd be an idiot to keep doing it. And he says that if he started his own brick laying business he wouldn't get even a single client. Okay, but why keep doing this?
Of course, generally people make music because they like making music, and streaming is a way to share it. If it connects with people, and they blow up, great. But if that’s the only drive they’ll probably have a bad time.
The same could be said about GitHub… why would anyone put their code up there for free, or work on these hobby projects, when they aren’t making money from it, or just get $100 in donations per year? It’s fun, the people enjoy it, they want to share the work they’ve done, and for some it’s a way to advertise themselves and what they can do.
Not everything needs to make someone a multimillionaire, especially in the arts.
I'm talking specifically about the artists that are complaining about getting a raw deal from Spotify. And I agree 0% with your assessment that just because they are not happy with a hundred dollars per year means that they demanded to be multimillionaires. Maybe people just should to get their fair share for their work?
I am friends with some career musicians and I am forced to pirate their music if I want to listen to it, because they refuse to sell their music online and only have it on streaming services. Which gives them almost nothing in return.
ghaff already covered why: because Spotify is the distribution channel.
40 years ago, they would've put their music on the radio. Today, they put it on Spotify. Why? Because if they don't, very few people are ever going to even know they exist.
And if you think the fact that Spotify is giving them a terrible deal means they shouldn't engage with them, then I'll point to any of a dozen other examples today of massive corporations profiting excessively off of people who have very little choice but to engage with them. Being able to choose to do otherwise, and remain in the music business, is a very privileged position to be in.
If you're not getting paid, you're not doing "business".
Yes, there are many other examples of companies having exploratory practices the same way as Spotify. That still does not explain very well why people put up with it.
If a farmer exploits a migrant worker, the migrant worker gets paid enough for shelter and food. He is depending on that job for surviving. When artists are exploited by Spotify, the money they usually receive is nowhere close to paying for shelter or food, so they have to survive by other means anyway. Keeping their music on Spotify or removing it from Spotify doesn't make any difference for their livelihood.
Somewhat different situation than the Spotify case which is arguably mostly an advertising channel while corporate gigs actually pay directly. But creatives of all stripes doing things they'd rather not do so they can live, do what they want to do, and have a sliver of a sliver of a chance to breakout is extremely common.
People pursue creative pursuits for a lot of different reasons, including personal fulfillment. But you pretty much have to win the lottery to make a decent full-time living off of it. People may somewhat enjoy laying bricks--but it's a job they expect to make a living at. If they can't, they'll try to do something else.
If it's for personal fulfilment, artists can be happy with the sales they can make on their own, even if the numbers are small. Or even give their music away for free, if they want to get as many listeners as possible. But what is the sense in letting a billion dollar company exploit you and make bank on your work, while paying you almost nothing in return?
Imagine if other professions were like that? "Just keep laying the bricks for free for my company, and maybe one day you'll be a famous bricklayer and I'll pay you millions".
If musicians were actually left without their music, like the bricklayer, I'd agree with you and I think so would most people. But conversely, if a bricklayer really loved building houses, spent a great deal of time building houses, owned all of them himself and they were empty and he was doing nothing with them, and a company came up to him and said "hey, we like your houses, we have a business letting people go on tours through houses and we make money off it, would you let us run tours through your houses in exchange for a cut of the profits, which will probably be very small but could be large?" then I don't think you can be too scandalised by him taking the deal and making at least some money off these houses that he'd already built and was doing nothing with! Even if you think selling photos of the houses directly to customers is a better model! Especially since he can still do that!
They clearly need new business models. Selling copies of infinitely abundant data in the age of networked computers just isn't gonna work out.
You consume it by going to youtube and playing the video.
You "pirate" it by saving the youtube video.
Passing the -x flag to youtube-dl will ignore the video and save just the audio.
It's very little additional effort.
Movies are not doing well with any alternate revenue streams yet. Ticket sales and merch are way down.
"That secrecy, however, comes with a psychological cost. Most people love being recognized for the work that they do, and yet you cannot take any credit for this in real life. Even simple things can be challenging, like friends asking you what you have been up to"
So sure, it is more safe, to always keep it a secret. But it is more fun to do things together, we are social beings after all. But yes, if the "together" gets too big and the whole project more popularity, getting caught is only a question of time. The licence holding companies do work with (private) undercover investigators. At least for music and movies. Not sure if the book rights companies are playing in the same league.
Once you have to switch to crypto for funding things get very hard as Average Joe doesn't know a damned thing about how to send you a chunk of Monero.
A "community" is the weakest link in their chain, it seems. Even if you get your OpSec 100% tight (very, very hard, if not impractical), the human factor is never securable.
>Fast downloads - Become a member to support the long-term preservation of books, papers, and more. To show our gratitude for your support, you get fast downloads.
>[3 "Fast Partner Server" links]
>Refer a friend, and both you and your friend get 50% bonus fast downloads!
>[3 "Slow Partner Server" links]
$5/m gets 20 fast downloads a day.
I'd be interested to hear others' thoughts on this.
edit: I should have said that the donations page is important context too: https://annas-archive.org/donate
>If you don’t like how we operate our project, go run your own shadow library! All our code and data are open source, so nothing is stopping you. ;)
Or be more specific what doesn't sit right with you.
What's not right with me, is that a donation is different from buying something, yet here it seems mixed in together.
Small perks usually and I am critical of those as well, as they blurry the line. But here it rather looks like a usual subscription model to buy.
The whole site is illegal anyway. Is there a legal difference in "donating" and getting benefits. And "buying" for benefits, when the benefits are illegal in both cases?
For me (not in the US), donating have a different meaning than buying. When I buy, I become a customer and it establish a business relation and the organization owe me a bunch of things (the product/the service, my customer rights …).
When I donate, it’s mainly to support a cause and I know I’m not tied to anything in return. Even if there are promised perks, the structure doesn’t owe me anything, the perk is just a mean to thank me for my donation.
Again, it’s not the legal definition from my country (or maybe, I really don’t know), it’s just what those words means culturally here.
Also, using « buy » which implies a business relationship (even an illegal one) when the project is explicitly about freeing knowledge from businesses would be pretty ironic.
Which side seems childish?
What surprises me is the need for fast downloads. Books are small. 20 fast small downloads doesn't seem much of a reward.
From some testing there seems to be a built in delay, and then as some scanned books can easily be 20-100MB a download time of 5-10mins isn't uncommon. (I not complaining about this)
I support their goals of open access, FWIW.
edit: the call for people to run mirrors is interesting to see: https://annas-archive.org/mirrors
So, I guess this is similar to buying official physical merchandise like t-shirt or mug at a higher than market price which they cannot ship (legally) due to the nature of their service. Both parties know that the benefit they get doesn't match the costs and it is about showing support.
Yes, I wouldn't suggest or support anything like that.
One way this feels different to me is that while somewhere able to sell merchandise may have a range of items including some very expensive it generally wouldn't be suggesting I buy something every month and then offer an increasing % discount for paying 3/6/12/24 months up front.
See also : the recent shutdown by Nintendo of a Switch emulator, where they exploited the fact that it got crowdfunded (with specific rewards for bigger backers ?).
I don't see an issue with charging users who would cause large amounts of traffic. It is a subscription model described as donations but this is common for many piracy sites.
How to become a pirate archivist - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33240701 - Oct 2022 (99 comments)
https://technologizer.com/2012/01/23/why-history-needs-softw...
Of course, as a content creator myself, I do believe that there should be some sort of reward and protection for creating content. However, I also know that we have become a ruthless world where inequality is enormous. And I don't just mean inequality in the traditional sense: even the middle and upper class are forced to live in a world where they are absolutely dependent on the upper tech elite for basic things, and costs are rising.
Thus, piracy of this sort is inevitable. It should not just be those who can pay who should have access to knowledge and ideas. Everyone should have that. In a fair world where there were limits to corporate power and technological development, there would be more equality and piracy would not be necessary.
So as much as I want to make money myself on my own content, I also support piracy simply because it's the only solution within the capitalistic system for some sort of equality in terms of access to knowledge.
This is often the framing of the debate around piracy, but I think it's fundamentally incorrect. Numerous studies over the years have shown that pirates spend more money on media, not less. Media companies want to frame this as a debate about money because it seems logical that we should reward content creators, but it's fundamentally not a debate about money because if it were, content creators would have no reason to be unhappy about piracy.
In reality, the real issue is control. Media companies want to control how and when you consume media, and pirates want to control how and when they consume media. This war isn't just being fought in the piracy space either--it's part of the motivation behind the move to subscription streaming services and streaming protocol changes that no longer serve up video files.
Personally, that's exactly why I spend more money on media than my friends: I have an extensive CD collection (and a somewhat less-extensive BluRay collection) and if you do the math on that it's very clear that it would be cheaper for me to pay for literally every music streaming service than what I spend on CDs each month. I'm not going to give exact numbers, but the amount of money isn't even in the same ballpark. But my CDs don't disappear, I can rip them and play them on any of my devices, I can leaf through my CDs and rediscover something I had forgotten instead of having some algorithm push me toward the latest dictated hotness, etc.
And to be clear, I'm saying "media companies" here, not "content creators", because almost universally the content creators aren't the ones trying to exert control over the content they create. On the contrary, my #1 tip for pirating academic papers is to email the author and ask them for the paper--I've literally never received a "no" to literally hundreds of such emails I've sent. Music and movies are different because they're usually less of a one-person product and more of the money actually makes it to the content creators, but generally musicians I've talked to are not the ones restricting their media to one streaming platform or refusing to allow MP3 downloads, or refusing to release on physical media--that only ever happens when big media companies get involved.
But now the bigcorps see it as a way to gain more money and control over other's lifes, so suddenly doing piracy is totally fine and for the greater good!
The worst part is that these individuals whose lives have been ruined weren't even harming anyone. Their operations were on such a small scale that it barely had any impact.
But these bigcorps are looking to reshape society, destroy many jobs and industries, rewrite social contracts, and it's all just hunky dory.
I'm definitely about as anti-corporation as you're going to find on HN, but I'm not sure I'm seeing what you're describing. It seems like bigcorps are definitely still fighting against piracy. At the moment, players like Anna's Archive appear to be winning because they've largely figured out technical means to bypass the legal problems, but I've been in this sphere for long enough to know you never really "win" this war--all you ever can do is carve out a temporary, limited space where knowledge is preserved and liberated. In fact, there are some pretty glaring weaknesses to stuff like Anna's Archive (which I'm not going to share here because I don't want to give anyone ideas) and I expect someone on the wrong side will figure those out in a decade at the most, and services like this will disappear.
Microsoft with OpenAI is leading the race, but all of the AI orgs are basically just laundering copyrighted material they do not have the rights to.
If your intent is to claim that this is evidence bigcorps aren't still fighting against piracy, I don't think that's true. Corporations are amoral, and it's naive to expect that they have a consistent ethical stance which they apply to themselves.
That is to say, Microsoft can be pirating everything they can get their hands on while at the same time trying to prevent anyone from pirating their intellectual property. They don't care that that's hypocritical; it's profitable and that's what matters to corporations.
paradoxically, we are all super dependent on the poor and low-income earners as well. If everyone was as well-off as the average HN poster, things would get expensive and services would become scarce. I don't say this to disagree with you, but rather to support the fact that we need to have a middle and lower class for our economy to function. the cost increases in basic goods (including books and entertainment), but especially housing, is destroying the middle and lower class. why would someone participate in an economy where the lowest-paying jobs don't even pay enough for a place to live?
> it should not just be those who can pay who should have access to knowledge and ideas.
I've thought a lot about this and particularly for prisons, where by definition there isn't a market for them to buy much of anything. They should make prisons, and perhaps hospitals, copyright-free zones because even if they brazenly "steal" content, its not really possible for the consumers to pay for it anyway. And prisons could use premium IP materials as an incentive to reward good behavior or placate them, without technically stealing anything.
Same was said about TOR
There is no such thing as truly anonymous and safe and there never will be
> There is no such thing as truly anonymous and safe and there never will be
Of course, there are no absolutes, but there is a reasonable privacy and safety.
> If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
- Eric Schmidt - Former Google CEO