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Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

Did the operators _want_ to poke the well connected & well funded bear with a historical anger problem?

No, but they weren't not going to, given that their mission is to archive all cultural content, by hook or by crook.

Archiving it and publishing it are different things.

More importantly, they may sabotage their mission: If Spotify shuts them down, their exiting archives and especially future archives may be effectively lost.

I guess I should say more accurately: Their mission is to both archive it and publish it. They seem to be explicitly against copyright, on principle. Which I greatly respect.

It's time to abolish copyright. It creates more problems (stiffles innovation, creates rents) than it solves (rewards innovation).

It doesn't create problems for large companies that make AI systems.

Yeah, it seems to only be a problem when you're a human being remixing the culture you grew up with.

Meta can admit to soullessly scraping books they don't own for their for-profit AI datasets [1], and it's not a problem because they're Meta. But if you're an artist? Nope. Sampling in hip hop songs, for example, is in a "complex legal gray area" (translation: "it's illegal but we don't want to admit that out loud") [2].

[1] https://futurism.com/the-byte/facebook-trained-ai-pirated-bo...

[2] https://urbanspook.com/copyright-laws-2025-impact-on-hip-hop...

Fortunately, Spotify does not have that power. Annas Archive is not based in US or EU jurisdictions. They can make access for normal people a bit harder, but not shut it down.

(Edited for clarity)

> Fortunately, Spotify does not have that power. They are not based in US or EU jurisdictions.

Perhaps I misunderstood something, but according to my understanding

1. Spotify is registered in Luxembourg and has its operational headquarter in Sweden (Stockholm). Both are EU countries.

2. I guess it won't be Spotify that sues, but the individual music labels (very likely united).

Annas archive is not based in the EU (sorry for being not clear). So the law in EU is limited to enforce a ban. In germany it is already "banned" via ISP but just DNS.

But the real servers are hosted in kazachstan or russia I think. And they do not cooperate so much with EU courts.

So unless the EU installs a great firewall like china, they cannot really shut it down.

> But the real servers are hosted in kazachstan or russia I think. And they do not cooperate so much with EU courts.

I believe the "official" AA servers only host the website + source code. The actual copyrighted content is stored by volunteers who seed the torrents.

Exactly, this is why the 'Hydra' is difficult to take it down.

Presumably the opposing party is residing in non-US-or(and? depends on the order of evaluation)-EU territory, but I might be mistaken. "They" refers to both sides in the parent comment.

I'm not sure archiving and publishing are different things.

They are, but archiving without publishing is pointless.

I occasionally wonder how many enormous collections of culture like that of Marion Stokes[1] have been lost because their curators made no effort to realize the value of their collection.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes

Most archives - the ones in libraries, etc. - are not published, except they are available to qualified people who physically travel there. Most are not even fully indexed - nobody knows all of what's there.

My perspective is compatible with this fact. An archive that approximately nobody can access and/or nobody knows what it contains has no value to society at large, except the potential that it may some day be published.

The good news is I'd guess the number of (nonreligious/nonproprietary) institutionally managed pointless archives is dwindling.

> They are, but archiving without publishing is pointless.

One may collect/archive now (when the data is, well, "available"), and publish later, when copyright expires and the material will likely be harder to obtain.

Both are illegal, if you just hoard you will never know if what you have is useful. Only way to judge that is by letting people use it.

I can save a copy of my friend's book on my computer, archiving it. Nobody else could see it unless I publish it.

They stated that they would pass the information on to other archivists and public/private trackers no? They obviously have backups, since there are multiple users seeding Gbs and even TBs of data. Mirrors can be created as well, like TPB.

No, because they are all backed up on torrent. Good luck, getting those "shut down" from the DHT

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