Yet all those songs certainly have illegal copies already being distributed on the internet. So what was the actual harm being prevented here? I cannot understand how they hoodwinked a court into this misguided procedure.
Billionaires and enterprises want to see consumers spending to return their investment.
The presence of other - dispersed - illegal material doesn’t diminish said returns too much, this central dump would have set precedent and had garnered massive attention.
This is the capitalist way.
I mean, the archive themselves publicly stated their intention to release all the material, without reference to any injunction. So the implication is trivially true, as a logician would say.
There's a huge difference between a ton of individual torrents or files you need to individually search for, identify, of varying quality, that may be mislabeled and have other sorts of quality issues, and which in no way approach "all" music...
...vs a single, shockingly comprehensive repository of uniformly high-quality music which does, in fact, approach "all" music.
If I wanted to start a pirate music service, it would become vastly easier with this particular repository. Many orders of magnitude easier. That's the actual harm.
Selective prosecution isn't a strong defense in civil court.