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Your points remind me of an old post on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41454990

especially the following parts

> So I understand the concern that this court decision threatens the future of some forms of archiving, digital preservation and librarianship. But the existing norms and repositories this threatens exist because people established those norms and archiving projects before now, in living memory, even in the face of threats and lectures about precedent and worries about legal gray areas.

> If you want to defend and protect "the many noble aspects of the archive", you have to remember that thirty years ago, those were imagined as impossible, impractical, and (whisper it) probably illegal. In both cases, it was Kahle's vision and approach that was -- apparently -- the only way it was going to get done.

This is about the Internet archive, but it applies to Anna's even better because Anna's is an ideologically motivated project. Yes they are taking a risk, but I imagine they consider it a worthwhile risk if it has a chance of helping them build the world they want — one where copyright does not exist as it does today.

Plus, it's not like Anna's got anything more to lose anyway. If they ever get caught the publishers are going to squeeze every single cent out of their pockets anyway, so how exactly is making spotify and record companies their enemies going to cause them extra harm?

> mostly widely available on YouTube already anyways

Problem is, when music disappears due to licensing nonsense, it generally disappears from all streaming services at the same time. Most music goes through only a few gigantic distributors / labels.

> potentially jeopardize

Nothing is in jeopardy if the operators remain completely anonymous, which it seems like they will.

> Nothing is in jeopardy if the operators remain completely anonymous, which it seems like they will.

If the 3 letter agencies want to track you down, it is highly unlikely that you could keep your anonymity. Unless you are also part of 3 letter agencies from NK, CN, RU etc.

I couldn't be more relieved that RIAA is a four letter agency

I don't think Anna's can get into any worse of a legal position by pirating more things. It's already the case that anyone involved in the project will be arrested on sight, have all of their property seized, and go to prison for life. Which is why they don't show up to court hearings. This isn't the kind of crime where they beg the judge for leniency, it's the kind where they expose how silly the state is for imposing completely unenforceable penalties against someone they don't know the identity of.

It's about weight and money of people going after you. No one else has more money and muscle to throw at than music/movie industry

Reminds me of internet archive’s emergency library that they felt magically didn’t have to follow the law because of COVID.

Some folks out there seem to have their otherwise good intentions sort of trend into self destructive waters.

Exactly. Governments that seem to have good intentions are enabling the self destruction of public data. I'm glad we have projects like AA to right this wrong.

Anna's Archive pretty explicitly doesn't give a shit about the law.

Except they do and posted this weird (and racist) national security narrative about llms and copyright reform

https://annas-archive.gl/blog/ai-copyright.html

To be more specific: Anna’s archive does not give two shits about compliance with laws they think unjust.

> that are just entertainment

And books aren't? What's the argument here? If it's that books serve a special purpose because they convey ideas and therefore it's a moral good to disseminate those ideas, you have to extend that to media beyond just the printed word. Music has that same potential (an even greater one, I would argue). It feels weird to pick and choose media like that.

> And books aren't?

Yes, since there are non-fiction books. A book about computer architecture is less „just entertainment“ than a Spotify song.

This implies the only content with moral worth are those that teach knowledge or skills, and presumably only the kinds that are worthy for productivity and advancement or something. But one person's "just an entertaining story or just a silly hobby" is another's life-changing or mind-opening allegory, or therapeutic pursuit with little immediate "practical" value.

I can sort of see the original point; this appears to be a careless risk when there were other options, but I have to push back against the idea it's just some dumb music. It's still an artifact of humanity that's worth accessing and preserving as much as any other.

> This implies the only content with moral worth are those that teach knowledge or skills

This is not what OP said. He was talking about the "moral goodness of providing access to X, despite it being illlegal. He never said anything about the moral worth of X itself, let alone that Y had no moral worth.

> AA is providing a valuable service to tons of people who don't have access to these books otherwise. There's a strong argument to be made for the moral goodness of that -- that even if it's illegal, it's at least in the spirit of a public library.

Don't many public libraries have other things other than printed books, including music?

Trying to imagine telling somebody writing about the history of music copyright that they can’t hear Ice Ice Baby, on account of they might enjoy it, which means it has no research merit.

>mostly widely available on YouTube already

This is the wrong way to look at things, the way YT is going then yt-dlp will be completely locked out within the next 3 years so essentially all that archive is about to be locked within Youtube.

Google Music had my own digitised records, and helped me move away from my physical media. Now I have to find another cd player since something broke in the one I dug out after they removed my shit. This whole ecosystem is rotten

We're only talking about music though. You can always literally just record the audio stream if you want. Or do that from free Spotify. Nothing's getting "locked" anywhere when it's just a simple stereo audio signal.

Now you’re at the mercy of YouTube etc’s compression, and having to decompress it for a worse output

It might be that the "secret owner" had an obsession to liberalise the song field, like the book one, and erroneously thought he could get away indefinitely. Songs are not books as they are backed by much stronger, concentrated and dedicate to kill piracy capital.

And as a result Spotify has restricted their public API; which has limited the functionality of third-party-apps and Spicetify plugins.

They were always going to do that.

Spotify's library has direct value in training ML models.

The value is in people controlling data. Any company with a data mote will always have an advantage, this damages the free and fair market on which capitalism is built.

Spotify has removed millions of songs over the years, so while the value to you, may be tiny, the value to the public is much larger than the marginal increase in risk to the project as a whole.

It should be under AA since it follows AA philosophy and benefits from AA's branding and brings more interested preservationinst parties who may be unaware of AA. Your strategy is the first step in divide and conquer, AA's is too big to fail

I know, considering anyone can download music from youtube for free at any time. The same can not be said of books, before AA.

There is a very fine line between dumb and provacative.

I'm kind of curious how long it will be before people start publishing copyrighted works on the TrumpCoin block chain. :-)

should have AI trained on them like Suno.