Hacker News

Fwiw, piratebay continues to be the -to my knowledge- biggest public tracker out there, with basically every media production available.

And I think that was his point. They may ruin some people's life's... but aside from that, they achieve nothing.

If the operators of Anna's Archive live somewhere like Russia or China, there's a good chance nothing will ever come of any of this legal action. Anna's Archive's biggest challenge is just maintaining availability of infrastructure.

Not necessarily. More cheerful examples exist, usually outside the west:

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

I’d love to see a streaming service where my payment goes to artists I listen to.

Spotify pays 70% of their music revenue to publishers based on the total number of listens. All revenue is put together and split based on the global numbers. Which means that niche band I like will get next to nothing. Instead if they account for 50% of my listening time in one month, they should get 35% of what I paid to Spotify that month. Unfortunately big labels will never agree to that.

I've always liked China's business model for music. In China, all music is free to stream and download. Musicians make their money the more traditional way, through performances, merchandise, promotions/advertising, etc.

> I don't like what they do to artists

Not sure if you're aware, but it's the labels, not Spotify:

> It pays roughly two-thirds of every dollar it generates from music, with nearly 80% allocated to recording royalties and about 20% to publishing, though how much artists and songwriters ultimately receive depends on their agreements with rights holders, which Spotify does not control. [0]

Spotify is frantically trying to escape the record label's death grip (hence podcasts), because they know they can squeeze it for just about anything with licensing deals. It's a terrible business model! Spotify keeps a third for their costs (& finally some profit in the past year or two), ie. about the same that Apple takes from App Store for basically nothing[1].

How the record labels convinced the world that Spotify is the bad guy here is beyond belief.

--

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/sofiachierchio/2026/01/28/spoti...

[1] Certainly app store costs are nothing when compared to the infrastructure that Spotify needs.

If I like an artist I buy a physical copy of the album.

I just brought Light Years on cassette by Nas.

I’m an hobbyist musician and I’m going to sell actual cassettes and donate the profits. I’m never going to get the 500 million streams you need to make money off Spotify

people that get their music from AA would never buy it or pay spotify for it, so the "loss" is completely imaginary. same goes for movies, videogames etc

> piracy brings artists absolutely nothing at all.

This has historically been unclear. Lots of artists make more money from touring and merchandise than from record sales, and piracy is likely to boost those.

> why then switch to a mode that pays artists nothing at all? Do Bandcamp. Buy merch. Do something to support the artists.

I don't like this perspective because it puts the onus on the individual consumer. Many people who listen to music struggle to make ends meet. They do not have the extra money to afford buying albums off of bandcamp, yet they are contributing members of society and they deserve to be able to listen to music.

Meanwhile there are billions of dollars floating around in the music industry. Spotify absolutely has the spare cash to pay their artists more; they just choose not to.

As much as I love the idea of Gabe's "piracy is a service issue" philosophy, I think the real truth is likely that piracy is an issue of capitalism and wealth inequality.

The entire record industry is scum and Spotify is just a part of that. It can just die a swift death, would be for the best. Bandcamp is much better. Much lower barrier to entry for everyone and it has my favorite artists.

A lot of this has to do with the fact that many more people want to create music, than the number of artists that people want to listen to.

So there’s a heavy supply/demand imbalance, and distribution/discovery thrives there.

The YouTube thing doesn't sound right. They had a ¿10? minute video limit for a long time and it was really annoying to watch pirated stuff on there. Google Video had a lot of full movies before they bought YouTube and shut it down.

Same as Crunchyroll with pirated anime fansubs.

Did Zuck really take messages and content? I know they had a certain "interoperability tool" that conveniently only worked in one direction but I didn't know it went that far

https://youtu.be/cBHouBDjqsc?si=Huil8xJys3VkYbGU

Anthropic and OpenAI have entered the chat

His talks are all fantastic

USA claiming global jurisdiction over internet copyright matters goes back a long way. The case that "radicalized" me was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd. , which was 25 years ago!

The other such case establishing global financial jurisdiction, often cited by cryptocurrency adopters, is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg - "Pokerstars".

It's wild to read "the U.S. Congress passed UIGEA to extend existing gambling laws into cyberspace. The law made processing payments for online gambling a crime" in the light of how prevalent online gambling is now in the US mainstream, with sports betting, Kalshi, Polymarket and so on.

> Immediately makes me think of the vitriol here on HN for the UK trying to enforce their age verification law outside their borders

The UK and US aren't unique in this regard. The concept of piracy has been commonly treated as a topic with universal jurisdiction that expands beyond borders, going back to the time when piracy meant people on boats in international waters. I'll be honest that I don't know if or how those laws correspond to digital piracy, but countries have long considered international piracy to be something their domestic courts can go after.

Practically speaking you can always choose to ignore it if you don't have offices or assets in that country and you're okay with never traveling there for the rest of your life. You also have to avoid countries with mutual extradition agreements because many countries will offer to extradite for certain crimes with the expectation that the other country will return the favor.

The UK age verification enforcement isn't a good comparison because the UK's overreach extends even to instances where UK citizens are geoblocked. Trying to enforce your country's laws on an operation in a different country which does not even serve your country is something else. For a recent example look at the online depression forum that is being threatened by the UK even though they've geoblocked UK users - Immediately makes me think of the vitriol here on HN for the UK trying to enforce their age verification law outside their borders

I've been against the UK trying to shove its regulations everywhere and I'm just as against the US doing it.

I don't understand why it makes you think of that, this is a completely different situation. If Anna's Archive were an upstanding site run by a known operator in compliance with UK law, I would definitely be highly critical of this ruling. But it's actually an anonymously run site that violates most countries' copyright laws and is blocked in the UK.

Copying intellectual property is not piracy. This term was co-opted by big industries to insure the cash cattle continue to pay. Piracy has a very specific sting to it. This was a deliberate choice. We don't call burglary "piracy", yet if we relax the definition enough to include IP theft, it is also piracy.

GabeN also had the wrong take in that it's a "supply problem" or whatever nonsense he said. GabeN is in fact an industry plant and owns one of the strictest IP protection platforms on the market. Why people buy on steam when they can ban you for almost anything and take everything you've ever rented (you dont own anything on steam). Thousands of dollars of games gone with a ban. In any normal world this would be tantamount to grand theft and a small business owner would actually face real prison time for it.

You can't "steal" something that isn't gone when it's stolen. If I walked into a house, took a necklace, and left an exact unaltered copy I'd at best be charged with a lesser crime that didn't include theft. But if you copy movies/music/software you're liable to have your entire life absolutely financially and possibly criminally ruined.

The government of the US is hardly a government for the people, by the people. It's strictly designed to enrich the few and consume "human resources".

You should consider Cloudflare. They don't care if you use their services for criminal purposes.

They are published on the old ones. The old ones don't all get shut down simultaneously.

Would be fairly easy for them to offer an onion service on which they publish the current list of domains, as one option among many, many options for distributing small strings on the internet in an uncensorable way.

Does it matter? It's not illegal to update an article with a new domain.

We need to split "a creation" and "a set of ideas used in creation"

You created entire book ? Sell it for 40 years, sure But that should not apply to someone taking a tiny thing from it and making their own stuff around it, 10 years maybe.

Don't you know that it's okay to steal IP (and skirt laws in general) when you're a big company with lots of money?

No as a concept. Assigning ownership to specific bit patterns is absurd.

I agree in fractions.

I think land ownership should be abolished. That'll never happen for a lot of reasons, but it's highly unethical in my opinion. Ignoring who the land was stolen from to begin with, I also feel that it's looting the future, land ownership often being generational and severely kneecapping society from making better, more productive use of a finite resource as its needs change over time.

I do not think intellectual property should be abolished outright, because I can't think of a reliable incentive structure constructed entirely from the social interest. I do think it, particularly copyright, should be severely curtailed, however. Companies exclusively controlling huge swaths of popular culture for 90 years or whatever basically amounts to theft from the public commons, in my opinion. If you're going to replace folk culture with Mickey Mouse, then we ought to own a bit of that, more quickly than is being done.

I have no issue with personal property and actually think it should be strengthened. Consider the right to repair; the right to run the software we choose on the devices we ostensibly own; the erosion of our ability to freely trade, share, and preserve increasingly digital products; stronger enforcement of Magnusson-Moss; infringements of our privacy in an online world; and so on.

Yes it is, at least 80% of the book market in the US is controlled by 5 companies: Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, Hachette, and HarperCollins.

Perhaps one day we will invent a technology that allows computers to connect to each other directly, and share information freely across some sort of distributed network.

One can dream!

Russia after Putins fall will do everything to please other countries, to get back to good terms (for sanctions, trade, debt markets, selling oil) and all people in Russia betting on not being extradited will have a rude awakening.

I imagine the record companies and shareholders.

It would look bad if they did nothing, so a few 100k on legal theatre is worth it for them. Now they can say it's the US courts that are powerless.

Probably the people involved getting paid hefty fees for the whole thing.

Yes your honor, we've identified one Big Bird of 123 Sesame St as being affiliated with the operators of the site based on the registration data.

The only reason you have to tell the truth is if you want to reduce the risk of arbitrarily losing control of the domain, such as having a chance to contest any abuse reports that might be filed against you.

Several domains previously used by Anna have been lost.

I assume that they may have been seized as a consequence of this trial.

This is presumably the real target of the lawsuit: the domain operators. There will likely be injunctions taking down the domains.

there are ways to buy domains using crypto and being completely anonymous.

No way Anna’s archive has $500k

Extra, because with the piracy of music they bought into equation members of (and implicitly) the recording industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recording_Industry_Association...

I do not see any law being violated by Anna's Archive in the slightest.

Water isn't wet, but it does "wet" other things. Wetness is the degree to which a liquid contacts and adheres to a solid surface, so it's makes no sense to say that water is wet.

Fair point, I kinda agree, though I do think they were mostly know for books and music is a whole new sector they entered with a different niche altogether

They have lost a few domain names.

For instance, they previously had a Swedish domain, which was taken down, together with a few others, possibly as a consequence of this lawsuit.

Hopefully they will succeed to keep the others.

Companies Spotify rent music from

Cool, feel free to create a website that does as much as lists track names and let me know how long will you survive before your hosting provider gets flooded with bullshit DMCA notices and shuts you down.

I'm not talking about downloading music, I'm not even talking about some custom player for reproducing music, I'm talking about just putting say a list of songs from a playlist as plain text online.

It's centralized because there's a few big labels that own a lot...but otherwise it's such a commodity that you can go to any streaming service and you more or less have the same catalog.

Anna's Archive went public with their announcement late December, Spotify started communicating this API lockdown mid-January. I have no evidence to back that up, but judging purely by the timing, it sure seems like these two events are connected and something Spotify did reluctantly to appease the big labels.

Get the metadata from Anna. At least now it's freely available.

Also it's unfair to call Anna greedy. There can't be much money in giving stuff away for free.

Plus they can probably use them to inject malware and god knows what else.

How does that work exactly? "I'll give you 1% of what I owe you, if you leave me alone."