> The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated. They’re definitely not doing this for AI companies.
They have a page directly addressed to AI companies, offering them "enterprise-level" access to their complete archives in exchange for tens of thousands of dollars. AI may not be their original/primary motivation but they are evidently on board with facilitating AI labs piracy-maxxing.
You go where the money is. Infra isn’t free. Churches pass the plate every Sunday. Perhaps one day we’ll exist in a more optimal socioeconomic system; until then, you do what you have to do to accomplish your goals (in this context, archivists and digital preservation).
> Infra isn’t free.
There is a certain irony in people providing copyrighted works for free justifying profiting from these copyrights on the basis that providing the works to others isn’t free.
I'd have a lot more sympathy if the music industry didn't try all of the worst available options to handle piracy for years and years.
They had many opportunities to get out ahead of it, and they squandered it trying to cling to album sales where 11/13 tracks were trash. They are in a bed of their own making.
You have been able to buy DRM free digital music from all of the record labels since 2009 from Apple and other stores.
“I only pirate because evil corporations make it too hard to pay for my favorite content” is a multi-decade ever-shifting goalpost. Some people just like to steal shit and will justify it to themselves on the thinnest of pretenses.
It is factually true though, music piracy DID drop once ad supported music streaming became available, the opposite is also true, video/movie piracy is now on the rise due to the amount of streaming subscriptions one has to juggle and their rising prices. Ofcourse there will always be those who yearn for the pirates life, but the vast majority just do it for convenience.
Is that still the case? The option to do that quietly disappeared from Amazon Music a couple of months ago, for example, and they were one of the last few holdouts where you still could. It might be only Apple now?
There's still plenty of options around, Qobuz and 7digital in particular offer drm-free flac downloads.
Quboz, bandcamp, etc.
Bandcamp is still my go to for owning music. Nice platform, just works.
I still buy DRM free music from Amazon.
Piracy went down quite a bit since that is possible.
You've been able to buy DRM free digital music since the 1980s.
Technically not true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Copy_Management_System
I think OP was referring to CDs, which AFAIK don't have DRM.
My link is to the CD DRM!
This is rather misleading. Standard CDs as sold had (and have) no DRM.
The scheme you link to is intended to prevent further copies of CD-Rs but you can copy a CD you bought as often as you like.
Unless the CD comes with a root kit that interferes with that copying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
> DRM free digital music from all of the record labels
Is this true? Can you show me where I can get DRM-free releases from Mountain Fever?
Better yet, can you add that information here? https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/DRM-free
Your link doesn’t work. But I assume you are talking about this label? I looked at the first artist and I found the artist’s music on iTunes. Everything that Apple sells on the iTunes Music Store has been DRM free AAC or ALAC (Apple lossless) since 2009.
https://mountainfever.com/colin-kathleen-ray/
While ALAC is an Apple proprietary format, it is DRM free and can be converted to FLAC using ffmeg. AAC is not an Apple format
ALAC is open source and royalty free since 2011. https://macosforge.github.io/alac/
Wow. How did I miss that!!!
The "iTunes going DRM free" was a big deal around 2008.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070207234839/http://www.apple....
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2008/may/15/drm.apple
I remember trying to use music I had bought in a slideshow that year and finding out that I couldn’t load tracks with DRM into the editor I was using; it was very frustrating.
A way to strip the DRM was built into the iTunes app - burn the song to a CD and rip it.
Is burning to a CD and ripping it lossless?
I don’t know about Mountain Fever, but for anything I haven’t been able to find on Bandcamp, I’ve been able to find on Qobuz.
they made cd singles and single song purchases long before streaming
Cost recovery isn’t profit. Copyright is just a shared delusion, like most laws. They’re just bits on a disk we’re told are special for ~100 years (or whatever the copyright lockup length is in your jurisdiction), after which they’re no longer special (having entered the public domain).
I think what is more ironic is we somehow were comfortable being collectively conditioned (manufactured consent?) with the idea that you could lock up culture for 100 years or more just to enable maximum economic extraction from the concept of “intellectual property” and that to evade such insanity is wrong in some way. “You can just do things” after all.
> that to evade such insanity is wrong in some way.
There’s a commons problem at play here. Most habitual pirates couldn’t pay for what they are pirating even if they wanted to, so restricting their access just makes the world worse-off; but who is going to finance the creation of new content if everything is just reliant on completely optional donations?
The 100 year period is absurd and does nothing to incentivize art, but there are costs involved in production of these works. People are always going to make music and write books regardless of the economic outcome; far fewer are going to write technical manuals or act as qualified reporters without being compensated.
There are several labs and researchers with ideas on how to do this and published books on the subject (https://www.sharing-thebook.com/).
Long story short: workable solutions exist, it is entirely a question of political will and lack thereof.
This would work on niche segments and not for the masses. Look up YouTube subscribers to Pateon ratio.
> Most habitual pirates couldn’t pay for what they are pirating
Seems questionable. You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days. In fact I often pirate things that I otherwise have access to via e.g. Amazon Prime.
> but who is going to finance the creation of new content if everything is just reliant on completely optional donations?
Well this is an appeal to consequences, right? It's probably true that increased protectable output is a positive of IP law, but that doesn't mean it's an optimal overall state, given the (massive) negatives. It's a local maxima, or so I would argue.
Plus it's a bit of a strange argument. It seems to claim that we must protect Disney from e.g. 'knock offs', and somehow if we didn't, nobody would be motivated to create things. But then who would be making the knock-offs and what would be motivating them?
> You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days.
Maybe for you that's something you can afford. I can't. I just consume less music. Or sail the high seas if I really want something.
If we're purely talking about music then almost everything is on YouTube, which has a subscription cost of $0/mo.
> You can cover almost everything with a handful of monthly subscriptions these days.
The majority of people on earth cannot afford more than two or three of these subscriptions.
> But then who would be making the knock-offs and what would be motivating them?
Ten years ago there was a popular blog that got posted on /r/anarcho_capitalism with some frequency. IP was a contentious topic among the then-technologically literate userbase. At some point, a spammer began copying articles from the blog and posting them to /r/anarcho_capitalism himself. This caught the attention of some users and the spammer was eventually banned. A few days later, I followed a link back to his site and found all the articles he had stolen now linked back to a page featuring the cease and desist letter he had received from the original blog, the URL being something like: “f*-statists-and-such-and-such.”
Without any* copyright law, any content that is generated effectively gets arbitraged out to the most efficient hosts and promoters. This might be a win for readers in the short term, but long-term tends towards commodification that simply won’t sustain specialized subject matter in the absence of a patronage model. YouTube and the wave of Short Form Video Content are the two most obvious case studies, though it happens on every social platform that moves faster than infringement notices can be sent.
> The majority of people on earth cannot afford more than two or three of these subscriptions.
I would guess the majority of people on earth don't even have good enough internet to pirate HD video, nor the technical skills to do it, so we're not really talking about global averages here.
> Without any* copyright law, any content that is generated effectively gets arbitraged out to the most efficient hosts and promoters. This might be a win for readers in the short term, but long-term tends towards commodification that simply won’t sustain specialized subject matter in the absence of a patronage model.
I don't think you understand my argument. I don't deny that this may be true. I deny that it is ipso facto the best outcome to have high-quality creator content, or whatever we are talking about here, at the cost of the massive benefits of free use. You might as well tell me New Jersey gas pumping laws lead to nicer service experiences, and getting rid of them would ruin that.
We can arbitrarily prop up any industry to make it cushy and a 'nice experience'. That doesn't make doing so the greatest overall good.
I would argue that even if all that we achieved with the abolition of IP law was the provision of cheap generic drugs, long out of research, it'd be worth far more than the YouTube creator economy.
The worldwide median internet download bandwidth is about 100 Mbps, which is far enough for HD or bluray video. The technical barrier can be as low as 'click to search, click to download' in some user-friendly BT clients. That being said, the price of these subscriptions is a problem that actually needs to be solved.
Anyone is free to release under free use in our current system. You already can live with the benefits of no IP law by just limiting yourself to those people that chose to to release this way.
It's not the bits that are copyrighted, it's the performance and the creative work.
Your savings account is just bits on a disk, yet presumably it represents value that you worked for and which belongs to you to do with what you wish.
> Your savings account is just bits on a disk, yet presumably it represents value that you worked for and which belongs to you to do with what you wish.
That's another example of the shared delusion, since yes, we tell eachother it represents labor and resources, and the market engages in allocation somewhat efficiently, and so the money is a pretty accurate representation of the value of labor and the value of resources.
In reality, that's not true, because the most highly compensated jobs are some of the least valuable, such as investment bankers, landlords, or being born rich (which isn't even a job, but is compensated anyway). Rent seeking is one of the most highly compensated things you can do under this system, but also one of the most parasitic and least valuable things.
Your savings account's number is totally detached from accurately representing value. It's mostly a representation of where you were born.
„Shared delusion“ - just another term for „social contract“?
Sort of? The contract doesn't mention that "value" and "price" are just as often negatively correlated as positively so, though, and claims the opposite (always positive correlation), hence where the shared delusion comes in.
> Your savings account's number is totally detached from accurately representing value. It's mostly a representation of where you were born
This could also be true because the number of dollars in circulation is "just bits on a disk" that politicians can manipulate for various reasons.
Someone can work very hard and save their earnings, only to have the value diluted in the future. Isn't that also a delusion?
> Someone can work very hard and save their earnings, only to have the value diluted in the future. Isn't that also a delusion?
Yes, it is.
It's one of my pet peeves about the cryptocurrency movement vs neoliberal institutional types. "Bitcoin is juts bits on a disk!" is always answered with "well, dollars is too!" To which the institutionalist can only say, "no, that's different." But really, it isn't.
What the cryptocurrency people get wrong is that replacing one shared delusion with another isn't a useful path to go down.
Unless you do substinence farming, you would not last a month without "shared delusions" in place to make sure farmers supply you with food, getting nothing in return except a promise that they can go somewhere to pick up something someone else than you made in the future.
Money isn't "only bits" it is also an encoding of social contracts
You use the word delusion like it also includes a) things everyone fully agree only exists in people's mind as intersubjective reality (no deceit going on really) and b) things you depend on for your survival.
You talk like getting rid of "delusions", as you call them, is a goal in itself. Why? It is part of human technology. (Just like math, which also only exist in people's minds.) Humans have had contracts since we were hunter gatherers in groups...
I would recommend Yuval Harari's "Sapiens" for you, you would probably like it. It talks about the history of "shared delusions" as you call them, as a critical piece for development of society.
> would recommend Yuval Harari's "Sapiens" for you, you would probably like it. It talks about the history of "shared delusions" as you call them, as a critical piece for development of society.
Already read it. Counter: read "Debt, the first 5000 years" by Graeber for, finally, a non- "Chicago school of economics" take on the history of trade amongst humans.
Thanks for the tip.
Just to be clear, I agree the money abstraction is not working particularly well. And that in the age of computers something that is more directly linked to the underlying economy could have worked better. But what needs to replace it is a better and improved "delusion", not a lack of it.
But, why? Regarding your farmer example, there are examples throughout history of farming that fed many without the involvement of currency or the paying off of debt. Take a look into syndicalized Spain if you ever get a chance (~1936-1939). Farms were collectivized and worked on by volunteers, distributions done by need with some bookkeeping to track how many people were in certain regions. Worked pretty well until the communists decided it needed to be centrally controlled and kicked out the anarchists!
Everyone always starts every future speculation assuming capitalism, or at least, currency. Isn't it worth challenging these core baseline assumptions? At the very least, the other ground is well covered, so we might come up with a little more interesting.
Are you an artist? Have you ever created a piece of work that has a copyright attached? You might be anti-establishment but ultimately you are anti-creation. Artists are finding it harder and harder to live and create, artists are vital proponents and voices in changing culture - for you to take away their ability to live in a financially viable way says more about you and how you have conflated big business and an artist who is trying to make art and live.
Sure. But in addition to copyright you might add the concept of money, or the concept of any property rights and ownership of physical things, and...
Calling such things "shared delusions" is missing the point...it's not that it's wrong, but it is not a very useful way to look at it.
There is such a thing as intersubjective (as opposed to objective) reality. Physically it exists as a shared pattern in the brains of humans, but that is seldom useful to reflect on. Language wise much more convenient and useful to talk about copyright as something, you know, existing.
Everyone knows these are just human agreements... it is not exactly deep thinking to point it out.
You may not agree to some laws. You can then seek to have the laws overturned (I agree patents and copyright are... counterproductive, at this point). Luckily many parts of the world have democracy to decide what laws to force on people, as opposed to a dictator.
I agree completely. Parasites with money like to keep open the legal loopholes for their clever wheeze.
Data are basically free. Infra to store and transfer data is not.
Everyone is doing it, who Cates anymore. Genie's out of the bottle, we could've tried to solve this for decades and yet we didn't so now we reap what we sowed. Happens, move on.
Do you have evidence they are profiting? I'm genuinely curious how these kinds of archives sustain themselves.
I don’t think any of them are breaking even when you consider the maintenance costs, I just thought it was kind of funny considering the nature of the line of work they are in.
This was a different group of people but when some of the old LibGen domains got seized the FBI uploaded photos of the owners and the things they had spent their money on; a crappy old boat, what looked like a trailer in rural Siberia, and a vacation somewhere in the Mediterranean. It honestly read like sketch comedy, because the purchases didn’t appear remotely ostentatious.
Z-library also supposedly caps downloads at 5 per day and offers more and faster downloads to paying subscribers.
They take donations.
Just to nitpick, that doesn't imply profit. They could be breaking even (and probably are working at a loss).
I admit the irony, but also funny reminder that Spotify started with a pirated catalogue back on the day.
You go where the money is.
That is the opposite of being ideologically motivated unless your ideology happens to be 'capitalism'.
Or they know that those parties are going to hammer their servers no matter what so they will at least try and get some money out of it.
I think there is a big legal difference between helping preserve books and papers with little regard for copyrights, to then turn around and selling access to large companies.
That made me chuckle, Enterprise Level Access. I mean as ai company, that’s incredibly cheap and instead of torrenting something, why get it. That price is just a fraction of a engineers salary.
But then you have a money trail connecting the company unambiguously to copyright violations on a scale that is arguably larger than Napster.
I believe they're largely targeting foreign companies who don't care much about US copyright law.
I mean Facebook and Anthropic both torrented LibGen in its entirety.
Yeah,how devstating it would be for Anna's Archive to be found skirting copyright laws. Their reputation may never recover.
\s
He meant the AI companies
I mean, the same comment applies mutatis mutandis.
So either these folks, who are admittedly living targets of all the world's copyright lawyers, have means to receive tens of thousands of USD anonymously and stealthily,
or they are totally immune to deanon / getting tracked down,
or they are stupid enough to allow their greed to become their downfall,
or this legend about underground warriors of light fighting against evil copyrighters is utter bullshit.