They will never see a single cent from that, AA will continue to rotate domains and nothing was accomplished, except for spotify's legal team which earned easy money arguing against empty chair in court.

BTW, you can donate and get faster downloads: https://annas-archive.gl/donate

Just donated in honor of this. Up yours spotify!

Ironic, since Spotify started by pirating music[0]

[0] https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files...

> In addition to the damages award, Rakoff entered a permanent worldwide injunction

Because apparently U.S. courts and judges can do that. The more this is ignored by third-parties outside of the U.S., the better.

I'm not against international cooperation regarding common rules (I'm rather for), but the current context certainly doesn't designate the U.S. as a responsible custodian/enforcer of such rules.

Trying to shut down a site by going after their domain names will always be a losing battle. As long as the link on their Wikipedia article keeps being updated, it'll remain easy to access. And it would be a pretty shocking attack on free speech if a U.S. court tried to order the Wikimedia Foundation to take that down; I suspect the public response would be similar to when the movie industry tried to get the AACS encryption key taken down in the 2000s.

Last week, I set-up a navidrome (docker compose) server after tagging my files with MusicBrainz and beets. I serve it over a private network (tailnet) using tailscale serve. It works on all my devices and on iOS with an app called Nautiline. Nautiline has a feature where it will switch between my local network address and my tailnet address seamlessly. It was so simple, I can't actually believe it works. It has CarPlay support and everything. A few clicks and I'm jamming and scrobbling to MusicBrainz. My next goal is to have a local LLM generate smart playlists. Everyone who wants off Spotify, or the other streaming music giants should do this.

After getting burned on faked/gamed ratings on a book trilogy where I had bought all three books before I started reading (they were terrible and I gave up during the second book), I now use Anna's archive to download a book and decide if I will pay for it later after reading at least some of it.

"Intellectual property" as an idea has to go away

Does anyone know the status of this whole release. The metadata was hosted, and now not hosted. I saw a torrent leaked of unpopular tracks.

No statements or blogs from AA explaining the metadata removal, or an updated release timeline.

Can anyone say more?

I think AA should have stuck to book piracy. Nobody really cares about that.

this won't actually change anything right?

> the operators of the site remain unidentified. The judgment [...] orders Anna’s Archive to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, that includes valid contact information for the site and its managing agents

Not sure how I feel. Anna’s Archive turned into a profit-seeking beast a long time ago. They’re also rolling in it thanks to he massive deals to “license” the content to AI companies.

Libgen was a much better option.

How do people safely download from these torrent sites? Isn't there a risk that you'll download something you wouldn't want on your computer? Yet I hear of many people actively using them, so there must be more to it.

Extra problems with the copyright industry for no benefit.

Hope the owner's OpSec was good enough and we won't hear about their unmasking.

300M come from: Statutory damages for circumvention of a technological measure for 120,000 music files

22M come from: Statutory damages for willful copyright infringement for 148 sound recordings from Sony, Warner and UMG.

Why is it only 148 sound recording with infringed copyright when the 'circunvention' is for 120,000?

Barbra Streisand effect for them, free PR, and lots of money wasted for the other side

Can't lose a fight against someone who can't catch you.

I am struggling to see how exactly this is even considered piracy. Nobody was going to stream music in low quality off a slow AA server anyway. It's archival.

I hope AA will make an onion version in addition to the unstable domain switching.

Demoniac move by Spotify

Annas Archive still has lots of mirrors and can switch domains if its ever taken down

How are the mainteners stay anonymous while buying many domains and servers?

I'm sure they are very worried about this right now

So, let us assume AA could or would pay Spotify for "profits lost".

Now that we know AA's abduction of files were the files that actually received playtime, we would immediately see a lot of music artists embursed, yes?

Well... hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

Watch the Spotify DOCU.

Pillage libraries for LLM training data, then sue them and shut them down for archiving a different format. Cool.

It's legal and chill when openai and anthropic pirates all of our content. But heaven forbid an outsider does it. RIP Aaron Swartz

Spotify was also forced to remove 60 or so endpoints from their API: https://developer.spotify.com/documentation/web-api/referenc...

...and add a bunch of other restrictions like limiting API access to premium users, ludicrously increasing the cap for acceptance into the extended quota programme (250k MAU), and so on and so on.

So the most fucked in this situation are neither Spotify nor Anna's Archive, but anyone trying to build anything on top of what was up until this point the most straightforward to use API in the music industry, which annoys me to no end.

You don't win in courts against people who bought the law. No reason to fight there.

Commercial music & movie industries are extensions of state sponsored propaganda. That is why they go to such lengths to defend their "products".

So how does one find this archive and how can it be kept alive in a decentralized way? I’m not super familiar with it.

Fuck Spotify

I used libgen quite a lot; new books were hard to find there, but many old books were available. Then libgen was kind of eliminated by the mega-corporation alliance. The latter is very hypocritical - see Meta and others sniffing off data to train for AI.

Anna's Archive kind of semi-replaced libgen (a few libgen mirrors are sometimes back up but then disappear again) but for various reasons I don't quite like Anna's Archive as much; the UI is imo also more confusing.

Now the mega-corporations decided to kill off Anna's Archive. Personally I don't use or "need" music; if I need a good song I use yt-dlp on youtube and get it these days. Many years ago napster. But this has also stopped, sort of; I rarely get new songs, mostly because they are often really just ... bad. Or, I don't need them locally anyway as I could listen to them in the background on youtube (which kind of makes you wonder why the mega-corporations really fight freedom providers such as Anna's Archive; and before that the noble pirates from piratebay and so forth).

So I think the following is IMO by far the biggest problem, no matter one's personal opinion:

"Rakoff entered a permanent worldwide injunction covering ten Anna’s Archive domains: annas-archive.org, .li, .se, .in, .pm, .gl, .ch, .pk, .gd, and .vg."

To me this is blatant dictatorship and censorship. I really do not want these private de-facto entities disguised as "public courts" to restrict any of us here. I want to decide the information I can access, at all times, without restriction. So that they can abuse people in, say, the USA and deny them easy access to these useful resources, is criminal behaviour by such corporation courts. We need to change this globally - and I believe it will eventually happen. Right now this may still be a minority opinion, but keep in mind that years ago, the right to repair movement was framed by corporations as evil. More recently they are even winning in court cases, see the most recent John Deere case and requirement to open up access when people purchased hardware.

Eventually I think freedom to information will win. Good luck to Anna's Archive and others.

Ok. Now what?

The operators are likely based in Russia, and the US has no jurisdiction there. As a result, they can simply ignore any US actions and continue their operations.

Compared to Anthropic's $1.5 billion, that's still too little.