Comment by Aurornis
4 days ago
> The thing is, this doesn't even seem particularly useful for average consumers/listeners, since Spotify itself is so convenient, and trying to locate individual tracks in massive torrent files of presumably 10,000's of tracks each sounds horrible.
I wouldn’t be so sure. There are already tools to automatically locate and stream pirated TV and movie content automatic and on demand. They’re so common that I had non-technical family members bragging at Thanksgiving about how they bought at box at their local Best Buy that has an app which plays any movie or TV show they want on demand without paying anything. They didn’t understand what was happening, but they said it worked great.
> Definitely wondering if this was in response to desire from AI researchers/companies who wanted this stuff.
The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated. They’re definitely not doing this for AI companies.
> 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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
> I had non-technical family members bragging at Thanksgiving about how they bought at box at their local Best Buy that has an app which plays any movie or TV show they want on demand without paying anything. They didn’t understand what was happening, but they said it worked great.
Sounds like one of these: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/11/is-your-android-tv-strea...
Probably not your problem to play tech support for these people and explain why being part of a botnet is bad, but mildly concerning nonetheless!
Who cares, today is pretty easy to be part of a botnet. Having a slightly outdated lightbulb qualifies, so I'd not bother.
Having an IoT device with security vulnerabilities does not automatically make you vulnerable to botnets because it’s behind your router’s NAT under normal conditions.
Botnet infections occur primarily through one of two ways: Vulnerable devices exposed directly to the Internet, or app downloads and installs on persons computing devices.
The TV box appears to be a rare hardware version of convincing someone to bring something into their network that compromises it. Usually it’s a software package that they’re convinced to install which brings along the botnet infection
Regardless, it’s a weird and dangerous mentality to believe that being part of a botnet is a “who cares” level of concern. Having criminal traffic originate from your network is a problem, but they might also decide to exploit other vulnerabilities some day and start extracting even more from your internal network.
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> The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated.
Very interesting, thank you. So using this for AI will just be a side effect.
And good point -- yup, can now definitely imagine apps building an interface to search and download. I guess I just wonder how seeding and bandwidth would work for the long tail of tracks rarely accessed, if people are only ever downloading tiny chunks.
I think the people seeding these are also ideologs and so would be interested in also supporting the obscure stuff, maybe more than the popular. There is no way any casual listeners would go to the quite substantial trouble of using these archives.
Anyone who wants to listen to unlimited free music from a vast catalog with a nice interface can use YouTube/Google Music. If they don't like the ads they can get an ad blocker. Downloading to your own machine works well too.
Spotify is $12/month at most to get unlimited ad-free access to virtually all music.
To get access to "all" TV content legally would be hundreds of dollars a month. And for many movies you must buy/rent each individually. And legal TV and movies are much more encumbered by DRM and lock in, limiting the way you can view them. (like many streaming apps removing AirPlay support, or limiting you to 720p in some browsers)
I think Spotify wins over pirating because of its relatively low cost and convenience. Pirating TV/Movies have increased as the cost to access them has.
It's not even close to virtually all music. 256M songs doesn't come even close.
It's virtually all popular music recently published commercially in the world.
It's missing large portions of bootlegs, old music, foreign music, radio shows, mixtapes and live streaming music to list a few prominent categories from music in my private archive of cultural works. Those categories, btw, are well represented by torrents on tracker sites.
> Spotify is $12/month at most to get unlimited ad-free access to virtually all music.
Until they decide to silence the artist you want to listen to because emperor god trump decides to unperson them.
Putting what music you listen to in the hands of a US corporation is such a dangerously stupid idea that it is amazing to me that there are people here who are OK with it.
>I think Spotify wins over pirating because of its relatively low cost and convenience
Spotify isn't "convenient" if you want to control and understand the media and software in your life. https://www.defectivebydesign.org/spotify
> Putting what music you listen to in the hands of a US corporation is such a dangerously stupid idea that it is amazing to me that there are people here who are OK with it.
Thankfully Spotify isn't primarily a U.S company.
Godwins Law recreated, the new version is Trump.
Barely all. I have so many songs in my playlist that has randomly become unavailable. It's quite frustrating to be honest.
It's absolutely not all, I'm an extremely casual listener, not 'into' music or anything, and I have plenty in a playlist that have disappeared (mostly I don't even know what they are, it's just greyed out with no information) for whatever reason. And that's just the stuff that was there at some point that I liked.
One of them has come back recently. It's still listed as by the wrong artist (same name, but dead, vs. the active artist who actually performed it) but I'm not reporting it again because I suspect I may have made it disappear for a couple of years in doing so before.
It's kind of crap and disorganised after anything more than barely glancing at it really, must be infuriating for (or just not used by) people who actually are into it.
Spotify used to be good, but have enshittified their UI past the point of usability for me. It really wants to play me tracks that are profitable for Spotify, not tracks I want to hear.
What you say is still true of the Amazon and Apple offerings, though. Haven't tried Youtube Music, so can't comment on that.
how are some tracks more profitable to spotify than others?
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> There are already tools to automatically locate and stream pirated TV and movie
Before we had spotify we had grooveshark. Streaming pirated content came first, and everything old is new again.
They’re doing it for everyone, so, yes, they are doing it for AI companies.
> They’re definitely not doing this for AI companies.
So it's just yet another instance of enormous luck / annuit coeptis for the wealthy and powerful, then.
Such lucky bastards. Whatever happens, does so to their benefit, and all inconvenient questions about the nature of their luck automatically recede into the conspiracy theory domain.
And let's not forget that Anna's Archive is also the host to the world's largest pirate library of books and articles.
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They know about AI companies and don't mind AI companies, but they're not doing it because AI companies.
> The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated.
Anna’s archive business is stealing copyrighted content and selling access to it. It's not ideologically motivated.
What ideology is about pirating books and music where most of the people producing this stuff cannot afford to do it full-time? It's not like pirating movies, software and large videogame studios, which is still piracy, but they also make big money and they don't act all the time in the interests of the users.
Writers and musicians are mostly broken. If we sum the rising cost of living, AI generated content and piracy, there's almost no reward left for their work. Anna’s archive is contributing to the art and culture decadence. They sell you premium bandwidth for downloading and training your AIs on copyrighted content, so soon we can all generate more and more slop.
> Anna’s archive business is stealing copyrighted content and selling access to it.
There is not enough profit in that compared to the risk. They're also not exactly aggressive about it (there are groups which host mirrors who charge far more/finance it in the usual criminal way of getting people to install malware).
To me, there's a "motivation gap" between what they get out of this and the effort it takes, so there's some kind of "ideology". Whether it's 100% what they say it is, is another question.
Writers and musicians are mostly broken. If we sum the rising cost of living, AI generated content and piracy, there's almost no reward left for their work.
For authors (books) ~70% of all the book sales go to the publisher, not the author (trad pub): https://reedsy.com/blog/how-much-do-authors-make/
For musicians: depending on how big a name you are and which publisher you chose, the publishers compensation ranges from 15% (small name/indy) to 60% (big name/Universal, Sony) https://www.careersinmusic.com/music-publishing/
This is an industry with profit maximising as its goal like every other industry. If artists are broke, first take a look at the publishers.
Agreed. I see far too many people rationalizing piracy as a principled thing to do. Instead of finding ways to improve the market such that the control of content isn't siloed in monopolistic corporations, many celebrate Annas Archive which is itself a more or less monopolistic profit-interested entity. The major difference being that we don't have to pay directly. The cost continues to fall on the writers and artists and the industry suffers.
Nothing wrong in rationalizing content sharing; as in rationalizing copyright. But IMO the current form of the copyright for both the technical and the creative works is a cure that is worse than the disease.
Recommending to an individual to work on changing copyright from within the system is, IMO, naive.
> Instead of finding ways to improve the market such that the control of content isn't siloed in monopolistic corporations
I always assumed the "Anna" in the name was for "Anarchist." My assumption about the archive is that they don't believe there's an ethical solution to the restriction of access to data that involves a capitalist market.
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> I wouldn’t be so sure. There are already tools to automatically locate and stream pirated TV and movie content automatic and on demand.
It may be relevant for those people, but I lost all interest in current TV or streaming stuff. I just watch youtube regularly. What's on is on; what is not on is not really important to me. My biggest problem is lack of time anyway, so I try to reduce the time investment if possible, which is one huge reason why I have zero subscriptions. I just could not keep up with them.