And I am one of the best customers of these 3 physical shops, in my town.
So sure, I don't buy the latest trends based on ads. I investigate a lot to buy GREAT stuff. Sometimes the shopkeeper has headaches to find the obscure stuff I discovered online that NOBODY knows it exists.
Am I an exception?
I don't know but those services are great to maintain a freedom of choice.
Many years ago, I was involved in a movie release group. Pretty much everybody in that group owned more VHSs/DVDs than the typical person. This is probably not surprising, since the time and effort one needs to put into that is rather large.
Those who only downloaded were more of a mixed bag; some of them were not in the US and might not be able to see a domestic release of the movies any time soon. Some proudly claimed that they never bought any media because paying for it when you could pirate was for losers.
Movies... I spent a small fortune on a movie collection. Then I moved countries and to my surprise found that my movies wouldn't play anymore. So I ripped the DVDs to digital media and played them using open source software. This saved a small fortune and was more convenient as well. I think I still have the DVDs.
I spent a large fortune on books. Thousands of them. Typically read once, a much smaller number read multiple times. So I gave away my books, except for a few hundred that I still keep. I support the authors that I like by buying their books but I read on screens not on paper because my eyesight sucks and on screens I can set the font to whatever I want rather than to what the publisher thought was optimal.
There is no way the media companies are going to guilt trip me over any of this, besides that I read both Janis Ian and Courtney Love's pieces on the recording industry.
Copyright is great, it has enabled lots of people to earn a living creating content. But it has also become a weapon in an ever more absurd war between consumers and middle men, the producers caught in some uncomfortable position in the background.
What's interesting is that the middlemen brought this all on themselves: they equated buying a physical copy of a production with licensing IP, but the general public didn't think that way at all: they bought a book, they bought a record, they bought a movie. And passing on what you've bought when you no longer need it was and still is such an ingrained part of our culture that it felt really weird to have restrictions placed on what you could do with stuff you bought and paid for. So when the format changed from physical to nothing (bits) plenty of people felt that this was not quite what we had agreed to, after all we were paying for the medium as much as we were paying for the content so how come we paid the same or even more as before? And now we paid and got something that we could no longer share with others. No way to easily pass that e-book to someone else (talk about malicious compliance), no way to send the song you just paid for through Spotify or iTunes to someone else to let them hear it after you are done with it. You don't own the medium any more so therefore you own nothing at all.
And those publishers and movie producers are all laughing to the bank whilst doing nothing at all except for playing bank.
The (in)ability to loan, trade, and bequeath media is a real loss in the ephemeral media era, and should be a serious topic of any copyright reform.
It's a really good trade-off. I would never have gotten into these comics without piracy but now if something catches my eye, I don't mind buying on release (and stripping the DRM for personal use).
Most of my downloading is closer to collecting/hoarding/cataloguing behaviour but if I fully read something I enjoy, I'll support the author in some way.
However, smaller publishers like Titan Comics care about piracy a great deal and attack it somewhat successfully with gusto, because that's the only revenue.
On the other hand, I buy way more movies than I used to, because upload sites have exposed me to many good films that I would never have heard of otherwise.
Years ago I was following development of an indie game. The developers wanted to provide a DRM-free experience.
The game had some online functionality (leaderboard or something). They were surprised when the number of accounts accessing the online functionality exceeded their sales by a dramatic number. The developer updates grew more and more sad as they switched from discussing new features to pleading with people to actually buy the game instead of copying it. Eventually they called it quits and gave up because the game, while very popular, was so widely pirated that few people actually paid.
Whenever the piracy topic comes up I hear people do mental gymnastics to justify it, like claiming they spend more than average and therefore their piracy is a net win. Yet when we get small peeks into numbers and statistics like with video game piracy, it’s not hard to see that the majority of people who pirate things are just doing it because they get what they want and don’t have to pay for it.
I'd assume that for your indie game, there were a lot of people who wound up thinking "I would play this if it's free, but I wouldn't spend $X" on it. Adding successful DRM wouldn't have done anything to them but drive them away, and reduce the amount of buzz the game received. But then, particularly in the indie game space, maybe trading away a lot of buzz for a couple hundred more full-price game sales would have been completely worth it...
This is where the concept of services like Xbox Game Pass seem to be landing. Once someone has paid their fairly-small-amount each month, every game is now "free". Much like fairly-cheap streaming music basically stopped music piracy from being mainstream, cheap game-services might have the same impact on the game industry.
Though, much like streaming music, whether it turns out to be economically viable for the average game studio is certainly a question.
(For the sake of completeness: I don't pirate anything, so I have nothing to justify here.)
Indie developers in particular don't like Game Pass because it apparently pays Spotify-tier rates, which is pretty bad. Spotify gets away with it because it took a deal with all big music labels for more favorable payouts, but your average indie band on Spotify makes absolutely zilch from your Spotify subscription, even if you listen to them 24/7 every year. Indie bands typically compensate with concerts and brand merchandise, but that isn't an option for games - secondary income sources are typically reviled (microtransactions in paid games) or don't sell to expectations (merchandise). The Spotify model only "works" because they shifted the music industry to rely primarily on those "side" sources (and even then there's a lot of disgruntled musicians who are unhappy with the Spotify model devaluing their craft).
Ok, but why? Whas the game actually unprofitable or did they just feel bad about some people getting it for free. You need to remember that a pirated copy does not equal a lost sale - in fact, sales may even be higher than they would be without piracy as popularity gained from pirated copies also translates to more legitimate buyers.
out of 100 people doing that how many actually buy product in the end???? if net gain is positive then developer would not pay millions to license DRM
Check out RimWorld.
Small game, no online functionality, never had DRM. It wasn't even big. It was shared all over the place because it was so expensive. It's still there and it's thriving. Still expensive.
I’ve recently started using my local library’s mobile app and I love it. (I typically use this for re-reading or audiobooks for plane trips) I’m tempted to donate my entire bookshelf to the library and let them store and maintain it for me :-p
Some Lovecraft letters were translated into french some weeks ago. Great reading! There, Lovecraft gives his opinion about the litterature and art of his time.
And he mentions Nicolas Roerich. No idea who this guy was, but hey pretty interesting painter (thank god Google Images!). Ok, let's check on AA if there is a definitive book about his art.
No luck, but that very same guy wrote many books about Hindouism and eastern asia. After a few downloads on AA, no big deal, I am not so fond of them. Except for one that I knew nothing about (the name is Altai Himalaya, and I have absolutely no clue why this one is picking my attention, but it does).
That's definitely what I call serendipity.
And that thing happens a lot when you have a full access to whatever content is available. [and you are curious by nature]
In the end, retrospectively, such widespread access permits serendipity at a level that is absurdly miraculous !
Also, I tend to look for obscure and old books (I love old travelogues) and once I find one that really gets me, you'll be sure to receive it as a gift, if I think you'd be someone (or in a place in life) who would enjoy it.
So, I might not but it for myself but I make my decision on the pirated version and then buy more than my share when it's truly a gem. If I don't end up recommending it or buying it for someone that usually means it was something which I'd be ok not to have consumed.
I'll never get over piracy sites blocking VPNs...
Yes, I think you're an exception, sorry.
We will never have real data on this. But simply on its face, I find it extremely hard to believe that most consumers have a strong enough moral compass to go out of their way to buy something they already have access to. Maybe they will for a tiny handful of special books that they want hard copies of, or authors they really like, but not for most media they consume.
This type of system also becomes a popularity contest for creators; you are supporting the people you like as opposed to whose work you want to read. If an author says something you disagree with, it's easy to just read their work without paying them. I'm not against consumer boycotts, but it should generally come with a sacrifice on both sides--for consumers, that means missing out on the product or service.
You are free to feel however you want about this. I can certainly see the immense societal value of making things accessible to more people. But I flat out don't believe the "piracy doesn't lead to lost sales" shtick, of course it does.
From above:
'The Dutch firm Ecory was commissioned to research the impact of piracy for several months, eventually submitting a 304-page report to the EU in May 2015. The report concluded that: “In general, the results do not show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements. That does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect.”
The report found that illegal downloads and streams can actually boost legal sales of games, according to the report. The only negative link the report found was with major blockbuster films: “The results show a displacement rate of 40 percent which means that for every ten recent top films watched illegally, four fewer films are consumed legally.”'
But, maybe this report is taking this into account too??
I obviously don't have time to read a 300 page report—I wish I did—but the conclusion says:
> With regard to total effects of online copyright infringements on legal transactions, there are no robustly significant findings. The strongest finding applies to films/TV-series, where a displacement rate of 27 with an error margin of roughly 36 per cent (two times the standard error) only indicates that online copyright infringements are much more likely to have negative than positive effects.
The conclusion goes on to discuss each type of media. Here's the section on games:
> For games, the estimated effect of illegal online transactions on sales is positive because only free games are more likely displaced by online copyright infringements than not. The overall estimate is 24 extra legal transactions (including free games) for every 100 online copyright infringements, with an error margin of 45 per cent (two times the standard error). The positive effect of illegal downloads and streams on the sales of games may be explained by players getting hooked and then paying to play the game with extra bonuses or at extra levels.
If this is what was meant by "illegal downloads and streams can actually boost legal sales of games" (and it's possible they're talking about something else which isn't in the conclusion), I don't find that convincing. It's within the margin of error and includes free transactions.
Moreover, I firmly believe that we are never going to have good data on this! You're trying to measure two things that are virtually impossible to measure with any accuracy: (1) how much piracy is taking place, and (2) what would sales have been without the piracy.
(I've edited my comment to actually quote the paper)
This is zero-sum thinking. Do you oppose libraries on the same principle?
Sometimes making a thing accessible can increase the overall market for the good, because it trains the behavior. The market for books requires readers, and readers are created by people reading.
No, because libraries have to buy the books! If lots of people check out a book, the library will have to buy more copies! Yes, maybe the authors loose out on some revenue, but there's a clear relationship between number of readers and the author getting paid for their work.
This is also why I thought the Internet Archive's lending lending library was great! I'm aware they got sued anyway, and I think that's a real shame.
The main reason to download "pirated" books is that they get rid of all annoying barriers that exist in "legitimate" copies. It's a better product.
Because most people don't care! I wish they did, because I'm like you, I do care about owning DRM free media! I buy videos game from GOG wherever possible, and audiobooks from a combination of downpour.com and libro.fm. Guess what most people do? They buy games on Steam and audiobooks on Audible.
Audible is the one that really breaks my heart! Games and movies I understand, because the DRM free sources have such narrow selections, but I can find just about any audiobook I want on either Downpour or libro.fm; every once in a while I'll come across an audible exclusive, but it doesn't happen frequently. And yet, everybody uses Audible!
And, sure, there are known ways to strip Audible DRM, but with DRM free stores so readily accessible, why wouldn't you use those?
Gabe figured it out eons ago, steam is the proof.
The reframing that will help you understand this is that these people are fans (I stole this framing from Korey Doctorow who releases his books online for free and encourages his fans to buy a copy if they like it). Fandom is a positive sum game. The more you do it, the deeper you go with it the more you’re happy to pay the people who create the content you love.
The easier it is for you to find new content the easier it is for you to become a fan of a new thing.
For example: I want to buy a copy of prince Pukler’s hints on landscape architecture. I can’t find a physical copy anywhere and I’m not sure if it’s worth $120 for a reprint or $500 for an older version. I could pirate it (I use that word loosely since this work is obviously in the public domain) and check it out, but I haven’t bothered so I haven’t bought a copy. This is a case of me NOT pirating and therefore NOT engaging with new content.
> I'm not against consumer boycotts, but it should generally come with a sacrifice on both sides--for consumers, that means missing out on the product or service.
I'm curious as to why you feel this way, genuinely. The decision to boycott means that there is no sale, full stop, so no money is being handed over. Why does anything after that matter? The important part, the money, is already decided from the start.
I'm someone who used to be a voracious reader. In my childhood alone I would devour paperbacks and hardcovers like nobody's business. My summers were spent destroying the full summer reading list distributed by my school in weeks, and then going to the library to find more things to read. I have had thousands and thousands of physical books in my hands during my life. But I still prefer digital.
I only purchase digital books that either have no DRM, or stripable DRM.
Some of these countries are codified under the Roman law principle, ie whatever is not explicitly forbidden by law, is simply not forbidden (as opposed to common law).
In some countries downloading the published media (eg a film after the official release) is permitted.
And those who download, paid for it in the form of tax.
Directive 2001/29/EC for the EU only (Article 5).
Other countries rely in provisions of WCT, 1996 (Art 10) and WPPT, 1996 (Art 16)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy has several countries listed, with examples/extent of these laws
I hope you support downloading books/films/TV shows/music by the customers who paid for this privilege.
> you are supporting the people you like as opposed to whose work you want to read
TBH personally I find that a much more convoluted reason. It might be an edge case of "I will watch this clip of horrible person to get the original source" but actively seeking out material for free just so that they get nothing, but I can consume it in whole? That sounds really rare to me.
But one of the point I also wanted to highlight is that I knew nothing about those stuff and would have had no opportunity to taste them and be convinced that they are GREAT stuff [for me].
And to come back to your comment regarding creators. The thing that I hate are creators [for example writers who are interviewed in radios] who sell their book with a marvelous speech, but the content is eventually very so/so. As a consumer I feel robbed.
I like the idea that consumers only buy stuff out of moral obligation.
Like if you went to your ethical friend’s house and saw that he had empty book cases and no art on his walls because he hasn’t yet been imbued with the requisite moral fervor necessary to buy anything. It’s hard for him to be sure what he’s obligated to buy or that he’s obligated to buy anything since it would be wrong of him to know what’s inside any book without buying it first.
And then you went to your no-good, dirty, downright despicable friend’s house and it’s full of books and art because for every 20 books he pirates he buys one, and because he’s just so darn unethical he pirates a lot of books
I'm not as certain as you are. Correlation does not imply causation, but media sales have trended upwards in the age of piracy which leads to some interesting hypotheses.
A few years ago Shirley Manson (lead singer of the 90s band Garbage) accused YouTube of making its fortune off the backs of content creators - basically charging the entire enterprise as being one big exercise in copyright infringement. And yet the music industry, as well as Hollywood, seem to be doing better and better each year in terms of dollars made. Some of the distribution models have changed - broadcast and cable television are pretty dead in the water, but the entertainment industries in general seem to be doing better than ever. And yeah lots of individual artists are still getting raw deals from Spotify and labels etc. as they always have. But industry-wise, in terms of dollar amounts, it seems there's more money to be made than ever before from creating and selling entertainment.
The statement you made that I absolutely agree with is that it's hard to get real world data on this. An individual who is able to get free access to something may be unlikely to ever pay for that same thing.But the answer to the question: "Does piracy hurt the industry's bottom line, or help it on the whole?" is a very difficult question to answer. And we have to consider the even harder stuff to measure. Things like: is a teenager who pirates recorded media more or less likely to buy merch and concert tickets? More or less likely to buy a special edition package with tangible collector items?
At the end of the day, I have no clue.
I also offer all of this being very pro-capitalism and pro-intellectual-property. I don't condone piracy. But if we're just looking at raw data and trying to form our hypothesis, we have to start with the fact that the raw data points to upwards trends on the whole.
But they were also on an upward trend before the age of piracy, so it's perfectly plausible to think they would be even higher. The same technologies that enable digital piracy also lower the cost of legal distribution, so you'd expect to see the industry doing better at the same time that piracy is rising.
Now, I'm of course not shedding too many tears for the major Hollywood studios, but I would like to live in a world with more niche films and games, and of course it's still quite difficult to make a living as an author or musician—a few manage it, most don't.
We agree that we don't have data—but to me, it just makes intuitive sense that a large majority of pirates are pirating lots of things they would have otherwise bought. For piracy to counteract that by generating buzz or aiding discovery or whatever it is... well, it would have to be an awful lot of buzz!
Occasionally in life, intuitions are dead wrong, and actual data leads to surprising discoveries. However, when faced with a lack of data, the first assumption shouldn't be "reality is the opposite of whatever I'd intuitively expect," that makes no sense.
I think there's a ton of motivated reasoning going on, and it just really bothers me. If you're going to pirate stuff, at least be honest with yourself about it.
So nothing really out of the "normality", but they are no longer marketed and are slowly fading to grey.
The Roots of the Swamp Thing collection is really fun and serves as a fantastic hors d'oeuvre for reading the famed Alan Moore run.
I was just trying to finish this writer’s corpus on a reread of their later material. It’s not that I’m cheap. I own a paper and audiobook copy of several of my favorite books. Including this author, so I’ve paid her twice. I just avoided the trap some of my friends long ago were falling into of hoarding books, by only keeping books I intend to read again. So any completionist tendencies have always been resolved via library or electronic editions.
I’m getting older now, and my first real confrontation with my own mortality came up with books. I have several years worth of books even if I were retired and reading three or four a week. New things come out all the time, and new voices. I haven’t read some of these books in ten years or more. Am I really going to read them again before… So a couple years ago I reread Dune for what will likely be the last time and sold my ratty old yellow copies to a used bookstore. If I do it again it will likely be audiobook.
Did a lot more while landscaping and walking for distance. Now I have a few favorites I just go through repeatedly when doing errands.
I had a friend who just ripped the audio track off of her favorite movies for road trips.
I'd assume there are many people who don't help out purely because of legal fears, something i2p could help with.
I remember a time when people would have seedboxes for private trackers, data hoarders brag about having TBs of storage and yet only a handful of people are seeding the complete collection(s). I understand not everyone has or can seed multiple TBs of data but I was expecting there to be a lot of seeders for torrents with few hundreds of GBs.
I keep about 16TB of personal storage space in a home server (spread over 4 spinning disks). The idea of expanding to ~200 TB however seems... intimidating. You're looking at ~qty 12 16TB disks (not counting any for redundancy). Going the refurbished enterprise SATA drive route that is still going to run you about $180/drive = $2200 in drives.
I'm not quite there as far as disposable income to throw, but, I know many people out there who are; doubling that cost for redundancy and throw in a bit for the server hardware - $5k, to keep a current cache of all our written scientific knowledge - seems reasonable.
The interesting thing is these storage sizes aren't really growing. Scihub stopped updating the papers in 2022? At honestly with the advent of slop publications since then, the importance of what is in that 170TB is likely to remain the most important portion of the contrib for a long time.
True but it matters a lot less in many fields because things have been moving to arXiv and other open access options, anyway. The main time I need sci-hub is for older articles. And that's a huge advantage of sci-hub--they have things like old foreign journal articles even the best academic libraries don't have.
As for mirroring it all, $2200 is beyond my budget too, but it would be nothing for a lot of academic departments, if the line item could be "characterized" the right way. To me it has been a bit of a nuisance working with libgen down the last couple months, like the post mentioned, and I would have loved for a local copy. I don't see it happening, but if libgen/sci-hub/annas archive goes the way of napster/scour, many academics would be in a serious fix.
I wonder how much space it is as highly compressed, deduplicated, plain text files.
Does the sum of human scientific knowledge fit on a large hard drive?
The problem is it's not all text, you need the images, the plots, etc, and smartly, interstitially compressing the old stuff is still a very difficult problem even in this age of AI.
I have an archive of about 8TB of mechanical and aerospace papers dating back to the 1930s, and the biggest of them are usually scanned in documents, especially stuff from the 1960s and 70s, that have lots of charts and tables that take up a considerable amount of space, even in black and white only, due to how badly old scans compress (noise on paper prints, scanned in, just doesn't compress). Also many of those journals have the text compressed well, but they have a single, color, HUGE cover image as the first page of the PDF, that turns the PDF from 2MB into 20MB. Things like that could, maybe, be omitted to save space...
But as time goes on I start to become more against space-saving via truncation of those kind of scanned documents. My reasoning is that storage is getting cheaper and cheaper, and at some point the cost to store and retrieve those 80-90MB PDF's that are essentially total page by page image scans is going to be completely negligible. And I think you lose something be taking those papers and taking the covers out, or OCR'ing the typed pages and re-typesetting them to unicode (de-rasterize the scan), even when done perfectly (and when not done perfectly, you get horrible mistakes in things like equations, especially). I think we need to preserve everything to a quality level that is nearly as high as can be.
Last but not least?
Apologies for the minor grumble, but on mobile I used to be able to browse search results much more effectively; the new design only fits ~4-5 results on a screen.
* ability to fund shadow libraries without fear of censorship
* lists with a single item still count as lists
I'd love to see more systems exploring this combination approach. There is a saying about not being able to solve a social problem with technology. Bitcoin is the blueprint on how to do that.
Its everything that came after that point that is the problem.
Bitcoin is much worse than cash in that regard
How many authors who write the books in Anna's archive are happy about it?
I personally am pro Anna's archive (and sci-hub, etc) because I believe it benefits society to have better-read citizens. That said, I have some misgivings, because under our current system, there are issues with law and remuneration.
In particular, Scihub is in opposition to the parasitic international publishers who dominate and control scientific publishing for profit, mostly on the backs of science generated by academia and other not-in-it-for-the-profit folks.
In contrast, downloading ebooks may, in some cases, lead to individual authors being hit in the pocket, in a profession it’s already hard to make a living from.
(I wish we’d figured out a better way to organise book publishing without publishing companies getting in the way and taking their large slice, allowing authors to profit more directly.)
In his words: “My experience has been that readers want to support things they like … But if they are at a point in their lives where they can’t, then it’s better to let them read the stories they want … and let them support artists when they’re capable of it. So I am a big fan of giving away books for free.”
Source: https://www.jotdown.es/2016/12/brandon-sanderson-i-want-to-s...
For example, if you pirated an ebook and liked it, you'd likely buy a physical copy.
I would suspect A pirates book B and tells C about it, C buys book B is a lot more common than A pirates book B and likes it enough to buy it
I have no data to support this, and while I have paid for things I could access for free, but I'm sufficiently pessimistic about human nature to think that's the norm.
It's completely different for a writer who gets their income from sales of their work, obviously
Not really helping in the big picture, here, guys.
IRL, "scanparties" used to be a thing if you were in the "bookz scene" around the turn of the century. (Where you and a small group of others go to a public library, hit the limits of your library cards and often clear out entire sections of shelves focused around a particular topic, meet someplace to scan/"cam" everything you borrowed as quickly as you can for processing and uploading in the near future, then return them all within a few days, and repeat this until you get bored or have other things to do.)
The only people facing consequences are the license-holders. Online lending libraries aren't missing a copy now that AA archived it, and there's not really a substantial cost to the hosters in network bandwidth.
Am I missing something here? As a user I don't empathize with anyone but the archivers.
European sanctions
The Council of Europe has decided that the websites of RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik News may no longer be transmitted. The website you are trying to visit falls under this European sanction.
VodafoneZiggo is obligated to enforce the sanction and has blocked the website.”
The council of Europe is a human rights body based in Strasbourg, broader than the EU. It is a kind of democracy watchdog and has no sanctions or telecoms authority.
There is the European council, which is the EU body composed of the 27 heads of government, which indeed has sanctioned Russia today by withdrawing it's broadcasting license (X) but I cannot find any source that says that says that telecoms have to block it's content.
And of course this all is not Russia today, but maybe they use some of the same servers, which might explain the question raised here how Anna's Archive keeps the lights on.
X https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/sanctions-agains...
when I hear people complain about these projects it just sounds like hypocrisy.
The real one has been down for a long time.
Also I'm surprised Cloudflare hasn't shut them down like they do for other dodgy sites.
Error HTTP 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons
In response to a legal order, Cloudflare has taken steps to limit access to this website through Cloudflare's pass-through security and CDN services within Belgium
By comparison, on my work network (TalkTalk) I can resolve the domain but I get a connection reset from the site.
I think this might be the first time I've hit a DNS block. It feels rather eerie seeing people talking about a site that, from my point of view, doesn't even exist...
Tons of public domain sources are locked into websites like Newspapers.com or the nearly-dead and now completely unsearchable old Google News / Newspaper.
It would be nice if the massive pursuit of AI training data resulted in some fully-legal open source alternatives to these proprietary, outdated, or abandoned sites. I know some of it is available via the Internet Archive, etc., but something new with an AI-powered search and finding aid sounds so useful.
https://archive.org/search?query=title%3ANew+York+Times&sort...
> as a full PDF download set
I imagine it's possible to achieve this through torrents from Anna's, but you'd have to search and compile the list of all individual PDFs.
> something new with an AI-powered search
With enough time and willingness, someone could put all the old NYT issues through optical character recognition and convert them to text; then make it available to large language models for semantic search of some kind. Ideally public cultural funds could support the effort as academic research.
Infinite love to the team <3
Everyone involved is taking on significant personal liability and hosting expenses. Not sure what more you expect.
Yes, there are many other reason why the music industry fell, but when your main demographic can always go to bittorrent to get their music if prices are too high, then there is only so much you can do with the price of music.
Yeah, I remember the 90's, music was huge, and there were so many good bands (Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, REM, White Stripes... Or if you're more into popular music, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston...). Now, music is de-valued and cheap and our music scene has been decimated. Personally, think we should try to find ways to support musicians, writers, thinkers, artists...
... but if you have a different opinion, no worries. But, if you can, give it thought.
Both producers and consumers of media are in the same boat of barely surviving. Maybe we can work with each other instead of against each other? :)
As for why I download: I am legally forbidden from buying the music that I want. Either it's the selling label geoblocking, or they only sell versions in a shitty format like mp3. I'm not jumping through hoops to give you my money, either I can buy FLAC files, or I download.
I want convenience, the same way users want it. Artists discovered that they were scammed by the labels instead of the pirates.
In general, I'd argue that Spotify will be more toxic to the industry (or the artists' livelihood) than piracy. Streaming is even more predatory and centralized than labels in the 90's, but with an important caveat: it's legal. When people engage in piracy there is at least some awareness of, say, the pirate being at fault in the transaction — even though, as someone else already mentioned, people who pirate might contribute, or engage in other ways, with the creators. But with streaming, it got normalized to pay artists a fraction of a cent per stream (and the terms get progressively worse). I've countless times heard the argument "at least they get paid something!"
Bandcamp, for example, seems like a much fairer ideal for the industry. Luckily, the Epic buyout a few years ago did not immediately ruin the business.
As for the music in the 90's...music has changed. Naturally, one could argue that these are also exciting times: one can singlehandedly produce a record, distribute it independently, and be touring all over Europe without ever having to sign off to a major label. Is this not a good thing — or at least, a notable one? Of course, there's still great music around.
And Bandcamp does seem nice, wish it took off more.
And yes, I do completely agree with you that there are some big positives with today's music landscape. The rise of Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) to create your own music was a revolution, as is youtube for getting your music to the masses. Seems like a ton of musicians got their break from this these days... ...So as we talk, am thinking, maybe piracy has become a unimportant aspect of the music industry?? Hmm... Well, one aspect is missing, the seasoned engineers, producers, marketers and managers who can get your music created, promoted and performed all without the musician's needing to learn all this themselves. It really is a lot of work!
Yeah, Spotify does screw musicians really horribly. Don't know what the solution is, but was talking with someone else here, and maybe piracy is not a big factor with the music industry anymore. With the rise of DAW's so that making music is really easy, and youtube as a primary source to market music, piracy really isn't as big a deal. This sounds reasonable to me (not great state of things, but not bad).
EU paid for report that concluded piracy isn’t harmful, tried to hide findings (thenextweb.com)
280 points by tchalla on Sept 21, 2017 | 59 comments
In the 90s the good bands got lucky that their distributors picked them up and promoted them etc. You just don't remember the amount of crap that was on at any given point in time.
Today you have instant access to millions of songs around the world in every genre imaginable: https://everynoise.com/ And not just to the whatever few records your local store carried, or what the Big Four paid the radio stations to promote.
Labels still do this today, but it's just the number of opportunities for musicians is smaller.
Although, again, do agree that youtube (and somewhat spotify from what I've heard) has made a huge difference. I've heard a few times that Youtube is probably one of the best resources for self promoting music, but being good at making videos on youtube is not easy to do well and is also another job in itself.
Survivorship bias is and always has been real. If you don't believe me, think about the last time you heard Tubthumping from Chumbawumba on the radio or in a commercial
And except all the rest in that illogic.
> but when your main demographic can always go to bittorrent to get their music if prices are too high, then there is only so much you can do with the price of music.
And that's the thing: if the prices are too high, in the absence of piracy, most people are going to just do without. There's no lost sale when someone decides to do without rather than pay a price they thing is unreasonable.
I think the shift in the music landscape you see is due to three things: 1) your tastes have changed, and everyone looks at the "good old days" with a fondness and appreciation that is often undeserved, 2) the music industry itself has changed, moving away from the album-sales model, and fully embracing streaming (I believe around 70% of revenue comes from streaming these days), and 3) it is easier and cheaper than ever to create high-quality music; sure you need some level of talent, but many of the financial barriers to recording your own music (like the need for an expensive recording studio) have lessened or evaporated entirely.
> And, the music industry is still not even the same size as it was in 90's - global revenue in 2024 was $29 billion, while in 1994, in was $35 billion
This seemed surprising to me, so I did a little bit of light research. This isn't true. Revenue was steadily rising until around 1999, started dropping during the main time of digital disruption, to a low in 2014. In 2024, revenues were 1.5x what they were in the ~1999 peak.
Now, if you do inflation-adjust those numbers, you get a picture more like what you're saying, with a peak around 1999, a sharp decline, and then only a partial recovery.
But total revenue is only one part of the picture, and we can't judge creator impact solely upon that. And at the end of the day, no one is entitled to revenue. Sell a compelling product at a price people are willing to pay, and you'll make money.
Outside of streaming, I personally don't see many compelling products out there when it comes to music. I bought CDs and cassettes as a kid, but I don't see physical media, or even digital album bundles, as purchases worthy of my time. I have a YouTube Music subscription, and that fulfills the entirety of my at-home or on-the-go music needs. On top of that, I go to concerts and festivals when my favorite music is in town, and I'll sometimes buy some merch (like a festival t-shirt). Beyond that, I just don't see a need to spend money on music. (When I think about it, though, I probably do spend more money on music today than I did when I was buying physical media! Some of that is due to my better financial situation now, to be sure, but not all.)
> Personally, think we should try to find ways to support musicians, writers, thinkers, artists...
I absolutely agree, but I don't think piracy has the big negative effect on creators that you think it does.
...Also, it seems like it depends on where you look for yearly revenue. At least this research article is more like what I saw (although, not sure what numbers are correct): https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-Recorded-Music-In...
Regardless, yeah, the music industry took a huge hit, and is looking better these days with streaming (which saved it), but it's still not great.
>And that's the thing: if the prices are too high, in the absence of piracy, most people are going to just do without. There's no lost sale when someone decides to do without rather than pay a price they thing is unreasonable.
Agreed, if prices are too high, yes, they'll do with out. But in the past, on average, it seems like most people did actually purchase CD's and DVD's, me included. Most of us had quite a sizable collection, and would routinely visit music stores to pay $20 to buy a CD, just because they liked one or two songs (and that's in 90's money). Yes, the music industry took a lot of the share of revenue, but that industry still is what promoted and supported the musicians.
https://annas-archive.org/donate
I'll also say that when too much money starts becoming a part of this, trouble will increase dramatically. I realize this sort of endeavor costs a lot of time and money, but it's a line we should probably be aware of.
About recent events.
We are still alive and kicking. In recent weeks we’ve seen increased attacks on our mission. We are taking steps to harden our infrastructure and operational security. The work of securing humanity’s legacy is worth fighting for.
Since we started in 2022, we have liberated tens of millions of books, scientific articles, magazines, newspapers, and more. These are now forever protected from destruction by natural disasters, wars, budget cuts, and other catastrophes, thanks to everyone who helps with torrenting.
Anna’s Archive itself has organized some of the largest scrapes: we acquired tens of millions of files from IA Controlled Digital Lending, HathiTrust, DuXiu, and many more.
We have also scraped and published the largest book metadata collections in history: WorldCat, Google Books, and others. With this we’ll be able to identify which books are still missing from our collections, and prioritize saving the rarest ones.
Much thanks to all of our volunteers for making these projects happen.
We’ve forged some incredible partnerships. We’ve partnered with two LibGen forks, STC/Nexus, Z-Library. We’ve secured tens of millions additional files through these partnerships. And they are helping the mission by mirroring our files.
Unfortunately we have seen the disappearance of one of the LibGen forks. We don’t have further information about what happened there, but are saddened by this development.
There is a new entrant: WeLib. They appear to have mirrored most of our collection, and use a fork of our codebase. We have copied some of their user interface improvements, and are grateful for that push. Sadly, we are not seeing them share any new collections, nor share their codebase improvements. Since they haven’t shown commitment to contributing back to the ecosystem, we advise extreme caution. We recommend not using them.
In the meantime, we have some exciting projects in the works. We have hundreds of terabytes in new collections sitting on our servers, waiting to be processed. If you’re at all interested in helping out, feel free to check out our Volunteering and Donate pages. We run all of this on a minimal budget, so any help is greatly appreciated.
Keep fighting.
Some AI company techbros like this data trove even harder, and limit their pretending to publicly saying things like "we're changing the world" (and "AI could be bad if you don't give us money and lock out competitors") but really only care about wealth and power.
Certain sanctioned countries that culturally value literature and science might also appreciate this. (This last category, I'm much-much more sympathetic to, and wish them well in their intellectual pursuits and appreciation of the humanities, though we should really find a better way to share that doesn't undermine Western economies and many people's livelihoods.)
Moreover, however many countless AI companies now buying and pulping copies of every book in existence seems to be really changing the used book market. Prices are going up dramatically and before this year it was very rare to not find a single copy in the world of whatever old book one desired.
As someone who spends a disproportionate amount on books and shares your concern for not making life even more difficult for authors, these services going away would be a tremendous regression.
People rationalizing aren't mental giants. Piracy is generally by people who want free stuff. Not by philosophers who arrived at piracy through some line of reasoning other than wanting free stuff.
The dialogue in the space is what you'd expect.
Origin is unreachable Error code 523
- DDOS attacks
- Spamming
- UK like surveillance laws
- LLM scraping
Why is it that there is almost not initiative for this?
Proof of work and micropayments (eg. Xanadu or Internet Mail 2000) schemes solve spamming and LLM scraping, but are more expensive or more CPU-intensive.
P2P systems like FreeNet too, but they are harder to use and more storage intensive and make it easier to spy on individual users.
Tor solves UK-like surveillance laws but it's slower and makes it easier to spam.
The easiest way to mitigate those problem will be to decrease the openness and centralize more. It might lead to even worse things that DDOS.
So see, there are initiatives, but people treat it as a joke, maybe because of when it was released.
(Not to mention the astronomical technical work it would be; you can't just replace "The Entire Internet")
even if it's decentralised, it'll be banned one way or another and you'll be hunted down.
- DRM. - Owner-unfriendly device locks (such as manufacturer-controlled secure boot or locked-down OSes). - Inability to audit network traffic from one's own devices, i.e. an IoT device. - Remote attestation, when in opposition to open computing.
I could also see folks seeing the use of cryptography as "having something to hide" - I don't personally agree.
The tweet only names Meta, but it would be very surprising if OpenAI didn't do the same thing.
Either this is practice is judged (or legislated) to be fair use, or copyright is done. It's also that simple.
I'll ignore the legality aspects in my response. I think coming up with a representative sample of all relevant information would be better in the long term (teams will not be outcompeted on long time horizons). Why don't the companies do this? Because it is easier to just "carpet bomb the parameter space" and worry about the potential confounding [1] and sampling bias [2] later. Coming up with a representative sample requires domain expertise and that is expensive in terms of time and money. But it reduces the total amount of training data and should reduce the amount of time and resources it takes to build the models. That may matter now that models are quite large.
This is definitely a design decision with tradeoffs on both sides. I can entertain the notion that we don't have time to sample things, but I think we are all too often dismissing the long-term benefits of proper sampling.
(In terms of the legality aspects, judges are trying to "split the baby" [3] in my opinion by saying that training on stuff you got legally is OK but training on pirated material isn't. So nobody is going to recommend training on pirated material in the first place.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_bias
[3] https://www.404media.co/judge-rules-training-ai-on-authors-b...
Copyright law exists for a reason. Trying to improve an LLM doesn't give you the right to flout our legal system. Yes, other countries might have an advantage in LLM training as a result but so be it.
Meta managed to get into a private ebook torrent tracker called Bibliotik a few years ago to use for training Llama and the resulting publicity essentially killed the tracker.
A pretty rich thing to say when your mission is piracy.
I'm not against piracy at all, quite the contrary, but this is quite laughable.
They're earning a fuck ton of money, that's what they're doing.
Just like megaupload back in the days, they sell premium accounts for fast download speeds and no queue.
And even if their motivations are less than pure, I will 100% get behind the mission of preserving humanity's literary output. If that's the outcome, I don't care about their motivations.
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/how-rich-are-jk-rowling-jame...
That being said, do you know if their offering of your material has had a significant impact on your revenue or is it more the principal of the matter?
• Anna's Archive is a delightful resource for readers
• the more widely the public reads, the better for society
• copyright law should be changed
• it would be good if society made it easier for authors to make a living
• some authors will rightfully feel exploited to have free copies of their works distributed illegally and without their permission
...or we could collapse under the cognitive dissonance, and lash out at @brianstorms instead.
I looked up one of my favorite authors ( https://annas-archive.org/search?q=scott+sigler ) and you can download practically his lifetime's worth of work in 5 minutes. This is not some author who lived 200 years ago - he is living and writing books now and this is his livelyhood.
You wouldn't have paid for it? Fine. Don't read, watch, play, or listen to it, then.
Culture distorts principles in order to defend the authority of evil. Culture must convince you that it is not wrong when law subjugates your worth and destroys your freedom. Culture convinces people of this by perverting the concept of morality. Morality is liberty. Immorality is evil. The exercise and defense of freedom are moral. The destruction of freedom is immoral. This is the pure truth of morality.
Prudence is the proper application of principle. Imprudence is foolishness. Prudence is not morality. It is not immoral to kick a heavy stone with your bare foot, but it would probably be foolish. Prudence is a question of applying the principles and wisdom you have gathered in your life to achieve the goals you have for yourself. This is made possible by liberty. Without liberty, prudence is meaningless. Morality must come before prudence.
The great lie of culture is that authority is not bound by morality, and that authority can enforce its own prudence upon you. The great lie of culture is that you are worth less than law. Cultures teach that intentions of prudence can be enforced by law. In this fashion they gain excuse to control the lives of people.
In order for people to learn, grow, and find happiness, people must be free to test their understanding of principles. With freedom, they can do this by a process of faith, trial and error. In this fashion children grow from immaturity to maturity. In this fashion human beings gain wisdom.
Cultures are agents of evil. The objective of evil is the damnation of your ability to grow strong in wisdom. The objective of evil is the destruction of your worth. In order to gain control over you, culture spreads the lie that authority is not bound by morality. It teaches that authority can destroy freedom at will, and claims prudence as the reason you should willingly submit. In the name of defending you, culture claims that the destruction of freedom is morality. Cultures pretend that evil is good and that good is evil.
Prudence can be found all around you. It is found in the choices you make every day. Even when a mistake is made, you learn prudence. Prudence cannot be enforced. To enforce prudence is law. Law is lie. Without the freedom to choose, you cannot learn prudence. You cannot be happy.
Morality can be found all around you. Wherever you find it, you will find joy. Wherever you find immorality, you will find misery. Culture enforces authority by destroying freedom with law. This is immorality.. - The End of all Evil, Jeremy Locke
You have invested in an idea that has been created by power structures through culture, that you are getting harmed by someone else's freedom. The people that will/want to support your work will do so out of a desire to do so, not because law says its right.
Many people are deceived that law breakers are immoral and harmful to society, but I don't think that's the case. Most laws are created to subjugate people, (I.E, take away there agency) Law's created by power structures which are ultimately designed to benefit the creators or supporters have done a very good job and convincing the subjugated that their interests align. Those that have been deceived by a system of laws that benefit the powerful are too invested in demanding a return for their efforts. What ever happened to the priority of making the world a better place first and foremost and having faith that you will be compensated in some fashion for your efforts?
The only way to avoid having culture, in the usual sense, is to prevent groups of people from existing.
People can exist out side of the constrains of a culture that is imposed on then by understanding their own human value and worth that they are born with instead of looking to institutions and governments to give it to them.
In a society that doesn't have a centralized governing factor where the powerful impose their will on the people, then yes, I agree that its created by a shared understanding by its people. But that's not the case for 95% percent of the worlds cultures.
I've been using WeLib since April and had a good experience so far
Otherwise, please explain how I am missing your point.
That's an odd combination.
that is an odd demand for a site that thrives on piracy. Don't steal from the thieves? When you take from others it's liberation, when others take from you it's parasitic, that's certainly a convenient coincidence
Only giving access to your material over downloads means that people have to pay if they want to get more of it. If those people don't share it then the material is going to be lost again.
Torrenting all the material slapping using their frontend as a base and just making money is different.
They are even offering decent bounties: https://software.annas-archive.li/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv...
Whoever is running it must be doing really well for themselves laundering all that crypto.
Also interestingly they don't offer a tor onion service, while the admin is most certainly technically competent to administer one given that he no doubt uses tor to insulate himself from his enterprise and launder crypto. What is the reasoning for that?
Obviously, since Anna's Archive is breaking the law, it can't conform itself to the normal legal/regulatory system that governs non-profit organizations. It can certainly still claim to be acting in the spirit of a non-profit, and it's up to you to decide whether you trust that claim. Nobody's forcing you to give them money.
I really, really don't think that anybody is being fooled or misled into thinking that Anna's Archive is a "legitimate" audited organization when they describe themselves as a non-profit.
This is very geography-specific. In the US, 501(c)(3)s (what most people think of when they say "non-profit" where I am) have no general requirement for audits. There's also plenty of non-profit-by-some-definition organizations that never file a Form 1023, giving up some benefits of the 501(c)(3) regulations but in exchange being even less regulated.
The primary difference between a non-profit and a for-profit is that a non-profit does not distribute profit to shareholders, including the founders.
A non-profit is a corporate legal structure. An unregistered organization could be a cabal, a gang, a syndicate, a fellowship, a religion, a movement, a private club, or something else.
I would love to see someone try to explain to the IRS why all those purchases of Amazon gift cards and Monero for the transparently illegal organization should be deductible though
The usage of crypto is entirely one of necessity, as controling information and knowledge is something powerful people have clear stakes in. Many countries weild their financial systems to hold or acquire power. Information and Knowledge is one form of such power.
Everything points to the Anna's Archive team being passionate ideologues as opposed to some criminal enterprise focused on profit motives.
Anonymous international fugitive?
> Nobody is getting rich off of donations.
How can anyone aside from the beneficiary know that?
The extent to which the controller can get rich off this enterprise depends entirely on the unknown quantity of donated funds (and deals with AI companies) and his skill at laundering crypto (which darknet marketplace controllers doing far more illegal stuff can do).
They're getting donations as much as megaupload was getting donations for premium accounts...
People pay for higher bandwidth and no wait time, not to support the "cause". It's a farce to qualify this of donations.
And obviously people do get rich off of it, as you can see from the slew of file hosting services.
I'll believe that when they publish financial statements.
> Everything points to the Anna's Archive team being passionate ideologues as opposed to some criminal enterprise focused on profit motives.
"Passionate ideologues" who make you pay if you want to download anything at speeds greater than 10KB/s, how nice of them. I would rather just support the author, thank you.
I generally support piracy, but these piracy-as-a-business vultures who've been showing up in the shadow library scene need to go.
Thus, Who gives a shit if they're taking money from those who voluntarily subscribe. They still offer an absolutely incredible free service to who knows how many people who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford so much access to so much free information.
Given the behavior of the pro-copyright business interests and legal bodies of the world, and the outright hypocrisy of openly creating one set of rules on content piracy for certain corporations while applying another, harsher rule system for those who aren't so nicely connected, smug moralizing about something like Annas Archive has little grounding.
And aside from picking random crap out of your ass for smearing arbitrarily, what shred of evidence do you have of anyone there laundering crypto, and how?
The controller's freedom. If they didn't launder it they wouldn't be free.
> They still offer an absolutely incredible free service
Actually their free downloads aren't particularly good when compared to some of the other online services that 'leech' from them.
And their torrent strategy could be altruistic but it could also be self interested. By spreading storage costs around and attracting more contributions. And providing insurance to hardrive seizures.
What mainly interests me is how much money they are actually making, I suspect it's very profitable.
Well, it's about calculating their site support, storage, server and bandwidth costs. What might those be? Aside from these, I've seen them claim they use volunteers for much of their site support and certainly don't pay, or need to pay, anything for marketing since the word of mouth (partly through notoriety and partly through uniquness coupled with extreme usefulness) is more than enough to keep them famous.
Is there any particular reason you suspect Anna's Archive to be run by a man?