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.

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.

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.

Data are basically free. Infra to store and transfer data is not.

I admit the irony, but also funny reminder that Spotify started with a pirated catalogue back on the day.

I mean Facebook and Anthropic both torrented LibGen in its entirety.

I believe they're largely targeting foreign companies who don't care much about US copyright law.

Yeah,how devstating it would be for Anna's Archive to be found skirting copyright laws. Their reputation may never recover.

\s