Same as Facebook: They got big by the Zuck sucking messages and content from MySpace - then Facebook afterwards lobbied to put laws in place to forbid this kind of 'interoperability' across platforms.
Youtube started out 'allegedly' by members of their team uploading pirated hollywood movies (because they had no content), posing as users to fall under the "user-content" policy to make the company not liable.
They are all breaking the rules all the way down, but when they make it, they know exactly what to do to fill the loopholes to prevent others to do to them what they did on others. That's big tech's ethics for you: Move fast and break things, then wall yourself in.
> 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.
Immediately makes me think of the vitriol here on HN for the UK trying to enforce their age verification law outside their borders. Will the principle stand, or will it reveal that "USA is always right" is a common held belief
It's wild to read "the U.S. Congress passed UIGEA to extend existing gambling laws into cyberspace. The law made processing payments for online gambling a crime" in the light of how prevalent online gambling is now in the US mainstream, with sports betting, Kalshi, Polymarket and so on.
This isn't a unique USA thing. Many countries will allow lawsuits against international entities if you can demonstrate harm within the jurisdiction.
Practically speaking it doesn't matter much when small countries do this because it doesn't mean much, other than maybe the owners of the country can't travel there any more. It hits headlines when the USA does it because being barred from traveling to the USA or working with US companies causes a lot of problems.
And even policing protects local monied interests.
One case was someone who used their bike as their vehicle put a tracker on it. Was stolen. Tracker dutifully said where it was. Went to police station, they did absolutely shit. They were handed the bike receipt, token receipt, and realtime log. They DGAF.
Years ago, worked at Walmart. They illegally edited my hours and thieved $100 and change. Put in police report, was told "CIVIL MATTER".
But if you stole $100 from a register, off to jail you go.
The laws protect monied interests and the elite, not the masses.
> Years ago, worked at Walmart. They illegally edited my hours and thieved $100 and change. Put in police report, was told "CIVIL MATTER"
Too late now, but for future reference for others: Wage theft reports should go to your state's department of labor. Every state is different but from what I've seen these offices have people who are hungry to catch real wage claims. Companies listen up when the state department of labor comes knocking.
> Immediately makes me think of the vitriol here on HN for the UK trying to enforce their age verification law outside their borders
The UK and US aren't unique in this regard. The concept of piracy has been commonly treated as a topic with universal jurisdiction that expands beyond borders, going back to the time when piracy meant people on boats in international waters. I'll be honest that I don't know if or how those laws correspond to digital piracy, but countries have long considered international piracy to be something their domestic courts can go after.
Practically speaking you can always choose to ignore it if you don't have offices or assets in that country and you're okay with never traveling there for the rest of your life. You also have to avoid countries with mutual extradition agreements because many countries will offer to extradite for certain crimes with the expectation that the other country will return the favor.
The UK age verification enforcement isn't a good comparison because the UK's overreach extends even to instances where UK citizens are geoblocked. Trying to enforce your country's laws on an operation in a different country which does not even serve your country is something else. For a recent example look at the online depression forum that is being threatened by the UK even though they've geoblocked UK users - Immediately makes me think of the vitriol here on HN for the UK trying to enforce their age verification law outside their borders
I don't understand why it makes you think of that, this is a completely different situation. If Anna's Archive were an upstanding site run by a known operator in compliance with UK law, I would definitely be highly critical of this ruling. But it's actually an anonymously run site that violates most countries' copyright laws and is blocked in the UK.
Copying intellectual property is not piracy. This term was co-opted by big industries to insure the cash cattle continue to pay. Piracy has a very specific sting to it. This was a deliberate choice. We don't call burglary "piracy", yet if we relax the definition enough to include IP theft, it is also piracy.
GabeN also had the wrong take in that it's a "supply problem" or whatever nonsense he said. GabeN is in fact an industry plant and owns one of the strictest IP protection platforms on the market. Why people buy on steam when they can ban you for almost anything and take everything you've ever rented (you dont own anything on steam). Thousands of dollars of games gone with a ban. In any normal world this would be tantamount to grand theft and a small business owner would actually face real prison time for it.
You can't "steal" something that isn't gone when it's stolen. If I walked into a house, took a necklace, and left an exact unaltered copy I'd at best be charged with a lesser crime that didn't include theft. But if you copy movies/music/software you're liable to have your entire life absolutely financially and possibly criminally ruined.
The government of the US is hardly a government for the people, by the people. It's strictly designed to enrich the few and consume "human resources".
It's infuriating but practically true. I had a few services that received illegitimate DMCA notices that I ignored. They were either blatantly fraudulent, automated junk or just not applicable to the law of the country where I'm hosting.
They escalated to either my hosting or my domain name provider, who then threatened to cut me off for not complying. No discussion with them would work in my favor. I had to comply with this BS. I got cut off several times for completely wrong reasons.
They don't care. It's not worth the legal risk for them. I'm not big enough.
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.
Different burden of proof. Why waste years trying to get server logs that may not exist when you can get a quick win? It's not about the money anyway. It's about the PR and whatever justification they can derive along the way.
Like, all together? I'd agree that copyright terms are often much too long, but if you write a book, I'm totally okay with you owning the rights to that and making money off of it for a while.
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.
> 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
They already removed the files when the lawsuit was filed.
Obviously, they're not paying the $322 million. The amount doesn't matter because they're not paying anything. What it does enable is seizing their domain names and any other resources that are hosted by companies in the US jurisdiction.
Aren't they widely believed to be Russian? They've been running for long enough that they're almost certainly in a non-extradition jurisdiction and know to stay there.
Russia after Putins fall will do everything to please other countries, to get back to good terms (for sanctions, trade, debt markets, selling oil) and all people in Russia betting on not being extradited will have a rude awakening.
Sure, but also the EU is comparably as weak over its member states as the US Federal government was over American states in the Articles of Confederation era. This is how Hungary was able to paralyse the collective response against Russia.
Nevertheless, extraditions based on international mandates are usually respected (terms and conditions may apply, see Greece or Italy). Wanted people often go to Serbia nowadays, to give a successful example.
Indeed. But I did write "will find friendly arms in China and Europe", and Greece, Italy, and indeed Serbia, are in Europe.
The whole continent != nation thing is clearer with the EU != Europe (due to the EU not even being a nation yet) than with the American nation != The Americas.
Even then, don't underestimate rules-lawyering of laws: I wish to suggest that the USA is going down the path of "rogue state", and that extradition treaties may have clauses (either explicitly in treaty text* or implicitly via the European Convention on Human Rights) protecting individuals from the risk of a death penalty, which may end up getting invoked due to the US having the death penalty.
Article 13 (``Capital punishment'') provides that when an offense for which extradition is sought is punishable by death under the laws in the requesting State but not under the laws in the requested State, the requested State may grant extradition on condition that the death penalty shall not be imposed or, if for procedural reasons such condition cannot be complied with by the requesting State, on condition that if imposed the death penalty shall not be carried out.
If there's a loss of trust that the US will honour its obligations, and in other cases besides extradition this has already happened, what then?
> Russia after Putins fall will do everything to please other countries, to get back to good terms
This is pretty obviously not true? Russia's not going to try to please the us or most European countries, and many fugitives in Russia only angered those countries.
That's not how politics necessarily works. Russia oil and already existing infrastructure into Europe means that Europe has huge incentives to continue trading eventually.
That's also better than Russia focusing delivering their resources to China for good.
There's unlikely to be any thaw within Putin's lifetime. Putin is 73. What happens after that? Opportunity to be a clean slate.
Before the war, upper-class Russians had it good. Freedom of movement to the West. Russian money was popular in Europe, now it's got a Chernobyl toxic glow to it. It wouldn't be so bad to go back to 2010 Russia before Putin threw all of that away on territorial expansion and irridentism.
Perhaps US may extradite some ordinary US citizens, but for example when some member of the US military kills in another country someone by driving drunk, USA will immediately smuggle him from that country, so that he will not stand trial in a foreign court for his crime.
We've got army block, FSB block, technocrats, bureaucrats and oligarchs. The usual (more or less) story.
The real problem is - we don't have system that scales horizontally. So when Putin goes people will have to deal with the vertical system he created for himself.
The problem here is this "for himself" part.
For this system to work you will have to be a new Putin (at least for some time) and for this you will have to enforce your decisions and shape your new system. Top to bottom.
Best thing that can happen to Russian (realistically) is that the power will be given to technocrats.
They are not neccesarily more liberal, but they have real education, they do understand a thing or to about economics, open borders, sharing of knowledge etc.
They won't be able to quickly change Russia, but given some time they can reshape it step by step.
Alas - we have FSB and Army blocks, high level of corruption and millions of people who see people like Putin as the best choice. They don't need progress and responsibility. They need their empire back even if they are just peasants with serfdom included.
Slightly OT: How is it possible that the operators are unidentified? Surely someone must own the domain and pay upkeep for that? Wouldn't that expose at least one of them?
Yes your honor, we've identified one Big Bird of 123 Sesame St as being affiliated with the operators of the site based on the registration data.
The only reason you have to tell the truth is if you want to reduce the risk of arbitrarily losing control of the domain, such as having a chance to contest any abuse reports that might be filed against you.
What does "finding them" even means in this context? There are many hacker organizations located in Russia that are much worse than Anna's Archive. From my understanding those also operate websites / platforms to offer services.
Well clearly that’s false?
Not all crypto transactions are traceable for example. And since they haven’t found them, that seems to disprove your statement doesn’t it?
ultimately it will depend on their opsec. i do think it shows that opsec strategies and tech can have a use case that is not morally bad (at least not in a straightforward way). so the good research done in this field is actually justified
Extra? I thought they were clearly violating IP law to begin with. Unless I misunderstand this is "water is wet" territory (both the judgment as well as what Anna's Archive did).
Water isn't wet, but it does "wet" other things. Wetness is the degree to which a liquid contacts and adheres to a solid surface, so it's makes no sense to say that water is wet.
At this point everyone who cares about anna's archive already knows about anna's archive.
If the goal is to eventuallu get their domain siezed (forcing them to get a new one and confusing existing users), they probably don't view this as a waste.
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?
...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.
It's centralized because there's a few big labels that own a lot...but otherwise it's such a commodity that you can go to any streaming service and you more or less have the same catalog.
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.
> Now the mega-corporations decided to kill off Anna's Archive.
You can still torrent the books from library genesis if they succeed. It would be a bit of an effort, but free books are currently the only positive thing (for me) in the internet.
> 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."
Legally speaking, the Southern District of New York can say whatever it likes, and Libera, Sweden, India, St-Pierre-et-Miquelon, Greenland, Switzerland, Pakistan, Grenada, and the British Virgin Islands are free to ignore what the US says. They all have national sovereignty over their respective ccTLDs, and of them, most are not going to simply accept the US telling them what to do considering recent geopolitical missteps.
Yes and: Our current intellectual property regime is indefensible.
Yes and: Gatekeeping megacorp's profits continue to rise, while creators are screwed.
The original intent of copyright protection in the USA was to encourage production of culture. (Ditto patents for knowledge.) That sounds fantastic. I support that.
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.
Ironic, since Spotify started by pirating music[0]
[0] https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files...
Same as Facebook: They got big by the Zuck sucking messages and content from MySpace - then Facebook afterwards lobbied to put laws in place to forbid this kind of 'interoperability' across platforms.
Youtube started out 'allegedly' by members of their team uploading pirated hollywood movies (because they had no content), posing as users to fall under the "user-content" policy to make the company not liable.
They are all breaking the rules all the way down, but when they make it, they know exactly what to do to fill the loopholes to prevent others to do to them what they did on others. That's big tech's ethics for you: Move fast and break things, then wall yourself in.
I think AA should have stuck to book piracy. Nobody really cares about that.
It's more that the book market is not dominated by only a few big conglomerates.
Yes it is, at least 80% of the book market in the US is controlled by 5 companies: Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, Hachette, and HarperCollins.
> 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.
Cory Doctorow made a whole CCC speech about this.
His talks are all fantastic
Immediately makes me think of the vitriol here on HN for the UK trying to enforce their age verification law outside their borders. Will the principle stand, or will it reveal that "USA is always right" is a common held belief
USA claiming global jurisdiction over internet copyright matters goes back a long way. The case that "radicalized" me was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Elcom_Ltd. , which was 25 years ago!
The other such case establishing global financial jurisdiction, often cited by cryptocurrency adopters, is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Scheinberg - "Pokerstars".
It's wild to read "the U.S. Congress passed UIGEA to extend existing gambling laws into cyberspace. The law made processing payments for online gambling a crime" in the light of how prevalent online gambling is now in the US mainstream, with sports betting, Kalshi, Polymarket and so on.
This isn't a unique USA thing. Many countries will allow lawsuits against international entities if you can demonstrate harm within the jurisdiction.
Practically speaking it doesn't matter much when small countries do this because it doesn't mean much, other than maybe the owners of the country can't travel there any more. It hits headlines when the USA does it because being barred from traveling to the USA or working with US companies causes a lot of problems.
The laws of the US have always been crafted to protect the interests of the elite, not the industrious.
Sure has.
And even policing protects local monied interests.
One case was someone who used their bike as their vehicle put a tracker on it. Was stolen. Tracker dutifully said where it was. Went to police station, they did absolutely shit. They were handed the bike receipt, token receipt, and realtime log. They DGAF.
Years ago, worked at Walmart. They illegally edited my hours and thieved $100 and change. Put in police report, was told "CIVIL MATTER".
But if you stole $100 from a register, off to jail you go.
The laws protect monied interests and the elite, not the masses.
> Years ago, worked at Walmart. They illegally edited my hours and thieved $100 and change. Put in police report, was told "CIVIL MATTER"
Too late now, but for future reference for others: Wage theft reports should go to your state's department of labor. Every state is different but from what I've seen these offices have people who are hungry to catch real wage claims. Companies listen up when the state department of labor comes knocking.
used to be the case before the government was gutted.
Life makes a lot more sense when you realize the government, or at least this government, doesn't actually care about you.
> Immediately makes me think of the vitriol here on HN for the UK trying to enforce their age verification law outside their borders
The UK and US aren't unique in this regard. The concept of piracy has been commonly treated as a topic with universal jurisdiction that expands beyond borders, going back to the time when piracy meant people on boats in international waters. I'll be honest that I don't know if or how those laws correspond to digital piracy, but countries have long considered international piracy to be something their domestic courts can go after.
Practically speaking you can always choose to ignore it if you don't have offices or assets in that country and you're okay with never traveling there for the rest of your life. You also have to avoid countries with mutual extradition agreements because many countries will offer to extradite for certain crimes with the expectation that the other country will return the favor.
The UK age verification enforcement isn't a good comparison because the UK's overreach extends even to instances where UK citizens are geoblocked. Trying to enforce your country's laws on an operation in a different country which does not even serve your country is something else. For a recent example look at the online depression forum that is being threatened by the UK even though they've geoblocked UK users - Immediately makes me think of the vitriol here on HN for the UK trying to enforce their age verification law outside their borders
Please don't equivocate “the concept of piracy” as if copyright infringement has any relation to kidnapping and murder.
I don't understand why it makes you think of that, this is a completely different situation. If Anna's Archive were an upstanding site run by a known operator in compliance with UK law, I would definitely be highly critical of this ruling. But it's actually an anonymously run site that violates most countries' copyright laws and is blocked in the UK.
Copying intellectual property is not piracy. This term was co-opted by big industries to insure the cash cattle continue to pay. Piracy has a very specific sting to it. This was a deliberate choice. We don't call burglary "piracy", yet if we relax the definition enough to include IP theft, it is also piracy.
GabeN also had the wrong take in that it's a "supply problem" or whatever nonsense he said. GabeN is in fact an industry plant and owns one of the strictest IP protection platforms on the market. Why people buy on steam when they can ban you for almost anything and take everything you've ever rented (you dont own anything on steam). Thousands of dollars of games gone with a ban. In any normal world this would be tantamount to grand theft and a small business owner would actually face real prison time for it.
You can't "steal" something that isn't gone when it's stolen. If I walked into a house, took a necklace, and left an exact unaltered copy I'd at best be charged with a lesser crime that didn't include theft. But if you copy movies/music/software you're liable to have your entire life absolutely financially and possibly criminally ruined.
The government of the US is hardly a government for the people, by the people. It's strictly designed to enrich the few and consume "human resources".
I never understand these positions. How do authors make money selling books if someone can legally copy it and give it out for free?
I dunno, the same way they did for decades with public libraries?
It's infuriating but practically true. I had a few services that received illegitimate DMCA notices that I ignored. They were either blatantly fraudulent, automated junk or just not applicable to the law of the country where I'm hosting.
They escalated to either my hosting or my domain name provider, who then threatened to cut me off for not complying. No discussion with them would work in my favor. I had to comply with this BS. I got cut off several times for completely wrong reasons.
They don't care. It's not worth the legal risk for them. I'm not big enough.
So in the end, the US CAN indeed do that.
You should consider Cloudflare. They don't care if you use their services for criminal purposes.
So if you're fraudulently accused of wrongdoing that makes you a criminal?
Nice, nice....
Receiving illegitimate DMCA notices is not the same as hosting criminal services.
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.
who updates wikipedia with the new domains? how do they know the new ones?
Does it matter? It's not illegal to update an article with a new domain.
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?
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?
Different burden of proof. Why waste years trying to get server logs that may not exist when you can get a quick win? It's not about the money anyway. It's about the PR and whatever justification they can derive along the way.
"Intellectual property" as an idea has to go away
Like, all together? I'd agree that copyright terms are often much too long, but if you write a book, I'm totally okay with you owning the rights to that and making money off of it for a while.
It's even more absurd now when the big AI companies train their LLMs on torrented books.
Don't you know that it's okay to steal IP (and skirt laws in general) when you're a big company with lots of money?
Don’t you mean as a law? Ideas should be free.
No as a concept. Assigning ownership to specific bit patterns is absurd.
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.
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
They already removed the files when the lawsuit was filed.
Obviously, they're not paying the $322 million. The amount doesn't matter because they're not paying anything. What it does enable is seizing their domain names and any other resources that are hosted by companies in the US jurisdiction.
Aren't they widely believed to be Russian? They've been running for long enough that they're almost certainly in a non-extradition jurisdiction and know to stay there.
Russia after Putins fall will do everything to please other countries, to get back to good terms (for sanctions, trade, debt markets, selling oil) and all people in Russia betting on not being extradited will have a rude awakening.
Please which countries, though? China? The EU? The US? All of them have conflicting interests and you can't please all three.
If you're bad at governing you can't please all three.
Bold claims with no backing. Always bet on russian antagonism.
Or apathy. The combo is extremely spicy.
I'm sure this time it won't turn into a imperialistic dictatorship.
Many of them.
Way things are going, I suspect that many of people who are wanted by the American government will find friendly arms in China and Europe.
(Perhaps even there I'm optimistic about Russia wanting to normalise relations? Or existing?)
I don't think with the EU, the EU bases its identity on rules for the better or worse.
Sure, but also the EU is comparably as weak over its member states as the US Federal government was over American states in the Articles of Confederation era. This is how Hungary was able to paralyse the collective response against Russia.
Nevertheless, extraditions based on international mandates are usually respected (terms and conditions may apply, see Greece or Italy). Wanted people often go to Serbia nowadays, to give a successful example.
Indeed. But I did write "will find friendly arms in China and Europe", and Greece, Italy, and indeed Serbia, are in Europe.
The whole continent != nation thing is clearer with the EU != Europe (due to the EU not even being a nation yet) than with the American nation != The Americas.
Even then, don't underestimate rules-lawyering of laws: I wish to suggest that the USA is going down the path of "rogue state", and that extradition treaties may have clauses (either explicitly in treaty text* or implicitly via the European Convention on Human Rights) protecting individuals from the risk of a death penalty, which may end up getting invoked due to the US having the death penalty.
* https://eur-lex.europa.eu/EN/legal-content/summary/agreement... and https://www.congress.gov/treaty-document/109th-congress/14/d...
If there's a loss of trust that the US will honour its obligations, and in other cases besides extradition this has already happened, what then?Assuming "Russia" cares to and can find out who is running Anna.
> Russia after Putins fall will do everything to please other countries, to get back to good terms
This is pretty obviously not true? Russia's not going to try to please the us or most European countries, and many fugitives in Russia only angered those countries.
And we would be stupid to give them as access to cheese afterward. They had that chance and blew it.
There is unlikely to be any thaw within our lifetimes.
That's not how politics necessarily works. Russia oil and already existing infrastructure into Europe means that Europe has huge incentives to continue trading eventually.
That's also better than Russia focusing delivering their resources to China for good.
There's unlikely to be any thaw within Putin's lifetime. Putin is 73. What happens after that? Opportunity to be a clean slate.
Before the war, upper-class Russians had it good. Freedom of movement to the West. Russian money was popular in Europe, now it's got a Chernobyl toxic glow to it. It wouldn't be so bad to go back to 2010 Russia before Putin threw all of that away on territorial expansion and irridentism.
Russians will get extradited right after French citizens in France or Lebanese in Lebanon.
It's honestly astonishing the US is cucked enough to betray their own citizens up for trial by foreign court. Plenty of places won't do that.
Perhaps US may extradite some ordinary US citizens, but for example when some member of the US military kills in another country someone by driving drunk, USA will immediately smuggle him from that country, so that he will not stand trial in a foreign court for his crime.
Putin is a Russian moderate. Anyone who pays attention to Russian politics prays for his good health and long life.
Difficult to imagine a less moderate policy than starting a war which gets hundreds of thousands of Russians killed. Starting a nuclear war?
Losing hundreds of thousands in war vs hundreds of thousands (or more) in labour camps.
Putting a bullet in your skull for accessing a blocked internet resource vs just blocking the resource or paying a fine.
Honestly I can name many things that can be different.
Well for starters he might try and conquer Greenland.
The nuclear war is the immoderate Russians.
The main opposition party in Russia is the Communist party. Their leader was one of the first to call for a general mobilisation.
Where can I learn more?
Nothing to learn about, really.
We've got army block, FSB block, technocrats, bureaucrats and oligarchs. The usual (more or less) story.
The real problem is - we don't have system that scales horizontally. So when Putin goes people will have to deal with the vertical system he created for himself.
The problem here is this "for himself" part.
For this system to work you will have to be a new Putin (at least for some time) and for this you will have to enforce your decisions and shape your new system. Top to bottom.
Best thing that can happen to Russian (realistically) is that the power will be given to technocrats.
They are not neccesarily more liberal, but they have real education, they do understand a thing or to about economics, open borders, sharing of knowledge etc.
They won't be able to quickly change Russia, but given some time they can reshape it step by step.
Alas - we have FSB and Army blocks, high level of corruption and millions of people who see people like Putin as the best choice. They don't need progress and responsibility. They need their empire back even if they are just peasants with serfdom included.
That's the funny thing of course. I don't understand who this show really is for
I imagine the record companies and shareholders.
It would look bad if they did nothing, so a few 100k on legal theatre is worth it for them. Now they can say it's the US courts that are powerless.
Probably the people involved getting paid hefty fees for the whole thing.
Slightly OT: How is it possible that the operators are unidentified? Surely someone must own the domain and pay upkeep for that? Wouldn't that expose at least one of them?
Yes your honor, we've identified one Big Bird of 123 Sesame St as being affiliated with the operators of the site based on the registration data.
The only reason you have to tell the truth is if you want to reduce the risk of arbitrarily losing control of the domain, such as having a chance to contest any abuse reports that might be filed against you.
It’s well established if the US wants to they can find them and crypto can be traced.
Same question though how are they paying for the domain, assuming this is on the plaintiff to trace
What does "finding them" even means in this context? There are many hacker organizations located in Russia that are much worse than Anna's Archive. From my understanding those also operate websites / platforms to offer services.
Well clearly that’s false? Not all crypto transactions are traceable for example. And since they haven’t found them, that seems to disprove your statement doesn’t it?
Several domains previously used by Anna have been lost.
I assume that they may have been seized as a consequence of this trial.
This is presumably the real target of the lawsuit: the domain operators. There will likely be injunctions taking down the domains.
Some of the Anna domains have been taken down a few weeks ago.
there are ways to buy domains using crypto and being completely anonymous.
ultimately it will depend on their opsec. i do think it shows that opsec strategies and tech can have a use case that is not morally bad (at least not in a straightforward way). so the good research done in this field is actually justified
"the operators of the site remain unidentified." I laughed at this quite a bit.
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.
They have a 500k[1] reward for finding OPSEC failures, so I think they have the basics down.
[1]https://software.annas-archive.gl/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv...
Extra? I thought they were clearly violating IP law to begin with. Unless I misunderstand this is "water is wet" territory (both the judgment as well as what Anna's Archive did).
Extra, because with the piracy of music they bought into equation members of (and implicitly) the recording industry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recording_Industry_Association...
I do not see any law being violated by Anna's Archive in the slightest.
Just use it to train / tune a LLM. Apparently, everything becomes legal if you only put the stuff into the right kind of software.
That's at least what many people like to argue here on HN.
Anna's wants[1] companies to train on their data.
[1] https://annas-archive.gl/blog/ai-copyright.html
Water isn't wet, but it does "wet" other things. Wetness is the degree to which a liquid contacts and adheres to a solid surface, so it's makes no sense to say that water is wet.
hmm you are right, I too wish the same brother
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.
Ironically thanks to Putin piracy sites have safe harbour in Russia.
Someone in the Kremlin understands "bread and games" and they're not very receptive for sob stories from Hollywood.
Can't lose a fight against someone who can't catch you.
Sounds like Anna won. Someone else had to spend a bunch of money on a lawsuit against a ghost.
They have lost a few domain names.
For instance, they previously had a Swedish domain, which was taken down, together with a few others, possibly as a consequence of this lawsuit.
Hopefully they will succeed to keep the others.
If they lose them they will create new ones, and someone will update the wikipedia page with the active URL(s).
Worst case scenario they could solely rely on Tor URLs, which would be virtually impossible to shut down.
Barbra Streisand effect for them, free PR, and lots of money wasted for the other side
At this point everyone who cares about anna's archive already knows about anna's archive.
If the goal is to eventuallu get their domain siezed (forcing them to get a new one and confusing existing users), they probably don't view this as a waste.
Not every lawsuit is the Streisand effect.
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.
I'm sure they are very worried about this right now
Pillage libraries for LLM training data, then sue them and shut them down for archiving a different format. Cool.
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.
Music should not be centralized.
It's centralized because there's a few big labels that own a lot...but otherwise it's such a commodity that you can go to any streaming service and you more or less have the same catalog.
That's a very long list. The API is now basically useless.
Yep, the API is now basically useless and you can't use it in production. All because of some anonymous greedy dickheads.
Forced?
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.
> Now the mega-corporations decided to kill off Anna's Archive.
You can still torrent the books from library genesis if they succeed. It would be a bit of an effort, but free books are currently the only positive thing (for me) in the internet.
> 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."
Legally speaking, the Southern District of New York can say whatever it likes, and Libera, Sweden, India, St-Pierre-et-Miquelon, Greenland, Switzerland, Pakistan, Grenada, and the British Virgin Islands are free to ignore what the US says. They all have national sovereignty over their respective ccTLDs, and of them, most are not going to simply accept the US telling them what to do considering recent geopolitical missteps.
Yes and: Our current intellectual property regime is indefensible.
Yes and: Gatekeeping megacorp's profits continue to rise, while creators are screwed.
The original intent of copyright protection in the USA was to encourage production of culture. (Ditto patents for knowledge.) That sounds fantastic. I support that.
Ok. Now what?
One or two dementia Truths penned by media bribers/donors and the world moves on.
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.
Would have been $135B if it was to go to trial. They settled since they knew that they would lose the case.