What an incredible amount of bad takes on the Ars Technica article about Anna's Archive and their Spotify scrape, sheesh.

[Gast]

What an incredible amount of bad takes on the Ars Technica article about Anna's Archive and their Spotify scrape, sheesh.

[Gast]

Some excerpts, paraphrased:

Obviously Anna's Archive is just laundering copyright infringement for AI companies that paid them!

Okay if that's the case, then why are they being so unnecessarily public about it? How does that make sense when it could've also been a private arrangement?

They're just painting a target on their back! They should've stuck to books!

Well yes, archiving things in the face of abusive copyright laws tends to do that, painting targets. You know, not just for music. Ever heard of Elsevier?

Or maybe you're just angry that it might interfere with your ability to easily download free books, and you never quite cared about the archival aspect to begin with?

If it were about archiving, they should've just kept a private collection!

Ah yes, because that has historically been super successful at not burning down and providing wide availability of diverse shared culture and experiences! And doesn't have a rich history of theft and exploitation whatsoever!

So now how are artists going to get paid??

You mean the pennies that Spotify pays out, and how that's now being sabotaged by public availability of low-quality OGGs of songs that definitely couldn't be pirated in higher quality before? Or what?

I don't know, maybe you're not quite thinking about the problem of "how do artists get paid" in a big enough scope to actually address it? Perhaps you're just doing empty moralizing to feel better about yourself?