Unfortunately for Spotify, court orders are ineffective against foreign nationals sharing information. Copyright enforcement is as futile as the encryption "export restrictions" the US and other countries tried in the 90s and early 2000s.
what‘s in it for spotify? i can‘t think of a single person who‘d stop paying for streaming services (music) in favour of going back to illegally download or (or even legally purchase) songs & managing their own library.
m a y b e some devs would. but those thinking about it, wouldn‘t be stopped like that. i am thinking about it, yet i just renewed my subscription because i lack time & motivation to crawl down yet another rabbit hole of diy.
But you can't even download the allegedly infringing material from the .org site. You can just read about it? So they're abusing the All Writs Act to take down a site that they think is related to some undetermined future nebulously bad thing for their business. If I wasn't on Anna's side before, I sure am now.
Deezer has in its onboarding flow a pretty cool "get your lists from spotify" feature. from all liked/currated songs - a few thousands - it could not match about 2.
Pretty ironic considering they bootstrapped the service with pirated music. But they've never actually cared about music — they started as an ad platform and music was the cheapest option for them to attract eyeballs.
I don't understand the sealing and ex-parte motions in this case. It looks completely corrupt. They're claiming that the archive would have released all the material publicly if they were allowed to know an injunction was about to be filed against them.
Yet all those songs certainly have illegal copies already being distributed on the internet. So what was the actual harm being prevented here? I cannot understand how they hoodwinked a court into this misguided procedure.
Can anyone recommend a music discovery service that isn't garbage? I fled to Spotify from Pandora because it kept recommending me the exact same songs, but now Spotify does basically the same thing.
In the age of machine learning, I'm really surprised there aren't superhuman music recommendation algorithms. Or maybe there are, and these algorithms simply don't serve the corporate interests. But then where are the open-source alternatives?
sharing knowledge for free is for the improvement of mankind. it fights the impoverishment of human intellect through control.
sharing music and art for free... not so much.
even if i put all my own music for free, yada yada. I do think there is a line and not everything should just be taken and put out for free.
the benefit to human progress should outweigh that damage to the artists or owners of said material.
i think we can all agree that most artists in that bundle are smalltime struggling artists. (the vast majority of something is never its peak afterall...).
is it really so important to listen some artist for free to destroy the income of thousands upon thousands of others? i dont think it adds anything important in our lives.
I just tried to download a podcast series from Spotify today, and even this turned out to be a massive pain: no dice on gallery-dl, yt-dlp, and the browser doesn't have a dedicated download option, even when logged in.
I was redirected to the Windows app to download an episode, and then I got denied from using the app because I was on a VPN with a different location than the one they had on file for me.
Genuinely wonder how much podcast history we're going to lose, if we're just making walled gardens out of RSS feeds at this point. Hope someone does back up the Spotify-exclusive podcasts somewhere.
21 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 42.2 ms ] threadAnna's Archive loses .org domain after surprise suspension - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46497164 - Jan 2026 (358 comments)
Spotify reportedly investigating Anna's Archive's scraping of their library - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355793 - Dec 2025 (82 comments)
Backing up Spotify - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46338339 - Dec 2025 (701 comments)
Oh it looks like the justice system isn’t stupid enough to fall for it. Now everyone is angry that the justice system isn’t serious and dumb.
Yet all those songs certainly have illegal copies already being distributed on the internet. So what was the actual harm being prevented here? I cannot understand how they hoodwinked a court into this misguided procedure.
Anna always knew the .org domain was vulnerable. Why wouldn't they?
In the age of machine learning, I'm really surprised there aren't superhuman music recommendation algorithms. Or maybe there are, and these algorithms simply don't serve the corporate interests. But then where are the open-source alternatives?
sharing music and art for free... not so much.
even if i put all my own music for free, yada yada. I do think there is a line and not everything should just be taken and put out for free.
the benefit to human progress should outweigh that damage to the artists or owners of said material.
i think we can all agree that most artists in that bundle are smalltime struggling artists. (the vast majority of something is never its peak afterall...).
is it really so important to listen some artist for free to destroy the income of thousands upon thousands of others? i dont think it adds anything important in our lives.
I was redirected to the Windows app to download an episode, and then I got denied from using the app because I was on a VPN with a different location than the one they had on file for me.
Genuinely wonder how much podcast history we're going to lose, if we're just making walled gardens out of RSS feeds at this point. Hope someone does back up the Spotify-exclusive podcasts somewhere.