Archiving it and publishing it are different things.
More importantly, they may sabotage their mission: If Spotify shuts them down, their exiting archives and especially future archives may be effectively lost.
I guess I should say more accurately: Their mission is to both archive it and publish it. They seem to be explicitly against copyright, on principle. Which I greatly respect.
Yeah, it seems to only be a problem when you're a human being remixing the culture you grew up with.
Meta can admit to soullessly scraping books they don't own for their for-profit AI datasets [1], and it's not a problem because they're Meta. But if you're an artist? Nope. Sampling in hip hop songs, for example, is in a "complex legal gray area" (translation: "it's illegal but we don't want to admit that out loud") [2].
Fortunately, Spotify does not have that power. Annas Archive is not based in US or EU jurisdictions. They can make access for normal people a bit harder, but not shut it down.
Annas archive is not based in the EU (sorry for being not clear). So the law in EU is limited to enforce a ban. In germany it is already "banned" via ISP but just DNS.
But the real servers are hosted in kazachstan or russia I think. And they do not cooperate so much with EU courts.
So unless the EU installs a great firewall like china, they cannot really shut it down.
Presumably the opposing party is residing in non-US-or(and? depends on the order of evaluation)-EU territory, but I might be mistaken. "They" refers to both sides in the parent comment.
They are, but archiving without publishing is pointless.
I occasionally wonder how many enormous collections of culture like that of Marion Stokes[1] have been lost because their curators made no effort to realize the value of their collection.
Most archives - the ones in libraries, etc. - are not published, except they are available to qualified people who physically travel there. Most are not even fully indexed - nobody knows all of what's there.
My perspective is compatible with this fact. An archive that approximately nobody can access and/or nobody knows what it contains has no value to society at large, except the potential that it may some day be published.
The good news is I'd guess the number of (nonreligious/nonproprietary) institutionally managed pointless archives is dwindling.
> They are, but archiving without publishing is pointless.
One may collect/archive now (when the data is, well, "available"), and publish later, when copyright expires and the material will likely be harder to obtain.
They stated that they would pass the information on to other archivists and public/private trackers no? They obviously have backups, since there are multiple users seeding Gbs and even TBs of data. Mirrors can be created as well, like TPB.
