They should have made more of an effort on audiobooks - until then myanonamouse will do.

Internet archive lost a massive case about book piracy. Anthropic had to pay I believe 1.4 billion because they engaged in some book piracy.

It's more that the book market is not dominated by only a few big conglomerates.

I almost think this Spotify stuff is an op, just like I think the archive.org covid library was an op. Just pulling these targeted orgs into stupid decisions that will leave most of the public unsympathetic, in order to justify more law enforcement resources to go after them.

When I imagine AA going offline for stupid pop music piracy, it makes me angry. They're basically where virtually all of the old archive.org material landed, and nobody else is mirroring it. 95% of it can't be purchased; you either dl it from AA, or do an interlibrary loan through libraries that barely exist anymore, or if you live in some little and/or poor country, you just don't get to read it.

The material in our history of nonfiction writing represents a far wider range of opinion than we're allowed to have right now. Eliminating all of it at once (as libraries throw books away and/or close down), and commercially reissuing approved and reedited things as ebooks (that can be edited again, and again) is a nightmare future. Maybe it's even an optimistic nightmare future - we'll just be expected to accept what the AI says.