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Fwiw, piratebay continues to be the -to my knowledge- biggest public tracker out there, with basically every media production available.

And I think that was his point. They may ruin some people's life's... but aside from that, they achieve nothing.

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Just visited two nights ago and was pleasantly surprised to see domains active with fresh magnets. The people are returning to nature.
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It never stopped!
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> basically every media production available.

not sure why you made this claim as its not at all germane to the discussion but this isn't even remotely true.

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> piratebay continues to be the -to my knowledge- biggest public tracker out there

It has been compromised for more than a decade. The site is impossible to navigate without an adblocker due to malicious redirect ads and most of the major torrents are being monitored by rights management companies who will notify the user’s ISP of suspected infringement.

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All public torrents are monitored by the movie studios, that has nothing to do with how The Pirate Bay is run. Users can just hop jurisdictions with a VPN and use these public torrents without ever getting any complaint letters.
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Those are just crappy replicas of 'The Pirate Bay'. Full of annoying junk ads. 1337x is probably the biggest public tracker.
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and even 1337x is too annoying to use at times compared to RuTracker
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yeah, rutracker is to my knowledge the biggest and "cleanest" semi-public tracker.
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If the operators of Anna's Archive live somewhere like Russia or China, there's a good chance nothing will ever come of any of this legal action. Anna's Archive's biggest challenge is just maintaining availability of infrastructure.
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If they were not physically in Russia or similar country out of the jurisdiction of the court, then they have likely moved to one or operate from one.

At this point, the court is just a willing instrument of corporate anger and assistant to help vent their frustration. The secondary purpose, is to erode rights and privacy, for a continual surveillance state and gain as much control over the DNS infrastructure as possible.

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You really ought to read about what happened to Steven Donziger. One of the most corrupt cases I've ever heard of.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Donziger

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For folks who don't feel like clicking through:

Chevron hired a private prosecutor who was friends with the judge who took the case, to prosecute Donziger after he won a case outside of the US against Chevron.

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That’s a big if. My bet is that they are in Central or Northern Europe, just like the Pirate Bay people. Unlikely anyone in Russia or China would care to offer a service primarily to the benefit of the western world. I bet there are similar sites in the Runet or behind the Great Firewall we don't even know about and that simply don't bother catering to us.
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Yep. You can also see that in the design language and the written English on their sites and blog posts. Something created by people with a Russian or Chinese background would approach a myriad of little things differently.
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> Unlikely anyone in Russia or China would care to offer a service primarily to the benefit of the western world.

Russians are huge on the piracy scene and have been for decades, primarily because it’s an effective way for the Russian Federation to thumb their nose at the Americans. China has more than a billion people in it. I’m sure between the two of them there is at least one person that identifies with citizen of the world style liberalism (and, if I could venture to be an optimist, probably a lot more than one).

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Z-library was/is very likely run by Russians. They were even arrested by FBI, but escaped. Archive.is is likely run by a Russian. LibGen was run by Russians.
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They are all not Anna's Archive and one is not like the other. Z-library, LibGen maybe, Archive.is might be eastern Europe but almost certainly not Russia. Just because it's advantageous in some cases to appear Russian or Chinese doesn't mean it is true. Some are better in their camouflage others like https://migflash.com/ not so much.
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There's at least a strong case that Archive.is is Russian run:

https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-...

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There is no "strong case" in this article. Yeah the guy linked to it has a slavic name and likely speaks Russian. Guess what? That's true for most of eastern Europe you will find plenty of people matching these criteria all over the rest of Europe.
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What are you on about? rutracker, libgen, sci-hub, z-lib are all Russian/ex-Soviet projects and cater heavily to westerners. I'm 99% sure archive.is and anna's-archive are also in this category.
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I see your point for most of these but why rutracker? It is entirely in Russian.
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They are almost certainly being financed by the AI lobby as they have been open about providing API access to companies training AI in exchange for “donations.”[1][2][3] Having all of this data available online for free gives those looking for training data plausible deniability. It would turn into a huge legal headache if OpenAI had scraped Spotify directly, but if they launder it through a third party they can at least try to argue they weren’t responsible for the infringement.

Spotify got started doing the same thing, though.[4]

[1]: https://annas-archive.gl/blog/llms-txt.html (“Making an enterprise-level donation will get you fast SFTP access to all the files, which is faster than torrents.”)

[2]: https://annas-archive.gl/blog/duxiu-exclusive.html (“We’re looking for some company or institution to help us with OCR and text extraction for a massive collection we acquired, in exchange for exclusive early access. After the embargo period, we will of course release the entire collection.”)

[3]: https://annas-archive.gl/donate (“Enterprise-level donation or exchange for new collections (e.g. new scans, OCR’ed datasets). […] We welcome large donations from wealthy individuals or institutions. For donations over $5,000, please contact us directly at Contact email.”)

[4]: https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files... (“Rumors that early versions of Spotify used ‘pirate’ MP3s have been floating around the Internet for years. People who had access to the service in the beginning later reported downloading tracks that contained ‘Scene’ labeling, tags, and formats, which are the tell-tale signs that content hadn’t been obtained officially.”)

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Not necessarily. More cheerful examples exist, usually outside the west:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan

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Or you know, MegaUpload. Raided at his home, while congress was trying to pass a bill, that allowed them to... stop online piracy... apparently, they REALLY needed that bill in order to do so.
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> like it ended for Aaron Schwartz in the worst.

They’ll… be offered 4 months in prison, or 6 months with an opportunity to ask the judge for less?

I don’t know about you, but to me that seems way more chill than how the TPB guys were treated!

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> > like it ended for Aaron Schwartz in the worst.

>They’ll… be offered 4 months in prison, or 6 months with an opportunity to ask the judge for less?

Surely the implication is that they'll end up being found dead, as happened to Aaron Swartz.

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