[silcoon]

> The Anna’s archive group is ideologically motivated.

Anna’s archive business is stealing copyrighted content and selling access to it. It's not ideologically motivated.

What ideology is about pirating books and music where most of the people producing this stuff cannot afford to do it full-time? It's not like pirating movies, software and large videogame studios, which is still piracy, but they also make big money and they don't act all the time in the interests of the users.

Writers and musicians are mostly broken. If we sum the rising cost of living, AI generated content and piracy, there's almost no reward left for their work. Anna’s archive is contributing to the art and culture decadence. They sell you premium bandwidth for downloading and training your AIs on copyrighted content, so soon we can all generate more and more slop.

[vintermann]

> Anna’s archive business is stealing copyrighted content and selling access to it.

There is not enough profit in that compared to the risk. They're also not exactly aggressive about it (there are groups which host mirrors who charge far more/finance it in the usual criminal way of getting people to install malware).

To me, there's a "motivation gap" between what they get out of this and the effort it takes, so there's some kind of "ideology". Whether it's 100% what they say it is, is another question.

[frm88]

Writers and musicians are mostly broken. If we sum the rising cost of living, AI generated content and piracy, there's almost no reward left for their work.

For authors (books) ~70% of all the book sales go to the publisher, not the author (trad pub): https://reedsy.com/blog/how-much-do-authors-make/

For musicians: depending on how big a name you are and which publisher you chose, the publishers compensation ranges from 15% (small name/indy) to 60% (big name/Universal, Sony) https://www.careersinmusic.com/music-publishing/

This is an industry with profit maximising as its goal like every other industry. If artists are broke, first take a look at the publishers.

[avoutos]

Agreed. I see far too many people rationalizing piracy as a principled thing to do. Instead of finding ways to improve the market such that the control of content isn't siloed in monopolistic corporations, many celebrate Annas Archive which is itself a more or less monopolistic profit-interested entity. The major difference being that we don't have to pay directly. The cost continues to fall on the writers and artists and the industry suffers.

[ptero]

Nothing wrong in rationalizing content sharing; as in rationalizing copyright. But IMO the current form of the copyright for both the technical and the creative works is a cure that is worse than the disease.

Recommending to an individual to work on changing copyright from within the system is, IMO, naive.

[komali2]

> Instead of finding ways to improve the market such that the control of content isn't siloed in monopolistic corporations

I always assumed the "Anna" in the name was for "Anarchist." My assumption about the archive is that they don't believe there's an ethical solution to the restriction of access to data that involves a capitalist market.

[silcoon]

I get your point but then let's not complains if creativity dies and things all look the same. Creative people don't have motivation to produce if they can't make a living out of it.

[moritzruth]

> Creative people don't have motivation to produce if they can't make a living out of it.

That is simply not true. Most artists do what they do without ever seeing any money for it.

[_DeadFred_]

Under the current system people can release everything they want as free use.

How much media that the average person choses to consume is this 'free use' media? How much is media that artists chose to make money from?

[komali2]

This doesn't do much for the argument that artists only do art for money. Everyone knows what happens to free use art, same as what happens to FOSS: corpos bundle it up and sell it back to people.

By the way, I do know a lot of artists that just give their work away for free. Hell, any Burn is just a bunch of free art that usually gets lit on fire or destroyed after a week. There's also graffiti art which is uncompensated and usually painted over within a month.

[pavlovsfrog]

fwiw, the vast majority of my working musician friends (who do also hold day jobs) would rather you pirate their music than stream it on spotify. they make basically all of their income from music via touring, streaming income might pay for a coffee or two a month.

[komali2]

> Creative people don't have motivation to produce if they can't make a living out of it.

I challenge you to ask 10 creative people in your life if they would stop doing whatever it is they do if they had a billion dollars.

[lotsofpulp]

The desire to create something does not seem like an immutable characteristic.

[v9v]

Would they do what they do if they had zero dollars?

[komali2]

> Would they do what they do if they had zero dollars?

No, probably not. Isn't it a shame we live in a world where we have the technology to automate all meaningful production, but people still need to justify their existence through often meaningless labor?

That said, I know artists that make the bare minimum to survive, on purpose, so they have more time to focus on art.

[nani8ot]

Yes, as long as they have enough to survive, people generally have some free time. I know someone who's living paycheck to paycheck and they make music as a hobby. Obviously, if you have to work 16 hours a day to survive they wouldn't do it – or at least they wouldn't have the capacity to share it.

[lukifer]

"I'm not a capitalist, I am a creativist... Capitalists make things to make money, I like to make money to make things." - Eddie Izzard

It's more about the viability of making any kind of living from one's creative work, not motivation to create. (Though for creative works with large upfront costs, eg films, ROI motivation is relevant for backers.)