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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

> that they think is related to some undetermined future nebulously bad thing

I mean, Anna's Archive was pretty clear about the future bad thing.

Spotify didn't "think", it wasn't just "related", nothing was "undetermined" or "nebulous".

Anna's Archive explicitly announced they were going to start distributing Spotify's music files. It's not even a case of hosting links to torrents but not seeding -- no, they were going to be doing the seeding too. You can't get more clear-cut than that.

I'm not taking anybody's side here, as to what copyright law ought to be, but Spotify isn't abusing the legal process here.

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> Anna's Archive explicitly announced they were going to start distributing Spotify's music files. It's not even a case of hosting links to torrents but not seeding -- no, they were going to be doing the seeding too. You can't get more clear-cut than that.

You can get more "clear cut" than that. You could rule when there were damages or law was actually broken. Committing a crime is not the same as saying you will commit a crime. ie. I will rob the bank on the Chase Bank Kraemer Branch in Orange County. Now try and prosecute me. Yes, I understand this would fall under criminal vs civil. The issue is about the law being applied in the way the benefits the ones with the most money, more often than not, violating equal protections and further eroding public confidence in the US legal system.

> Actually committing a crime is not the same as saying you will commit a crime.

No, but it can have a lot of legal repercussions, like restraining orders, you can be arrested for making a threat, search warrants may be issued... and in the case of corporations, restraining orders and injunctions. Like here. This is all very standard stuff. There's absolutely nothing exceptional about the court process in this particular case.

>On January 2, the music companies asked for a temporary restraining order, and the court granted it the same day.

That pretty much tells me all about what courts care about. Can't get TRO's when the government is attacking its people, but when there's a sniff of sharing music? Instant hammer.

EDIT: to answer a response I got about "courts aren't supposed to 'care'", that's the point of a TRO:

>To obtain a TRO, a party must convince the judge that they will suffer immediate irreparable injury unless the order is issued.

TRO's are rare and losing it just means you need to wait for the actual court case. That's why I'm making such a big deal of this. Getting a TRO the same day because maybe one day some website will have archives of music files just shows how out of touch the justice system is with tech.

Law is made of people and politics touches everything.

Even with separate of powers, lobbies make sure those they represent get good treatments.

I guess this is a naive question, but where are the lobbies that care about the people? Or even common decency at this point? It really feels like people are treating the US less as an investment and more like a sinking ship to abandon. And they were the ones that shot the holes to begin with.

There aren't any, everyone's out for themselves, further diluting any soft power the masses had. After like 99% of the population doesn't have a stock value associated, might as well join the Mobile Infantry at this point.

There are plenty. The issue is funding thus even cumulatively have less impact than say, APAC.

Also "the people" have a lot of different things they individually care about, and aren't well organized around those either.

> Getting a TRO the same day because maybe one day some website will have archives of music files just shows how out of touch the justice system is with tech.

Huh? It's not a "maybe one day", it was a public announcement by AA that they were absolutely going to do this soon.

And TRO's are exactly for this, when irreparable harm might occur. Nothing out of touch at all.

Now, granted the site still operates under other domains. But it's certainly expected that they would block the domain controlled by a US TLD, i.e. do the little they can. Really, what else would you possibly expect?

>it was a public announcement by AA that they were absolutely going to do this soon.

"soon" isn't good enough for your typical TRO. To emphasize, "immediate, irreparable damage". And even if it was tomorrow, you really need to be unaware of the internet to argue that dumping a few more torrents into the wild is causing "irreparable damage". Do any of us really buy that?

>Really, what else would you possibly expect?

A TRO to be denied as usual because a few more torrents is not going to bankrupt a billion dollar music industry and to proceed at a later time like anyone else in the legal system?

If denying a TRO of someone illegally deported to a foreign prison isn't a high enough bar, you're not convincing me some torrents is.

Depending on the jurisdiction, you can absolutely be punished even if you were only in the planning stage of the heist.

"I'm not taking anybody's side here, as to what copyright law ought to be, but Spotify isn't abusing the legal process here".

Normally, only those who own one or more of the exclusive rights in copyright can actually enforce. Spotify does not own copyright in the music involved in the archive, unless they created some of it (which would be an interesting story, actually - spotify competing with its own artists).

So normally, they would not be able to sue for copyright related violations against anyone.

The other plaintiffs (record companies) are not abusing legal process, but it is unclear what spotify is doing in this lawsuit.

They almost certainly do not own meaningful copyright in the metadata, either, and that would be a bad precedent to see set.

This is not unusual. Spotify is included because it is a relevant source of evidence as the custodian of the data. It improves the narrative that the data wasn't just indexed but obtained illegally.

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