The post was published on December 20th. The size of the archive is indeed impressive. Let’s talk about 300TB of music filesall derived from a large-scale scraping operation done on Spotify. In short, we are talking about aprocedural operation with which all the vouchers stored by the platform were downloaded. Or rather, almost everyone. To be precise they were taken “86 million of music files representing approximately the 99.6% of listeners”.
The coup was carried out by activists of Anna’s Archivea collective that is creating a huge catalog online. It is a catalog open to anyone. They started with books and now it seems we have decided to move to books too audio files.
The download system and blocking by AgCom
Certain. The project is not exactly in line with the laws protecting copyrightso much so that in Italy the site anna-archive.org it is blocked by AgCom. Usually Anna’s Archive’s line of defense is that in fact they they do not allow direct downloads of files but users are only directed to users or platforms where they are actually hosted. To be clear, the system is practically the same as the Torrent platform.
Spotify down today, app problems for an hour
In general the objective declared by the activists is to preserve cultural heritage. A mission that started first of all from books. Not only that. On the project blog they explain that their strength is precisely that of acting outside the legal systems: “There are libraries, archives, laboratories, museums and other institutions tasked with this type of preservation. Many of these are well funded by governments, private citizens or corporations. But they have a huge blind spot: the legal system.”
Spotify has a slightly different take. The platform left a comment to Billboard magazine, speaking directly about piracy: “Spotify has identified and disabled illicit user accounts that carried out illegal scraping operations. We have implemented new security measures for this type of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring any suspicious behavior.” And then: “We are against piracy”.
