What Can We Give One Another? On Public Domain, Preservation, and Living Without Copyright · brennan.day

"Here's an idea. What if everything you consumed was freely available? Not pirated. Not "technically legal." Actually, genuinely free. Public domain. Creative Commons. Open source. Free software. Free culture.

News came out in the past few days about the fact that the largest shadow library on the Internet, Anna's Archive, has successfully scraped Spotify's music catalog and is planning on releasing it to the public in whole. 256 million tracks of metadata, 86 million audio files, nearly 300 terabytes of data, representing 99.6% of all listens on Spotify.

Spotify is furious, calling Anna's Archive "anti-copyright extremists" and shutting down the user accounts involved. But Anna's Archive frames it differently: "preserving humanity's knowledge and culture." Creating "the world's first 'preservation archive' for music which is fully open."

I think about the illegal-yet-morally-grey work such as this. The preservation of our art and culture seem far more important than copyright law. And perhaps it is a worthwhile trade-off."