Grow yr own Archivez

The recent news about The Internet Archive losing its right to be a digital library that lends ebooks is grim in any context, but especially grim during this current wave of tech companies freely and shamelessly scraping the entire internet for content to feed to their large language models so they can give hugely profitable companies excuses to fire artists and generate an endless amounts of AI trash that will make everything online even worse than it already is.

I'm not an internet commentator, so rarely put the effort into forming a coherent, articulate opinion about any of this. But 65 and I have been banging a vague, possibly incoherent, but certainly sincere and vehement anti-AI drum for a few years now. And combined with this Internet Archive news, it has really given me another firm push towards both cheering on Team Luddite and also defending internet piracy. Because time and time again it gets harder and worse to pay for anything digital and even if you can, if you read the small print it will probably turn out that you don't actually own it anyway.

And that screenshot above: you could pretty much say the same thing about Spotify, right? They're allowed to host all the music in the world and arbitrarily decide that they're not going to pay royalties to artists that don't get many streams, but you'd better not go to Soulseek and download those songs without paying the artists anything!

It's not like I often visit The Internet Archive, but cool things I have used it for over the years include:

• tracking down long forgotten sci-fi novels I had fond memories of reading as a teenager.
• downloading catalogues of gorgeous 1980s graphic design work - logos from various telecommunications companies - while researching the design of Wreckage Systems.
• discovering the David W. Niven Jazz Collection, an absolutely astonishing collection of Jazz cassettes painstakingly put together by this guy who occasionally adds his own commentary between tracks, like he's hosting a radio show. (Seriously it is so good. I wrote this listening to Tape 54.)

The very few times I used The Internet Archive as a 'digital library', I admit that I used DeDRM tools on whatever epub or PDF I'd borrowed so I could keep hold of it afterwards. This behaviour, as far as I understand, is why the handful of celebrity authors and big publishing companies demanded that this service cannot be allowed to exist. Except: the only material I ever did this with I could not buy elsewhere, or I had bought in the past but had lost or was in storage or I had given away.

Because if I wanted to download new, big, popular books by celebrity authors for free, why would I bother going to the Internet Archive? I would have to sign up, navigate their digital library, place a hold on a digital copy and then patiently wait my turn to be able to digitally borrow it. Instead, I could just go to The Pirate Bay or Libgen and download an un-DRMed epub in about 20 seconds.

And let's say, hypothetically, that I do that. Well you know what I also still do? Buy a stupid amount of actual books!

WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

I dunno. I'm just a noisy musician. But I do know that all of these things exist simultaneously:

• 65daysofstatic has almost certainly earned far more from people buying digital copies of our music on Bandcamp than we have ever earned from all our streaming royalties combined.
• Our entire back catalogue is available to download for free (and very well curated, full of rarities!) on the main unofficial 65daysofstatic fan page on vkontakte (the Russian equivalent of Facebook).
• The same goes for Soulseek and presumably wherever else people pirate and share music.
• There are bootlegs and 65 mp3s flying around the 65 Discord server all the time.
• As far as I can tell, broadly speaking, anybody who is interested enough in our band to have sought out any of the above has also found a way that suits them and is within their means to support us financially.
• Fuck that guy who runs Spotify in particular! I really don't like him.

That's all for now. No conclusions really. Mostly just wanted to share that link to the amazing Jazz cassettes and show The Internet Archive some love.

In the extremely unlikely event that you're signed up to this newsletter but not the 65daysofstatic one, a bunch of our lesser-heard Bandcamp-only albums are being drip-fed onto streaming services, starting today with Utopian Frequencies and Disquiet. Check that out here.

Bye for now.