A niche band from Asia I loved as a teenager disbanded in the early 2000s. Due to legal reasons their work is in forever limbo, no Spotify, official YouTube etc. Best you can get is 2nd hand CDs on online marketplaces for a premium.
One guy was seeding a 4GB torrent over on PirateBay from 2008 with every song, music video, numerous interviews etc. Reasons like this is why pirating needs to stay alive. Legend made me want to seed it with him longterm. Now we’re 2 seeders strong.
Keep sailing pirates, and whenever possible please seed.
There are definitely workarounds and mitigations that could solve a lot of the issues people have with IA. Unfortunately Jason Scott seems unwilling or unable to implement them. Based on what happened with the “textfiles” thing, I get the feeling he would rather see everything burn than give up any control. I hope I’m wrong, but I’m not holding my breath.
The issue isn’t that IA has problems, it’s that people have been pointing those problems out for years and nothing has changed. Eventually the disks are going to rot or the feds are going to come knocking and it’ll be too late.
To be clear, I’m not attacking Jason here. He’s running a great project using a lot of his own money and resources and I think it’s perfectly valid if he wants to keep an iron grip on how things work. There are real problems though, and it would be wrong to pretend there aren’t. We have to be prepared for a future where IA won’t be around forever, because nothing is around forever, and the IA isn’t an exception.