[HN Gopher] Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago
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Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago
Author : luuurker
Score : 276 points
Date : 2024-06-01 13:08 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (torrentfreak.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (torrentfreak.com)
| NathanielBaking wrote:
| Everything is free now That's what they say Everything I ever
| done Gonna give it away Someone hit the big score They figured it
| out That we're gonna do it anyway Even if it doesn't pay
|
| Everything Is Free Song by Gillian Welch
| bradleyjg wrote:
| Napster was a big part of it, credit where credit is due, but
| faster networks were the critical ingredient. I was in college at
| the time and it blew up on campus, but for my friends still in
| high school on DSL or even still POTS it was far less useful.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I was on 56k and Napster was the best and fastest thing around
| for a while, but more importantly had the largest library.
| Gnutella/Kazaa took over but only once Napster shut down and
| people started making their libraries available there. Torrents
| came in short order but that was more coupled to when broadband
| became much more widely adopted
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Universities & Colleges have been ground zero for establishing
| pretty much every major advancement, from the internet itself
| to Doom, file sharing and Facebook. Lots of resources combined
| with young, rich people with big ideas and energy who get the
| benefit of knowledge & wisdom while almost universially staking
| out a position in opposition to the established "way things
| are".
| sizzzzlerz wrote:
| Still remember the very last day Napster was alive. It was an
| absolute feeding frenzy as thousands and thousands of people were
| attempting to download everything they could before it all went
| away. Napster was, basically, a giant middle finger to the record
| companies and their control over what got released and their
| ability to put out albums containing one or two songs people
| wanted and then stuffed with what ever crap they could shovel
| into it.
|
| The music business changed that day.
| echelon wrote:
| > According to the RIAA's former CEO, Hilary Rosen, a few months
| after Napster's release, the music industry shifted into full
| panic mode. In February 2000, all major label executives
| discussed the threat during an RIAA board meeting at the Four
| Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles.
|
| > "I will never forget this day. All of the heads of the labels,
| literally the titans of the music business, were in that room. I
| had somebody wheel in a PC and put some speakers up and I started
| doing a name that tune," Rosen later recalled.
|
| > The major music bosses started to name tracks, including some
| that weren't even released yet, and time and again Napster would
| come up with results. Needless to say, the board was terrified.
|
| They're about to be more terrified. Suno and Udio are just the
| beginning of the complete unraveling of the need for studio
| capital.
|
| It's going to happen to Hollywood too.
| gedy wrote:
| Maybe, but don't discount media lobbying gov't, and trying to
| generate moral outrage about AI stealing from artists, deep
| fakes, AI safety, etc to make sure only big corps control AI.
| jkolio wrote:
| One of the funniest moments in modern music history, to me,
| was when Kim Dotcom got a bunch of superstars to sing on a
| track about how much they loved MegaUpload. One of the least
| funny moments was when the RIAA and MPAA essentially directed
| American and New Zealand authorities to raid his house, shut
| down the MegaUpload website, seize all the servers, and jail
| a bunch of his employees (Kim himself only barely escaping
| extradition).
|
| Episodes like that really do make me fearful of what
| corporations might push government to do. If they want to get
| you on something that isn't illegal, they'll try to make it
| illegal. If it's already illegal, they'll try to make the
| punishment as severe as possible. Oversight of, and
| accountability from, these entities is paramount.
| HeatrayEnjoyer wrote:
| >AI stealing from artists, deep fakes, AI safety
|
| This isn't generated outage, it's genuine, and objectively
| justified. Trying to find clients was hard enough for artists
| to begin with.
|
| We should be automating hard labor so we can focus on art and
| human interaction, but instead we're automating art and
| interaction so we can focus on slaving away even harder. This
| is somehow worse than any traditional dystopia story.
| Government propaganda posters were at least the work of a
| human hand.
| echelon wrote:
| It's not a conscious choice. It's the fact that the
| convolutions that create human visual and auditory pleasure
| are simple signals relative to logic and reasoning.
|
| Nature itself is somehow shaped such that it is easier to
| create beautiful patterns than it is to engineer complex
| logical deductions.
|
| It is a fundamental aspect of physics and reality. Beauty
| is just simple patterns.
|
| We figured out that art is simple math. Engineering and law
| and planning not so much.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I'd phrase it as: pop art and culture have been
| optimizing themselves against the human psyche for so
| long (much longer than engineering and law and planning)
| that we have a pretty firm bead on what an every-person
| will like (mathematically-speaking).
|
| There's tons of avant garde art, but on average it's less
| popular (because that's not what it's optimized for).
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if GenAI commoditizes pop art,
| but in turn creates greater demand for abstract, more
| unique forms.
| skydhash wrote:
| By its nature, pop art and culture reduce itself to the
| common expectations of everyone. And as such has only few
| knobs to tune. But humans can appreciate a wide range of
| qualities and the more you play on these dimensions, the
| more reduced the people that will "get" it and appreciate
| it.
|
| GenAI can be great for pop art, but try to create
| something unique to you or another person, and it will
| fail miserably.
| echelon wrote:
| > GenAI can be great for pop art, but try to create
| something unique to you or another person, and it will
| fail miserably.
|
| GenAI is just a tool. Creating unique art with unique
| perspectives is going to be more accessible to more
| people.
|
| Not everyone will put the work in, but there's a new
| opportunity in a world full of opportunity cost.
| internet101010 wrote:
| Yep. Imagine you are a producer that doesn't sing very
| well but knows exactly what you want. There are TTS VSTs
| that allow for custom models. You can change the key,
| length, modulation, etc. by just dragging the mouse along
| the word(s) and it integrates into your DAW like any
| other instrument.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I'd make the argument that the nature of tools drives
| much of mass/low-cost art (that is, the majority).
|
| Very few people have the training and complete skill set
| to fully customize everything.
|
| Consequently, the further you get away from "doing the
| thing" (e.g. playing an instrument) to "operating the
| tool that does the thing" (e.g. writing music for a
| player piano), the stronger impression the tool leaves on
| your work.
|
| See also the corralling of c64 demos into hardware
| limitations. Or early electronic music vs 80s+.
| echelon wrote:
| The electronic music point is good, but I wouldn't label
| electronic music as inferior or not art.
|
| It's about choosing which parts of your stack are
| artisanal vs which parts are implemented for you. These
| choices impact the form factor, but I wouldn't say that
| they diminish the work itself.
| skydhash wrote:
| > _We figured out that art is simple math._
|
| Art is not about making things beautiful. It's about
| making things meaningful. Unless compelled by external
| reasons (Money,...) artists wish to express themselves
| and to do so the best way the can.
|
| > _Engineering and law and planning not so much._
|
| All of these aims to be as precise as they can be and
| wish that they could be Math. But Nature and Humanity
| randomness won't let them be.
| wrl wrote:
| > We figured out that art is simple math. Engineering and
| law and planning not so much.
|
| Simple math... but mostly a ton of existing human-
| generated art. Don't act like generative AI isn't
| standing on a _lot_ of collective shoulders.
|
| > Engineering and law and planning not so much.
|
| Maybe OpenAI should have trained it on that first? Simple
| math, right?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Don't act like generative AI isn't standing on a lot of
| collective shoulders.
|
| Everything is standing on a lot of collective shoulders.
| gedy wrote:
| Don't blame "AI" for all the cheapening of the arts. It's
| been that way for a long time, largely due to mass media
| giving away for very cheap. No one already wants to pay for
| anything, and artists don't help by putting their works in
| digital form on the internet. If I want to train a computer
| model on all this digital stuff, so be it.
|
| If you want to be an artist: perform music live, make a
| real object like a painting or sculpture, act in a play,
| etc. Don't be a digital "artist" it's already worth next to
| nothing.
| Teever wrote:
| The royal we.
|
| What steps have you personally taken to automating hard
| labour?
| echelon wrote:
| > objectively justified.
|
| Subjectively.
|
| GenAI is just a tool.
|
| Artists learn the craft of analogy, allusion, satire, and
| storytelling. These are portable to new forms and methods
| of creation, and they'll continue to serve artists that use
| GenAI.
|
| Software engineers have been constantly reinventing
| themselves since forever. The stack and frameworks you
| learn won't last forever, and the field continually gets
| easier to enter year over year. This is no different than
| what artists now face.
|
| And now bigger forms of automation and process are
| available to artists. They don't need studios or big
| budgets to achieve monumental works - they'll be making
| movies and games soon. (Without publishers!) And the 99% of
| non-artists aren't going to put the work in.
|
| These tools are going to be incredible for the artists that
| adopt them. We're going to see a whole bunch of Vivienne
| Medranoses, Zach Hadels, and Michael Cusacks.
| devbent wrote:
| > We should be automating hard labor so we can focus on art
| and human interaction
|
| We have being doing that for over 100 years now. Look at
| industrial productivity per worker, it skyrocketed
| throughout the 20th century. It has plateaued only because
| all the low and medium hanging fruit was long ago picked
| and now engineers are busy doing incremental improvements.
|
| I am genuinely curious what sacrifices would have to be
| made of we went with a fully automated community, from
| growing food to putting it on store shelves, to running the
| store, cleaning it, everything. Obviously not all foods are
| possible to automate end to end, but I wonder how far we
| could go.
| sumedh wrote:
| Steve Jobs was able to use their fear to sign up most
| publishers on itunes.
| 39896880 wrote:
| And sell outrageously priced MP3 players. There's no way
| people were stocking those things with music they paid for.
| tbihl wrote:
| Mostly, yeah. My dad, brothers, and I (all one household)
| had probably 200 CDs between us that we ripped and listened
| to repeatedly. Paid once per person? Doubtful, but yes, we
| paid.
| echelon wrote:
| This is exactly what happens when a reverse salient
| collapses and opens up a new channel of distribution.
| jdenning wrote:
| OT: thanks for introducing me to the term "reverse
| salient"! That's a very useful concept.
| musicale wrote:
| > outrageously priced MP3 players
|
| Like the best Apple designs, the iPod redefined its product
| category. And it put Apple back on track for ARM-based
| mobile devices.
|
| > There's no way people were stocking those things with
| music they paid for
|
| Indeed. But you could also rip physical CDs, and the iTunes
| store managed to sell a lot of 99 cent song downloads, as
| it was legal, easier than messing with file sharing, and
| cheaper than buying a whole CD just for a single song.
|
| Arguably the music industry messed up greatly by not making
| CD singles cheap and ubiquitous (and solving issues with 3"
| CDs in slot-loading car players, etc.)
| samatman wrote:
| > _no wireless. less space than a nomad. outrageously
| expensive_
| localfirst wrote:
| I was reading parents comment with a bit of cynicism
|
| until I tried suno and I believe we are going to see
| significant garnishing of wages in creative field
|
| https://suno.com/song/dc950e10-6bbe-4649-8cdb-7a4d81762aae
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| _I believe we are going to see significant garnishing of
| wages in creative field_
|
| _A wage garnishment is any legal or equitable procedure
| through which some portion of a person 's earnings is
| required to be withheld for the payment of a debt. Most
| garnishments are made by court order._
|
| You think because of auto generated music there are going to
| be court orders to take money out of the paychecks of people
| in 'creative fields'?
|
| Garnish wages means taking money out of what someone has
| already earned.
| mmh0000 wrote:
| Napster was such an improvement over what it replaced, but, it's
| funny by today's standards Napster was so "basic".
|
| I remember waiting 3+ hours for a single song to download. Then
| discovering it wasn't what I wanted but a troll who renamed the
| `Barney The Dinosaur I love you` song. Then I'd spend another 3+
| hours downloading a different song. Ah 56k internet, what fun.
|
| Today, TPB and a quick search can give you an artist's entire
| discography in one go. Or if you're into automation, lidarr ,
| sonarr , and radarr can pull in your favorite things as soon as
| they're released.
|
| What I find most strange about the modern day piracy is quality.
| It blows my mind how different groups fight to offer the best
| version of a free thing. And they're so good at it, that the
| pirated product is usually substantially better than the official
| version.
| im3w1l wrote:
| 3+hours? I remember being able to download roughly 10 songs in
| an hour.
| mmh0000 wrote:
| Look. It was 25 years ago. I'm an old man now. My memory of
| that time is a haze of multiplayer Quake strategy. How about
| I rephrase it: it FELT like 3+ hours.
| jl6 wrote:
| It could still have been 3 hours as you would have been
| constrained not only by your own download speed, but also
| the peer's upload speed, and they might have been on an
| even crappier dial-up line or sharing their bandwidth with
| other uploads.
| brabel wrote:
| IIRC Napster downloaded from multiple peers if possible.
| Each peer could restrict bandwidth so that they didn't
| get overwhelmed with outbound traffic. So speed would
| depend vastly on the popularity of content... if many
| people could provide a song, you could download it
| quickly (for the time: maybe a few minutes per song), but
| those where you had to rely on a single peer at a time
| could take hours.
| bawolff wrote:
| I'm not sure, but i think it was napster's succesors that
| introduced that. I dont think napster had that sort of
| thing.
| brabel wrote:
| Too long ago, you could be right, maybe KaZaA?
| bawolff wrote:
| I think so. KaZaa was somewhat famous for implementing
| that feature using the non-cryptographically secure
| UUHash algorithm (instead of something like sha1) for
| better performance, which allowed trolls to insert fake
| file parts into your downloads.
| brabel wrote:
| I found a post talking about KaZaA and Napster, and
| that's right: I forgot but Napster had a central server
| to provide files, that's why it was so easy to shut
| down...
|
| https://computer.howstuffworks.com/kazaa.htm
|
| KaZaA didn't store the files itself so it was thought
| they wouldn't be possible to shutdown. From the site
| above:
|
| "While Kazaa claims to be "completely legal," there are
| those who disagree: The free-to-download blue files are
| controlled by Kazaa users and include copyrighted
| content."
|
| "Later that year, Kazaa was sued again, this time in the
| United States by the Recording Industry Association of
| America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association (MPAA).
| As of February 2005, the decision in that suit is still
| pending."
|
| I remember they started suing individual users at that
| time... I found an article explaining that:
|
| https://www.videoproc.com/resource/what-happened-to-
| kazaa.ht...
|
| "In September 2003, the RIAA filed lawsuits against over
| 250 individuals, accusing them of illegally distributing
| about 1,000 copyright music files each, using P2P
| networks. RIAA sought an average compensation of $3,000
| per case."
|
| The result of the first case:
|
| "In July 2006, the MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.
| caused Sharman to settle for $100 million, the amount to
| compensate the loss of four major music labels - EMI,
| Sony BMG, Universal Music, and Warner Music. The company
| also agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to the studios
| in the industry."
|
| It's unclear exactly how Kazaa got down, the article
| concludes with "In August 2012, the Kazaa website was no
| longer active."... "the rise of legal streaming services
| such as iTunes, Spotify, and Netflix further compounded
| Kazaa's demise.".
|
| Looks like the music industry managed to scare people
| away from pirating instead of actually succeeding in
| bringing them down directly, which is more or less what I
| remember.
| bawolff wrote:
| bit torrent is basically the succesor to all this, and
| torrenting sites like the pirate bay are still going
| strong.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Napster used a centralized server for indexing but
| downloads were peer-to-peer. This is what made Napster so
| awesome on college campuses: you could _find_ anything,
| but if you chose a local peer, the actual download would
| happen over the college LAN at godly speeds.
|
| Gnutella brought peer-to-peer searches. Basically it used
| a flood-fill algorithm: your search would be broadcast to
| all connected peers, which would broadcast it to all
| peers that hadn't seen it yet, until somebody responded
| with the file and their IP and you could download
| directly from them. Interestingly Ethereum uses basically
| the same algorithm for block distribution, with some
| optimizations that were first published by RTM, who was
| one of the founders of YCombinator.
|
| Kazaa's innovation was to split the peer space into
| "ordinary nodes" and "superpeers", with the observation
| that not all bandwidth links were equal. It would enlist
| hosts on high-bandwidth connections to form quasi-
| centralized indexing nodes to organize the network
| topology for all the low-bandwidth consumer nodes. It's a
| similar principle to how the Lightning Network works for
| Bitcoin, or how L2s on Ethereum operate. This also made
| it easier to shutdown than Gnutella though, because being
| a superpeer made you a legal target for the RIAA.
| tithe wrote:
| Fun fact: Kazaa's inventors (and their P2P architecture)
| would later go on to build "Sky peer-to-peer" AKA Skype.
| parineum wrote:
| Napster kept a central repository if who had what files,
| not the files themselves.
|
| Kazaa and ed2k were distributed. I think ed2k is still
| viable.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| 25 years ago i had an engineer come out: everyone on the
| street was sharing a connection in the local box. We
| chatted about tech etc and he put me on a single
| connection. Sod the neighbors (their connections didn't
| get slower, mine got faster).
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Curious to hear more informed thoughts from old ISP
| folks, but afaik one of the things that made Napster
| possible was that 56kbps connections were roughly
| symmetrical (~33kbps up?).
|
| By capitalizing on the oft unused upload bandwidth,
| Napster provided a benefit at little cost.
|
| Would be fascinated to hear what this looked like on the
| PSTN backend load side, ~2000.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| One of the coolest things about the modem age is that you
| could easily try a different ISP if you weren't happy
| with your current ISP's performance (upstream and down).
| temporarely wrote:
| I would think symmetric bandwidth is baked into switched
| circuit networks by definition.
|
| A bit earlier than 2000 /g
| https://lineofsightgroup.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2017/01/phon...
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _56kbps connections were roughly symmetrical_
|
| I don't think so, asymmetry was the innovation that made
| 56K possible on POTS (plain old telephone sevice, with
| only enough bandwidth for squawky voice)
| ethbr1 wrote:
| From a spec standpoint, acoustic modems were building
| over wires spec'd for bidirectional voice transmissions,
| i.e. symmetrical.
|
| I'm curious about the nuances, but it seems like the last
| mile download/upload imbalance was created by the
| originating signal mode?
|
| Download = First mile internet to ISP could be upgraded
| to digital, and thus grab some extra throughout by
| avoiding analog noise handling
|
| Upload = First mile user to ISP was inherently analog
| over phone lines, and so sacrificed throughput for line
| noise tolerance
|
| https://www.edn.com/an-introduction-to-
| the-v-90-56k-modem/
| aeyes wrote:
| It was 56k down, 33.6k up.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Sorta-kinda.
|
| v.90 didn't work at all between two regular POTS-
| connected analog modems. In order for a v.90 connection
| to happen, the ISP-end of the connection needed to be a
| digital circuit (typically using ISDN PRI).
|
| By being digital, the gear at the ISP-end was able to
| precisely and distinctly control each individual bits
| that would ultimately be converted to analog at a point
| that was physically near to the user (their local CO
| switch). This was what gave us asymmetric nature of "56k"
| v.90.
|
| Eventually, we got good enough at learning how to handle
| changing line conditions and thereby twiddle the bits
| with a modicum of precision in the upstream direction.
| This allowed us to produce a standard with a bit more
| symmetry: v.92.
|
| v.92 offered up to "56k" (~53k due to FCC limits) down,
| and 48k up.
|
| A lot of users -- at least in the US -- never experienced
| v.92. It wasn't formalized until right around the turn of
| the century, which corresponded well with the time when
| xDSL, DOCSIS, and/or BRI started showing up even in
| fairly small not-completely-rural communities at fairly
| reasonable prices. The local dialup ISP market was
| beginning to die by then and many never bothered with
| upgrading their gear to support v.92 before they closed
| their doors for good.
|
| (All of this wacky dial-up modem tech was both enabled
| and limited by digital switching in the PSTN. Speeds over
| dry-pair phone lines could be far higher if there wasn't
| a digital conversion in the middle, and avoiding that
| digital conversion is how DSL became possible.
|
| Which is interesting: A DSL circuit was meant to go only
| across town (ish), and was always betwixt two fixed
| points. But a point-to-point v.90 or v.92 connection
| could be established to any properly-equipped machine by
| just dialing its phone number, and that machine could be
| across town or on the other side of a continent; it
| didn't care.)
| giantrobot wrote:
| The 56k specs were _asymmetrical_ , the downstream
| connection could be 56k (actually 53k) while the upstream
| connection was only 33.6k. The key with v.90 was the ISP
| could send a fully digital signal down to the customer
| but they could only send an analog signal up which was
| capped by physics to 33.6k.
|
| The later v.92 spec supported a digital upstream and
| could hit 48k upload.
|
| Regardless, dialup users did not have a lot of upstream
| bandwidth available. They also suffered through high
| packet loss and latency making their throughput even
| lower than their line speed would suggest.
| Asmod4n wrote:
| maybe you are misremembering creating mp3 files from CDs,
| on a 486 it took quite a while to generate a mp3 from a 4
| minute wav file. Pentiums with MMX made it quite alot
| faster.
| bloopernova wrote:
| You wanna LAN party in the old people's home? Although I
| was better at Unreal Tournament, I like the weapons more.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Nah, your memory serves you well. It really did take three
| hours sometimes.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I don't think you had figured out you needed to download
| from hosts with the lowest ping to get the top modem speed.
| I remember like 15min for one song on a 56k modem but like
| 6-7 min at top speed, which was rare.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| It was more like 4 mins per song on a 56K modem. So you
| could listen a full song while downloading another. Hence
| pretty acceptable. The less acceptable part was that nobody
| could use the phone.
| Vvector wrote:
| I remember being queued up to download one song from a
| specific host. My download with be like 6th in line.
| madduci wrote:
| Yes it was for me 3+ hours. It all depended on codec and
| length of song. And also the fact that your phone line was
| kept busy while using it and loosing the connection when your
| parents wanted to make a telephone call. It was weird but
| funny at same time
| nostrademons wrote:
| Hah, my first MP3 took about 2 weeks to download, over ZModem
| on a 14.4KBps link. I had to work around my parents'
| Internet-time restrictions - they'd say "times up", I had to
| disconnect, then I'd pick up again the next time I was
| allowed on the computer. Then I needed to convince them to
| buy a ZIP disk to free up enough hard disk space so I could
| decompress it (my Centris 660AV wasn't fast enough for real-
| time MP3 playback), then it took another 2 hours to
| decompress once I'd freed up the requisite 40 MB of hard disk
| space.
|
| It was 1995 and pretty magical to get CD-quality audio coming
| out of the computer, though.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| We had rural phone lines with lots of noise. I think I got
| 3kB a sec max on those things even with 56k.
| skrause wrote:
| Most MP3s were 128 kbps back then, so a song would
| typically be around 3-4 MB. Even at 3 kB per second a
| download would only take around 20 minutes.
| nvarsj wrote:
| > What I find most strange about the modern day piracy is
| quality.
|
| For a lot of pirates, it's a niche hobby to preserve the best
| quality version of some media / art. I see it as an underground
| librarian archivist movement.
|
| In 100 years iTunes may be dead, but there will be some person
| with every album available in high quality lossless FLAC. Same
| with Netflix and it's bit starved encodes.
| eisa01 wrote:
| In addition, quite a lot of the backlog has never been
| released on iTunes
|
| I wanted to complete a set of DJ mixes, and had to purchase
| them on Discogs to as there were no digital copies, one cost
| me EUR50 for one CD...
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| Hahahaha I had the same problem. Had to buy a vinyl for
| 80EUR and digitilize it. Did upload it then. Now the artist
| has a bandcamp with the collection for free so sharing is
| caring
| exe34 wrote:
| already, Disney has been censoring past episodes not even
| based on today's sensibilities but it seems purely based on
| keywords.
|
| there's an episode of the suite life of zach and cody where
| zach pretends to have dyslexia in order to get extra time in
| his exams, and near the end of the episode he gets busted and
| they have a thoughtful conversation about how it's unfair and
| hurts the people who need the extra time, and he should be
| less lazy and do the work, etc, and somehow that's too
| offensive now.
| cyanwave wrote:
| My hope is human nature will prevail. SOME are that
| sensitive but I think there's a growing amount of people
| maybe even a majority that don't want censorship and
| nannie's in media / comedy etc.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Disney is only slightly better about nuking old "offensive"
| content than other providers. Many times they just gave an
| unskippable "this is culturally offensive to some" text and
| call it good. For example the old lady and the tramp has
| that "we are Siamese" song, which I guess is offensive...
| at least they still let you watch it.
|
| Hulu on the other hand just pulls shit. For example they
| pulled my favorite it's always sunny episode where they do
| that diehard movie. I guess the fact they do black face
| makes it racist (which they call out as such in the show
| itself!) and since we are all apparently too stupid to
| think for ourselves about the content we watch they better
| block it. After all they know better than me about what is
| offensive.
|
| ... shit like that... _that_ is what is gonna lead me back
| to piracy.
| exe34 wrote:
| in the case I mentioned, the episode "smarter and
| smarterer" just went down the memory hole, it's like it
| was never there.
| pavlov wrote:
| Indeed. Many of these pirates are the most devoted fans of
| the music they store and distribute. They go to gigs, buy
| merchandise and vinyl editions, and otherwise support the
| artists directly.
|
| In contrast companies like Spotify don't care about the music
| at all. They would just as well sell you white noise if it
| would somehow give them the slightest improvement in growth
| or margins.
|
| Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, regularly makes statements that
| suggest he'd rather see professional musicians disappear.
| Most recently:
|
| https://www.nme.com/news/music/music-fans-and-artists-hit-
| ba...
| listenallyall wrote:
| > Many of these pirates are the most devoted fans of the
| music
|
| ...but most are simply pirates, completely detached from
| the music or the artist. Let's not glorify them.
| rickdicker wrote:
| Presumably if you're pirating music you aren't
| "completely detached" from the music - otherwise why
| would you do it?
| ineptech wrote:
| In the early 80s, the local pirate scene in my hometown
| revolved around a guy who I'll call George. George's
| entire basement was devoted to boxes full of diskettes (5
| 1/4" in those days) of pirated software and photocopied
| documentation. All kinds of software - games, office
| apps, scientific stuff, you name it. Some was downloaded
| from BBS's but the majority of it was shipped USPS from
| god knows who.
|
| Thing is, he used virtually none of it. He collected
| software for the sake of collecting it. He didn't even
| play video games, just loaded them up once to make sure
| they ran. He was a hoarder basically, who had stumbled
| into a niche hobby, and like most hobbyists he would
| happily share it with anyone who asked.
|
| I'm not saying every pirate is like that, or even most,
| but I am saying, I don't think the pirate scene works
| without people like that. The music fans are spokes, but
| people who do it for the sake of doing it are the hubs.
| al_borland wrote:
| For the hoarders that don't share, I don't really see
| much of an issue. Sure, they have all that stuff, but
| they would have never bought it. It's not actually a lost
| sale.
| afavour wrote:
| Hoarding.
|
| I'm half joking but all these tools to automatically
| download TVs and movies has absolutely led to this class
| of user that habitually downloads stuff just for the sake
| of doing it. Terabytes of movies they have no interest
| in. The psychology of it fascinates me.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| These two are not mutually exclusive
| dasil003 wrote:
| Wait, what? There are so many assumptions packed into
| this statement.
|
| Why should we view things through the lens of whether we
| are glorifying pirates or not? Is your assertion we
| should be condemning them? Why? Is it because they are
| taking bread out of the mouths of musicians? Is it
| equally bad if Spotify uses their leverage to commoditize
| and devalue music so musicians can no longer make
| meaningful money from recorded music? What about music
| labels who structure deals so they get the bulk of the
| money for a fraction of the work?
|
| I'm curious to understand the principles you hold that
| give you such a black and white view on piracy.
| listenallyall wrote:
| First, when someone uses "many" and "most", it indicates
| they are avoiding "a black and white view," by
| acknowledging there are some exceptions.
|
| As to the main point, no individual has the right to take
| someone else's intellectual property (such as songs,
| movies, books, etc that were often created by large teams
| of people over months or years) and, without asking any
| permission, "liberate" that content so that it can be
| freely copied and consumed by virtually anyone, anywhere,
| around the world, without recognition or attribution.
|
| The question isn't whether distribution of the work
| ultimately does or does not benefit the creator(s), which
| it often does. It's that the "pirate" has no right to
| independently make the irreversible decision to freely
| distribute the content.
| buildsjets wrote:
| For indie artists, the vinyl release frequently comes with
| a download code for a digital version. Some bands even
| include lossless versions.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Spotify might not care as much about the music and the
| artists as pirates, but they sure pay the artists more.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Barely. Some artists outright tell you to pirate their
| music since most of their money comes from touring/merch.
| ugjka wrote:
| I discover stuff on Spotify more than i would ever from
| pirating and only then i can go watch their live stuff
| and buy their merch. If I want a Flac i go to Bandcamp
| though
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| Makes me wonder if artists would see the same benefit
| then if piracy were legal and someone made a nice
| Spotify-like frontend for it. I think about how places
| like library genesis have to be so weirdly arranged
| because of how illegal they are.
| bigfatfrock wrote:
| Spotify is a prime example of an amazing service (yet still
| no FLAC equivalent) offering with a highly developed
| customer base ruined by the love of money.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Spotify loves money so much it has yet to show a profit
| in almost 20 years.
| musicale wrote:
| Spotify posted EUR168M in profit for Q1 2024.
|
| But executives loving money is a separate issue from
| whether the company is profitable or not.
|
| Daniel Ek takes no salary but has filed to sell EUR165M
| in stock so far in 2024.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Executive compensation is part of a business's expense,
| so it is not a separate issue from profit, since profit =
| revenue minus expense.
|
| Also, Ek could have sold his equity years ago and made
| more money with less risk by sticking it in SP500. If he
| really loved money, wouldn't he have gotten rid of stock
| in an obviously poorly performing business and stuck it
| into something less risky?
|
| My point is to say that Spotify is obviously in a
| difficult business, given the vendors it has to negotiate
| with, the competitors it has to compete with, and the
| customers it has to sell to. It is not some conspiracy or
| excess short term greed by executives that is hampering
| its success or ability to pay artists.
| pavlov wrote:
| As long as you can invest in growth, why not spend on
| that? The alternative is to report a profit and have it
| taxed.
|
| Amazon did the same for a long time. It's a fine strategy
| if your investors don't need the immediate returns.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| If the market believed there was growth potential, their
| annual returns would not be trailing SP500 by 3%+ per
| year.
|
| Amazon's market cap grew by much more than the SP500,
| because the market (correctly) anticipated Amazon being
| able to earn profits.
|
| Spotify's ability to earn decent profits is not a given,
| and in my opinion, their whole business is currently
| being a negotiating chip between the 3 businesses that
| own music copyrights (Warner/Universal/Sony) and
| Apple/Amazon/Alphabet.
| rm_-rf_slash wrote:
| Amazon invested in selling physical things and ran a loss
| forever until AWS became the real money maker.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| For sure, I mean to me, what.cd was the ultimate
| intersection of musicphiles (as opposed to audiophiles,
| though there's an overlap) and torrenters.
| radley wrote:
| > Same with Netflix and it's bit starved encodes.
|
| Bitrates are tied to the subscription tier. If you do the 4K
| plan, it's visibly noticeable that 1080p video bitrates are
| higher. They don't have much 4K content, but the 1080p
| difference is worth it for my 4K projector.
| sargun wrote:
| Subscription tier and device. If your device isn't capable
| of playback, there's no way to get the content.
| Forbo wrote:
| My device is perfectly capable of playing 4K media, but
| Netflix has decided that Linux doesn't deserve it.
| jorvi wrote:
| > In 100 years iTunes may be dead, but there will be some
| person with every album available in high quality lossless
| FLAC. Same with Netflix and it's bit starved encodes.
|
| Yeah, nah. WhatCD's full catalogue has never been recovered.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| >> some person with every album available in high quality
| lossless FLAC
|
| > nah. WhatCD's full catalogue has never been recovered.
|
| The loss of WhatCD's torrent database didn't wipe out
| anyone's library.
| eisa01 wrote:
| But the successors still have stuff iTunes don't have, and
| there's even new uploads of old releases that What didn't
| have ;)
| joshuaturner wrote:
| This is especially true with the current wave of upscaled 4k
| releases that are, frankly - awful. Eventually, these will be
| the only versions we have access to on streaming platforms,
| but someone will have the original Blu-ray remux or DVD rip
| on their Plex server.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Yep, that is why I pirate as well, movies and shows are
| simply lower quality when streaming than via direct
| downloads. Plus, I can play them with my own media player and
| use software like SmoothVideoProject to interpolate the frame
| rate and use upscalers for sub-4k content.
| sharkweek wrote:
| >every album available in high quality lossless FLAC.
|
| In college I ate up an entire hard drive downloading the
| bootleg discography of Pearl Jam live shows in the hugest
| quality I could find.
|
| Not sure why I needed 50+ live versions of the song Daughter
| or Yellow Ledbetter but... I had 'em
| acchow wrote:
| Still frustrated that 1080p bluray looks and _sounds_
| significantly better than 4k Netflix. Will a lot of quality
| stuff be lost forever when these companies disappear?
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Yes but I also don't think enjoyment is gated behind some
| arbitrary maximum quality.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Being constantly reminded you are a tool watching some
| dark filter compressed pseudo-4k video at the mercy of
| some conglomerate takes away some of the fun in consuming
| culture.
|
| I feel way freer when watching downloaded films. Like the
| old VHS days. It is mine.
| steve1977 wrote:
| > And they're so good at it, that the pirated product is
| usually substantially better than the official version
|
| How so, when most of these products are digital to begin with?
| If you have the quality of the studio master, then there's
| nothing to improve.
| everyone wrote:
| In the case of software removing DRM and shitware either
| bundled with the product or necessary to use it. In the case
| of music it's less clear but I would suggest curation and
| completeness.
| miah_ wrote:
| There isn't always a studio behind a videos release.
| Sometimes the only remaining copy of a show is found in
| somebodies VHS collection and its filled with static and
| audio pops. These often get a standard 'as-is' release and
| then somebody in the community will clean it up, upscale the
| video, and fix the audio for a 'proper' release. Same goes
| for audio, sometimes its a old bootleg tape of a show that
| gets digitized and cleaned up.
|
| This is before even getting into 'fan edits' where people
| will re-add cut scenes, or do other edits to films. For an
| example of that, search for 'Topher Grace Star Wars Prequel'.
| steve1977 wrote:
| But in most of those cases I wouldn't really speak of
| ,,official" versions.
| rightbyte wrote:
| > For an example of that, search for 'Topher Grace Star
| Wars Prequel'
|
| A funny detail in The Obi Wan series are the prequel
| lookbacks that, if you don't remember how bad they are,
| make them seem like mediocre movies instead.
| Fezzik wrote:
| For a great example of fan edits, compare Harmey's
| Despecialized Editions of Episodes 4, 5, and 6 to the
| butchered final copies that George tried to make be the
| only available versions; the Despecialized versions are
| astonishingly superior in content and audio/video quality.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmy%27s_Despecialized_Edi
| t...
| npteljes wrote:
| Sometimes they further optimize it for a goal, or maximize it
| to have everything. Sometimes organize it, provide additional
| material that fans might appreciate, add commentary. Port it
| to a platform where previously it was inaccessible.
|
| For examples, an artist's discography is sometimes neatly
| organized in folders, by year, and the files are tagged with
| metadata. In case of anime, fans improve or outright provide
| subtitles. They often do extra things like including karaoke
| for the opening and ending, color coding subtitle lines to
| match the speaker's personality or design, and provide
| stylized subtitles for signs and other letterings on the
| screen. In case of movies, they are often optimized to a
| specific kind of usage, for example to be able to be viewed
| on every phone, or to have a minimal file size. Sometimes,
| especially older releases, are digitally cleaned up and
| enhanced. Games install easily and is packaged in a way that
| it just works, without faffing about with the launchers and
| things like that.
| mmh0000 wrote:
| Well. No unskippable ads for shows I don't care about.
|
| No FBI warnings.
|
| But, I think theoatmeal sums it up best:
|
| https://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
| Khaine wrote:
| I am into Jazz, and would like to buy Ella Fitzgerald's
| discography. No website will easily let me do that. Pirates
| do.
| Pannoniae wrote:
| Same, and what's the thing about those old records - there
| are either streaming services which have some of it (but
| streaming services are garbage so I don't consider those)
| or you can buy the original records one by one, if someone
| has a copy to sell. Sure, there are CD compilations and
| whatnot but usually out of print and they aren't sold
| digitally.
|
| Sooooo..... soulseek and friends it is:)
| issafram wrote:
| Quality? I can rarely find FLAC files.
| Biganon wrote:
| Private trackers are great for FLAC files.
| mmh0000 wrote:
| https://sharemania.us/
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| Gosh this is such a throwback... One of my first experiences
| with Napster was trying to download Britney Spears' Oops I Did
| It Again and getting a shitty remix. The worst part was that I
| didn't check the song, so I ended up burning it to a CD only to
| find out after the fact that the song wasn't what I was looking
| for. And every song took so long to download because it was
| dial-up... It's crazy how much things have changed in a mere 20
| years.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| A friend of mine downloaded a bunch of videos "funny hidden
| camera" and then burned them on a CD and one turned out to be
| porn. Like, even back then it boggled my mind why he wouldn't
| have checked.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _Ah 56k internet, what fun._
|
| Unless you were young and on a college/university campus where
| your dorm room probably had Ethernet jacks.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| >> Ah 56k internet, what fun.
|
| > your dorm room probably had Ethernet jacks.
|
| One 64k T1 channel, so 14% more fun.
|
| Okay to be fair the modem was probably averaging closer to
| 32k so double the fun.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| > One 64k T1 channel, so 14% more fun.
|
| A ton less latency, though. T1 connectivity still felt
| snappy for web browsing long after cable modems pushed up
| average available bandwidth because the latency was so much
| better.
| throw0101c wrote:
| > _One 64k T1 channel, so 14% more fun._
|
| Except if you were sharing between all the students in the
| dorm and on campus.
| supafastcoder wrote:
| I remember burning CD's full of 1 minute songs that never
| completed because someone was always calling our house line,
| disrupting the internet connection (and there were no resumable
| downloads). Good times ;)
| asveikau wrote:
| Where did you get those from?
|
| By the p2p era (which napster was) they absolutely needed to
| do resumable downloads because a peer could suddenly go
| offline.
|
| Before that I remember getting mp3s from ftp and irc
| fserves... Ftp definitely had resume, though not all clients
| and servers did it.
| jakupovic wrote:
| I also remember having cable modems and parties with Napster
| station where people would find download and then play the song
| of choice. No sign-ups no artificial borders just music. This
| is still not possible...
| a1o wrote:
| About quality, it's weird it doesn't matter how much bandwidth
| I seem to have (currently with 1Gbps fiber), the streaming
| keeps the quality varying down without explanation. If I just
| pirate the highest quality in less than five minutes I can
| download the best version of a movie at around 20 GB and watch
| it in the best quality from start to end without any
| degradation. Why can't the paid streaming services deliver at
| the same quality as the pirates?
| belthesar wrote:
| They can. You know they can, others (ie: the pirate versions
| you mention) do. Larger files consume more bandwidth and
| storage on the CDN, which makes it more expensive. And while
| there are indeed some issues with lower quality (especially
| in dark scenes, I'm reminded of the muddy mess in the final
| episodes of Game of Thrones), most folks are "fine" with the
| quality we get today. Fine enough, anyway, that they keep
| paying for the status quo.
|
| That's not to say that they're not interested in providing
| more quality. There's heavy investment in per-video, and
| sometimes per-video-section encoding and next generation
| codecs like AV1. The goal for them though is to get more
| quality with the same or less storage and bandwidth budget.
| deadbunny wrote:
| Because higher bitrates cost more to store and transmit.if
| they can drop the size of every file they have by 40% that's
| 40% savings every time someone streams something even if it
| looks like dogshit.
| yard2010 wrote:
| I could hear the modem connecting while you're yelling "DO NOT
| PICK UP THE PHONE"
|
| peeeee duuuuu denu denu denudenu
| dtx1 wrote:
| My personal feeling is that Spotify and youtube et. al. killed
| music piracy. I'd rather pay a small monthly fee and have
| access to an always up to date music library then torrent
| everything artist by artist. But that only applies because
| spotify has basically all the artists i like and want.
| teleforce wrote:
| Napster is p2p done right, it's a game changer that the music
| industry was only saved by listening to Apple (read Steve) and
| doing that catapulted Apple to the first Trillion dollar
| company in history. It's so good that Metalica members were
| loosing their sleeps over it. For personally one of the best
| software I have used of more than 30 years using computer and
| it's fit for purpose metric was second to none.
|
| Mate, it only takes a few minutes downloading mp3 song that's
| only a few MBytes, unless you are using dial-up or ADSL
| connection further down the road from the residential switch.
| coretx wrote:
| Yet we still don't have a safe & resilient alternative for using
| Kademlia tables. Shame on us.
| bawolff wrote:
| What's wrong with current generation DHT? They work. They are
| secure (depending on how you define that). They are reliable.
| Why would we want to replace them?
| coretx wrote:
| Anyone with mediocre skills can take it down; ( And more )
| that's the problem. I'd rather not mention the specifics
| because that might give people ideas but they can be found in
| academic papers.
| bawolff wrote:
| Not discussing security vulnerabilities helps attackers and
| hinders defenders.
|
| The obvious question here is - if its so easy, why hasn't
| anyone done so? When was the last time bit torrent's DHT
| went down? As far as i know never.
|
| It should be noted that current generation DHTs aren't the
| same as the original and do have some mitigations from
| certain attacks.
| coretx wrote:
| Sybil attacks if i'm not mistaken ;-)
| dboreham wrote:
| I briefly worked there. Like three Scaramuccis.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| I remember how out of control the lawsuits got by the mid-2000s.
| A friend had to drop out of college and move back home over some
| multi-million dollar claim on behalf of the RIAA that his family
| "settled" for $40K. It wasn't even clear he was responsible (the
| lawsuit was based on IP), but he was scared and admitted to using
| "file sharing services", and that was that.
|
| I'm still disappointed that laws against barratry didn't become
| more prevalent in the US as a result of "copyright trolling".
| Instead, exceptions have been slowly chiseled out of the DMCA to
| restore a sliver of the rights we used to have.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| What rights did you used to have?
| bdowling wrote:
| We used to have the right to copy whatever we wanted and be
| accountable to no one.
|
| That all went away in 1790 when the U.S. government passed
| the first Copyright Act. https://www.copyright.gov/timeline/t
| imeline_18th_century.htm...
| CPLX wrote:
| > We used to have the right
|
| > That all went away in 1790
|
| Interesting use of the word "we" here.
|
| Also there's a few other "rights" that have changed since
| then, not sure this argument has the power you think it
| does.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > We used to have the right to copy whatever we wanted and
| be accountable to no one.
|
| Unless you copied something of value to a rich and powerful
| person, in which case your accountability would likely be
| quite high.
|
| Also, "copying" before 1790 meant something rather
| different than cp(1).
| steve1977 wrote:
| And what exactly would you have copied with your rights in,
| say, the year 1789? And how would you have done that?
| logicchains wrote:
| You could copy a book, and sell it. This was a big part
| of the Protestant revolution; the Catholic church didn't
| want the common people reading the Bible, but back then
| they had no legal way to control how people used the
| printing press.
| steve1977 wrote:
| The Bible is not copyrighted. So you could still do that
| today.
|
| Also I'm pretty sure the catholic church wanted no one to
| read the Luther Bible. Neither common people nor others
| ;)
| costco wrote:
| The copyright to the King James Version is owned by the
| crown.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Apparently that's true (in the UK).
| mprev wrote:
| Specific translations, such as the NIV, are copyrighted.
| sophacles wrote:
| The big one is: when you bought a thing you owned it. The
| anti-circumvention clause is ultimately the root cause of the
| right to repair movement.
|
| The anti-circumvention clause also means it might be illegal
| to make a back up copy of media you bought, a thing that
| always used to be ok.
| chinathrow wrote:
| Never forget their bug when they only transferred 99% of the MP3
| you wanted. Good times.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| And now rock stars who were once as rich as, well, rock stars,
| are largely forced to get by on a pittance from either Spotify or
| YouTube. It used to be that there were hundreds of stars getting
| rich. Now there's Taylor Swift and... I can't name anyone else.
|
| But, hey, the quasi-communists who thought they were somehow
| liberating the music from the evil rich people ended up dragging
| all of the music industry down into poverty.
| bitwize wrote:
| This is why we have DRM -- and need more.
| artninja1988 wrote:
| Disagree. DRM is evil and anti consumer. I don't care if
| there aren't as many billionaire artists as in the past
| coretx wrote:
| DRM is done by elected officials, usually parliamentarians.
| Whenever it's not elected individuals or institutions doing
| it, it's called tyranny or vigilantism.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| > It used to be that there were hundreds of stars getting rich.
| Now there's Taylor Swift and... I can't name anyone else.
|
| Just becaus you don't know them doesn't mean they don't exist.
| There are way more than hundreds of "rock stars" that are
| getting rich now. There are also way more "rock stars" now than
| there ever was.
| redwall_hp wrote:
| The "rock star" era was a bubble, at a time of rising demand
| and limited supply. Digital recording has democratized music,
| tastes have stratified (thank fuck) and now there's so much
| supply people have FOMO over discovery tools not finding them
| optimal recommendations in a sea of possibilities.
|
| On the other side, in the first half of the 20th century,
| artists were more likely paid a one-off pittance to come into
| a studio and record a song, and then the record labels profit
| from it to this day.
|
| Music is worth less now because the supply is vast and the
| demand is relatively limited. Pretty simple economics. And
| most artists have always made their money from
| touring...while concert prices are more eye watering than
| ever.
| luuurker wrote:
| > Now there's Taylor Swift and... I can't name anyone else.
|
| Ariana Grande, Adele, Billie Eilish, etc. I believe someone
| called Kendrick Lamar has been popular recently?
|
| Are they _rock_ stars? No, people tastes are a bit different
| now, but they are stars and they are rich. You not knowing them
| is a different problem.
| hinkley wrote:
| Even Lily Allen is worth $4 mill and I only know - and own -
| one of her songs.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| How is someone's "net worth" determined, especially someone
| with no significant publicly traded, liquid assets whose
| ownership is public information?
| hinkley wrote:
| David Bowie was a billionaire when he died.
|
| It's true that in the top 50 richest musicians, most of them
| were already rock gods before Napster. But they all are rock
| gods.
|
| But then you have people like Swift, Robbie Williams, Dave
| Matthews and Dave Grohl, most of which were on the cusp. But
| Grohl for instance worked hard for more than a decade after
| Nirvana broke up, and I would be very surprised if a lot of his
| money didn't end up coming from a combination of the Foo
| Fighters and royalties. Commentary on one of those net worth
| sites: the Foo Fighters "have consistently been one of the
| highest-grossing touring acts in the world for more than two
| decades." So yeah.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >Commentary on one of those net worth sites: the Foo Fighters
| "have consistently been one of the highest-grossing touring
| acts in the world for more than two decades." So yeah.
|
| Data about "net worth", especially on free clickbait
| websites, is garbage speculation with no evidence or basis in
| reality. It's not like those website makers have any access
| to someone's brokerage accounts and list of assets they have
| title to or the debt they have.
| wiseowise wrote:
| > And now rock stars who were once as rich as, well, rock
| stars, are largely forced to get by on a pittance from either
| Spotify or YouTube.
|
| Boo hoo. Let me play a song on tinniest violin in the world for
| them.
| mattmaroon wrote:
| Man do I feel old now. I remember using that in college when it
| was brand new. These were in the days when Yahoo practically WAS
| the internet and Google was a scrappy upstart.
|
| I remember trading mp3s on AOL before it. I remember how much
| effort it took to download an mp3 over a 56k modem. Every time my
| brother picked up the phone I had to start over. The first one I
| succesfully downloaded, after trying for what must have been days
| but felt like months, was Gettin' Jiggy Wit It and of course it
| turned out our 386 computer couldn't even really play an mp3
| without stuttering.
|
| I remember moving in with two friends, a block from campus, and
| putting a $2,500 Gateway computer (bought from the Gateway store
| in the strip mall, of course) on a credit card because we were
| going to split it three ways. You can probably guess how that
| ended up. Even though that was equivalent to about $5k today it
| was a midrange computer at best and, of course, was replaced a
| little over a year later. But, we did get broadband and it could
| play Starcraft and online poker just fine. Worth it!
|
| I remember after Napster exploded, it had gotten bogged down with
| new traffic and they started offering multiple servers, and
| someone wrote some third-party software that let you switch
| between them at will until you could find the song you wanted
| without too terribly much wait.
|
| I remember my first mp3 player, a Diamond Rio 500. It used a USB
| cord that, of course, had the pins reversed, so you couldn't just
| use any USB cord. It held about one hour of music, 1.5 if you
| bought a very expensive 32mb flash card. It ran for a week on one
| aaa battery. It cost almost $300, which would be like $500 today.
| God did I love that thing.
|
| I remember the RIAA and MPAA suing file sharers. I remember lots
| of tech bros saying what idiots they were for trying to use the
| legal system to put the toothpaste back in the tube. I remember
| one particularly astute, well-known tech guy saying at a YC
| dinner (must have been 2007 or 2008) in response to a sneering
| question about it that not everyone who chooses a career outside
| of tech is an idiot, the people who run the media companies might
| know more about media than you, certainly understand that selling
| physical media's days are numered, and that what they were doing
| was really a delaying tactic while they figured out how to
| monetize content in the digital age. (The answer, it turned out,
| was things like Netflix and Spotify, but those were still a few
| years away. Netflix's first original content wasn't until 2012!)
|
| I remember after Napster got sued into oblivion there were so
| many others. The toothpaste was out of the tube on file sharing.
| Limewire. Edonkey. Bittorrent. For every one they killed two more
| appeared. Fragmentation wasn't even an issue since everyone ran
| (and thus seeded) several.
|
| Good nostalgia for a Saturday,.
| bigtex wrote:
| I remember having 384KB symmetrical DSL in mid 2000 from
| Northpoint Communications, who would go out of business a few
| months later. I basically had business class service to my
| apartment because that it all they could provide, so I didn't
| complain. Obviously one of the first things I tested was Napster
| on my Bondi Blue iMac B computer and man could you download music
| so fast and easily!
| neilv wrote:
| Napster helped motivate and justify all sorts of nasty DRM and
| legislation, which has adverse implications for more than just
| piracy.
|
| And at the time of the MP3 frenzy, there were a relatively small
| number of people saying, "Wait, won't this mean a backlash of
| adversarial laws and technology that make things bad for
| everyone?"
|
| But that was ignored by the masses of newly-arrived Internet
| users wanting to take stuff for free.
| artninja1988 wrote:
| Isn't this a bit like victim blaming? You should be criticizing
| the RIAA and lawmakers instead.
| neilv wrote:
| No, it is not.
|
| I'm not blaming the artists whose work was stolen.
|
| A bunch of people took up thievery. Someone said please stop.
| They laughed, and were complicit in creating a tech dystopia.
|
| If you want to say they were dumb kids who didn't know any
| better, we can work with that.
|
| So then the question would be how do they help fix the mess
| they helped create?
| giantrobot wrote:
| No one "stole" anything. The original publisher wasn't
| deprived of anything. Don't use inflammatory language to
| push a narrative.
|
| Someone downloading a single off Napster no more "stole"
| that same single when they listened to it on the radio. The
| person downloading a song was as much of a non-customer as
| the radio listener.
|
| In fact Napster's rise was coincident with _increased_ CD
| sales. Napster et al were not causing poor innocent record
| executives to go hungry or beg on the street.
|
| The thing that killed CD sales wasn't P2P but online music
| stores like iTunes and then streaming. They served a market
| demand.
|
| The backwards laws like the DMCA were written and passed
| before Napster even existed. Blaming Napster for that is
| not just ahistorical but ludicrous.
| neilv wrote:
| Yes, I'm familiar with decades of self-serving philosophy
| rationalizing piracy.
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| An argument could be made that Napster contributed to the
| acceleration of that trend, but it was well underway already.
| The Software Publishers Association was coordinating raids of
| businesses for pirated software at least as far back as 1991.
| The WIPO Copyright Treaty was ratified in 1996, and the DMCA
| was passed in 1998 to implement it. CSS was introduced with DVD
| in 1996. _United States v. LaMacchia_ was decided in 1994,
| leading to the passage of the NET Act in 1997. The first
| versions of SecuROM and SafeDisc were released in 1998. The
| same year, the Secure Digital Music Initiative was formed.
| neilv wrote:
| Yep, that's why I said "helped". Obviously software piracy
| was a problem in some corners. And we knew the kinds of moves
| that were being made (not just on this, but on things like
| surveillance and censorship). Then comes things like Napster,
| serving up on a silver platter a high-profile pretext -- and
| increased legitimate need that couldn't be ignored.
| lupusreal wrote:
| You're being naive if you think we wouldn't have those laws if
| not for Napster. If not that pretext it would be another.
| Floppy disks and flash drives could have been it.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > You're being naive if you think we wouldn't have those laws
| if not for Napster. If not that pretext it would be another.
| Floppy disks and flash drives could have been it.
|
| To this day, if you can find a place to buy a cassette tape
| or blank CD, you will have to pay a tax (bundled into the
| price) which goes straight to the record industry as
| "compensation" to offset the presumed loss of revenue due to
| unauthorized music sharing.
| Aloisius wrote:
| DRM existed before Napster.
|
| Hell, the DMCA, which made circumventing DRM illegal, predated
| Napster.
|
| Indeed, music labels _loved_ DRM because companies like
| RealNetworks and Microsoft promised them they could do things
| like charge _per play_.
| steve1977 wrote:
| I was putting a lot of effort into starting a career in the music
| business in the middle of the 90s. Thankfully I was not
| successful and ,,pivoted" to IT in 1998.
| romanhn wrote:
| Best part of Napster was searching for that one song you were
| interested in, and then looking through all of that user's shared
| files. It was an amazing discovery mechanism which I missed
| dearly with all the subsequent P2P apps. Spotify now fills this
| void, but it's not quite the same.
| grimgrin wrote:
| Definitely enjoy browsing a user's shares, and even
| occasionally checking what's been downloaded from me.
|
| Soulseek goes strong https://nicotine-plus.org/
| heed wrote:
| Whoa I totally forgot that Soulseek was a thing, thank you! I
| used to be able to find rare b-sides and live recordings of
| my favorite bands on it.
| consumer451 wrote:
| I had no idea that this existed.
|
| I already found cool stuff. Thank you so much!
|
| This brings me way back to when I hosted a Hotwire server.
| pea wrote:
| Soulseek is absolutely awesome at this. Why don't the record
| labels shut it down? Have they just given up on P2P?
| Cockbrand wrote:
| My personal favorite was Audiogalaxy, which had a fairly decent
| recommendation engine. I discovered a lot of excellent music
| (which I subsequently bought) through this.
| mouzogu wrote:
| torrent is really a great technology.
|
| subversive and evergreen. genuinely useful and hard to kill.
| issafram wrote:
| Only if you use a private tracker. Public ones always have
| seeders whose job it is to collect IP addresses. You'll still
| get that letter in the mail about pirating
| andai wrote:
| Isn't going after torrent makers more important than random
| downloaders? By that logic shouldn't big music / movie
| companies be targeting private trackers? (Surely they have
| enough materials to pass the interview!)
| simonw wrote:
| Something I found fascinating about Napster at the time is that
| it was fiercely difficult to use... but it didn't matter, because
| what it gave people (access to ANY music) was so desirable that
| they would learn how to use it.
| pea wrote:
| One side effect of this I remember was that, for a little
| while, there was a blackmarket of buying MP3s on CD at car
| boots and flea markets. My dad came home once with a CD with
| all the Beatles songs. He had paid something like PS15 and
| thought he'd got a deal of his life.
|
| I also wonder which year it stopped being an acceptable
| Christmas present to give someone a burned CD.
| ww520 wrote:
| Ah good time. Bring back memory. My involvement with that period
| was I wrote a p2p file sharing app using the Gnutella protocol,
| an alternative to the Napster. It was a fun time.
| andai wrote:
| That's what Limewire used right? Is that network still a thing?
| Last I checked it was, but full of bots that return fake files
| named after your exact search query.
| ww520 wrote:
| Yes. Limewire came out a bit later. All the apps with the
| same protocol could talk to each other. Initially mine was
| open sourced as well. I close sourced it after selling it to
| a company.
| _fat_santa wrote:
| Napster was a little before my time, though I fondly remember
| torrenting when I was a kid and oddly enough, it was a small time
| scam that got me into it.
|
| I remember when I was a kid (maybe 13 or 14) I really (and I mean
| really) wanted to play Grand Theft Auto. My dad picked up a copy
| of GTA San Andreas for me about a year prior but after seeing the
| violence and language he forced me to take it back, that put the
| taste into my mouth and I wanted more.
|
| So I searched for "free video game downloads" and I remember I
| went to this site that claimed that for just $30, you could
| "download unlimited video games for free". I begged my parents to
| let me sign up and pay the $30 until they finally relented and
| bought it for me.
|
| What it turned out to be was just a tutorial on how to use
| uTorrent (and they also had an "addon" for unlimited MP3's which
| taught you how to use Limewire).
|
| I realized pretty quickly I got scammed and I think to date this
| is the only scam that I've ever fallen for. Kinda worked out
| though because I learned how to torrent and after a few years I
| had a basic gaming PC with a hard drive full of games that I had
| torrented (everything from Crysis to GTA games to every Call of
| Duty game).
|
| I was also pretty deep into torrenting music right up until
| Spotify came to the USA (I still remember all the "workarounds"
| to get Spotify to work in the US before they officially released
| here, though I didn't try any myself)
|
| Since then Spotify has remained my longest kept subscription and
| for all it's faults I think Spotify got the solution to music
| piracy right. With Spotify it was just more convenient to pay
| them every month then to bother pirating music and uploading it
| to my iPhone.
| andai wrote:
| How is that a scam? You received, as promised, the ability to
| download infinite games for free :)
| zulban wrote:
| Doesn't sound like a scam. You wanted to buy a fish and they
| gave you a fishing pole. And for just 30$? Some online training
| today costs many thousands of dollars. Indeed you must be young
| because you think online tutorials must be free and instructors
| charging for their work is a scam.
| xandrius wrote:
| This is probably the cutest scam I've ever heard of.
|
| It feels like an old gramp saying "come here, today you will
| learn 2 life lessons".
| swed420 wrote:
| Excerpts from chapter 5 of "Free as in Freedom" (freely available
| at https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/):
|
| > Although based on proprietary software, the Napster system
| draws inspiration from the long-held Stallman contention that
| once a work enters the digital realm-in other words, once making
| a copy is less a matter of duplicating sounds or duplicating
| atoms and more a matter of duplicating information-the natural
| human impulse to share a work becomes harder to restrict. Rather
| than impose additional restrictions, Napster execs have decided
| to take advantage of the impulse. Giving music listeners a
| central place to trade music files, the company has gambled on
| its ability to steer the resulting user traffic toward other
| commercial opportunities.
|
| > The sudden success of the Napster model has put the fear in
| traditional record companies, with good reason. Just days before
| my Palo Alto meeting with Stallman, U.S. District Court Judge
| Marilyn Patel granted a request filed by the Recording Industry
| Association of America for an injunction against the file-sharing
| service. The injunction was subsequently suspended by the U.S.
| Ninth District Court of Appeals, but by early 2001, the Court of
| Appeals, too, would find the San Mateo-based company in breach of
| copyright law,5 a decision RIAA spokesperson Hillary Rosen would
| later proclaim proclaim a "clear victory for the creative content
| community and the legitimate online marketplace."
|
| > For hackers such as Stallman, the Napster business model is
| scary in different ways. The company's eagerness to appropriate
| time-worn hacker principles such as file sharing and communal
| information ownership, while at the same time selling a service
| based on proprietary software, sends a distressing mixed message.
| As a person who already has a hard enough time getting his own
| carefully articulated message into the media stream, Stallman is
| understandably reticent when it comes to speaking out about the
| company. Still, Stallman does admit to learning a thing or two
| from the social side of the Napster phenomenon.
|
| > "Before Napster, I thought it might be OK for people to
| privately redistribute works of entertainment," Stallman says.
| "The number of people who find Napster useful, however, tells me
| that the right to redistribute copies not only on a neighbor-to-
| neighbor basis, but to the public at large, is essential and
| therefore may not be taken away."
|
| . . .
|
| > "It's a mistake to transfer answers from one thing to another,"
| says Stallman, contrasting songs with software programs. "The
| right approach is to look at each type of work and see what
| conclusion you get."
|
| > When it comes to copyrighted works, Stallman says he divides
| the world into three categories. The first category involves
| "functional" works-e.g., software programs, dictionaries, and
| textbooks. The second category involves works that might best be
| described as "testimonial"-e.g., scientific papers and historical
| documents. Such works serve a purpose that would be undermined if
| subsequent readers or authors were free to modify the work at
| will. The final category involves works of personal
| expression-e.g., diaries, journals, and autobiographies. To
| modify such documents would be to alter a person's recollections
| or point of view-action Stallman considers ethically
| unjustifiable.
|
| > Of the three categories, the first should give users the
| unlimited right to make modified versions, while the second and
| third should regulate that right according to the will of the
| original author. Regardless of category, however, the freedom to
| copy and redistribute noncommercially should remain unabridged at
| all times, Stallman insists. If that means giving Internet users
| the right to generate a hundred copies of an article, image,
| song, or book and then email the copies to a hundred strangers,
| so be it. "It's clear that private occasional redistribution must
| be permitted, because only a police state can stop that,"
| Stallman says. "It's antisocial to come between people and their
| friends. Napster has convinced me that we also need to permit,
| must permit, even noncommercial redistribution to the public for
| the fun of it. Because so many people want to do that and find it
| so useful."
|
| > When I ask whether the courts would accept such a permissive
| outlook, Stallman cuts me off.
|
| > "That's the wrong question," he says. "I mean now you've
| changed the subject entirely from one of ethics to one of
| interpreting laws. And those are two totally different questions
| in the same field. It's useless to jump from one to the other.
| How the courts would interpret the existing laws is mainly in a
| harsh way, because that's the way these laws have been bought by
| publishers."
|
| > The comment provides an insight into Stallman's political
| philosophy: just because the legal system currently backs up
| businesses' ability to treat copyright as the software equivalent
| of land title doesn't mean computer users have to play the game
| according to those rules. Freedom is an ethical issue, not a
| legal issue. "I'm looking beyond what the existing laws are to
| what they should be," Stallman says. "I'm not trying to draft
| legislation. I'm thinking about what should the law do? I
| consider the law prohibiting the sharing of copies with your
| friend the moral equivalent of Jim Crow. It does not deserve
| respect."
| Aloisius wrote:
| > while at the same time selling a service based on proprietary
| software
|
| Napster never sold anything. The business model was a plan to
| build a subscription service sometime in the future, but music
| labels wouldn't let us license their catalogs.
|
| Source: worked at Napster
| chinathrow wrote:
| Napster was awesome but Audiogalaxy was way better: it just
| worked and had a remote interface which was magical at the time.
| smugma wrote:
| Paramount+ coming out with a two part documentary June 11 based
| on a book with the same name, How Music Got Free:
|
| https://www.paramountpressexpress.com/paramount-plus/shows/h...
| CaptainOfCoit wrote:
| 1) What kind of domain is that? Looks like a domain for a
| tabloid or something
|
| 2) It redirects me to
| https://www.paramountpressexpress.com/location-not-allowed
| which says "Your geographic location is not allowed access".
|
| Here is a mirror for others who happen to not live in the US
| (or whatever country it's restricted to):
| https://archive.is/AYgwj
| Kailhus wrote:
| 1. Paramount pre sex press obviously! 2. Same here, geo-
| blocking is the worst.
| p3rls wrote:
| Back around in World of Warcraft around 2009ish, there was a
| rogue named Napster that someone invited to the guild I was in
| <Death and Taxes> as a casual/friend.
|
| I never found out if he was actually the founder for real but I
| always wanted to add "geared up the founder of Napster in
| Sunwell" to my resume somehow.
| koolala wrote:
| Music sparked the revolution, not Napster. People freely sharing
| what they love. Sing it! <3
| mynameishere wrote:
| Try that at a coffeeshop open mic night where they don't have a
| BMI license.
| sorenjan wrote:
| I rarely see it mentioned when discussing old file sharing
| programs, but I thought DC++ was the best. With the right hubs
| you could find anything you wanted, you could download parts of a
| file from multiple peers, you could browse a user's shared files
| to find new stuff, we had a server in our university network that
| RIAA/MPAA could find, there was a chat for each server, etc.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC%2B%2B
| joemazerino wrote:
| DC++ was a superior file sharing app. I used it often. I liked
| how you could control ratios from individual downloaders or
| servers.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| That was awesome. You would think of an song and right there you
| could download it, even more obscure stuff. Information right at
| your fingertips or something like that.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I think the biggest thing Napster did was get everyone onto a
| computer. I don't know if folks here remember, but before
| Napster, desktop computers at home were largely the destination
| for folks who worked at home, nerdy kids or the occasional school
| research. AOL changed _some_ of that but not as profoundly as
| Napster did. Not everyone had a reason to socialize online but
| everyone loved free music.
|
| I remember a friend of mine coming to _me_ telling me about
| Napster. He was definitely a lot more socially adept than me and
| I knew he didn't hang out on computers much so it was quite the
| shock that he knew about this thing that, by all accounts, was
| quite nerdy.
| tmalsburg2 wrote:
| Napster may have started the file sharing revolution. But the
| exciting part for me was Gnutella and later Bittorrent, peer-to-
| peer technology in general, and the realization that we could use
| technology to liberate ourselves. Needless to say, I was young
| and naive. That spirit is long dead, and the only remnants are
| crypto currencies and the community around them, which has tossed
| all lofty ideals in favor of blind greed.
| xandrius wrote:
| I think you need to check better: piratebay and so many of
| older tech is still being used, for many different niches (I
| find each country having their own preferred way to distribute
| content in their native language).
|
| Nowadays the only people left are the ones wanting to put the
| extractor effort for the principle of it, the rest can easily
| find most things somewhere (and if not give up). But there are
| still lots of us! (or so it feels like)
| mindslight wrote:
| napster asked me if I wanted to work on his project, and I told
| him I saw no future because it would inevitably just get shut
| down. From my perspective Napster was the start of the trend of
| startup companies based around brazenly flouting the law
| directly as a middleman, then when finally called out just
| bargaining with the incumbents to arbitrage their user base and
| associated hipness for a payout.
|
| I still don't think the dream of techno-liberation is dead.
| Rather the naive bits were thinking the sea change would happen
| so quickly, and thinking that the same old type of vectoralist
| hucksters wouldn't seek to corrupt our new systems. In
| actuality our systems need to be designed with the perspective
| of all possible gatekeepers as attackers. For example take the
| End to End principle - it's not sufficient to merely _tell_ the
| network to not meddle with your communications, those
| communications must be cryptographically protected to avoid any
| temptation. Otherwise as you commit an increasing amount of
| value to your use of the network, it merely becomes a question
| of when the network operators will eventually try to take
| advantage of you to extract some of that value.
|
| The big issue these days is there is so much capital funding
| "startups" that are essentially centralized crud apps running
| that same pump-and-dump arbitrage playbook. They buy lots of
| advertising and other mindshare (cf "It is difficult to get a
| man to understand something...") and generally use up most of
| the air in the room.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Buying music (singles or albums) was super expensive in 1999. It
| was unfair for listeners as well as artists.
|
| Napster suddenly made it 'free'. I remember thinking, if CD's
| were not so ridiculously expensive and i could pick the songs on
| it, i would just buy them instead of spending money on data
| traffic time/bandwidth.
|
| Today, we pay much less and the artists are still paid, while we
| can choose exactly what to listen to.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| The "long tail" artists are paid a lot less. Even if you listen
| to Frog Eyes all day, every day most of your Spotify
| subscription is going to Taylor Swift.
| AcylicUnicorn wrote:
| When I look at the personalities who made a name for themselves
| in corporate piracy.. err.. file sharing, I keep noticing some of
| the people who've contributed a lot to the current suckage in
| tech.
| wordsinaline wrote:
| The day I discovered Napster is the day I unplugged. Wait forever
| for my favorite song as a kid to come on the radio or MTV? No
| thanks, the future was Napster.
| thr0waway001 wrote:
| I still remember how hard it was to find an mp3 on the Internet
| before Napster. It was awesome. And Winamp, which was quite
| possibly the greatest desktop music app ever IMO, truly
| complimented Napster.
| kdtsh wrote:
| In memory of Napster, whenever I use the search function of a
| file sharing network I am looking at for the first time, I search
| for 'I Disappear' by Metallica.
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| For the younger folks: Napster arose when CDs and radio were the
| dominant official commercial distribution platforms for music. CD
| ripping into MP3s and portable music players drove the need to
| share them, and the internet was new, but needed a more scalable
| way to exchange them. Back in the day, it was mostly IRC
| channels, but these were slow and cumbersome. So Napster,
| Gnutella, and Hotline took off. These gradually gave way to
| eDonkey2000/eMule, KaZaA, and Limewire. These also then gave way
| to BitTorrent and overlay p2p apps.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications
| gonesilent wrote:
| Never forget waste and Gnutella. Justin Frankel told Shawn
| Fanning Napster would get shutdown back when it had 50 users.
| Gnutella was made not to use a central server that could be
| shutdown.
| mentos wrote:
| Before Napster I remember the AOL warez scene where you could get
| a bot to send you 35 emails with the content broken up to
| download off AOLs servers.
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