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Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

torrentfreak.com

61–70 of 350 posts

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#61
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. G…

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…

> 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.

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#62
post #42
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too long ago, you could be right, maybe KaZaA?

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.

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.

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#63
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every generation thinks that the next generations music is crap. Studies show that people stop discovering new music when they are 30. https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2023/03/study-shows-why-we-s... !

Last study I've seen, that stopped being... I won't say true, but I'd say that it stopped being a valid counterargument to that particular complaint. Now that young people can access music from any time in YouTube, their choices are more atemporal and certain remote decades keep getting much love. If you combine that fact with current music being more marketed and aired, there's seem to be something at play here. I d…

There has always been a lot of marketing an airing to make music catchy. The entire “Motown machine” wasn’t about the artists, it was about the writers, producers, choreographers etc and making sure music was “acceptable” to a wider audience.

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#64
post #59
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#65
post #18
post #15

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 ar…

3+hours? I remember being able to download roughly 10 songs in an hour.

I remember being queued up to download one song from a specific host. My download with be like 6th in line.

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What rights did you used to have?

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/timeline_18th_century.htm...

> 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.

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#67
post #29
post #15

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 ar…

> 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.

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.

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#68
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!

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#69

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…

> 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.

Re: Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What rights did you used to have?

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/timeline_18th_century.htm...

> 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).

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