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Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

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

#211
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this a bit like victim blaming? You should be criticizing the RIAA and lawmakers instead.

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?

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.

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

#212
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…

I could hear the modem connecting while you're yelling "DO NOT PICK UP THE PHONE"

peeeee duuuuu denu denu denudenu

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

#213
post #80

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.

Definitely enjoy browsing a user's shares, and even occasionally checking what's been downloaded from me. Soulseek goes strong https://nicotine-plus.org/

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.

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

#214
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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…

Yes, I'm familiar with decades of self-serving philosophy rationalizing piracy.

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

#215
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…

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.

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

#216

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 na…

> 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

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

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> How can it be better than the OFFICIAL version!? How nexactly is that possible? Some content, e.g. Netlfix, has DRM that limits the quality that you can view in certain browsers/operating systems. As another example, a DVD/blu-ray sources are often significantly higher quality than what streaming services offer, so if you have a choice to watch some movie on Netflix or a pirated blu-ray copy, the pirated copy will…

Also, stolen/leaked masters and stems are a thing.

Even in the old analog scene, people trade master tapes that are higher quality than commercial available sources.

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

#218
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, regular…

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.

Spotify loves money so much it has yet to show a profit in almost 20 years.

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

#219
post #67
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 h…

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.

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

#220
post #78

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 fo…

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.

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