121–130 of 189 posts
I witnessed the dawn of the MP3 as a piracy tool and hence a cultural phenomenon. Without that post, there would be no Apple Music, no iTunes, no iPod, no Napster, none of it.
When I was an undergraduate student at a conservative university back circa 2001 I had the Napster binary in my home directory because I was curious about how it worked and was doing some packet analysis in my spare time. About halfway into the semester I tried logging into my account on a lab computer to do an assignment only to get an access denied. When I asked the lab assistant about it, he pulled up my info and…
Napster didn’t yet exist, so we were maintaining a huge (for the time) shared library of mp3s, VCDs, games, and all the rest - this proved extremely popular at boarding school, where they shut off the network and internet access at 8pm (or so they thought). We played cat and mouse for a while until we compromised the physical security of cabling, and started just splicing in, and at that point they realised they weren’t going to win.
We eventually reached a détente, where I ran a shadow network and piracy hub between 8pm and 6am, and didn’t interfere with their operations, and they didn’t interfere with mine. By the sixth form, I was helping them harden their network, with the understanding that after I left they’d allow my successor to continue to run our parasitic network - which they did, until it was voluntarily wound down in the face of obsolescence.
We'd take the complaint, check the netflow logs to verify that the IP in question really was running file sharing software at the same time, turn off the Ethernet port, report them to the Dean of Students, turn them back on after the deans talked to them, etc., etc.
My boss at the time was sick of doing the RIAA's dirty work for them (back then the RIAA was way more vigorous about enforcement than the MPAA. I don't remember why). So he decided that we were going to make a web site to give step-by-step instructions with screenshots to show how to disable file uploading in every p2p client available. We didn't care what the kids were downloading because the DMCA complaints only came in from uploads.
Fast-forward a year or so and the site is pretty popular. We'd get asked by at least one or two other universities a week if they could copy our instructions locally for their students. Being a university, of course we would encourage it and only ask for attribution for the copyrighted text and images.
Every now and then, I'd Google around and see who was using our instructions, and one day I noticed a .com show up in the results, which was unusual. I don't remember what the name of the site was, but it was some site trying to convince people that copyright infringement is bad and the music industry really are the good guys, etc. I know for sure we didn't get any requests from anyone like that, so I did some digging.
The site didn't have a DMCA contact listed (as required), so it took some serious digging to find out who really owned the site. As I'm sure you've guessed by now, it was owned and operated by none other than the Recording Industry Association of America. They had stolen the entire site, text, screenshots and all, removed our copyright information, and rebranded the pages, claiming the work as their own.
I dug through my email to find the most recent takedown notice they had sent us, changed all the names to reflect the current situation and fired it off to the RIAA's General Counsel. About 10m later, I got a phone call from a very concerned attorney. I genuinely couldn't stop laughing as he was talking, so I referred the matter to our attorneys and thought no more of it.
It sucks to know that your career has peaked so early. It's all been downhill from there.
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>Napster, in many ways, gave birth to BitTorrent, Bitcoin, and all of the derivative work thereof. You say that, but before Napster, there was Seti(?), a program that would search for extra-terrestrial life - by distributing the work load on top your personal laptop
sounds like bitcoin mining without making money
I vaguely recall there was some kind of chat built in to Napster and it was the era when people did sometimes turn off their computers and/or where in some countries they paid by the minute for internet. I recall getting a message from a German on the other side of the world that I was able to read and respond to because I just happen to speak German letting me know he was headed to bed but that he'd leave his comput…
I was sharing some music from the early times of classic heavy metal, the NWOBHM. A compilation album done by Lars Ulrich with the songs that had inspired him. One day I received a message from someone in England. He was very surprised to find a song from the band of his brother-in-law on napster. He had always thought it was a band that had amounted to nothing. A week later I chatted with the bass player or drummer (I forgot) where he talked about the band. They felt forced to either go commercial, like Def Leppard, or go thougher, like trash metal from the US. The band was divided and that is where it ended. I forgot the name of the band.
The album is now even on wikipedia :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Wave_of_British_Heavy_Meta...
By the way I was using a console client for linux, nap.c. Does anyone remenber that? I ran it on my 486 pc on a console. Just like virtual tty's it had virtual screens built in with search, shares, chat, etcetera.
There was something about piracy in the times of Napster, emule and the like. It really made you feel like you knew some incantation to get access to the whole world's information. In practical terms, I have access to far more content now (music on Spotify, shows and movies on streaming services, tutorials, online classes, etc) and yet our reach doesn't seem as wide as it seemed in those times. Perhaps it was just th…
I don't use Spotify just because whole genres are not there. And I'm not talking about some obscure music from 150 years ago. Even Jungle Tekno from the early to mid 90s can't be found. The only sources are some 50 years old random guy fondly remembering their MDMA-fueled glory days and uploading their records on YouTube, vinyl from Discogs, or private trackers.
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No streaming site will ever have licenses for the bizarre remixes of video game themes, or the Sesame Street theme, that made their way around Napster. More than the music, though, Napster had chat rooms where you could get legit recommendations of new music that far exceeded the recommendation engines of today.
The pinnacle of sharing music was Audiogalaxy
Yes piracy is bad and all but as a college student, Napster was such as life saver. You could literally download any song you wanted to listen to. I also remember another application called Kazaa that was popular as well (circa 2000-2002ish)
I don't like the use of the term "piracy". Piracy is taking a vessel. Common crimes committed by pirates are homicide, kidnapping, rape... It is all very different from copying a file to someone. Of course, "the industry" doesn't care equating one with another.