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Napster.com banned at some universities for clogging networks (2000)

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21–30 of 189 posts

Re: Napster.com banned at some universities for clogging networks (2000)

#21
post #2

Back then we were moving a terabyte a week on one Hotline Server alone. Napster was already way way more popular (and accessible).

Curious if any P2P networks existed before Hotline. I recall using it briefly before Napster burst onto the scene, and always considered it to be the pioneer.

Re: Napster.com banned at some universities for clogging networks (2000)

#22
post #3

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)

The guy that made Kazaa went on to co-found Skype.

Re: Napster.com banned at some universities for clogging networks (2000)

#23

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…

Napster had some bootleg content that would be illegal on modern streaming services.

Re: Napster.com banned at some universities for clogging networks (2000)

#24
post #5

Those were glorious days. To go from buying CDs to being able to find and download almost any song you could think of was amazing. I loved the ability to discover artists I didn’t know about by looking through people’s collections. Such a great discovery feature. It was all illegal, but it just an amazing time.

Reminds me of the time I saw a bookshelf in the bedroom of my brother's friend. Half were books I loved and half were books I'd never heard of. I got some new favorite authors out of that discovery :)

Re: Napster.com banned at some universities for clogging networks (2000)

#25

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…

The content you readily have access to now is far far more curated by others than you realize, largely because it's so easy to use.

It's a bit of legwork and both legally and ethically questionable, but a modern usenet|(radarr||sonarr)|nzbget|jellyfin pipeline makes the legal providers seem obscenely limited.

It doesn't matter who has negotiated what license with whom -- if I want to watch a bit of media, I can usually do so in high quality with a few clicks and a few minutes wait. (rarely more than 30 minutes for the 4k good stuff)

Re: Napster.com banned at some universities for clogging networks (2000)

#26
post #20

Napster is one of the two or three products that spawned a completely different world, entirely tossing established and antiquated rules on their head. Of course, very directly, Spotify would not exist without Napster. But a step further, it opened the eyes to end-users about their collective power, and the beauty of distributed distribution. It was the first proof that "regular" users would buy into such a thing. Na…

I think p2p was so successful that the music industry had to change. They had to be more convenient or would lose all the control on media distribution. Users of modern streaming services owe a lot to p2p users of early.

Evidence: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/...

Re: Napster.com banned at some universities for clogging networks (2000)

#27
post #5

Those were glorious days. To go from buying CDs to being able to find and download almost any song you could think of was amazing. I loved the ability to discover artists I didn’t know about by looking through people’s collections. Such a great discovery feature. It was all illegal, but it just an amazing time.

Remember the days of Wrapster?

Re: Napster.com banned at some universities for clogging networks (2000)

#28

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…

Napster had some bootleg content that would be illegal on modern streaming services.

I've been pleased to see that YouTube Content ID usually just results in attribution (a good thing!) and monetisation (ads) - it's not totally illegal to upload someone else's song.

There are a couple of times when it has been totally deleted though (Universal Studios Japan deleting Monoeyes songs), so that's why I prefer not to use my personal Google account for sharing content - losing access to GMail as a result of sharing something on YouTube is not a risk I'd like to take.

I wish there were a way to bulk-upload music (from, say, the 1.3 TB MySpace Dragon Hoard), but personal accounts are limited to 50 songs per day.

Re: Napster.com banned at some universities for clogging networks (2000)

#29
post #3

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)

Saw plenty of DirectConnect usage while attending college..

Re: Napster.com banned at some universities for clogging networks (2000)

#30

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…

> and yet our reach doesn't seem as wide as it seemed in those times.

because you don't actually "have" the files.

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