4 ms·

> It's genuinely hard to imagine a world where ripping your own CDs to MP3 was considered "grey area information" that you wouldn't want to "touch with a ten fo

> It's genuinely hard to imagine a world where ripping your own CDs to MP3 was considered "grey area information" that you wouldn't want to "touch with a ten foot pole". The '90s was a very different place. Yes, but you could also argue it was a much freer place, as in wild west free. On the one hand there was a lot of legal scare, surrounding MP3, patents, DMCA, export controls, etc., and a few people actually got into trouble. On the other hand, you could run a illegal Warez or music download site for years with impunity. Everything was in flow. We as a society haven't determined what goes and what doesn't yet. Good times :-).

dualogy 10y ago
> On the one hand there was a lot of legal scare, surrounding MP3, patents, DMCA, export controls As with any "scares", it took place largely in the media (even there not that much, maybe the odd op-ed and tech/talkshow) while in on-the-ground reality nobody cared and everyone either directly got eagerly and excitedly "into it" or asked their "tech-savvy neighborhood youth" to hook them up with warez or music or in any event back up /digitize their existing collections. (Apart from your typical cautious disposable-income-middle-classer who actually enjoyed regularly investing some of their funds into their ever-growing legal collection of CDs/DVDs/etc) The "scares" initiative really only began in earnest as movies became a feasible target and the music industry must have been much more focused on not sharing the music industry's fate (ie "almost die, then be 'rescued' on breadcrumb terms by Apple")