13 ms·

The dawn of online piracy (2015)

115 points by bckygldstn 9y ago

featherverse 9y ago
This article is garbage. It's a typical case of a complete outsider trying to analyze a scene he doesn't understand or know anything about based on "research", and trying to write for an audience that also doesn't understand the tech or scene or know anything about it. There's not some "guy" responsible for online piracy, and there wasn't a "dawn". If Napster hadn't existed something else would have. Piracy existed outside of Napster. Napster did not give birth to piracy. Piracy has been huge since removable storage was invented, whether it was data cassettes or floppy disks. Piracy was in demand and Napster was the answer, not the inspiration. Considering the source, The New Yorker, none of this comes as a surprise.
- 45h34jh53k4j 9y ago
  hey chill, i dont think its garbage. I detected no technical errors in this article. Napster did have an effect, but this article isnt about that, its about the RNS crew, who released so much stolen music in the 00s. Its from the book "How Music Got Free", and probably has more details you are after.
- blueish 9y ago
  I think the article addressed those points rather well. It highlighted the fact that Glover wasn't the only one doing these things, but his unique position made him a supplier for one of the more exclusive pirating clubs. The author did a rather good job tying a few story lines together coherently to portray a few of the human interest stories at the heart of the piracy movement. Is the headline and top subject a little grandiose? Sure, but the heart of the article didn't claim that Glover was the only supplier of the pirated records, only that he was the supplier for one of the clubs that typically leaked the records first.
- sandworm101 9y ago
  Anyone who thinks napster was the dawn of online piracy either wasn't alive or didn't own a computer in the 90s.
  - christoph 9y ago
    90s? There was "online" piracy and organised piracy groups through BBS systems in the 80s!
    - rev_null 9y ago
      Yarr. In me day, "piracy" didn't involve computers and had actual pirates, Matey.
    - empath75 9y ago
      Yep I remember going through a list of phone numbers printed on a dot matrix printer, asking for ‘elite’ access back in the 80s.
- jzzskijj 9y ago
  No. This wasn't an article about one person making piracy possible. It told a story of few individuals who, on their behalf, brought the music available to the scene. And how the music got from scene's inner circles to the public. Considering the number of releases the group released and the much of the blockbuster albums were supplied by the main protagonist, it is hard to argue that his and their actions weren't significant. Napster is mentioned only as a first easy to use tool for giving the mainstream an access to the goods pirates were releasing.
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  Which article did you read? Napster is a footnote in this one.
  - pavement 9y ago
    That Napster is depicted as a footnote is pretty inaccurate, considering the title. Paint his story as the story of a kingpin, but this is not "the dawn of" anything beyond his personal tale.
- aceoflala 9y ago
  >This article is garbage. It's a typical case of a complete outsider trying to analyze a scene he doesn't understand or know anything about based on "research", and trying to write for an audience that also doesn't understand the tech or scene or know anything about it. You mean, like all journalism?
phsource 9y ago
I love how this story weaves the changes of an industry around a single life who anticipated, benefited, and eventually fell behind the trends of how we get music, movies, and media. I still remember buying bootleg "VCDs" in Hong Kong back in 2001. When it comes to how the music industry's changed as a whole, I think two charts tell the story: 1. RIAA-tracked (North American) music sales have fallen from a high of $14 billion in 1999 to only about $6 billion today, even with downloads included. [1] 2. At the same time, concert ticket sales have gone up from $1.5 to $7.5 billion, offsetting three-quarters of the drop in music sales. [2] It's an incredible shift in how the industry works, and explains the rise of Live Nation/Ticketmaster, Spotify (why are music publishers and others are more willing to give away music?). The winners and losers have changed, but the music keeps playing. [1] https://blog.thecurrent.org/2014/02/40-years-of-album-sales-data-in-one-handy-chart/ https://blog.thecurrent.org/2014/02/40-years-of-album-sales-... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/306065/concert-ticket-sales-revenue-in-north-america/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/306065/concert-ticket-sa...
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  That makes sense to me. Our digital music distribution system is stupid to begin with. We shouldn't be paying for digital goods per item. We should be using alternate payment methods. Unfortunately, this is bad news for the RIAA, as they lose out on a large pool of profits because we've automated the distribution problem away.
  - mikepurvis 9y ago
    The patreon/kickstarter model is much better, but the issue with that from the industry's perspective is that it pays artists more or less directly from their fanatical core of devoted fans. You see this model at work on Twitch as well, where a small group of "subscribers" can support a stream that is viewed by the much larger group of followers. The reason the industry doesn't like it is it requires fanatical fans. It doesn't fit with a model of bland, mass-appeal content; the kind of stuff that everyone likes but nobody loves.
    - 9y ago
qwerty456127 9y ago
One of the sad things is that people willing to just get a no-nonsense DRM-free MP3 of a years-old song they like for personal use (and sharing with a friend perhaps) are considered the same with those willing to get and even sell original stuff before it's even released.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  This in large part because the MAFIAA got so damned used to selling the same thing over and over and over, as new ways to package came to be. This anything that comes around that shortcircuit that business model gets lawyer bombed.
  - qwerty456127 9y ago
    Any ideas on what can probably change the situation at some point?
computator 9y ago
> From 2001 on, Glover was the world’s leading leaker of pre-release music. I love reading a long-after-the-fact story when a key person is willing to talk. Had this story been written in 2001, it would have been speculation and hype. We wouldn't have learned about the real people and how and why they did it. I'm looking forward to reading the following around a decade from now: (1) The real story behind Satoshi Nakamoto, his true name and motives, and why he went silent. (2) The Truecrypt author's story, who was he really, and what caused him to disavow his creation 3 years ago even though it appears totally secure even today.
Norther 9y ago
Anyone else think this would make a great movie? Or perhaps a Silicon Valley-esque tv-series centered around the Scene would be fantastic.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
hungerstrike 9y ago
The "dawn" of online piracy was in the 70s and 80s with BBSs and Usenet, way before Napster. Even right before we had Napster, we had IRC as mentioned in the article. Napster was more like the beginning of peak online piracy. Then we had all the Napster knock-offs for 10 years. Piracy pretty much lost mainstream appeal after that with the emergence of legal media streaming services.
- wmeredith 9y ago
  Agreed. A better title for this may have been "the normalization of online piracy" or "the mainstreaming (ha) of online piracy".
amelius 9y ago
With torrent being blocked in so many countries, it seems more like the end of piracy.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  You can't block torrent. You can perhaps block individual DNS entries, but as long as traffic can flow between "random" ip addresses, torrent will exist.
  - ewams 9y ago
    Right, there is no such thing as a firewall or ACL that can block a type of packet... even though it is so common even consumer products have the ability: https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Firewall_and_Traffic_Shaping/Blocking_P2P_And_File_Sharing https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Firewall_and_Traffic_Sha...
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      Blizzard and a bunch of other gaming companies have made good use of torrent as a way to distribute patches.
      - cptaj 9y ago
        I wish ALL companies distributed their software through torrents. I live in Venezuela and my ISPs throttle each connection, they're also slow and unstable. Bittorrent gets around all this by giving me the ability to resume and leech through dozens or even hundreds of parallel connections. I've actually had to download pirated copies of Microsoft software that they freely provide as downloads. They offer direct downloads but don't let me use download managers... Long slow downloads always fail for me. And that is just Venezuela. I know Iranians have exactly the same problems and I'm sure many others do.
      - squeaky-clean 9y ago
        I remember my university had to make special exceptions to the network for the WoW and LoL patchers. A few students figured out how to spoof their torrents to look like the LoL patcher in order to torrent on campus. Not really that wise though since your network access was tied to your student credentials.
spray 9y ago
The mainstream media is pirating my attention with their nonsense about piracy.
metafrag 9y ago
Data sharing technologies disrupted the media market in the same way that ride sharing technologies disrupted the taxi market. Its piratical uses are secondary to the fact that analog information had been largely outmoded by digital information as early as the first BBS. The piracy, "concert/merch" model, as well as the success of Bandcamp and Spotify, are adaptations to changes in the infrastructure for information exchange. However, anyone arguing that music, movies, or code "should be free" probably hasn't played a guitar, acted in a play, or written a block. Doing these things well is not easy and takes a lifetime of almost-daily practice and expertise...consider resuming that argument when the world is post-currency.
grawprog 9y ago
That was pretty cool to read. I always like hearing about the ways a few people can influence something so widespread. I remember reading a few RNS .NFO files back in the day. I've still got an old hard drive kicking around somewhere that probably has a few of those old .mp3 scene releases in its belly. Back from the days when it used to take longer to download an album of shitty quality .mp3 files than it does to download a 4k movie today.

115 points by bckygldstn 9y ago

This article is garbage. It's a typical case of a complete outsider trying to analyze a scene he doesn't understand or know anything about based on "research", and trying to write for an audience that also doesn't understand the tech or scene or know anything about it. There's not some "guy" responsible for online piracy, and there wasn't a "dawn". If Napster hadn't existed something else would have. Piracy existed outside of Napster. Napster did not give birth to piracy. Piracy has been huge since removable storage was invented, whether it was data cassettes or floppy disks. Piracy was in demand and Napster was the answer, not the inspiration. Considering the source, The New Yorker, none of this comes as a surprise.

45h34jh53k4j 9y ago
hey chill, i dont think its garbage. I detected no technical errors in this article. Napster did have an effect, but this article isnt about that, its about the RNS crew, who released so much stolen music in the 00s. Its from the book "How Music Got Free", and probably has more details you are after.
blueish 9y ago
I think the article addressed those points rather well. It highlighted the fact that Glover wasn't the only one doing these things, but his unique position made him a supplier for one of the more exclusive pirating clubs. The author did a rather good job tying a few story lines together coherently to portray a few of the human interest stories at the heart of the piracy movement. Is the headline and top subject a little grandiose? Sure, but the heart of the article didn't claim that Glover was the only supplier of the pirated records, only that he was the supplier for one of the clubs that typically leaked the records first.
sandworm101 9y ago
Anyone who thinks napster was the dawn of online piracy either wasn't alive or didn't own a computer in the 90s.
- christoph 9y ago
  90s? There was "online" piracy and organised piracy groups through BBS systems in the 80s!
  - rev_null 9y ago
    Yarr. In me day, "piracy" didn't involve computers and had actual pirates, Matey.
  - empath75 9y ago
    Yep I remember going through a list of phone numbers printed on a dot matrix printer, asking for ‘elite’ access back in the 80s.
jzzskijj 9y ago
No. This wasn't an article about one person making piracy possible. It told a story of few individuals who, on their behalf, brought the music available to the scene. And how the music got from scene's inner circles to the public. Considering the number of releases the group released and the much of the blockbuster albums were supplied by the main protagonist, it is hard to argue that his and their actions weren't significant. Napster is mentioned only as a first easy to use tool for giving the mainstream an access to the goods pirates were releasing.
PhasmaFelis 9y ago
Which article did you read? Napster is a footnote in this one.
- pavement 9y ago
  That Napster is depicted as a footnote is pretty inaccurate, considering the title. Paint his story as the story of a kingpin, but this is not "the dawn of" anything beyond his personal tale.
aceoflala 9y ago
>This article is garbage. It's a typical case of a complete outsider trying to analyze a scene he doesn't understand or know anything about based on "research", and trying to write for an audience that also doesn't understand the tech or scene or know anything about it. You mean, like all journalism?

phsource 9y ago

I love how this story weaves the changes of an industry around a single life who anticipated, benefited, and eventually fell behind the trends of how we get music, movies, and media. I still remember buying bootleg "VCDs" in Hong Kong back in 2001. When it comes to how the music industry's changed as a whole, I think two charts tell the story: 1. RIAA-tracked (North American) music sales have fallen from a high of $14 billion in 1999 to only about $6 billion today, even with downloads included. [1] 2. At the same time, concert ticket sales have gone up from $1.5 to $7.5 billion, offsetting three-quarters of the drop in music sales. [2] It's an incredible shift in how the industry works, and explains the rise of Live Nation/Ticketmaster, Spotify (why are music publishers and others are more willing to give away music?). The winners and losers have changed, but the music keeps playing. [1] https://blog.thecurrent.org/2014/02/40-years-of-album-sales-data-in-one-handy-chart/ https://blog.thecurrent.org/2014/02/40-years-of-album-sales-... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/306065/concert-ticket-sales-revenue-in-north-america/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/306065/concert-ticket-sa...

CaptSpify 9y ago
That makes sense to me. Our digital music distribution system is stupid to begin with. We shouldn't be paying for digital goods per item. We should be using alternate payment methods. Unfortunately, this is bad news for the RIAA, as they lose out on a large pool of profits because we've automated the distribution problem away.
- mikepurvis 9y ago
  The patreon/kickstarter model is much better, but the issue with that from the industry's perspective is that it pays artists more or less directly from their fanatical core of devoted fans. You see this model at work on Twitch as well, where a small group of "subscribers" can support a stream that is viewed by the much larger group of followers. The reason the industry doesn't like it is it requires fanatical fans. It doesn't fit with a model of bland, mass-appeal content; the kind of stuff that everyone likes but nobody loves.
  - 9y ago

qwerty456127 9y ago

One of the sad things is that people willing to just get a no-nonsense DRM-free MP3 of a years-old song they like for personal use (and sharing with a friend perhaps) are considered the same with those willing to get and even sell original stuff before it's even released.

digi_owl 9y ago
This in large part because the MAFIAA got so damned used to selling the same thing over and over and over, as new ways to package came to be. This anything that comes around that shortcircuit that business model gets lawyer bombed.
- qwerty456127 9y ago
  Any ideas on what can probably change the situation at some point?

computator 9y ago

> From 2001 on, Glover was the world’s leading leaker of pre-release music. I love reading a long-after-the-fact story when a key person is willing to talk. Had this story been written in 2001, it would have been speculation and hype. We wouldn't have learned about the real people and how and why they did it. I'm looking forward to reading the following around a decade from now: (1) The real story behind Satoshi Nakamoto, his true name and motives, and why he went silent. (2) The Truecrypt author's story, who was he really, and what caused him to disavow his creation 3 years ago even though it appears totally secure even today.

Norther 9y ago

Anyone else think this would make a great movie? Or perhaps a Silicon Valley-esque tv-series centered around the Scene would be fantastic.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

hungerstrike 9y ago

The "dawn" of online piracy was in the 70s and 80s with BBSs and Usenet, way before Napster. Even right before we had Napster, we had IRC as mentioned in the article. Napster was more like the beginning of peak online piracy. Then we had all the Napster knock-offs for 10 years. Piracy pretty much lost mainstream appeal after that with the emergence of legal media streaming services.

wmeredith 9y ago
Agreed. A better title for this may have been "the normalization of online piracy" or "the mainstreaming (ha) of online piracy".

amelius 9y ago

With torrent being blocked in so many countries, it seems more like the end of piracy.

digi_owl 9y ago
You can't block torrent. You can perhaps block individual DNS entries, but as long as traffic can flow between "random" ip addresses, torrent will exist.
- ewams 9y ago
  Right, there is no such thing as a firewall or ACL that can block a type of packet... even though it is so common even consumer products have the ability: https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Firewall_and_Traffic_Shaping/Blocking_P2P_And_File_Sharing https://documentation.meraki.com/MR/Firewall_and_Traffic_Sha...
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Blizzard and a bunch of other gaming companies have made good use of torrent as a way to distribute patches.
    - cptaj 9y ago
      I wish ALL companies distributed their software through torrents. I live in Venezuela and my ISPs throttle each connection, they're also slow and unstable. Bittorrent gets around all this by giving me the ability to resume and leech through dozens or even hundreds of parallel connections. I've actually had to download pirated copies of Microsoft software that they freely provide as downloads. They offer direct downloads but don't let me use download managers... Long slow downloads always fail for me. And that is just Venezuela. I know Iranians have exactly the same problems and I'm sure many others do.
    - squeaky-clean 9y ago
      I remember my university had to make special exceptions to the network for the WoW and LoL patchers. A few students figured out how to spoof their torrents to look like the LoL patcher in order to torrent on campus. Not really that wise though since your network access was tied to your student credentials.

spray 9y ago

The mainstream media is pirating my attention with their nonsense about piracy.

metafrag 9y ago

Data sharing technologies disrupted the media market in the same way that ride sharing technologies disrupted the taxi market. Its piratical uses are secondary to the fact that analog information had been largely outmoded by digital information as early as the first BBS. The piracy, "concert/merch" model, as well as the success of Bandcamp and Spotify, are adaptations to changes in the infrastructure for information exchange. However, anyone arguing that music, movies, or code "should be free" probably hasn't played a guitar, acted in a play, or written a block. Doing these things well is not easy and takes a lifetime of almost-daily practice and expertise...consider resuming that argument when the world is post-currency.

grawprog 9y ago

That was pretty cool to read. I always like hearing about the ways a few people can influence something so widespread. I remember reading a few RNS .NFO files back in the day. I've still got an old hard drive kicking around somewhere that probably has a few of those old .mp3 scene releases in its belly. Back from the days when it used to take longer to download an album of shitty quality .mp3 files than it does to download a 4k movie today.