15 ms·

Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

• tiahura 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • cushpush 2y ago
    Modern music is fire, modern music distribution is a dumpster fire.
    • coretx 2y ago
      That's because of using the IPR's for market/platform/eyeballs/etc.-gatekeeping is more lucrative. Such behavior is illegal in any other market, but in media it's not for "unknown" reasons.
    • gosub100 2y ago
      Completely agree. As much as I dislike modern streaming services' habit of preventing you from owning the art, I have to credit them for breaking me out of my deep rut and getting me to discover new artists. For decades I didn't know what I was missing.
  • ljlolel 2y ago
    Let me guess, you’re over 40
    • jumpman_miya 2y ago
      You'll understand once you get there.
      • maroonblazer 2y ago
        I'm there (and then some) and hard disagree.
    • lawgimenez 2y ago
      I think he’s Lars of Metallica. Hey Lars
      • codetrotter 2y ago
        Beer good. Napster bad.
  • dividefuel 2y ago
    What's the argument for file sharing ruining music? I would think more the opposite, that it improved distribution and discovery for lesser-known artists, and so helped diversify music.
    • jl6 2y ago
      There’s a theory that for a period of time in the 00s, all the “smart” people were getting their music for free online, while only “dumb” people were buying CDs, and so popular music charts began to reflect the tastes only of the “dumb” people. I don’t believe it because (a) crap music has always existed, and (b) Napster nerds were numerous but still weren’t a critical mass capable of moving the market like this.
      • brabel 2y ago
        I downloaded stuff from Napster (and its successors) but still bought CDs that I liked it in the store. Having a CD of vinyl collection used to be a matter of pride even if you had everything also on mp3s.
    • bitwize 2y ago
      Every musician I know says this. Back in the day, you could actually make money selling records, which led to a flourishing of music. New hopefuls would work their butts off, playing gigs and selling small-print-run CDs to make ends meet while they waited and hoped for a major label to give them their big break. And they really had a shot at a big break, too. Then file sharing happened, and if you were any good your stuff was being pirated as soon as it was released, if not before. Major labels won't touch pirated stuff, it's radioactive. The only way to make it is to take a bath on record sales and hope that enough people buy concert tickets and swag to meet your expenses. So yeah, the likes of Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Justin Bieber, Drake -- they all get rich, but everybody else is struggling. The idea that piracy helps listeners discover new music may well be true. But it doesn't help put food on musicians' tables -- just the opposite. See also: open source and the corrosive effect it's had on programmers' livelihoods.
      • 2y ago
  • scarface_74 2y ago
    Every generation thinks that the next generations music is crap. Studies show that people stop discovering new music when they are 30. https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2023/03/study-shows-why-we-stop-discovering-new-music-as-we-get-older.html#:~:text=If%20you're%20past%20the,and%20more%20as%20you%20age https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2023/03/study-shows-why-we-s...!
    • narag 2y ago
      Last study I've seen, that stopped being... I won't say true, but I'd say that it stopped being a valid counterargument to that particular complaint. Now that young people can access music from any time in YouTube, their choices are more atemporal and certain remote decades keep getting much love. If you combine that fact with current music being more marketed and aired, there's seem to be something at play here. I don't think new music is crap, but it's less catchy.
      • scarface_74 2y ago
        There has always been a lot of marketing an airing to make music catchy. The entire “Motown machine” wasn’t about the artists, it was about the writers, producers, choreographers etc and making sure music was “acceptable” to a wider audience.
        • narag 2y ago
          I meant that the music that's publicized today is the music that's made today. So if even with this handicap, older music is as popular as the new, one explanation could be that it was intrinsically catchier. The graphic that I saw: https://x.com/antonello/status/1781197022910947492 https://x.com/antonello/status/1781197022910947492 To be clear: I'm not arguing that it was better, just more memorable, uplifting or touching. Actually, in ye olden times, "commercial music" was a synonym of bad and "quality music" was expected to be minoritary.
    • bloopernova 2y ago
      I've definitely discovered less new artists as I've aged. I'm near 50 now and last year only added Röyksopp, and Sleaford Mods, to my regular listening playlist. But I'm also still listening to new stuff by many artists like Aesop Rock, Orbital, and The Chemical Brothers. I don't follow radio or popular music at all. However if I hear something I like, the supercomputer in my pocket tells me just what it is so I can discover new music that way.
• NathanielBaking 2y ago
  Everything is free now That's what they say Everything I ever done Gonna give it away Someone hit the big score They figured it out That we're gonna do it anyway Even if it doesn't pay Everything Is Free Song by Gillian Welch
  • wes-k 2y ago
    Just heard this song for the first time like a month ago, thanks for the reminder!
• bradleyjg 2y ago
  Napster was a big part of it, credit where credit is due, but faster networks were the critical ingredient. I was in college at the time and it blew up on campus, but for my friends still in high school on DSL or even still POTS it was far less useful.
  • vlovich123 2y ago
    I was on 56k and Napster was the best and fastest thing around for a while, but more importantly had the largest library. Gnutella/Kazaa took over but only once Napster shut down and people started making their libraries available there. Torrents came in short order but that was more coupled to when broadband became much more widely adopted
  • skeeter2020 2y ago
    Universities & Colleges have been ground zero for establishing pretty much every major advancement, from the internet itself to Doom, file sharing and Facebook. Lots of resources combined with young, rich people with big ideas and energy who get the benefit of knowledge & wisdom while almost universially staking out a position in opposition to the established "way things are".
• sizzzzlerz 2y ago
  Still remember the very last day Napster was alive. It was an absolute feeding frenzy as thousands and thousands of people were attempting to download everything they could before it all went away. Napster was, basically, a giant middle finger to the record companies and their control over what got released and their ability to put out albums containing one or two songs people wanted and then stuffed with what ever crap they could shovel into it. The music business changed that day.
• echelon 2y ago
  > According to the RIAA’s former CEO, Hilary Rosen, a few months after Napster’s release, the music industry shifted into full panic mode. In February 2000, all major label executives discussed the threat during an RIAA board meeting at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles. > “I will never forget this day. All of the heads of the labels, literally the titans of the music business, were in that room. I had somebody wheel in a PC and put some speakers up and I started doing a name that tune,” Rosen later recalled. > The major music bosses started to name tracks, including some that weren’t even released yet, and time and again Napster would come up with results. Needless to say, the board was terrified. They're about to be more terrified. Suno and Udio are just the beginning of the complete unraveling of the need for studio capital. It's going to happen to Hollywood too.
  • gedy 2y ago
    Maybe, but don't discount media lobbying gov't, and trying to generate moral outrage about AI stealing from artists, deep fakes, AI safety, etc to make sure only big corps control AI.
    • jkolio 2y ago
      One of the funniest moments in modern music history, to me, was when Kim Dotcom got a bunch of superstars to sing on a track about how much they loved MegaUpload. One of the least funny moments was when the RIAA and MPAA essentially directed American and New Zealand authorities to raid his house, shut down the MegaUpload website, seize all the servers, and jail a bunch of his employees (Kim himself only barely escaping extradition). Episodes like that really do make me fearful of what corporations might push government to do. If they want to get you on something that isn't illegal, they'll try to make it illegal. If it's already illegal, they'll try to make the punishment as severe as possible. Oversight of, and accountability from, these entities is paramount.
    • HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
      >AI stealing from artists, deep fakes, AI safety This isn't generated outage, it's genuine, and objectively justified. Trying to find clients was hard enough for artists to begin with. We should be automating hard labor so we can focus on art and human interaction, but instead we're automating art and interaction so we can focus on slaving away even harder. This is somehow worse than any traditional dystopia story. Government propaganda posters were at least the work of a human hand.
• coretx 2y ago
  Yet we still don't have a safe & resilient alternative for using Kademlia tables. Shame on us.
  • bawolff 2y ago
    What's wrong with current generation DHT? They work. They are secure (depending on how you define that). They are reliable. Why would we want to replace them?
    • coretx 2y ago
      Anyone with mediocre skills can take it down; ( And more ) that's the problem. I'd rather not mention the specifics because that might give people ideas but they can be found in academic papers.
      • bawolff 2y ago
        Not discussing security vulnerabilities helps attackers and hinders defenders. The obvious question here is - if its so easy, why hasn't anyone done so? When was the last time bit torrent's DHT went down? As far as i know never. It should be noted that current generation DHTs aren't the same as the original and do have some mitigations from certain attacks.
        • coretx 2y ago
          Sybil attacks if i'm not mistaken ;-)
          • bawolff 2y ago
            Sybil attacks are like DoS attacks. They are never going away fully. All webservers are vulnerable to DoS attacks and yet in practise it is pretty rare for major websites to go down because of them despite their simplicity. But there are strategies to mitigate sybil attacks. Requiring hashcash style proof of work to participate in the network, increase state requirements to participate in the network, basing node id's on something the attacker cannot control (e.g. IP addressss), are common strategies often mentioned. In the context of bit torrent, i guess it doesn't super matter that much. If your goal is to spy on the overlay network, while the entire point is to publicize the tracker data so what is the point of spying on public data? If the goal is to more actively attack the network - having bit torrent be a dual system with traditional trackers (and other ways to find peers) also, means that an attack causes degredation but is not a killing blow to bit torrent. Which in the cost/benefit analysis reduces the benefits, causing attackers to wonder if the cost is worth it. Like denial of service attacks, the best defence is to make the attack expensive enough that it just isn't worth it.
• dboreham 2y ago
  I briefly worked there. Like three Scaramuccis.
• mmh0000 2y ago
  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 artist’s entire discography in one go. Or if you’re into automation, lidarr , sonarr , and radarr can pull in your favorite things as soon as they’re released. What I find most strange about the modern day piracy is quality. It blows my mind how different groups fight to offer the best version of a free thing. And they’re so good at it, that the pirated product is usually substantially better than the official version.
  • im3w1l 2y ago
    3+hours? I remember being able to download roughly 10 songs in an hour.
    • mmh0000 2y ago
      Look. It was 25 years ago. I’m an old man now. My memory of that time is a haze of multiplayer Quake strategy. How about I rephrase it: it FELT like 3+ hours.
      • bloopernova 2y ago
        You wanna LAN party in the old people's home? Although I was better at Unreal Tournament, I like the weapons more.
      • jl6 2y ago
        It could still have been 3 hours as you would have been constrained not only by your own download speed, but also the peer’s upload speed, and they might have been on an even crappier dial-up line or sharing their bandwidth with other uploads.
        • brabel 2y ago
• aaron695 2y ago
  [dead]
• washadjeffmad 2y ago
  I remember how out of control the lawsuits got by the mid-2000s. A friend had to drop out of college and move back home over some multi-million dollar claim on behalf of the RIAA that his family "settled" for $40K. It wasn't even clear he was responsible (the lawsuit was based on IP), but he was scared and admitted to using "file sharing services", and that was that. I'm still disappointed that laws against barratry didn't become more prevalent in the US as a result of "copyright trolling". Instead, exceptions have been slowly chiseled out of the DMCA to restore a sliver of the rights we used to have.
  • jjtheblunt 2y ago
    What rights did you used to have?
    • bdowling 2y ago
      We used to have the right to copy whatever we wanted and be accountable to no one. That all went away in 1790 when the U.S. government passed the first Copyright Act. https://www.copyright.gov/timeline/timeline_18th_century.html https://www.copyright.gov/timeline/timeline_18th_century.htm...
      • CPLX 2y ago
        > We used to have the right > That all went away in 1790 Interesting use of the word “we” here. Also there’s a few other “rights” that have changed since then, not sure this argument has the power you think it does.
      • PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
        > We used to have the right to copy whatever we wanted and be accountable to no one. Unless you copied something of value to a rich and powerful person, in which case your accountability would likely be quite high. Also, "copying" before 1790 meant something rather different than cp(1).
      • steve1977 2y ago
        And what exactly would you have copied with your rights in, say, the year 1789? And how would you have done that?
• chinathrow 2y ago
  Never forget their bug when they only transferred 99% of the MP3 you wanted. Good times.
• xhkkffbf 2y ago
  And now rock stars who were once as rich as, well, rock stars, are largely forced to get by on a pittance from either Spotify or YouTube. It used to be that there were hundreds of stars getting rich. Now there's Taylor Swift and... I can't name anyone else. But, hey, the quasi-communists who thought they were somehow liberating the music from the evil rich people ended up dragging all of the music industry down into poverty.
  • bitwize 2y ago
    This is why we have DRM -- and need more.
    • artninja1988 2y ago
      Disagree. DRM is evil and anti consumer. I don't care if there aren't as many billionaire artists as in the past
    • coretx 2y ago
      DRM is done by elected officials, usually parliamentarians. Whenever it's not elected individuals or institutions doing it, it's called tyranny or vigilantism.
  • eddythompson80 2y ago
    > It used to be that there were hundreds of stars getting rich. Now there's Taylor Swift and... I can't name anyone else. Just becaus you don’t know them doesn’t mean they don’t exist. There are way more than hundreds of “rock stars” that are getting rich now. There are also way more “rock stars” now than there ever was.
    • redwall_hp 2y ago
      The "rock star" era was a bubble, at a time of rising demand and limited supply. Digital recording has democratized music, tastes have stratified (thank fuck) and now there's so much supply people have FOMO over discovery tools not finding them optimal recommendations in a sea of possibilities. On the other side, in the first half of the 20th century, artists were more likely paid a one-off pittance to come into a studio and record a song, and then the record labels profit from it to this day. Music is worth less now because the supply is vast and the demand is relatively limited. Pretty simple economics. And most artists have always made their money from touring...while concert prices are more eye watering than ever.
• mattmaroon 2y ago
  Man do I feel old now. I remember using that in college when it was brand new. These were in the days when Yahoo practically WAS the internet and Google was a scrappy upstart. I remember trading mp3s on AOL before it. I remember how much effort it took to download an mp3 over a 56k modem. Every time my brother picked up the phone I had to start over. The first one I succesfully downloaded, after trying for what must have been days but felt like months, was Gettin' Jiggy Wit It and of course it turned out our 386 computer couldn't even really play an mp3 without stuttering. I remember moving in with two friends, a block from campus, and putting a $2,500 Gateway computer (bought from the Gateway store in the strip mall, of course) on a credit card because we were going to split it three ways. You can probably guess how that ended up. Even though that was equivalent to about $5k today it was a midrange computer at best and, of course, was replaced a little over a year later. But, we did get broadband and it could play Starcraft and online poker just fine. Worth it! I remember after Napster exploded, it had gotten bogged down with new traffic and they started offering multiple servers, and someone wrote some third-party software that let you switch between them at will until you could find the song you wanted without too terribly much wait. I remember my first mp3 player, a Diamond Rio 500. It used a USB cord that, of course, had the pins reversed, so you couldn't just use any USB cord. It held about one hour of music, 1.5 if you bought a very expensive 32mb flash card. It ran for a week on one aaa battery. It cost almost $300, which would be like $500 today. God did I love that thing. I remember the RIAA and MPAA suing file sharers. I remember lots of tech bros saying what idiots they were for trying to use the legal system to put the toothpaste back in the tube. I remember one particularly astute, well-known tech guy saying at a YC dinner (must have been 2007 or 2008) in response to a sneering question about it that not everyone who chooses a career outside of tech is an idiot, the people who run the media companies might know more about media than you, certainly understand that selling physical media's days are numered, and that what they were doing was really a delaying tactic while they figured out how to monetize content in the digital age. (The answer, it turned out, was things like Netflix and Spotify, but those were still a few years away. Netflix's first original content wasn't until 2012!) I remember after Napster got sued into oblivion there were so many others. The toothpaste was out of the tube on file sharing. Limewire. Edonkey. Bittorrent. For every one they killed two more appeared. Fragmentation wasn't even an issue since everyone ran (and thus seeded) several. Good nostalgia for a Saturday,.
• bigtex 2y ago
  I remember having 384KB symmetrical DSL in mid 2000 from Northpoint Communications, who would go out of business a few months later. I basically had business class service to my apartment because that it all they could provide, so I didn't complain. Obviously one of the first things I tested was Napster on my Bondi Blue iMac B computer and man could you download music so fast and easily!
• neilv 2y ago
  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 for free.
  • artninja1988 2y ago
    Isn't this a bit like victim blaming? You should be criticizing the RIAA and lawmakers instead.
    • neilv 2y ago
      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?
      • giantrobot 2y ago
        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.
        • neilv 2y ago
• steve1977 2y ago
  I was putting a lot of effort into starting a career in the music business in the middle of the 90s. Thankfully I was not successful and „pivoted“ to IT in 1998.
• romanhn 2y ago
  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.
  • grimgrin 2y ago
    Definitely enjoy browsing a user's shares, and even occasionally checking what's been downloaded from me. Soulseek goes strong https://nicotine-plus.org/ https://nicotine-plus.org/
    • heed 2y ago
      Whoa I totally forgot that Soulseek was a thing, thank you! I used to be able to find rare b-sides and live recordings of my favorite bands on it.
    • consumer451 2y ago
      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.
      • spectre3d 2y ago
        Guessing you’re taking about Hotline. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications I ran a Hotline server for a few months, but ran KDX and Carracho servers for years. Same client-server setup as Hotline. Great communities and interesting people.
        • consumer451 2y ago
          Yup, my brain glitched. That is the one.
    • pea 2y ago
      Soulseek is absolutely awesome at this. Why don't the record labels shut it down? Have they just given up on P2P?
• 5350-uiop-1130 2y ago
  torrent is really a great technology. subversive and evergreen. genuinely useful and hard to kill.
  • issafram 2y ago
    Only if you use a private tracker. Public ones always have seeders whose job it is to collect IP addresses. You'll still get that letter in the mail about pirating
    • andai 2y ago
      Isn't going after torrent makers more important than random downloaders? By that logic shouldn't big music / movie companies be targeting private trackers? (Surely they have enough materials to pass the interview!)
    • ogurechny 2y ago
      …if you live under a regime controlled by big media business.
      • issafram 2y ago
        Or when Comcast is your ISP...
    • ls612 2y ago
      Which is why there are so many VPN services out there. Or seedboxes if you are serious about this stuff.
• simonw 2y ago
  Something I found fascinating about Napster at the time is that it was fiercely difficult to use... but it didn't matter, because what it gave people (access to ANY music) was so desirable that they would learn how to use it.
  • pea 2y ago
    One side effect of this I remember was that, for a little while, there was a blackmarket of buying MP3s on CD at car boots and flea markets. My dad came home once with a CD with all the Beatles songs. He had paid something like £15 and thought he'd got a deal of his life. I also wonder which year it stopped being an acceptable Christmas present to give someone a burned CD.
• ww520 2y ago
  Ah good time. Bring back memory. My involvement with that period was I wrote a p2p file sharing app using the Gnutella protocol, an alternative to the Napster. It was a fun time.
  • andai 2y ago
    That's what Limewire used right? Is that network still a thing? Last I checked it was, but full of bots that return fake files named after your exact search query.
    • ww520 2y ago
      Yes. Limewire came out a bit later. All the apps with the same protocol could talk to each other. Initially mine was open sourced as well. I close sourced it after selling it to a company.
      • gonesilent 2y ago
        The gnutella.wego.com guys ran servers called mrclean on the gnutella network and ran most of the main nodes for the network passing the torch later to limewire who ran nodes and also cleaned network spam.
• _fat_santa 2y ago
  Napster was a little before my time, though I fondly remember torrenting when I was a kid and oddly enough, it was a small time scam that got me into it. I remember when I was a kid (maybe 13 or 14) I really (and I mean really) wanted to play Grand Theft Auto. My dad picked up a copy of GTA San Andreas for me about a year prior but after seeing the violence and language he forced me to take it back, that put the taste into my mouth and I wanted more. So I searched for "free video game downloads" and I remember I went to this site that claimed that for just $30, you could "download unlimited video games for free". I begged my parents to let me sign up and pay the $30 until they finally relented and bought it for me. What it turned out to be was just a tutorial on how to use uTorrent (and they also had an "addon" for unlimited MP3's which taught you how to use Limewire). I realized pretty quickly I got scammed and I think to date this is the only scam that I've ever fallen for. Kinda worked out though because I learned how to torrent and after a few years I had a basic gaming PC with a hard drive full of games that I had torrented (everything from Crysis to GTA games to every Call of Duty game). I was also pretty deep into torrenting music right up until Spotify came to the USA (I still remember all the "workarounds" to get Spotify to work in the US before they officially released here, though I didn't try any myself) Since then Spotify has remained my longest kept subscription and for all it's faults I think Spotify got the solution to music piracy right. With Spotify it was just more convenient to pay them every month then to bother pirating music and uploading it to my iPhone.
  • andai 2y ago
    How is that a scam? You received, as promised, the ability to download infinite games for free :)
  • zulban 2y ago
    Doesn't sound like a scam. You wanted to buy a fish and they gave you a fishing pole. And for just 30$? Some online training today costs many thousands of dollars. Indeed you must be young because you think online tutorials must be free and instructors charging for their work is a scam.
    • noman-land 2y ago
• swed420 2y ago
  Excerpts from chapter 5 of "Free as in Freedom" (freely available at https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ 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 natural human impulse to share a work becomes harder to restrict. Rather than impose additional restrictions, Napster execs have decided to take advantage of the impulse. Giving music listeners a central place to trade music files, the company has gambled on its ability to steer the resulting user traffic toward other commercial opportunities. > The sudden success of the Napster model has put the fear in traditional record companies, with good reason. Just days before my Palo Alto meeting with Stallman, U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Patel granted a request filed by the Recording Industry Association of America for an injunction against the file-sharing service. The injunction was subsequently suspended by the U.S. Ninth District Court of Appeals, but by early 2001, the Court of Appeals, too, would find the San Mateo-based company in breach of copyright law,5 a decision RIAA spokesperson Hillary Rosen would later proclaim proclaim a "clear victory for the creative content community and the legitimate online marketplace." > For hackers such as Stallman, the Napster business model is scary in different ways. The company's eagerness to appropriate time-worn hacker principles such as file sharing and communal information ownership, while at the same time selling a service based on proprietary software, sends a distressing mixed message. As a person who already has a hard enough time getting his own carefully articulated message into the media stream, Stallman is understandably reticent when it comes to speaking out about the company. Still, Stallman does admit to learning a thing or two from the social side of the Napster phenomenon. > "Before Napster, I thought it might be OK for people to privately redistribute works of entertainment," Stallman says. "The number of people who find Napster useful, however, tells me that the right to redistribute copies not only on a neighbor-to-neighbor basis, but to the public at large, is essential and therefore may not be taken away." . . . > "It's a mistake to transfer answers from one thing to another," says Stallman, contrasting songs with software programs. "The right approach is to look at each type of work and see what conclusion you get." > When it comes to copyrighted works, Stallman says he divides the world into three categories. The first category involves "functional" works-e.g., software programs, dictionaries, and textbooks. The second category involves works that might best be described as "testimonial"-e.g., scientific papers and historical documents. Such works serve a purpose that would be undermined if subsequent readers or authors were free to modify the work at will. The final category involves works of personal expression-e.g., diaries, journals, and autobiographies. To modify such documents would be to alter a person's recollections or point of view-action Stallman considers ethically unjustifiable. > Of the three categories, the first should give users the unlimited right to make modified versions, while the second and third should regulate that right according to the will of the original author. Regardless of category, however, the freedom to copy and redistribute noncommercially should remain unabridged at all times, Stallman insists. If that means giving Internet users the right to generate a hundred copies of an article, image, song, or book and then email the copies to a hundred strangers, so be it. "It's clear that private occasional redistribution must be permitted, because only a police state can stop that," Stallman says. "It's antisocial to come between people and their friends. Napster has convinced me that we also need to permit, must permit, even noncommercial redistribution to the public for the fun of it. Because so many people want to do that and find it so useful." > When I ask whether the courts would accept such a permissive outlook, Stallman cuts me off. > "That's the wrong question," he says. "I mean now you've changed the subject entirely from one of ethics to one of interpreting laws. And those are two totally different questions in the same field. It's useless to jump from one to the other. How the courts would interpret the existing laws is mainly in a harsh way, because that's the way these laws have been bought by publishers." > The comment provides an insight into Stallman's political philosophy: just because the legal system currently backs up businesses' ability to treat copyright as the software equivalent of land title doesn't mean computer users have to play the game according to those rules. Freedom is an ethical issue, not a legal issue. "I'm looking beyond what the existing laws are to what they should be," Stallman says. "I'm not trying to draft legislation. I'm thinking about what should the law do? I consider the law prohibiting the sharing of copies with your friend the moral equivalent of Jim Crow. It does not deserve respect."
• chinathrow 2y ago
  Napster was awesome but Audiogalaxy was way better: it just worked and had a remote interface which was magical at the time.
• smugma 2y ago
  Paramount+ coming out with a two part documentary June 11 based on a book with the same name, How Music Got Free: https://www.paramountpressexpress.com/paramount-plus/shows/how-music-got-free/releases/?view=109839-paramount-announces-new-docuseries-how-music-got-free-to-premiere-june-11 https://www.paramountpressexpress.com/paramount-plus/shows/h...
  • CaptainOfCoit 2y ago
    1) What kind of domain is that? Looks like a domain for a tabloid or something 2) It redirects me to https://www.paramountpressexpress.com/location-not-allowed https://www.paramountpressexpress.com/location-not-allowed which says "Your geographic location is not allowed access". Here is a mirror for others who happen to not live in the US (or whatever country it's restricted to): https://archive.is/AYgwj https://archive.is/AYgwj
    • Kailhus 2y ago
      1. Paramount pre sex press obviously! 2. Same here, geo-blocking is the worst.
    • slyall 2y ago
      Paramount is very keen on region restrictions. I have a hobby of watching/sharing TV/Movie Trailers and 90% of the time the Paramount ones on youtube will be region locked to the USA. Hence many don't get shared to a forum that is 80% US residents..
      • CaptainOfCoit 2y ago
        > Paramount is very keen on region restrictions Bit too much it seems, as I live in one of the countries mentioned in the article where this documentary is supposed to launch...
• p3rls 2y ago
  Back around in World of Warcraft around 2009ish, there was a rogue named Napster that someone invited to the guild I was in <Death and Taxes> as a casual/friend. I never found out if he was actually the founder for real but I always wanted to add "geared up the founder of Napster in Sunwell" to my resume somehow.
  • eszed 2y ago
    <Salute> to Vanilla WoW. DnT were rockstars. 2009 was after the drama, and the migration to the Horde side, right? I stopped playing around that time (it was distracting me from RL stuff, as well as removing some of the elements that made it such a great distraction), but the first five or so years of that game are really special memories.
    • p3rls 2y ago
      DnT died in vanilla and Napster joined during the reorganization led by Kiberian and a few other old DnT on Blackrock, yeah. It was an interesting time for many reasons, like you said the first waves of casualitis (lol) were sweeping through, it was becoming harder to fill raids, many people who were thought to be good players in naxx were the same types that were letting scorch fall off but they were still demanding gear like they were rockstars, the game finally hit that sorta cultural moment around TBC too so we had everyone in guild chat from porn stars like Mia Rose to guys like Napster. Just wild times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJoNZJW8jpw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJoNZJW8jpw One day I'm going to write a book on that era, I think I'm one of the few people who got into Death and Taxes, Aurora, Exodus, Vigil and Premonition and I have many many stories from all the bleeding at on the bleeding edge of the US raiding scene. Perls/Puresin was my character for reference
      • eszed 2y ago
        Please write that book! Vanilla WoW was a unique (to my experience) social creation / culture, that I've not seen duplicated nor properly articulated. A server was a village, and you recognized (and were recognized for) competence and generosity. There was a great deal of silliness, and drama, but also real human connection, validated by the currency of time. There were people on my friends list for whom I'd drop anything to go and help, and vice versa. I had deep, deep late-night conversations with strangers who'd become anonymous friends. I remember sitting on Southshore and typing back and forth with a guy who'd never told anyone in RL he was gay, but felt safe to share that with us. I had a guild-mate who stayed online until the very last moment before he deployed to Afghanistan - and I remember our jubilation when he logged back in nine months later, and how every raid thereafter, for a time, was built around gearing him back up. WoW was how I maintained a connection with distant friends; it's how I got to know my brother-in-law; it sustained a romantic partner and I while we were apart for a while (our guild became her family as well: she never logged in without expressions of support, and invitations to go do [whatever]). Anyway, that was my experience in a non-elite guild, on a non-special server (we did eventually kill every boss, though - except Naxx; bloody Naxx). I could go on for ages. Oh! One more thing: PvP was never really my thing, but I appreciated the sense of honor that developed (at least on a our low-pop server) once people realized that too-blatant kill-farming would mean the other side would stop signing back up to a battleground. Most people had toons and friends on both sides, anyway, so PvP stayed a game (though, oh, what a dreadful grind) and not the pissing contest it turned into when they put in cross-realm combat. It was a village, and that turned it into arbitrage. I watched a lot of DnT videos, and "Puresin" rings a bell. I'd love to read your recollections of that time.
• koolala 2y ago
  Music sparked the revolution, not Napster. People freely sharing what they love. Sing it! <3
  • mynameishere 2y ago
    Try that at a coffeeshop open mic night where they don't have a BMI license.
• sorenjan 2y ago
  I rarely see it mentioned when discussing old file sharing programs, but I thought DC++ was the best. With the right hubs you could find anything you wanted, you could download parts of a file from multiple peers, you could browse a user's shared files to find new stuff, we had a server in our university network that RIAA/MPAA could find, there was a chat for each server, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC%2B%2B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC%2B%2B
  • joemazerino 2y ago
    DC++ was a superior file sharing app. I used it often. I liked how you could control ratios from individual downloaders or servers.
  • whateveracct 2y ago
    Before YouTube (and Google video..remember that?), Super Smash Bros Melee players shared matches and combo videos on a DC++ hub. It was THE place to find footage of people pushing the game to its (then) limits. Another DC++ use that persisted well beyond streaming and torrents was Dtella, the file-sharing network on Purdue dormitory intranet.
  • kalleboo 2y ago
    At our university, DC++ was the king. When I started, each dorm room had a 10 Mbit switched port, and each dorm area had a shared 100 Mbit uplink to the university network. So if just 10 people were downloading, you'd instantly overwhelm the uplink. So everyone was instructed to [tag] their username with which dorm they were in, so you'd prioritize people in the same network as yourself for the fastest downloads and so that uni IT could keep a blind eye to us as we weren't killing the uplinks. (a year or two later, the dorms were disconnected from the university network and connected to an open city fiber network with commercial ISPs with 100 Mbit ports and no uplink contention and DC++ went away as people could now use public BitTorrents)
• ofrzeta 2y ago
  That was awesome. You would think of an song and right there you could download it, even more obscure stuff. Information right at your fingertips or something like that.
• dclowd9901 2y ago
  I think the biggest thing Napster did was get everyone onto a computer. I don’t know if folks here remember, but before Napster, desktop computers at home were largely the destination for folks who worked at home, nerdy kids or the occasional school research. AOL changed _some_ of that but not as profoundly as Napster did. Not everyone had a reason to socialize online but everyone loved free music. I remember a friend of mine coming to _me_ telling me about Napster. He was definitely a lot more socially adept than me and I knew he didn’t hang out on computers much so it was quite the shock that he knew about this thing that, by all accounts, was quite nerdy.
• tmalsburg2 2y ago
  Napster may have started the file sharing revolution. But the exciting part for me was Gnutella and later Bittorrent, peer-to-peer technology in general, and the realization that we could use technology to liberate ourselves. Needless to say, I was young and naïve. That spirit is long dead, and the only remnants are crypto currencies and the community around them, which has tossed all lofty ideals in favor of blind greed.
  • xandrius 2y ago
    I think you need to check better: piratebay and so many of older tech is still being used, for many different niches (I find each country having their own preferred way to distribute content in their native language). Nowadays the only people left are the ones wanting to put the extractor effort for the principle of it, the rest can easily find most things somewhere (and if not give up). But there are still lots of us! (or so it feels like)
  • mindslight 2y ago
    napster asked me if I wanted to work on his project, and I told him I saw no future because it would inevitably just get shut down. From my perspective looking back, Napster was the start of the trend of startup companies based around brazenly flouting the law directly as a middleman, then when finally called out just bargaining with the incumbents to arbitrage their user base and associated hipness for a payout. I still don't think the dream of techno-liberation is dead. Rather the naive bits were thinking the sea change would happen so quickly, and thinking that the same old type of vectoralist hucksters wouldn't seek to corrupt our new systems. In actuality our systems need to be designed with the perspective of all possible gatekeepers as attackers. For example take the End to End principle - it's not sufficient to merely tell the network to not meddle with your communications, those communications must be cryptographically protected to avoid any temptation. Otherwise as you commit an increasing amount of value to your use of the network, it merely becomes a question of when the network operators will eventually try to take advantage of you to extract some of that value. The big issue these days is there is so much capital funding "startups" that are essentially centralized crud apps running that same pump-and-dump arbitrage playbook. They buy lots of advertising and other mindshare (cf "It is difficult to get a man to understand something...") and generally use up most of the air in the room.
• nuancebydefault 2y ago
  Buying music (singles or albums) was super expensive in 1999. It was unfair for listeners as well as artists. Napster suddenly made it 'free'. I remember thinking, if CD's were not so ridiculously expensive and i could pick the songs on it, i would just buy them instead of spending money on data traffic time/bandwidth. Today, we pay much less and the artists are still paid, while we can choose exactly what to listen to.
  • AlexandrB 2y ago
    The "long tail" artists are paid a lot less. Even if you listen to Frog Eyes all day, every day most of your Spotify subscription is going to Taylor Swift.
  • relaxing 2y ago
    > the artists are still paid No, no, no, no. Not at all compared to the glory days of the industry CD boom.
• AcylicUnicorn 2y ago
  When I look at the personalities who made a name for themselves in corporate piracy.. err.. file sharing, I keep noticing some of the people who've contributed a lot to the current suckage in tech.
• wordsinaline 2y ago
  The day I discovered Napster is the day I unplugged. Wait forever for my favorite song as a kid to come on the radio or MTV? No thanks, the future was Napster.
• thr0waway001 2y ago
  I still remember how hard it was to find an mp3 on the Internet before Napster. It was awesome. And Winamp, which was quite possibly the greatest desktop music app ever IMO, truly complimented Napster.
  • theandrewbailey 2y ago
    I'm probably the last person still using Winamp.
• kdtsh 2y ago
  In memory of Napster, whenever I use the search function of a file sharing network I am looking at for the first time, I search for ‘I Disappear’ by Metallica.
• hi-v-rocknroll 2y ago
  For the younger folks: Napster arose when CDs and radio were the dominant official commercial distribution platforms for music. CD ripping into MP3s and portable music players drove the need to share them, and the internet was new, but needed a more scalable way to exchange them. Back in the day, it was mostly IRC channels, but these were slow and cumbersome. So Napster, Gnutella, and Hotline took off. These gradually gave way to eDonkey2000/eMule, KaZaA, and Limewire. These also then gave way to BitTorrent and overlay p2p apps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications
  • lagniappe 2y ago
    I miss Hotline so much. Glad The Agency is still around.
    • spectre3d 2y ago
      I used Hotline client a bunch, but ran my own servers on KDX and Carracho. Same client-server setup as Hotline. It was great to peruse the music people had uploaded to my server and discover bands I didn’t know that way. Not having any luck finding info about The Agency. Can you provide some?
      • lagniappe 2y ago
        Should be listed through preterhuman's tracker
        • spectre3d 2y ago
          Wow haven’t heard that name in years, thanks for the reminder!
          • lagniappe 2y ago
            Any time :)
• gonesilent 2y ago
  Never forget waste and Gnutella. Justin Frankel told Shawn Fanning Napster would get shutdown back when it had 50 users. Gnutella was made not to use a central server that could be shutdown.
• mentos 2y ago
  Before Napster I remember the AOL warez scene where you could get a bot to send you 35 emails with the content broken up to download off AOLs servers.
  • pimlottc 2y ago
    --÷^±/ Ràmϸàgè †øølz /\/\àss /\/\àilèr --÷^±/ Mass Mail in 5 minutes --÷^±/ Type [/AddMe] to get on or [/RemoveMe] to get off!
• TheSmoke 2y ago
  so it's the year 2000, right. you got home from school, you're at 6th grade. saw your sweetheart and got fired up all day. summer's around the corner, it's been a pretty good day. a friend at school told you about napster, you download it and install it. you are amazed. you login to icq and wait for her to come online. in the meanwhile you search for some metallica and limp bizkit. it's insane! everything you search is there. you just have to be patient. you download nothing else matters, start playing it. she logs in and says hi, already missed you. and nothing else matters..
  • edvinbesic 2y ago
    poetry
  • aunty_helen 2y ago
    Limp bizkit dragon ball z music videos were one of my fondest memories from this period, I think peaking during the Kazaa era.
  • c0THg 2y ago
    Real.
• gjs4786 2y ago
  A guy I know used to get music from me because he knew I had quite a large collection. I asked him why he was going through me when he could just download it himself, and he said, "I can't turn it up on my stereo without it getting all staticky." He had a car stereo worth more than some people's homes. The key difference between my collection and the collections he was referring to that sounded so staticky was that mine was archival, constantly maintained quality, and his was Napster 56kbps-128. And that is why torrents inflicted a lot of damage to a previously somewhat high-quality only scene. From that point on, it was like wading through a Goodwill bargain bin. Thankfully, it has rebounded in the time since.
• olalonde 2y ago
  Outkast - Hey Ya.mp3
• cactusplant7374 2y ago
  I am still using Soulseek.
• _obviously 2y ago
  In the 2010's, tech companies got together and tried to remove files from the user space.
• salad-tycoon 2y ago
  Tangent, sorry, but every time I hear a modern sound now I hear it as music and it’s beautiful. I still remember being able to listen to the HDD and feel it. I would place my hand on the case when it was struggling and I felt like a horse whisperer. I may have given it a few affirmative words of encouragement.
• mikewarot 2y ago
  When Napster came out, I started discovering a lot of new things I liked and would then go and buy the CDs. I was spending about $50 per month or so... It was wonderful. Then they decided to start suing their own customers out of greed. I've not bought a new CD since.