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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 MP
by 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 agoIsn't this a bit like victim blaming? You should be criticizing the RIAA and lawmakers instead.
- neilv 2y agoNo, 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 agoNo 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 agoYes, I'm familiar with decades of self-serving philosophy rationalizing piracy.
- artninja1988 2y ago0 arguments made
- 0xcde4c3db 2y agoAn argument could be made that Napster contributed to the acceleration of that trend, but it was well underway already. The Software Publishers Association was coordinating raids of businesses for pirated software at least as far back as 1991. The WIPO Copyright Treaty was ratified in 1996, and the DMCA was passed in 1998 to implement it. CSS was introduced with DVD in 1996. United States v. LaMacchia was decided in 1994, leading to the passage of the NET Act in 1997. The first versions of SecuROM and SafeDisc were released in 1998. The same year, the Secure Digital Music Initiative was formed.
- neilv 2y agoYep, that's why I said "helped". Obviously software piracy was a problem in some corners. And we knew the kinds of moves that were being made (not just on this, but on things like surveillance and censorship). Then comes things like Napster, serving up on a silver platter a high-profile pretext -- and increased legitimate need that couldn't be ignored.
- lupusreal 2y agoYou're being naive if you think we wouldn't have those laws if not for Napster. If not that pretext it would be another. Floppy disks and flash drives could have been it.
- chimeracoder 2y ago> You're being naive if you think we wouldn't have those laws if not for Napster. If not that pretext it would be another. Floppy disks and flash drives could have been it. To this day, if you can find a place to buy a cassette tape or blank CD, you will have to pay a tax (bundled into the price) which goes straight to the record industry as "compensation" to offset the presumed loss of revenue due to unauthorized music sharing.
- Aloisius 2y agoDRM existed before Napster. Hell, the DMCA, which made circumventing DRM illegal, predated Napster. Indeed, music labels loved DRM because companies like RealNetworks and Microsoft promised them they could do things like charge per play.