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One thing I miss about the iPod era is that Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music. It doesn't take much look at how much music an iPod cou
by CoolestBeans 3mo ago
One thing I miss about the iPod era is that Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music. It doesn't take much look at how much music an iPod could store, how much music cost, and how much people had in disposable income to spend on music to realize that music had to come from other means. The iPod and P2P file sharing were incredibly synergistic in a way that makes me giggle. The iTunes store is just as much about getting the record companies on board as it is about running a legitimate music store. I don't know I guess it reminds me of a time when tech disruption was in the consumer's favor and it was frustrating exploitive companies.
- Cthulhu_ 3mo agoI'd even go as far as argue that all streaming has its origins in piracy - Spotify seeded its catalog with pirated music (allegedly), Crunchyroll started off as an anime piracy site, etc.
- scadge 3mo agoSometimes it's cheaper to break the law and pay a fine, than to do everything by law.
- whstl 3mo agoSometimes it’s impossible. Music labels wouldn’t even get in a room with you to discuss web back in the day.
- account42 3mo agoSeems quite often it turns out you don't even need to pay a fine if you manage to get big enough quickly enough.
- joshstrange 3mo agoSee also: LLMs or Uber (two of many such examples). It's incredibly disheartening to know that one of the easiest ways to success is breaking the law and hoping it doesn't catch up to you before you have enough money to be above the law. That crime does pay. That lawsuits ruined people's lives for downloading MP3s and some of the biggest companies on the planet stole everything and walk away with a slap on the wrist. This isn't an anti-LLM comment, it's just depressing how we live in a system with 2 very different sets of rules based on how much money you have.
- ninjin 3mo agoNot allegedly, I was there at the time as a user and I and others can confirm that there was plenty of scene releases on Spotify in ~2008: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43202117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43202117
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- rusk 3mo ago> Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music If I’m remembering right, the tagline on the Mac mini was “rip mix burn”
- SllX 3mo agoPredates the Mac mini (tagline: The most affordable Mac ever.) by a good few years—predates the iPod even—but it was an Apple ad campaign: https://youtu.be/K0ZWuhcM7t4 https://youtu.be/K0ZWuhcM7t4 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Apples-Rip-Mix-Burn-campaign-Copyright-C-2001-Apple-Computer-Inc_fig4_269408905 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Apples-Rip-Mix-Burn-camp... You can’t really call it a pro-piracy message though. Ripping implies you have the original CD already.
- rusk 3mo ago> You can’t really call it a pro-piracy message though. Of course not. That would probably infringe on advertising standards. But it is the clear implication.
- erikschoster 3mo agoIt was also common to have a collection of CDs you owned and wanted to put on a device like this.
- lopis 3mo agoExactly. I mean sure, people were definitely pirating music. But lots of people are own huge collections of CDs, and you could also just borrow other people's CDs to rip them. We were kids without money, but older folks at the time did spend money on CDs.
- account42 3mo ago> and you could also just borrow other people's CDs to rip them Which is "piracy" - not that that makes it ethically wrong. It's actually the main kind of copying that is targeted by DRM since users of the LimeWire kind never see that.
- ryandrake 3mo agoWhich is why we should never use the word "piracy." Don't let the industry dictate language (for their own benefit). Equating sharing music with a friend to robbery and murder on the high seas is a wildly out of touch exaggeration. If we let booksellers dictate language in the same way, they'd call libraries and book clubs organized crime.
- account42 3mo agoAgreed, I didn't put the word in quotes on accident. I'm just quite happy to point out that copyright infringement is something that every day people do without thinking and not restricted to the realm of hardened cyber criminals aka. nerds with an internet connection.
- mghackerlady 3mo agoI still borrow CDs to rip, lol. Half my digital music library comes from my library having a way better library of music than books (at least for my taste)
- hdgvhicv 3mo agoThe first one had no wifi and less space than a nomad - 5g from memory. That’s about 85 hours at 128k. I had more than that on CDs at the time. Now technically it’s “piracy” in the U.K. to rip your own cd. I really should go back to buying CDs.
- ghaff 3mo agoJust had a friend give one to me. If I want an entire album and the CD is the same or less than the digital version, why not? Ripping takes a minute or two.
- mghackerlady 3mo agoPlease do! New releases aren't exactly cheap, but places like goodwill are practically giving them away. Make a list of albums you want, spend a day going to charity/pawn shops, and get what you can. If you can't find it, see what it costs on discogs, and buy it there if it's reasonable. I've gotten to the point that the only albums I have exclusively digital are those that cost an arm and a leg otherwise
- wasmitnetzen 3mo agoAlso iTunes Match, which legalized all of your pirated music[1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2625967 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2625967
- ghaff 3mo agoMy digital collection got really messed up at one point partially due, I'm pretty sure to Apple Match. At one point--early in the pandemic I think--I spent a day or two whacking my collection back into some semblance or order. For example, I had a lot of titles that weren't actually attached to a file.
- raydev 3mo agoIn the early 2010s I uploaded an ALAC copy of an album through iTunes (and I guess iCloud Music???) that still has not appeared on any streaming service, and it remains accessible on any of my devices today. And now that my preferred streaming service is Apple Music, the album is accessible whenever/wherever I want. When Apple gets something right, they really do get it right. A shame a lot of other aspects of Apple Music are bad or wrong.
- CrimsonCape 3mo agoI'm having the opposite experience. I have tons of music in Itunes and they are all DRM from early itunes. Apparently they predate the DRM-free era? I have no idea how to get the DRM free versions.
- postalcoder 3mo ago> Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music. On the flip side, Sony lost the consumer devices market for this very reason. Sony's single-minded pursuit of proprietary formats was a disaster class of corporate mismanagement. It disgusts me because I used to love their products so much. Sony's competitor to the iPod was a marvel of a device called the NW-HD1. It was beautiful, had a ton of space, and great battery life. But it wasn't an MP3 player. It could only play ATRAC music. That means you had to transcode all of your MP3s to their proprietary format just to listen to them. I remember trying to debate the virtues of my Sony NW-HD1 versus the iPod, but having to keep my computer on throughout the night just to transcode a couple albums was indefensible.
- speed_spread 3mo agoYet a few years before that Sony had no qualms selling walkmans, blank tape cassettes and dual-tape portable sound systems, often with double speed copy function. We would gather for afternoons and make actual copy parties. Recording quality wasn't great but we didn't care.
- mghackerlady 3mo agonot to mention minidisc, which was pretty much exclusively used as a format to copy your CDs to
- kmeisthax 3mo agoYes, but that was also the era where Sony was fighting Congress to keep DAT legal. Even when they got their way, no label would touch the format and it was a total, abject failure. Sony's response to this was to use their bubble-era money to start buying US record labels, purely so they could force them to support their formats. But they ultimately wound up buying the exact same mentality that they were fighting against, and the labels won that fight internally. Sure, Sony had Minidisc releases of major label music, but the format flopped anyway, because they were entirely unwilling to market it for recording in the US. Outside of the US, Minidisc was the Apple "Rip. Mix. Burn" experience half a decade prior to the iPod; but in the US that experience basically didn't exist unless you knew exactly where to look.
- dwedge 3mo ago> One thing I miss about the iPod era is that Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music I don't know. iTunes at the time was notorious for deleting all of your library if it thought you didn't buy something through them
- lostlogin 3mo agoThere was that time they gave us music though. Utterly tone deaf Steve, we don’t all like your music.
- RandallBrown 3mo agoNever had that happen to me (or heard of it happening) and I used iTunes for like 15 years.
- basisword 3mo agoI don't think that's true. People had been amassing CD collections for a decade or two by that point. At the original '1000' songs you're talking around 80 albums which isn't a lot.
- efficax 3mo agoi pirated a ton but i also ripped all my cds and all my friends cds (and their parents cds). i took my macbook around everywhere and ripped every cd in could find
- francisofascii 3mo ago> selling a device to play pirated music. Am I the only one here who legit purchased MP3s downloads for 99 cents off Amazon? (This was the era after Napster stopped working.)
- marysol5 3mo agoNot really, you have to rip CD's and import them into their software to load up the iPod. Ripping CD's for personal usage and storage is perfectly legal everywhere