4 ms·

Human nature's funny. Societies have been fighting about the same things for a long time. My sister's friend used to burn and sell CDs and had pretty much all o

• e12e 12y ago
  > My sister's friend used to burn and sell CDs and had pretty much all of the popular music from the time. I think "piracy" is usually two different things: illicit copying for profit, and illicit copying for sharing. My first introduction was through sharing: cassette tapes for the vic20 and c64. Then floppies for the Amiga. Then BBSs (that where free to access, less the fee the phone companies took). I think my first introduction to copying for (small) profit was around the time of the first affordable cd burners. Some people financed their cd burners this way -- and some made real money. I never used Napster -- so I can't really comment. But with IRC and ftp sites -- things were again back to copying for sharing (no fee). Same for DC++/Direct Connect -- people ran hubs out of love, for fun -- and in many ways I'd say they were more distributed than torrent sites -- in the sense that there were many small (compared to the Pirate Bay) hubs, and there was more of a sense of community. And again, no ads, no money involved. I hope we'll see the rise of more distributed networks (eg: freenet) run by the users themselves, without any central orchestration -- and without an artificial ad-financed gateway like TPB. We'll see. It's a shame Netflix can't just change to distributing torrents, as they'd never be allowed to license the content like that.