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Comment by featherverse | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

Which article did you read? Napster is a footnote in this one.

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.

Anyone who thinks napster was the dawn of online piracy either wasn't alive or didn't own a computer in the 90s.

90s? There was "online" piracy and organised piracy groups through BBS systems in the 80s!

Yarr. In me day, "piracy" didn't involve computers and had actual pirates, Matey.

Yep I remember going through a list of phone numbers printed on a dot matrix printer, asking for ‘elite’ access back in the 80s.

>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?

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