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Comment by torben-friis | Hacker News Reader

There was something about piracy in the times of Napster, emule and the like. It really made you feel like you knew some incantation to get access to the whole world's information.

In practical terms, I have access to far more content now (music on Spotify, shows and movies on streaming services, tutorials, online classes, etc) and yet our reach doesn't seem as wide as it seemed in those times.

Perhaps it was just the jump from scarce physical media to digital abundance. Perhaps it's that I now feel like I'm being sold what others want to put on my plate, rather than stumbling on information by accident. Perhaps it's just nostalgia... but I feel we've lost something on the way, that we should have kept for the next generation.

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>> ... to digital abundance.

Really? Spotify and Netflix pale in comparison to what Napster was. For all the content you think you have access to, Napster gave us the ability to see what other people had stored on their drives, stuff that they wanted to share rather than whatever media Spotify has a license for. That opened a world of discovery unmatched by any streaming service, or all of them put together. Want a club track from an unknown Russian group that only existed for a few nights back in 1998? That was on Napster. Netflix cannot deliver classic Simpsons episodes.

No streaming site will ever have licenses for the bizarre remixes of video game themes, or the Sesame Street theme, that made their way around Napster.

More than the music, though, Napster had chat rooms where you could get legit recommendations of new music that far exceeded the recommendation engines of today.

The pinnacle of sharing music was Audiogalaxy

I loved Audiogalaxy but Soulseek was the best in its prime. Either way I miss those days. It felt like the whole world was open to sharing.

Fully agree. I discovered Tenacious D though their early bootlegs on AG. The amount of stuff they had available had never been matched.

what.cd was the high point IMO

Oink, what.cd, and the redacted followers, were on a level that commercial streaming will never ever reach.

(The only reason is our absurd, anti-culture copyright laws)

Redacted is still very good. Sadly spotify makes it too easy so I stopped pirating music.

This! A web browser based UI which would trigger downloads in a native download manager is a user experience which is unparalleled to the day!

You know, Soulseek exists.

I'm impressed soulseek exists and is popular. I think it is the only centralized p2p network which survived.

Grooveshark came close, but it was always going to get shut down

Hotline was pretty exciting. Did anyone else here get involved with this? [0]

Back when broadband had just hit Seattle I ran a server on an old PowerPC

IA paraphrased quote from a user:

> I am actually signed to TVT records but it this server’s contents that enables my creativity.

These days I pay for everything, but that testament to digital freedom sticks with me.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications

Hotline is still up :) Now we use KDX, Pitbull Pro and a few others, but it's still around. Check out Preterhuman.

Hotline, brings me back. Find the third word ending in ‘ed’ after clicking the banner ad. That’s your hotline password.

I'm actually logged into an hl server as we speak! (Higher Intellect) .. Still some of my favorite internet memories. I still insist my fast typing speed is due to chatting for hours and hours every night on there :)

Yes! Hotline was wild.

I am not affiliated in any way with SADwyw spider.

I agree to delete all backups within 24 hours as per the internet act signed by Bill Clinton.

What.CD is another unparalleled archive that is now gone for good. Rips of old beat tapes from the 90s, obscure electronica releases, all kinds of stuff that it seems won’t ever be found anywhere else.

https://interviewfor.red/en/index.html

You know, the only reason I've never joined a music tracker was because until this thread I'd forgotten what it was like to have a pure, limitless, non-commercial library of everything audio.

Not that many years before the dawn of BitTorrent, I was making, mixing, and trading APEs and FLACs of self-recorded tapes (dubs, live, local) and record collections in niche communities and channels that no longer exist- bullied off the net because they didn't make money for someone else. I lost everything to hardware failure a few years later and left the scene, but I'd be thrilled to find anything from back then still circulating.

for recordings of live shows try dimeadozen.org

I wonder if we can go back to that and still compensate artists.

Have a music sharing service accessible via subscription. You can share anything you want including copyrighted music. If someone downloads copyrighted music from you, detected via audio fingerprinting, the service will pay the copyright holder from subscription fees - kind of like how streaming services do it now.

Granted this would require copyright holders to all buy-in but I guess we can just exclude the music of non-cooperating copyright holders from the network, again via fingerprinting, although this “restricted form” of the service will be of lesser value.

Now that I think about it, in a way, I feel YouTube has already taken up this role in the aforementioned restricted form since it publishes everything without seeking anyone’s permission and only removed stuff if there are complains.

Torrent Roulette (rebranded to Taboo and disabled download by default) scratched this exact itch for me:

https://github.com/retrohacker/taboo

Arguably without Napster the major music labels would never have accommodated the iTunes Store and then Spotify. We’d still be slinging physical media around as the only non-radio option. If you didn’t live through that time I think it’s hard to appreciate how necessary the disruption was for moving the industry forward.

"If it ever gets too bad, they'll just steal again" should hang on the wall of every media distribution company.

Consolidation efforts like Netflix prevented piracy, but the splintering of streaming services has encouraged it, and sports (and especially football) has become the great fulcrum. Pirating sports is huge right now, because their distribution is an anti-consumer mess. Cable is using them to cling for dear life, streaming services own fragments, and some teams even have their own dedicated networks.

Eventually I think it will break, and somebody is going to have to take a haircut. Likely cable, with a slight shot to the sports leagues who have benefitted from cables desperation and entrenched customers. Consumers may finally getting a reasonable-ish price (maybe $20 a month instead of $65).

I believe Disney is in the best place to execute this: owning ESPN, ABC, Disney+, and enough of Hulu. They've made the largest investment into the NFL of any company, but rights are all scattered between Amazon, CBS, Fox, and NBC until 2033! I could see them acquiring either the rest of Fox and/or CBS (who hold down Sunday slots), maybe work out a deal for RedZone with the NFL, and pull in noon and afternoon audiences, which might be the tipping point that gets consumers on board.

F1's online presence under Liberty Media is a great example of how to do it right. Every race gets same-day highlights on YouTube within hours, along with tons of interview and analysis content. You can be an F1 fan and not spend a penny to watch the entire season. But the premium option to watch full events live is still there, along with merchandising, (quite good) licensed video games, etc. As a result, F1 is growing faster than ever before and is profitable for the first time in years.

And funny because former owner/director Ecclestone seemingly battled against that for so long. Now he's gone, it changed, and they are doing well.

I'm not sure about that. The Serie A (Italian football/soccer) also puts same-hour highlights on YouTube within hours, but people still use illegal streaming all the time.

You lose a lot by not following a sport in real time, especially if such sport is part of your social environment, and likewise you lose a lot if you just see highlights.

For an example of a perfect digital play, I think the America's Cup would be it: live streaming, analysis, interviews, replays, highlights.

It competes directly with tv streaming, but it can do that because it has a much smaller following.

Football’s drama plays out over the course of the entire match, with the evolution of play happening minute to minute and any small mistake turning into big moments. Highlights take away from that drama.

The nature of F1 lends itself to this highlight model, as you can get 90% of the experience of a race from the 10 minutes of highlights extracted from 1.5hours of racing.

> "If it ever gets too bad, they'll just steal again"

Is it as easy to steal as it used to be? I'm not even sure I know where to get torrents reliably atm. Last I knew pirate bay was always being disrupted.

And is it easy to rip stuff when the source is streamed? Like dvds, music, software is easy to copy and distribute when it was just a cd to copy and some authentication to work around.

Im totally out of the piracy loop, maybe im wrong and still as easy as getting on to pirate bay and find a decently reviewed torrent?

Lingen, soulseek and piratebay are all very much alive from what I've read.

Its not the Napster era of finding any obscure stuff because torrents work on popularity, but should be good enough for 95% of your searches.

Besides, at this point, I believe Piratebay will survive forever.

> Is it as easy to steal as it used to be?

Yes. The quality is better and it can be easily automated with Sonarr, Radarr et al. Torrents are not the way to go imho, but Usenet is amazing (notably it isn’t necessarily free).

There is content that isn’t available in my region or the legal options are worse in some way (resolution, app UI etc).

I pay for several streaming services (mainly to keep my conscience clear) but watch their shows via pirated means as the experience is better.

As the provider options get broader, the piracy option also gets more attractive as it’s all in one place.

As the sibling comment pointed out, it is SO much easier than it was.

I hopped back into it about 3y ago. I’ve got a NAS running on my local network with sonarr to snatch new tv shows and radarr for new movies.

In practice, if I decide I want to watch a movie I can reliably pull down something high quality within 2-10m (depending on how esoteric it is) and then be watching it on our tv.

When paramount decided not to let lower decks season 1 outside the US, I went to pirate bay and got it. Also had to get some torrent software having not used one for years. Worked flawlessly.

The risk of companies that literally refuse to take money for their products is people will just get them elsewhere, but once you force people to open that door, you knock down a major barrier.

Sports packages should license more camera feeds. Make the normal cheap package like it is now. Add in a deluxe package where you have 4+ camera options to look at. Bars would eat it up. Everyone has a large TV in there home. Very few people have the space for 4 large TVs in livingroom.

> steal again

Can we avoid the conflation of piracy and stealing? Stealing under the pre-internet definition has very different consequences from the duplication of copyable resources.

At the individual level, you're denying the copyright holder and the dependency chain of rent extractors the money from a purchase transaction they're legally entitled to, if you were willing to pay and jump through whatever hoops were in place as a potential customer. Game of thrones streaming issues showed people don't like hoops or shitty service.

If you're not a potential customer, and don't share the media, copyright holder et al have lost nothing. If you do share, they're out whatever percentage of people who you passed the data to that were potential customers.

If I own something via other distribution channels or physical media, I have no compunction against downloading, nor if I know I will never pay for it otherwise. I have on occasion tried out software I've pirated and paid for a real license after continued use, or purchased physical media despite having the album or movie from a torrent. I have to assume that I'm not an outlier, so it occurs to me that piracy may actually be a net positive influence on media companies revenue. The marketing of content is good in terms of exposure, software reviews and recommendation, and so forth.

It may actually be a social good, depending on the culture at the time, creating more free channels of distribution and communication about content products, and services that otherwise wouldn't exist or would be stifled.

It's not theft. At worst it's cheating at the game of commerce.

> the dependency chain of rent extractors

Especially this part. Spotify in particular is bad this way, with the artists getting a nearly invisibly small slice of the money. Youtube isn't much better. Reduce the friction that prevents me from giving my money directly to the artists to support their work and I'd be a much bigger paying consumer of online media.

I suggest bandcamp.com as one of the best places to support artists right now. It's not the same model as Spotify though.

The search there isn't great but I find a huge % of things I'm interested in come up on a websearch for: artistname albumname bandcamp

The illegal part isn't procuring it for yourself. It's distributing it to others.

P2P can't be 100% leeches, so the lawyers always have plenty of people to go after.

To get to the tech savvy folks, they tear down VPNs and force the hands of ISPs.

> Pirating sports is huge right now, because their distribution is an anti-consumer mess.

I would watch way more baseball if it weren't for MLB.com. It's got some OK features, but overall the service is a garbage fire technically. They stuck with Flash until the bitter end. But even if they fixed the technical issues, the restrictions on access cripple the service.

Granted what I'm talking about is far below the level of the major music labels, but I still buy music on CD. Then I rip it to my network drive when I get home. The reason is that my family is into music that's way off the mainstream, and we've asked the musicians directly: "Which way of buying your music nets you the most actual money?" The answer is still buying their CD.

I'm a musician myself but have no interest in recording or selling music.

>The reason is that my family is into music that's way off the mainstream, and we've asked the musicians directly: "Which way of buying your music nets you the most actual money?" The answer is still buying their CD.

I guess this depends on the genre, area, etc. But whenever I've talked to (low to mid level) musicians, live performances are basically the only way they make money.

The sale of music is so ridiculously low for them, particularly considering the low percentage of profit they get, that it might as well be considered an ad for the live performance.

I'm certainly at that level myself. The music I play is done when it hits the walls of the venue. Or my living room. ;-) The main financial impact of recording for me is not having to spend any money on it.

There's a middle level out there. The genres I'm familiar with are things like folk, fiddling, some classical. Some of those people are good enough to travel a little bit, and have a supportive following. Sometimes a local organization will help arrange for a venue, and promote it. Those folks always have a briefcase full of CDs with them.

I think it's ripe for it yet again.

The content you readily have access to now is far far more curated by others than you realize, largely because it's so easy to use.

It's a bit of legwork and both legally and ethically questionable, but a modern usenet|(radarr||sonarr)|nzbget|jellyfin pipeline makes the legal providers seem obscenely limited.

It doesn't matter who has negotiated what license with whom -- if I want to watch a bit of media, I can usually do so in high quality with a few clicks and a few minutes wait. (rarely more than 30 minutes for the 4k good stuff)

The tools around Usenet are amazing and easily blow any legal offering out of the water. I don't currently use it, but when I did years ago, it was fairly easy to setup a completely automated system to download any shows/movies I'm interested in at the right quality level and make them available to me within minutes of release. I still miss it and with the increase of competing services I've gravitated more towards piracy than I have since my Usenet days.

You got a brief, glorious whiff of what a world without artificial scarcity is like. We'll get another whiff when someone invents Star Trek style replicators, before they are also outlawed by the moneyed interests who benefit from lack of abundance.

We have already "Star Trek style replicators", at least for information. They're called "digital computers".

But humanity isn't ready to handle that it seems.

that is exactly what parent said. information replication is free, but it has been siloed by the large coprorations because big tech trumps prosperity . Looks like star trek got their abundance utopia wrong.

But if people are free from scarcity, how will Apple and Google continue making trillions of dollars? Corporations are people, too! /s

I don't use Spotify just because whole genres are not there. And I'm not talking about some obscure music from 150 years ago. Even Jungle Tekno from the early to mid 90s can't be found. The only sources are some 50 years old random guy fondly remembering their MDMA-fueled glory days and uploading their records on YouTube, vinyl from Discogs, or private trackers.

Going to need some sauce on those private trackers, thx.

I agree. Thinking about it, probably to do with discovery. In those days, the idea of just mindlessly flipping through content didn't really exist, except on TV or radio. So we had to ask for recs, google for top charts and new albums, etc to know what to find, specifically.

Today it's too easy. Why research, Spotify/Netflix and the like will dump more in your face than you could handle in a lifetime.

Added to that, there's not much concept of 'building a collection' anymore. It used to be a personal point of pride. I have 3000 songs! Today the model is to just stream everything on the fly.

The only music services that I find provides a similar experience to the discovery experience within Napster are Bandcamp and SoundCloud. Both encourage you to "snoop" at other users' collections, and provide an enormous range of independent and esoteric music.

> I have access to far more content now (music on Spotify, shows and movies on streaming services, tutorials, online classes, etc)

I don't. I am tired of looking up a movie in some service I pay for and getting nothing. It doesn't matter what streaming company I choose, there's always something that just isn't there.

Music? If you stray from the mainstream path, you're on your own. Mercifully YouTube is still a respectable repository of music. There are often gaps in the playlists now but what can you do?

Back then we had instant access to everything humanity had ever created. The monopolists ruined it all and replaced it with their garbage services.

Modern forms of pirating still exist give you far more control over how you use the content. I’ll pirate something I’ve bought just so I can fix the subtitle syncing issues that for some reason plague streaming services.

It's because you were younger. It happens to everyone.

You think younger people now don't feel the same way you did? And that they won't wistfully be talking about the times that Youtube gave them all the content they could ever dream of?

Maybe. But I wouldn't count on it.

They have never downloaded a video off Napster or Limewire and realized it's actually... well, not the video they wanted.

I remember as a youth I was very excited to find an early cam of Matrix Revolutions on Kazaa, only to find it was some porno that wasn't even very good.

Actually burst out laughing at this. I almost forgot.

Yeah, those were "fun" days. I'm not sure I'd go back to them.

How else would we even know Japanese puke porn existed!

respectfully disagree. i remember also things before the internet of 2000, like TV, but not fondly at all. and in my mind somewhere around 2004 things strayed from the linear progress i had in mind for the future of the internet.

what has changed culturally is pseudonymity became real names, with all the baggage that comes with it, and that makes people more conservative. If you want an objective measure of that, look at the attitudes towards nudity. Nowadays, crypto is a space that brings back anonymity, and you can see all the chaos it brings with it. but chaos is mystery and people also love those

Yes anonymity on the internet is gone. And with current "social justice" you can be crucified for something that you posted somewhere 10 years ago.

On the other hand most people wouldn't want a completely free internet. 4chan versus Reddit and the public chose Reddit.

Reddit is still pseudonymous.

It's gotten worse.

They prominently use SSO, encourage the use of their app, and embed dozens of trackers.

They're actively trying to develop social features and get people to embed their identities.

This creates stickiness, a moat, and aids monetization.

Look to Twitter. They're forcing phone number association and blocking valid accounts from logging in without one. This will happen to Reddit too eventually.

We were stealing, and it felt good at the time.

It would probally feel better now, but the consequences are too stiff.

It felt good to be a gangster at a time when the laws were grey, or enforcment was not as easy as today?

Eh? How can you steal something that's infinitely copyable?

Ahh never mind, I don't feel like getting into it.

> and yet our reach doesn't seem as wide as it seemed in those times.

because you don't actually "have" the files.

Napster had some bootleg content that would be illegal on modern streaming services.

I've been pleased to see that YouTube Content ID usually just results in attribution (a good thing!) and monetisation (ads) - it's not totally illegal to upload someone else's song.

There are a couple of times when it has been totally deleted though (Universal Studios Japan deleting Monoeyes songs), so that's why I prefer not to use my personal Google account for sharing content - losing access to GMail as a result of sharing something on YouTube is not a risk I'd like to take.

I wish there were a way to bulk-upload music (from, say, the 1.3 TB MySpace Dragon Hoard), but personal accounts are limited to 50 songs per day.

what was that service in the post-Napster world, it was sort of exclusive, very well curated (so to speak), you needed an invite to join, even music industry insiders used it, described by Trent Reznor as the "world's greatest record store"... till it got shut down.

I think it used a pig as a mascot. Then there was an even more secret attempt to revive it

OiNK! FOUND IT!

https://nymag.com/news/features/42391/

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/01/oink-founder-fre...

I too feel the same way.

I think that's because not everyone had access, inclination or capability to access all that. Speeds were way lesser, bandwidth wasn't unlimited, most people were still on CDs and were more keen on converting them for the MP3 players.

Now that everyone can listen to all the music at any time using user-friendly apps, maybe it isn't as rare anymore.

Nowadays, everyone's on the internet, practically all the time, with everything standardized, be it interfaces, commerce or buzzwords/jargon.

From 'The Incredibles' - >> If everyone is special, no one is.

“Perhaps it's that I now feel like I'm being sold what others want to put on my plate”

It’s not just you. Spotify makes you think “here’s a song similar to the last one” but I’m sure that algorithm is skewed by this record label or that, or the cost per play is cheaper for this one, and it’s not “discovery” anymore but spoonfed

There was no algorithm to "guide" your search, there was no limitation, no manipulation. Just you get what you see, and what you get - is all there is. Everything from there, was experience-wise a downgrade.

far more doesnt mean far more wide range. With P2P you could browse a server for the popular, as well as a bunch of things you d never heard. And it wasnt just music, just about anything , specifically very obscure stuff. anarchist material was something often uploaded. It was like you could see the whole jungle. Google is instead a zoo.

(Incidentally, what is the current evolution of gnutella, or any P2P that allows to browse the remote server?)

You reminded me The Eye [1], an archive of stuff like that including old software and an overwhelming bunch of non-mainstream and abandoned things

[1] https://the-eye.eu/

> Living without the knowledge of our past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots

We need a The Eye for The Eye that backs up The Eye

We are busy keeping it! Join us in groups like data horders and snahp.it forums.

Napster, and The Pirate Bay, were my best years on the internet.

I still think The Pirate Bay was the best website ever, but for degenerate disenfranchised Pirates like myself.

I learned Watchmaking from that site, and I doubt 90% of the stuff I downloaded was copy written.

Oh yea, I ended up buying all the books I downloaded over the years.

My horology library has probally 40 books, and I ended up with a side occupation.

Silk Road tho

It's because going from 100 songs to 10K is more of an experience than going from 10K to 1M. A human can only listen to a limited number of songs.

Also, you were 20years younger and so were more enthralled by novelty.

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