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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

> Compact cassettes were not a lossless medium. The DAT cassette was fought against with tooth and nail. The CD was okay as a read only medium.

even if we accept that, that still means we had more than 3 decades of limitless duplication, yet people aren't "lose their minds and bend their whole will toward reintroducing scarcity by any means possible".

>Look how long it took for the music industry to accept DRM free audio formats. Without Apple's dominance we probably wouldn't still have them now.

1. DRM realistically wasn't an issue due to pirates (remember naptster?)

2. games have DRM that are sometimes unbroken for years. Yet nothing noticeable changes when the DRM is finally broken. there's also DRM-free games, that people aren't clamoring for scarcity over. therefore I doubt something being DRM protected or not has any effect on its scarcity value.

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We didn't have 30 years of limitless duplication. You're overestimating how many people were online in the 90s.

Look at the graphs from this article: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/10/visualizing-40-years-...

I'm actually surprised that the music industry revenue went down that fast in the 2000s. I would have guessed it took a little bit longer. So going by those figures, we had 20 years of limitless duplication and it utterly destroyed the revenue of the music industry. Exactly what they feared would happen if there was ever a digital writable medium to play music from.

NFTs are not DRM. They produce scarcity in a different way than DRM does. They don't encrypt digital content, they sign it. Without additional support from websites or physical venues this doesn't do anything.

This could e.g. be something like a Twitter checkmark for a NFT profile or being allowed to a special club only if you own a certain kind of NFT.

>So going by those figures, we had 20 years of limitless duplication and it utterly destroyed the revenue of the music industry. Exactly what they feared would happen if there was ever a digital writable medium to play music from.

right, but that's more of a economics issue (ie. how content creation would be funded) than GP's claim of

"people who are forced to reckon with the concept of infinite abundance lose their minds and bend their whole will toward reintroducing scarcity by any means possible.".

>NFTs are not DRM. They produce scarcity in a different way than DRM does.

the NFT equivalent in ye olden days would be signed records/cds/posters. they have similar characteristics to NFTs (scarcity, bragging rights, etc.), but people aren't "losing their minds" over them. I haven't heard owners of signed records making fun of napster/itunes users for "right-clicker mentality" or whatever.

There was no way to reintroduce scarcity up until now. And now there's money involved. So people go crazy, although not necessarily those people or the industry that should benefit from it.

> I haven't heard owners of signed records making fun of napster/itunes users for "right-clicker mentality" or whatever.

There was no Twitter back then. :-)

But also, as far as I have witnessed it, it was the "right-clickers" that started it. "Hey, coiner, I downloaded your NFT with a simple right-click. How stupid are you to pay money for that?"

If the owners of signed records made fun of mp3 users, the mp3 users might have retaliated as well?

> 1. DRM realistically wasn't an issue due to pirates (remember naptster?)

IIRC, it did have a couple consequences like Apple embedding PII into music files..

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/06/should-apple-embed-you...

..or going even further back, the arrest of a hacker at a Defcon convention who broke the DRM from eBooks.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/01/07/17/130226/fallout-from-...

I can't specifically recall but I think there was a time a Stanford (?) researcher published a paper on SDMI (?) watermarks in music files as well.

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