Napster sparked a file-sharing revolution 25 years ago

I remember waiting 3+ hours for a single song to download. Then discovering it wasn’t what I wanted but a troll who renamed the `Barney The Dinosaur I love you` song. Then I’d spend another 3+ hours downloading a different song. Ah 56k internet, what fun.

Today, TPB and a quick search can give you an artist’s entire discography in one go. Or if you’re into automation, lidarr , sonarr , and radarr can pull in your favorite things as soon as they’re released.

What I find most strange about the modern day piracy is quality. It blows my mind how different groups fight to offer the best version of a free thing. And they’re so good at it, that the pirated product is usually substantially better than the official version.

The music business changed that day.

I remember when I was a kid (maybe 13 or 14) I really (and I mean really) wanted to play Grand Theft Auto. My dad picked up a copy of GTA San Andreas for me about a year prior but after seeing the violence and language he forced me to take it back, that put the taste into my mouth and I wanted more.

So I searched for "free video game downloads" and I remember I went to this site that claimed that for just $30, you could "download unlimited video games for free". I begged my parents to let me sign up and pay the $30 until they finally relented and bought it for me.

What it turned out to be was just a tutorial on how to use uTorrent (and they also had an "addon" for unlimited MP3's which taught you how to use Limewire).

I realized pretty quickly I got scammed and I think to date this is the only scam that I've ever fallen for. Kinda worked out though because I learned how to torrent and after a few years I had a basic gaming PC with a hard drive full of games that I had torrented (everything from Crysis to GTA games to every Call of Duty game).

I was also pretty deep into torrenting music right up until Spotify came to the USA (I still remember all the "workarounds" to get Spotify to work in the US before they officially released here, though I didn't try any myself)

Since then Spotify has remained my longest kept subscription and for all it's faults I think Spotify got the solution to music piracy right. With Spotify it was just more convenient to pay them every month then to bother pirating music and uploading it to my iPhone.

https://www.paramountpressexpress.com/paramount-plus/shows/h...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DC%2B%2B

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotline_Communications

I never found out if he was actually the founder for real but I always wanted to add "geared up the founder of Napster in Sunwell" to my resume somehow.

> “I will never forget this day. All of the heads of the labels, literally the titans of the music business, were in that room. I had somebody wheel in a PC and put some speakers up and I started doing a name that tune,” Rosen later recalled.

> The major music bosses started to name tracks, including some that weren’t even released yet, and time and again Napster would come up with results. Needless to say, the board was terrified.

They're about to be more terrified. Suno and Udio are just the beginning of the complete unraveling of the need for studio capital.

It's going to happen to Hollywood too.

I'm still disappointed that laws against barratry didn't become more prevalent in the US as a result of "copyright trolling". Instead, exceptions have been slowly chiseled out of the DMCA to restore a sliver of the rights we used to have.

I remember a friend of mine coming to _me_ telling me about Napster. He was definitely a lot more socially adept than me and I knew he didn’t hang out on computers much so it was quite the shock that he knew about this thing that, by all accounts, was quite nerdy.

Everything Is Free Song by Gillian Welch

Napster suddenly made it 'free'. I remember thinking, if CD's were not so ridiculously expensive and i could pick the songs on it, i would just buy them instead of spending money on data traffic time/bandwidth.

Today, we pay much less and the artists are still paid, while we can choose exactly what to listen to.

> Although based on proprietary software, the Napster system draws inspiration from the long-held Stallman contention that once a work enters the digital realm-in other words, once making a copy is less a matter of duplicating sounds or duplicating atoms and more a matter of duplicating information-the natural human impulse to share a work becomes harder to restrict. Rather than impose additional restrictions, Napster execs have decided to take advantage of the impulse. Giving music listeners a central place to trade music files, the company has gambled on its ability to steer the resulting user traffic toward other commercial opportunities.

> The sudden success of the Napster model has put the fear in traditional record companies, with good reason. Just days before my Palo Alto meeting with Stallman, U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Patel granted a request filed by the Recording Industry Association of America for an injunction against the file-sharing service. The injunction was subsequently suspended by the U.S. Ninth District Court of Appeals, but by early 2001, the Court of Appeals, too, would find the San Mateo-based company in breach of copyright law,5 a decision RIAA spokesperson Hillary Rosen would later proclaim proclaim a "clear victory for the creative content community and the legitimate online marketplace."

> For hackers such as Stallman, the Napster business model is scary in different ways. The company's eagerness to appropriate time-worn hacker principles such as file sharing and communal information ownership, while at the same time selling a service based on proprietary software, sends a distressing mixed message. As a person who already has a hard enough time getting his own carefully articulated message into the media stream, Stallman is understandably reticent when it comes to speaking out about the company. Still, Stallman does admit to learning a thing or two from the social side of the Napster phenomenon.

> "Before Napster, I thought it might be OK for people to privately redistribute works of entertainment," Stallman says. "The number of people who find Napster useful, however, tells me that the right to redistribute copies not only on a neighbor-to-neighbor basis, but to the public at large, is essential and therefore may not be taken away."

. . .

> "It's a mistake to transfer answers from one thing to another," says Stallman, contrasting songs with software programs. "The right approach is to look at each type of work and see what conclusion you get."

> When it comes to copyrighted works, Stallman says he divides the world into three categories. The first category involves "functional" works-e.g., software programs, dictionaries, and textbooks. The second category involves works that might best be described as "testimonial"-e.g., scientific papers and historical documents. Such works serve a purpose that would be undermined if subsequent readers or authors were free to modify the work at will. The final category involves works of personal expression-e.g., diaries, journals, and autobiographies. To modify such documents would be to alter a person's recollections or point of view-action Stallman considers ethically unjustifiable.

> Of the three categories, the first should give users the unlimited right to make modified versions, while the second and third should regulate that right according to the will of the original author. Regardless of category, however, the freedom to copy and redistribute noncommercially should remain unabridged at all times, Stallman insists. If that means giving Internet users the right to generate a hundred copies of an article, image, song, or book and then email the copies to a hundred strangers, so be it. "It's clear that private occasional redistribution must be permitted, because only a police state can stop that," Stallman says. "It's antisocial to come between people and their friends. Napster has convinced me that we also need to permit, must permit, even noncommercial redistribution to the public for the fun of it. Because so many people want to do that and find it so useful."

> When I ask whether the courts would accept such a permissive outlook, Stallman cuts me off.

> "That's the wrong question," he says. "I mean now you've changed the subject entirely from one of ethics to one of interpreting laws. And those are two totally different questions in the same field. It's useless to jump from one to the other. How the courts would interpret the existing laws is mainly in a harsh way, because that's the way these laws have been bought by publishers."

> The comment provides an insight into Stallman's political philosophy: just because the legal system currently backs up businesses' ability to treat copyright as the software equivalent of land title doesn't mean computer users have to play the game according to those rules. Freedom is an ethical issue, not a legal issue. "I'm looking beyond what the existing laws are to what they should be," Stallman says. "I'm not trying to draft legislation. I'm thinking about what should the law do? I consider the law prohibiting the sharing of copies with your friend the moral equivalent of Jim Crow. It does not deserve respect."

Then they decided to start suing their own customers out of greed. I've not bought a new CD since.

subversive and evergreen. genuinely useful and hard to kill.

I remember trading mp3s on AOL before it. I remember how much effort it took to download an mp3 over a 56k modem. Every time my brother picked up the phone I had to start over. The first one I succesfully downloaded, after trying for what must have been days but felt like months, was Gettin' Jiggy Wit It and of course it turned out our 386 computer couldn't even really play an mp3 without stuttering.

I remember moving in with two friends, a block from campus, and putting a $2,500 Gateway computer (bought from the Gateway store in the strip mall, of course) on a credit card because we were going to split it three ways. You can probably guess how that ended up. Even though that was equivalent to about $5k today it was a midrange computer at best and, of course, was replaced a little over a year later. But, we did get broadband and it could play Starcraft and online poker just fine. Worth it!

I remember after Napster exploded, it had gotten bogged down with new traffic and they started offering multiple servers, and someone wrote some third-party software that let you switch between them at will until you could find the song you wanted without too terribly much wait.

I remember my first mp3 player, a Diamond Rio 500. It used a USB cord that, of course, had the pins reversed, so you couldn't just use any USB cord. It held about one hour of music, 1.5 if you bought a very expensive 32mb flash card. It ran for a week on one aaa battery. It cost almost $300, which would be like $500 today. God did I love that thing.

I remember the RIAA and MPAA suing file sharers. I remember lots of tech bros saying what idiots they were for trying to use the legal system to put the toothpaste back in the tube. I remember one particularly astute, well-known tech guy saying at a YC dinner (must have been 2007 or 2008) in response to a sneering question about it that not everyone who chooses a career outside of tech is an idiot, the people who run the media companies might know more about media than you, certainly understand that selling physical media's days are numered, and that what they were doing was really a delaying tactic while they figured out how to monetize content in the digital age. (The answer, it turned out, was things like Netflix and Spotify, but those were still a few years away. Netflix's first original content wasn't until 2012!)

I remember after Napster got sued into oblivion there were so many others. The toothpaste was out of the tube on file sharing. Limewire. Edonkey. Bittorrent. For every one they killed two more appeared. Fragmentation wasn't even an issue since everyone ran (and thus seeded) several.

Good nostalgia for a Saturday,.

But, hey, the quasi-communists who thought they were somehow liberating the music from the evil rich people ended up dragging all of the music industry down into poverty.

And at the time of the MP3 frenzy, there were a relatively small number of people saying, "Wait, won't this mean a backlash of adversarial laws and technology that make things bad for everyone?"

But that was ignored by the masses of newly-arrived Internet users wanting to take stuff for free.