Napster was such an improvement over what it replaced, but, it’s funny by today’s standards Napster was so “basic”.
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.
> What I find most strange about the modern day piracy is quality.
For a lot of pirates, it's a niche hobby to preserve the best quality version of some media / art. I see it as an underground librarian archivist movement.
In 100 years iTunes may be dead, but there will be some person with every album available in high quality lossless FLAC. Same with Netflix and it's bit starved encodes.
Indeed. Many of these pirates are the most devoted fans of the music they store and distribute. They go to gigs, buy merchandise and vinyl editions, and otherwise support the artists directly.
In contrast companies like Spotify don’t care about the music at all. They would just as well sell you white noise if it would somehow give them the slightest improvement in growth or margins.
Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify, regularly makes statements that suggest he’d rather see professional musicians disappear. Most recently:
Spotify is a prime example of an amazing service (yet still no FLAC equivalent) offering with a highly developed customer base ruined by the love of money.
Executive compensation is part of a business’s expense, so it is not a separate issue from profit, since profit = revenue minus expense.
Also, Ek could have sold his equity years ago and made more money with less risk by sticking it in SP500. If he really loved money, wouldn’t he have gotten rid of stock in a business losing money and stuck it into something less risky?
My point is to say that Spotify is obviously in a difficult business, given the vendors it has to negotiate with, the competitors it has to compete with, and the customers it has to sell to. It is not some conspiracy or excess short term greed by executives that is hampering its success or ability to pay artists.
Spotify “loves” money implies that Spotify is penny pinching because it is in such a powerful position that it can afford to alienate customers, whereas my point is Spotify is probably making a calculation to reduce expenses because it is not even known if it is a viable business yet.
Spotify’s executive compensation is what it is, it is still a large organization managing 9k employees with 600M customers, so they obviously want a carrot to work. Shareholders and board members can vote on compensation they think is undeserved.
In fact, Ek hasn’t even received compensation since 2017, so he’s just been offloading his existing equity from being a founder from way back when. And since Spotify stock has lost money relative to the market for 7 years, Ek has been working for free. He literally could have more money if he had quit working years ago.
If the market believed there was growth potential, their annual returns would not be trailing SP500 by 3%+ per year.
Amazon’s market cap grew by much more than the SP500, because the market (correctly) anticipated Amazon being able to earn profits.
Spotify’s ability to earn decent profits is not a given, and in my opinion, their whole business is currently being a negotiating chip between the 3 businesses that own music copyrights (Warner/Universal/Sony) and Apple/Amazon/Alphabet.
Why is that relevant? The organization he has lots of equity in due to his negotiations as a founder has 600M customers and 9k employees. The public markets still believe it might be worth a few billion dollars for an organization that has 600M customers with recurring revenue.
The “tech bro” founder could have had billions of more dollars if he had dumped all his Spotify shares years ago.
It does not mean the organization is making a ton of money, or has any pricing power. An alternative is Visa or Verisign of Intuit or Microsoft or Qualcomm or Apple, those businesses have fat profit margins. Those businesses get to set their prices at the highest profit margins. Spotify barely limps along hoping one day it can eke out more than a low single digit profit margin consistently.
In the early 80s, the local pirate scene in my hometown revolved around a guy who I'll call George. George's entire basement was devoted to boxes full of diskettes (5 1/4" in those days) of pirated software and photocopied documentation. All kinds of software - games, office apps, scientific stuff, you name it. Some was downloaded from BBS's but the majority of it was shipped USPS from god knows who.
Thing is, he used virtually none of it. He collected software for the sake of collecting it. He didn't even play video games, just loaded them up once to make sure they ran. He was a hoarder basically, who had stumbled into a niche hobby, and like most hobbyists he would happily share it with anyone who asked.
I'm not saying every pirate is like that, or even most, but I am saying, I don't think the pirate scene works without people like that. The music fans are spokes, but people who do it for the sake of doing it are the hubs.
For the hoarders that don’t share, I don’t really see much of an issue. Sure, they have all that stuff, but they would have never bought it. It’s not actually a lost sale.
I’m half joking but all these tools to automatically download TVs and movies has absolutely led to this class of user that habitually downloads stuff just for the sake of doing it. Terabytes of movies they have no interest in. The psychology of it fascinates me.
Wait, what? There are so many assumptions packed into this statement.
Why should we view things through the lens of whether we are glorifying pirates or not? Is your assertion we should be condemning them? Why? Is it because they are taking bread out of the mouths of musicians? Is it equally bad if Spotify uses their leverage to commoditize and devalue music so musicians can no longer make meaningful money from recorded music? What about music labels who structure deals so they get the bulk of the money for a fraction of the work?
I'm curious to understand the principles you hold that give you such a black and white view on piracy.
First, when someone uses "many" and "most", it indicates they are avoiding "a black and white view," by acknowledging there are some exceptions.
As to the main point, no individual has the right to take someone else's intellectual property (such as songs, movies, books, etc that were often created by large teams of people over months or years) and, without asking any permission, "liberate" that content so that it can be freely copied and consumed by virtually anyone, anywhere, around the world, without recognition or attribution.
The question isn't whether distribution of the work ultimately does or does not benefit the creator(s), which it often does. It's that the "pirate" has no right to independently make the irreversible decision to freely distribute the content.
Copyright impedes accessibility, an important human right. The “pirates” sometimes “liberate” content that has no hope of being released due to a snarl of copyright and artificial regional restrictions.
For example: audio description. Audio description is an accessibility technology that allows people who are blind or low vision to watch films, essentially by providing an extra soundtrack with a narrator concisely providing context for what's going on that can't be accounted for by dialogue or sound effects.
I have owned, in my life, 5 copies of the film Alien. None of those versions are audio described. Up until last year there was no way to hear a described version without resorting to “piracy”. The only way to hear a (mediocre version with a synth voice instead of an expressive human one) described version is to pretend to be in Canada, or attend a theatre capable of delivering AD with the new re-release. It's not a world-wide release.
So, sitting here in a cow-paddock in rural Western Australia, I still have no legal way to watch the audio described version of an oscar-winning film over 40 years old. Having paid 5 times for it, damn right I pirate that. And while I am not vision impaired, there are many others who are who depend on AD to participate in culture, and when they find barriers to that, they pirate that content too.
I have films on DVD I paid for, but cannot legally watch because I'm too many kilometers from some notional border or other. Damn right I “pirated” those!
As to your main point, you note that no individual has the right to take someone else's intellectual property. I presume you are giving your ethical blessing and a free pass to OpenAI and Midjourney et. al. who have provably leveraged a pirated corpus into highly profitable products?
> So, sitting here in a cow-paddock in rural Western Australia, I still have no legal way to watch the audio described version of an oscar-winning film over 40 years old.
Put a note up in the nearest local store, invite someone from the foodbank around and swap a meal for them describing what happens as you watch the film together.
FWiW I'm also currently living in wheatbelt W.Australia, my father (born 1935) makes a habit of helping out older people (Meals on Wheels, book reading, etc) in the local area that are struggling ..
You might have more legal options than you realise.
(Where I am the community is not so great. If you need a casserole, they're in your corner. If you supported gay marriage, and if prefer to do indigenous patch burning instead of let it turn into a wildfire so you can be a hero, then you're about as welcome as a blowfly).
Anyway I'm not vision impaired, I just enjoy audio described films while I'm doing chores or commuting.
Audio description is very much an art, and while some do resort to ad hoc description from friends, it's often clumsy and not immersive. Producing the real thing is highly asymmetric to the film run-time. It takes about 2 hours to properly describe about 20 minutes of a film, depending on the overal genre.
The blind community face an even greater hurdle. I've heard so many stories of blind people signing up to a streaming platform to watch a film, only for the audio description not be avaiable on that platform for that film. Because streaming platform X doesn't have the rights to the AD produced by streaming platform Y. It also leads to a great deal of redundancy as multiple services create entirely distinct AD tracks for the same film. It's crazy!
Piracy is the only way some of these movies and television shows can be enjoyed by some people, and often those people are of limited means.
I did some digital | electronic support work for the WA Institute for the Blind(?) in Perth back in 1984 (ish) and understand the value of goo audio description (and piracy .. or file sharing in hobbyist communities as I might think of it) so I understand your position.
Just being that person on teh internet that likes to point out there are many ways to skin cats .. not that we do that in the country anymore.
Stange presumption on your part... groups, companies, associations, teams, cooperatives, guilds, whatever... they are collections of individuals and no, they don't have any right to piracy. That includes anyone working on or involved in AI, so if it is unclear to you, I absolutely do not support OpenAI, Midjourney, Claude, ChatGPT or any other AI technology to "learn" or "train" off of others' works without their permission.
I discover stuff on Spotify more than i would ever from pirating and only then i can go watch their live stuff and buy their merch. If I want a Flac i go to Bandcamp though
Makes me wonder if artists would see the same benefit then if piracy were legal and someone made a nice Spotify-like frontend for it. I think about how places like library genesis have to be so weirdly arranged because of how illegal they are.
Bitrates are tied to the subscription tier. If you do the 4K plan, it's visibly noticeable that 1080p video bitrates are higher. They don't have much 4K content, but the 1080p difference is worth it for my 4K projector.
Still frustrated that 1080p bluray looks and sounds significantly better than 4k Netflix. Will a lot of quality stuff be lost forever when these companies disappear?
Being constantly reminded you are a tool watching some dark filter compressed pseudo-4k video at the mercy of some conglomerate takes away some of the fun in consuming culture.
I feel way freer when watching downloaded films. Like the old VHS days. It is mine.
Not as a goal within itself, but when the audio quality is so bad that you cannot understand the dialog without closed captions turned on.... That is a problem...
I find this often the case with streaming. I used to think that this is just how they make movies now, but when trying out the same movie in Bluray, every word comes out crystal clear.
Hahahaha I had the same problem. Had to buy a vinyl for 80€ and digitilize it. Did upload it then. Now the artist has a bandcamp with the collection for free so sharing is caring
Yep, that is why I pirate as well, movies and shows are simply lower quality when streaming than via direct downloads. Plus, I can play them with my own media player and use software like SmoothVideoProject to interpolate the frame rate and use upscalers for sub-4k content.
already, Disney has been censoring past episodes not even based on today's sensibilities but it seems purely based on keywords.
there's an episode of the suite life of zach and cody where zach pretends to have dyslexia in order to get extra time in his exams, and near the end of the episode he gets busted and they have a thoughtful conversation about how it's unfair and hurts the people who need the extra time, and he should be less lazy and do the work, etc, and somehow that's too offensive now.
Disney is only slightly better about nuking old “offensive” content than other providers. Many times they just gave an unskippable “this is culturally offensive to some” text and call it good. For example the old lady and the tramp has that “we are Siamese” song, which I guess is offensive… at least they still let you watch it.
Hulu on the other hand just pulls shit. For example they pulled my favorite it’s always sunny episode where they do that diehard movie. I guess the fact they do black face makes it racist (which they call out as such in the show itself!) and since we are all apparently too stupid to think for ourselves about the content we watch they better block it. After all they know better than me about what is offensive.
… shit like that… that is what is gonna lead me back to piracy.
The creators of always sunny pulled that themselves just fyi. They decided as artists that they weren’t cool with it and I think that is their right as creators, personally.
I believe the opposite on this actually. You may be the creator of something, but once you've shown it to me, it becomes the property of the human race. Something our species has done and enjoyed (or hated). You have no right to erase it from existence. You could make a big speech about how bad it was, put a warning at the start, etc, but removing it entirely from existence is just vandalism. Imagine if the Pharaohs decided to blow up the pyramids after they built them!
My hope is human nature will prevail. SOME are that sensitive but I think there’s a growing amount of people maybe even a majority that don’t want censorship and nannie’s in media / comedy etc.
What’s offensive changes from generation to generation. Blackface is a problem because racism is a problem. I can envision a future where racism against blacks is so low that blackface in itself is no longer triggering.
As an example: I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s with the feminist second wave. Women of my generation hated being called girl, for good reason! In that time, men were men, and women were considered children.
Their granddaughters don’t seem to mind the term girl at all. They didn’t suffer the same trauma their grandmothers did. Society has progressed, at least a bit.
People don't like to be discriminated against based on their skin color or gender so there is always going to be resistance against bigots like you, who justify and rationalize the discrimination. There has been some progress as evident by the fact that your racist beliefs are already a relatively fringe minority. Even people like you changed, you no longer advocate for slavery or colonialism and probably don't support lynchings, murdering gay people or banning women's right to vote, to understand social change in your case you just have to shift your timeframe by a hundred years or so. You will be dragged along into the future or die, that's how social progress happens, older bigots die off and are replaced by slightly less racist bigots. Overall, slowly progress will be made.
people in the majority/oppressor groups have always defended themselves like this, slavers saw themselves as the victims with black people stealing their livelihood, increases in womens rights or levels of education is seen as taking something away from men/boys... equal opportunity and affirmative action has always been seen as discriminatory instead of the necessary corrective uplifting of historically oppressed groups. White people are forced to share a bathroom with black people, cis people are forced to share a bathroom with trans people, etc. Always conservatives predicted the end of society as we know it, it was never true, nothing bad ever came of society becoming more progressive and less oppressive against minority groups.
The patterns are obvious and the future is clear, it's obvious who is going to be on the wrong side of history. There is no place for social regressive conservatism in a free and open society, that doesn't mean you are being oppressed not matter how convenient of an idea that victim complex is, society at large will progress, with or without you and there is nothing you can do about it.
Considering the demographics I find it hilarious that you believe that current perceived discrimination is the result of a majority.
Because if there is one thing that's for sure, it's that the white person is a race in extinction considering the fertility levels that do not beat the replacement rate in pretty much every single western country.
And you clearly don't understand much about what you are talking about. The fact is that society as we know it is clearly going away, precisely because the fertility level is so abysmal that at this rate in two generations the genetic heritage that built all this world of freedom will be extinguished.
There is actually a trend of "strong women" going out of their way to bring around men from foreign countries to mate and create a family, precisely because of all the problems the social propaganda has created. Another society will perdure that's for sure, but it definitely won't be the same and the more time passe the more it looks like the replacement won't be as nice and open to liberties as what it replaced.
I don't even care, this is what happens when a culture gets too complacent, it gets overthrown and replaced by a stronger competitor. Now the question is: will it be better? So far, I fear the signs are not in favor of this conclusion, but we will see...
All these feelings and emotions of great anxiety and fear of getting replaced by the "inferior" other, its so primitive. Just like these ideas of the "strong" dominating over "us" because we became "weak". It's such a primitive way of looking at the world.
How do you think people felt that opposed social progress in the past? They felt exactly like you are feeling, but you don't agree with them now do you? Everything you say is derived from those base emotions, but it's all just in your head. You don't have to fear people who are different from you, they are all just people, we are all the same, we are all the same species, race, gender, sexuality, religion, language; it's all unimportant, we all just want to live happy lives in peace. Anyway
It's not discrimination when it's based on objective reality.
But I guess you are one of those who will call discrimination when someone doesn't make the cut because they weren't good enough, whether it is in sport performance or intellectual capacity or anything else for that matter.
We are still hearing about discrimination of women in STEM subjects when not only they have the same exact opportunities but we reworked a lot of the education system to accommodate them in preference.
We can never win with your type because there is no logic, it's all about the feelings and emotions that uncomfortable truths create.
And nice trying on the racist insult, I fundamentally don't think there is a superior race or whatever, just that there are objectively different genetic heritages that are better at some things (and vice versa). It's the same thing for women, men are not able to make other humans, that's an objective truth.
Either you take advantage of that and assign different things to do depending on actual relative strength of peoples or you put your head in the sand, makes everyone go through meaningless competition that bring about the same results, just less efficiently and with way more casualties than necessary.
People are complementary, you can't have the smart ones doing masonry while the strong ones doing architecture, that's just stupidly inefficient and a sure way of creating problems in the long run...
And to be clear, I strongly believe in the equality of opportunities as well as equality in laws but that doesn't mean you have to engineer a whole system against "discriminations"; it won't work no matter how much you believe.
This is especially true with the current wave of upscaled 4k releases that are, frankly - awful. Eventually, these will be the only versions we have access to on streaming platforms, but someone will have the original Blu-ray remux or DVD rip on their Plex server.
High quality piracy, especially for music, can convey a lot of social status. Many of the “pirate clubs” online are gated behind presenting your own vault of gems: lots of lossless FLAC files and maybe some rare foreign cd rips.
> In 100 years iTunes may be dead, but there will be some person with every album available in high quality lossless FLAC. Same with Netflix and it's bit starved encodes.
Yeah, nah. WhatCD’s full catalogue has never been recovered.
By virtue of being a private torrent tracker, WhatCD never had that full catalog, itself. The members did and what you consider to be an inability to recover is only because the torrents were never remade. The same thing would happen if the tracker was up and there were no seeds.
About quality, it's weird it doesn't matter how much bandwidth I seem to have (currently with 1Gbps fiber), the streaming keeps the quality varying down without explanation. If I just pirate the highest quality in less than five minutes I can download the best version of a movie at around 20 GB and watch it in the best quality from start to end without any degradation. Why can't the paid streaming services deliver at the same quality as the pirates?
They can. You know they can, others (ie: the pirate versions you mention) do. Larger files consume more bandwidth and storage on the CDN, which makes it more expensive. And while there are indeed some issues with lower quality (especially in dark scenes, I'm reminded of the muddy mess in the final episodes of Game of Thrones), most folks are "fine" with the quality we get today. Fine enough, anyway, that they keep paying for the status quo.
That's not to say that they're not interested in providing more quality. There's heavy investment in per-video, and sometimes per-video-section encoding and next generation codecs like AV1. The goal for them though is to get more quality with the same or less storage and bandwidth budget.
Because higher bitrates cost more to store and transmit.if they can drop the size of every file they have by 40% that's 40% savings every time someone streams something even if it looks like dogshit.
Gosh this is such a throwback... One of my first experiences with Napster was trying to download Britney Spears' Oops I Did It Again and getting a shitty remix. The worst part was that I didn't check the song, so I ended up burning it to a CD only to find out after the fact that the song wasn't what I was looking for. And every song took so long to download because it was dial-up... It's crazy how much things have changed in a mere 20 years.
I had plenty of experiences like that, but also a happy one once. There was some Slipknot song I had downloaded that was edited to repeat the final chorus 2x. When I head the real song on CD I was disappointed, it was actually a lot better with that one more run through the chorus.
A friend of mine downloaded a bunch of videos "funny hidden camera" and then burned them on a CD and one turned out to be porn. Like, even back then it boggled my mind why he wouldn't have checked.
Napster is p2p done right, it's a game changer that the music industry was only saved by listening to Apple (read Steve) and doing that catapulted Apple to the first Trillion dollar company in history. It's so good that Metalica members were loosing their sleeps over it. For personally one of the best software I have used of more than 30 years using computer and it's fit for purpose metric was second to none.
Mate, it only takes a few minutes downloading mp3 song that's only a few MBytes, unless you are using dial-up or ADSL connection further down the road from the residential switch.
A ton less latency, though. T1 connectivity still felt snappy for web browsing long after cable modems pushed up average available bandwidth because the latency was so much better.
Look. It was 25 years ago. I’m an old man now. My memory of that time is a haze of multiplayer Quake strategy. How about I rephrase it: it FELT like 3+ hours.
It could still have been 3 hours as you would have been constrained not only by your own download speed, but also the peer’s upload speed, and they might have been on an even crappier dial-up line or sharing their bandwidth with other uploads.
25 years ago i had an engineer come out: everyone on the street was sharing a connection in the local box. We chatted about tech etc and he put me on a single connection.
Sod the neighbors (their connections didn't get slower, mine got faster).
Curious to hear more informed thoughts from old ISP folks, but afaik one of the things that made Napster possible was that 56kbps connections were roughly symmetrical (~33kbps up?).
By capitalizing on the oft unused upload bandwidth, Napster provided a benefit at little cost.
Would be fascinated to hear what this looked like on the PSTN backend load side, ~2000.
The 56k specs were asymmetrical, the downstream connection could be 56k (actually 53k) while the upstream connection was only 33.6k. The key with v.90 was the ISP could send a fully digital signal down to the customer but they could only send an analog signal up which was capped by physics to 33.6k.
The later v.92 spec supported a digital upstream and could hit 48k upload.
Regardless, dialup users did not have a lot of upstream bandwidth available. They also suffered through high packet loss and latency making their throughput even lower than their line speed would suggest.
I don't think so, asymmetry was the innovation that made 56K possible on POTS (plain old telephone sevice, with only enough bandwidth for squawky voice)
v.90 didn't work at all between two regular POTS-connected analog modems. In order for a v.90 connection to happen, the ISP-end of the connection needed to be a digital circuit (typically using ISDN PRI).
By being digital, the gear at the ISP-end was able to precisely and distinctly control each individual bits that would ultimately be converted to analog at a point that was physically near to the user (their local CO switch). This was what gave us asymmetric nature of "56k" v.90.
Eventually, we got good enough at learning how to handle changing line conditions and thereby twiddle the bits with a modicum of precision in the upstream direction. This allowed us to produce a standard with a bit more symmetry: v.92.
v.92 offered up to "56k" (~53k due to FCC limits) down, and 48k up.
A lot of users -- at least in the US -- never experienced v.92. It wasn't formalized until right around the turn of the century, which corresponded well with the time when xDSL, DOCSIS, and/or BRI started showing up even in fairly small not-completely-rural communities at fairly reasonable prices. The local dialup ISP market was beginning to die by then and many never bothered with upgrading their gear to support v.92 before they closed their doors for good.
(All of this wacky dial-up modem tech was both enabled and limited by digital switching in the PSTN. Speeds over dry-pair phone lines could be far higher if there wasn't a digital conversion in the middle, and avoiding that digital conversion is how DSL became possible.
Which is interesting: A DSL circuit was meant to go only across town (ish), and was always betwixt two fixed points. But a point-to-point v.90 or v.92 connection could be established to any properly-equipped machine by just dialing its phone number, and that machine could be across town or on the other side of a continent; it didn't care.)
One of the coolest things about the modem age is that you could easily try a different ISP if you weren't happy with your current ISP's performance (upstream and down).
You can still do that in some places that have open fiber networks! I actually have two ISPs right now running over the same fiber connection (via separate PPPoE connections) - one ISP gives you fixed IP addresses with custom reverse-DNS for cheap so I use it for my apex domain, and the other ISP is Dynamic DNS but has much better performance.
IIRC Napster downloaded from multiple peers if possible. Each peer could restrict bandwidth so that they didn't get overwhelmed with outbound traffic. So speed would depend vastly on the popularity of content... if many people could provide a song, you could download it quickly (for the time: maybe a few minutes per song), but those where you had to rely on a single peer at a time could take hours.
I think so. KaZaa was somewhat famous for implementing that feature using the non-cryptographically secure UUHash algorithm (instead of something like sha1) for better performance, which allowed trolls to insert fake file parts into your downloads.
I found a post talking about KaZaA and Napster, and that's right: I forgot but Napster had a central server to provide files, that's why it was so easy to shut down...
KaZaA didn't store the files itself so it was thought they wouldn't be possible to shutdown. From the site above:
"While Kazaa claims to be "completely legal," there are those who disagree: The free-to-download blue files are controlled by Kazaa users and include copyrighted content."
"Later that year, Kazaa was sued again, this time in the United States by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association (MPAA). As of February 2005, the decision in that suit is still pending."
I remember they started suing individual users at that time... I found an article explaining that:
"In September 2003, the RIAA filed lawsuits against over 250 individuals, accusing them of illegally distributing about 1,000 copyright music files each, using P2P networks. RIAA sought an average compensation of $3,000 per case."
The result of the first case:
"In July 2006, the MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. caused Sharman to settle for $100 million, the amount to compensate the loss of four major music labels – EMI, Sony BMG, Universal Music, and Warner Music. The company also agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to the studios in the industry."
It's unclear exactly how Kazaa got down, the article concludes with "In August 2012, the Kazaa website was no longer active."... "the rise of legal streaming services such as iTunes, Spotify, and Netflix further compounded Kazaa's demise.".
Looks like the music industry managed to scare people away from pirating instead of actually succeeding in bringing them down directly, which is more or less what I remember.
Napster used a centralized server for indexing but downloads were peer-to-peer. This is what made Napster so awesome on college campuses: you could find anything, but if you chose a local peer, the actual download would happen over the college LAN at godly speeds.
Gnutella brought peer-to-peer searches. Basically it used a flood-fill algorithm: your search would be broadcast to all connected peers, which would broadcast it to all peers that hadn't seen it yet, until somebody responded with the file and their IP and you could download directly from them. Interestingly Ethereum uses basically the same algorithm for block distribution, with some optimizations that were first published by RTM, who was one of the founders of YCombinator.
Kazaa's innovation was to split the peer space into "ordinary nodes" and "superpeers", with the observation that not all bandwidth links were equal. It would enlist hosts on high-bandwidth connections to form quasi-centralized indexing nodes to organize the network topology for all the low-bandwidth consumer nodes. It's a similar principle to how the Lightning Network works for Bitcoin, or how L2s on Ethereum operate. This also made it easier to shutdown than Gnutella though, because being a superpeer made you a legal target for the RIAA.
I don't think you had figured out you needed to download from hosts with the lowest ping to get the top modem speed. I remember like 15min for one song on a 56k modem but like 6-7 min at top speed, which was rare.
It was more like 4 mins per song on a 56K modem. So you could listen a full song while downloading another. Hence pretty acceptable. The less acceptable part was that nobody could use the phone.
Which Quake? Are we talking Q1 E1M1 and the rocket launcher, Q2 Base1 + Quad damage +
double-shotty, or Q2CTF and grapple hook-fishing, Action quake or what?? :)
maybe you are misremembering creating mp3 files from CDs, on a 486 it took quite a while to generate a mp3 from a 4 minute wav file. Pentiums with MMX made it quite alot faster.
Hah, my first MP3 took about 2 weeks to download, over ZModem on a 14.4KBps link. I had to work around my parents' Internet-time restrictions - they'd say "times up", I had to disconnect, then I'd pick up again the next time I was allowed on the computer. Then I needed to convince them to buy a ZIP disk to free up enough hard disk space so I could decompress it (my Centris 660AV wasn't fast enough for real-time MP3 playback), then it took another 2 hours to decompress once I'd freed up the requisite 40 MB of hard disk space.
It was 1995 and pretty magical to get CD-quality audio coming out of the computer, though.
Yes it was for me 3+ hours. It all depended on codec and length of song. And also the fact that your phone line was kept busy while using it and loosing the connection when your parents wanted to make a telephone call. It was weird but funny at same time
Napster wasn't a huge improvement at all. More people could use it sure, but it was awful on a technical level compared to anything else. You couldn't resume transfers. It automatically shared your library with everyone else. You could cancel any active transfers.. all this meant that most things I tried to download via Napster were from people who weren't intentionally sharing their mp3s, and would cancel any transfers they saw going. I had so many that I waited 10-15 minutes to download only to end up with an incomplete file that I had to throw away because I couldn't just resume it.
Downloading via IRC was objectively better in every way.
I also remember having cable modems and parties with Napster station where people would find download and then play the song of choice. No sign-ups no artificial borders just music. This is still not possible...
My personal feeling is that Spotify and youtube et. al. killed music piracy. I'd rather pay a small monthly fee and have access to an always up to date music library then torrent everything artist by artist. But that only applies because spotify has basically all the artists i like and want.
Spotify is cool but I have playlists where half the songs are missing because some invisible licensing deal expired and the songs disappeared from reality.
With Spotify you are renting art. The moment you stop paying rent, your library disappears. Sometimes even before that.
There isn't always a studio behind a videos release. Sometimes the only remaining copy of a show is found in somebodies VHS collection and its filled with static and audio pops. These often get a standard 'as-is' release and then somebody in the community will clean it up, upscale the video, and fix the audio for a 'proper' release. Same goes for audio, sometimes its a old bootleg tape of a show that gets digitized and cleaned up.
This is before even getting into 'fan edits' where people will re-add cut scenes, or do other edits to films. For an example of that, search for 'Topher Grace Star Wars Prequel'.
For a great example of fan edits, compare Harmey’s Despecialized Editions of Episodes 4, 5, and 6 to the butchered final copies that George tried to make be the only available versions; the Despecialized versions are astonishingly superior in content and audio/video quality.
> For an example of that, search for 'Topher Grace Star Wars Prequel'
A funny detail in The Obi Wan series are the prequel lookbacks that, if you don't remember how bad they are, make them seem like mediocre movies instead.
Sometimes they further optimize it for a goal, or maximize it to have everything. Sometimes organize it, provide additional material that fans might appreciate, add commentary. Port it to a platform where previously it was inaccessible.
For examples, an artist's discography is sometimes neatly organized in folders, by year, and the files are tagged with metadata. In case of anime, fans improve or outright provide subtitles. They often do extra things like including karaoke for the opening and ending, color coding subtitle lines to match the speaker's personality or design, and provide stylized subtitles for signs and other letterings on the screen. In case of movies, they are often optimized to a specific kind of usage, for example to be able to be viewed on every phone, or to have a minimal file size. Sometimes, especially older releases, are digitally cleaned up and enhanced. Games install easily and is packaged in a way that it just works, without faffing about with the launchers and things like that.
If you want to watch Lord of the Rings without either a weird color cast or janky AI upscaling artifacts, you need to get a version that pirates have fixed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkNFZkUHeKQ
Streaming services show unskippable ads for their other shows before your stream. Amazon showed an ad for a violent war movie before a kids movie my family wanted to watch.
With pirated copies, you can often get subtitles that were not available with the original (fan-subs)
In the case of software removing DRM and shitware either bundled with the product or necessary to use it. In the case of music it's less clear but I would suggest curation and completeness.
Same, and what's the thing about those old records - there are either streaming services which have some of it (but streaming services are garbage so I don't consider those) or you can buy the original records one by one, if someone has a copy to sell. Sure, there are CD compilations and whatnot but usually out of print and they aren't sold digitally.
I share that attitude, but you assume that “discography” is an existing product that should magically appear for you to choose. I don't even mean tangled distribution rights, and other legal problems, someone has to do significant about of work to compile such collection. And it's no different from other media. If I decide to collect all books from some author (and it's not a superstar money maker who gets fancy limited edition collected works printed each couple of years), I have to do some research, an understand that Book X has not been reprinted in 15 years, Book Y has a single really questionable translation (or some horrible cover, or a completely delusional editor's preface that the author would never accept), Story Z was only published in some journal, etc.
“P2P discography” is more like a personal collection, personal library shared with others. That person still has to do the similar amount of work to make sure it's not a smoking pile of data. Sometimes they do understand it, sometimes they don't.
I remember burning CD's full of 1 minute songs that never completed because someone was always calling our house line, disrupting the internet connection (and there were no resumable downloads). Good times ;)
I remember getting transfer rates of around 10kbps and giving a solid nod of approval as I watched it go. Nice! I’ll get to listen to my song in… 80 minutes!
> How can it be better than the OFFICIAL version!? How nexactly is that possible?
Some content, e.g. Netlfix, has DRM that limits the quality that you can view in certain browsers/operating systems.
As another example, a DVD/blu-ray sources are often significantly higher quality than what streaming services offer, so if you have a choice to watch some movie on Netflix or a pirated blu-ray copy, the pirated copy will often be higher quality than Netlify while being more convenient than blu-ray.
It in unclear though how you could possibly get higher quality than the best quality that the source offers.
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.