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Comment by tommek4077

8 hours ago

And what happened after Napster? Filesharing totally stopped, right?

With the chinese in the mix it wont stop ai. It probably will change Copyright.

11 comments

tommek4077

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dijksterhuis  8 hours ago

Spotify and Netflix happened.

file sharing became far less popular and ubiquitous as a result of their popularity.

they tweaked the model — originally users download a temporary copy from central servers instead of p2p, then later to users rent licensed copies of media instead of pirated copies.

i’m tired of seeing this as an argument on HN — that because something didn’t hit 100% that implies it was a failure and not worth doing or something.

the fact that a limited subset of people still do filesharing is not evidence that the napster case had no effect.

(spotify didn’t exactly start out squeaky clean with how they built out their repertoire iirc).

(apologies for early edits. i just woke up.)

neoncontrails  8 hours ago

Can you name an active filesharing app that's in use today? The action against Napster might not have killed filesharing, but it was p2p's Antietam.

  • TFNA  8 hours ago

    The Bittorrent ecosystem is still very much around. I’m a cinephile who has a collection of nearly a thousand films in Blu-Ray image format, and 95% of that is off a tracker that is open even, not private.

    And Soulseek is still known as the P2P source where you can find all kinds of obscure music.

    • palmotea  7 hours ago

      > The Bittorrent ecosystem is still very much around.

      The point is: When Napster was around, everyone was running it all the time from their dorm rooms; it was ubiquitous. Now most people run something like Spotify or Netflix instead; piracy is niche, streaming is ubiquitous.

      2 replies →

    • stinos  4 hours ago

      And Soulseek is still known as the P2P source where you can find all kinds of obscure music.

      Wow, TIL. Do you happen to know if IRC file sharing of obscure music is still a thing?

  • yard2010  6 hours ago

    There are many people sharing many files on usenet. There are few open source projects to automate the downloads.