Comment by erikschoster

15 hours ago

It was also common to have a collection of CDs you owned and wanted to put on a device like this.

We forget that the labels also consider that piracy. For a while there were attempts to make CDs un-rippable.

Streaming (which pays labels and artists much less) only exists because it's the compromise that solves the "service problem" side of piracy.

  • > For a while there were attempts to make CDs un-rippable.

    The movie industry unfortunately never gave up no matter how vain the attempts are.

    • Still why I like DVDs. Smaller in size, easy to rip, and 480p is good enough that I don't mind the quality loss. Blu-ray is great, but if I'm buying something I'm not sure about or just want to have because it's worth having, DVD all the way

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  • Apple and Steve Jobs were always taking about ripping your CDs to have your music on the iPod in their presentations to the public.

    • Down voters might want to read this open letter posted by Steve Jobs: https://web.archive.org/web/20070207234839/http://www.apple....

      "To begin, it is useful to remember that all iPods play music that is free of any DRM and encoded in “open” licensable formats such as MP3 and AAC. iPod users can and do acquire their music from many sources, including CDs they own. Music on CDs can be easily imported into the freely-downloadable iTunes jukebox software which runs on both Macs and Windows PCs, and is automatically encoded into the open AAC or MP3 formats without any DRM. This music can be played on iPods or any other music players that play these open formats."

      And this part might be interesting in the context of the article:

      "The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat. If the big four music companies would license Apple their music without the requirement that it be protected with a DRM, we would switch to selling only DRM-free music on our iTunes store. Every iPod ever made will play this DRM-free music.

      Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy."

Exactly. I mean sure, people were definitely pirating music. But lots of people are own huge collections of CDs, and you could also just borrow other people's CDs to rip them. We were kids without money, but older folks at the time did spend money on CDs.

  • > and you could also just borrow other people's CDs to rip them

    Which is "piracy" - not that that makes it ethically wrong. It's actually the main kind of copying that is targeted by DRM since users of the LimeWire kind never see that.

    • Which is why we should never use the word "piracy." Don't let the industry dictate language (for their own benefit). Equating sharing music with a friend to robbery and murder on the high seas is a wildly out of touch exaggeration. If we let booksellers dictate language in the same way, they'd call libraries and book clubs organized crime.

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  • I still borrow CDs to rip, lol. Half my digital music library comes from my library having a way better library of music than books (at least for my taste)

Yeah, GP is rose-tinting piracy and Apple’s stance a bit…

When I was a teenager we had _dial-up_. My first 2 iPods were strictly playing ripped CDs, which I, friends, or family had bought. Buying the iPod itself was probably cheaper than 2 months worth of internet traffic back then.

  • It took about 30 minutes to get 3.5 MB mp3 song over dial up. I would let downloads run overnight and could get a dozen songs by next day. I would do my bulk mp3 downloading in the morning before class at schools library to immediately transfer over USB to my 4 GB Archos Jukebox hard drive mp3 player. That was around 2001 - 2003 either before schools blocked p2p or I must have been using public file downloading sites.

I mean, sure, but at some point with 3 or 4 thousand cds crated up, it became a lot easier to steal than go crate digging in my own basement. And then when what.cd happened and you could literally grab a torrent of perfectly curated files of an artist’s whole catalog, the laziness really spiked.

  • Brother, arranging 0s and 1s a particular way on storage you own is not theft in any context.

    • Unfortunately, that kind of hyper-atomism isn't really an effective argument if you don't already agree with the premise being presented. To make matters worse, the law is a collection of postulates. It can give itself the predetermination of any high-level conclusion it wants, and no amount of reasoning or appeal to lower principles will ever matter.

      In otherwords, it's theft if the law says it is. Simple as that.

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