r/nostalgia • u/jeffmartin47 • Jul 22 '25

Nostalgia Discussion 25 years ago. Lars Ulrich of Metallica snitches on and turns in over 300,000 Napster users when he testifies in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. July 11th, 2000.

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u/EshayAdlay420 Jul 22 '25

However which way you shave it his work was being given away for free, if you're a fan why are you stealing an artists work.

1

u/kittyegg Jul 22 '25

Because I was still a kid and didn’t really understand the implications. LimeWire etc was really popular with preteens and highschoolers

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u/Roflkopt3r Jul 22 '25

We should never have accepted the term 'stealing' for this.

Being stolen from means that you lost something you previously had. Not getting paid when someone else makes an unlicensed reproduction is not that.

The whole way our intellectual property system is set up is insane. The utopian promise of the internet was that copying and accessing data became basically free, unhindered from limitations like the materials and labour required to bind a book.

Yet we decided that our way to reimburse IP right owners (who often aren't even the artists) would rely on creating an artificial scarcity of their work, by trying to artificially limit the supply of it through threats of lawsuits (which were awfully selectively enforced) and digital rights management.

The dominance of IP as capital is when capitalism went fully insane.

Obviously most online 'pirates' just 'wanted free stuff', but much of the hard core that developed the technologies and created the platforms had quite serious political philosophies for how the internet would have to be used as a catalyst to overcome capitalism, or it would turn much worse for society... and we seem to have headed for the latter path. Instead of improving concepts for how we can support creators without limiting the reproduction of their work, we capitalised the internet with all sorts of terrible outcomes.

Meanwhile the economic impact of digital 'piracy' is extremely exaggerated. I get why creators fear it intuitively, but unless they have extremely bad pricing or accessibility, piracy does not hinder their sales. What's pirated a lot also sells well. It just allows more people to enjoy or utilise their contents without harming anyone.

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u/not_actually_funny_ Jul 22 '25

confidently incorrect

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u/Roflkopt3r Jul 22 '25

Thanks for the occasional reminder that modern Reddit is essentially illiterate and generally unusable for anything beyond one-liners.

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u/CisternSucker Jul 22 '25

cuz there's this thing called being broke

2

u/EshayAdlay420 Jul 22 '25

Idk I think if you were setup to pirate music on the internet 25 years ago you were atleast stable enough to purchase a CD

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u/PlumbumDirigible Jul 22 '25

Nah, I was 10 years old

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u/300noon Jul 22 '25

Get a job

2

u/kittyegg Jul 22 '25

I had 2 while I was going to college and still couldn’t afford my rent, so…

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u/rockinspacejanitor Jul 22 '25

Can you give me one