[CoolestBeans]

One thing I miss about the iPod era is that Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music. It doesn't take much look at how much music an iPod could store, how much music cost, and how much people had in disposable income to spend on music to realize that music had to come from other means. The iPod and P2P file sharing were incredibly synergistic in a way that makes me giggle. The iTunes store is just as much about getting the record companies on board as it is about running a legitimate music store. I don't know I guess it reminds me of a time when tech disruption was in the consumer's favor and it was frustrating exploitive companies.

[erikschoster]

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

[pjc50]

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.

[xaitv]

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

One of these attempts that I assume most people are familiar with but is an interesting read for those that aren't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...

[qingcharles]

The irony was that Sony wanted all those CDs on streaming, so they sent them to me to rip because they didn't have any other proper digital copy for ingestion at the time. (It wasn't just the rootkit ones, either, they tried a bunch of other really ugly methods across their catalogue to stop the CDs being useable in a CD-ROM drive)

[MilkLizard]

And of course Sony was involved

[fridder]

Sony has so often footgunned itself it is comical. Occasionally great engineering hobbled by terrible business choices

[carlosjobim]

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

[carlosjobim]

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."

[fy20]

I'd say Steve was actually wrong here. The move to streaming (which Apple had a big part in pushing, directly or indirectly), is actually what halted music privacy. Giving access to all music (I remember the big deal Apple made when they were finally able to sell The Beatles on iTunes), and making it easier than privacy is what stopped it.

He's right that DRM alone didn't stop it, but at the same time you can't really say it didn't help. If we could just download Spotify playlists and share DRM free files with out friends, there would be no reason to subscribe to Spotify on an ongoing basis.

Hollywood still hasn't figured that out, but given how little artists get paid, maybe that's what they haven't push for the same.

[account42]

> 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.

[mghackerlady]

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

[amiga386]

While that's true, it glosses over the battle to make DVDs convenient. Hollywood did not want them to be convenient, they wanted them region-locked and unrippable, and spent a fortune prosecuting anyone who thought otherwise:

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

We have Derek Fawcus, "mdx", "DVD Jon" et al to thank for making DVDs worthwhile.

[dyauspitr]

I have never heard the phrase 480p is good enough. 480p is not good enough, 720p might be good enough.

[slumberlust]

Depends on screen size and viewing distance.

[mghackerlady]

On a small display that I usually want to watch digital movies on, it's fine. 720p is the minimum for anything I actually want to watch/enjoy watching. Like I said, a lot of stuff I have on DVD is stuff that is good to have that I'll probably never watch regularly

[account42]

I like 4K UHD HDR Blu Rays very much and have a big TV to take advantage of them but I agree with gp that 480p is good enough in the sense that a good movie will still be enjoyable in 480p. And if you are engrossed in what you are watching you won't even notice the reduced detail. There are some DVDs with atrocious encode quality with a much lower effective resolution due to low bitrate (i.e. multiple full length flicks squeezed onto one DVD) or unfortunate processing (NTSC master -> PAL DVD release or the inverse is to be avoided) but that's thankfully rare.

Now, 480i is something I'd rather leave behind but even that is a lesser concern than the content of the film.

[shawnhermans]

I recently started collecting Blu-ray because of thrift and second hand stores. In a few cases, I was able to purchase some of my all time favorite movies unopened in the original retail packaging for a dollar. Not to mention my local library has a larger Blu-ray selection than my local video rental place did before they closed.

[lopis]

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.

[account42]

> 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.

[ryandrake]

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.

[account42]

Agreed, I didn't put the word in quotes on accident. I'm just quite happy to point out that copyright infringement is something that every day people do without thinking and not restricted to the realm of hardened cyber criminals aka. nerds with an internet connection.

[mghackerlady]

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)

[port11]

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.

[AntronX]

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.

[port11]

Hmm, with unmetered traffic? I played DarkGalaxy one month at home and we got a ~95€ bill, my dad wasn’t amused. Literally just DG’s website once a day.

[AntronX]

I don't remember worrying about data usage. I got into wardriving and was torrenting from neighbors unsecured linksys ssids. Will never forget that warm feeling of hearing netstumbler pings picking up new APs.

[marysol5]

"I did not have sexual relations with that women"

FUCK SAKE

[AntronX]

You OK?

[b40d-48b2-979e]

GP probably wasn't alive back then in all likelihood.

[tclancy]

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.

[pluralmonad]

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

[ux266478]

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.

[pluralmonad]

Only if you operate under the misguided assumption that the law cannot be wrong. I care less for legalese than morals. Its plainly not theft, regardless of the hand wringing of bureaucrats and gatekeepers.

[ux266478]

What? The context of the conversation was about piracy which is a distinct legal fiction, it's inherently grounded in the law's opinion, so yes necessarily the law cannot be wrong in this context, that's incoherent. An idiosyncratic disagreement with the law isn't saying anything relevant to the discussion.

[marysol5]

So you're happy with private documents like banking records, credit numbers, nudey photos being available. It's just "ones and zeros" after all?

[tclancy]

Preach!

[Cthulhu_]

I'd even go as far as argue that all streaming has its origins in piracy - Spotify seeded its catalog with pirated music (allegedly), Crunchyroll started off as an anime piracy site, etc.

[ninjin]

Not allegedly, I was there at the time as a user and I and others can confirm that there was plenty of scene releases on Spotify in ~2008:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43202117

[scadge]

Sometimes it's cheaper to break the law and pay a fine, than to do everything by law.

[account42]

Seems quite often it turns out you don't even need to pay a fine if you manage to get big enough quickly enough.

[whstl]

Sometimes it’s impossible. Music labels wouldn’t even get in a room with you to discuss web back in the day.

[joshstrange]

See also: LLMs or Uber (two of many such examples).

It's incredibly disheartening to know that one of the easiest ways to success is breaking the law and hoping it doesn't catch up to you before you have enough money to be above the law. That crime does pay. That lawsuits ruined people's lives for downloading MP3s and some of the biggest companies on the planet stole everything and walk away with a slap on the wrist.

This isn't an anti-LLM comment, it's just depressing how we live in a system with 2 very different sets of rules based on how much money you have.

[hdgvhicv]

The first one had no wifi and less space than a nomad - 5g from memory. That’s about 85 hours at 128k.

I had more than that on CDs at the time.

Now technically it’s “piracy” in the U.K. to rip your own cd.

I really should go back to buying CDs.

[mghackerlady]

Please do! New releases aren't exactly cheap, but places like goodwill are practically giving them away. Make a list of albums you want, spend a day going to charity/pawn shops, and get what you can. If you can't find it, see what it costs on discogs, and buy it there if it's reasonable. I've gotten to the point that the only albums I have exclusively digital are those that cost an arm and a leg otherwise

[ghaff]

Just had a friend give one to me. If I want an entire album and the CD is the same or less than the digital version, why not? Ripping takes a minute or two.

[wasmitnetzen]

Also iTunes Match, which legalized all of your pirated music[1].

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2625967

[raydev]

In the early 2010s I uploaded an ALAC copy of an album through iTunes (and I guess iCloud Music???) that still has not appeared on any streaming service, and it remains accessible on any of my devices today. And now that my preferred streaming service is Apple Music, the album is accessible whenever/wherever I want.

When Apple gets something right, they really do get it right. A shame a lot of other aspects of Apple Music are bad or wrong.

[CrimsonCape]

I'm having the opposite experience. I have tons of music in Itunes and they are all DRM from early itunes. Apparently they predate the DRM-free era? I have no idea how to get the DRM free versions.

[ghaff]

My digital collection got really messed up at one point partially due, I'm pretty sure to Apple Match. At one point--early in the pandemic I think--I spent a day or two whacking my collection back into some semblance or order. For example, I had a lot of titles that weren't actually attached to a file.

[dwedge]

> One thing I miss about the iPod era is that Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music

I don't know. iTunes at the time was notorious for deleting all of your library if it thought you didn't buy something through them

[RandallBrown]

Never had that happen to me (or heard of it happening) and I used iTunes for like 15 years.

[lostlogin]

There was that time they gave us music though.

Utterly tone deaf Steve, we don’t all like your music.

[basisword]

I don't think that's true. People had been amassing CD collections for a decade or two by that point. At the original '1000' songs you're talking around 80 albums which isn't a lot.

[postalcoder]

> Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music.

On the flip side, Sony lost the consumer devices market for this very reason. Sony's single-minded pursuit of proprietary formats was a disaster class of corporate mismanagement.

It disgusts me because I used to love their products so much. Sony's competitor to the iPod was a marvel of a device called the NW-HD1. It was beautiful, had a ton of space, and great battery life. But it wasn't an MP3 player. It could only play ATRAC music. That means you had to transcode all of your MP3s to their proprietary format just to listen to them.

I remember trying to debate the virtues of my Sony NW-HD1 versus the iPod, but having to keep my computer on throughout the night just to transcode a couple albums was indefensible.

[itsmartapuntocm]

Arguably it hurt them with the PSP as well by trying to get everyone to buy UMDs for their movies and store music on memory sticks.

[ssl-3]

Perhaps so, but they were clueless: The PSP was so easy to mod and run pirated games and emulators with that I'm not sure if I've ever tried to run a UMD in the one I have.

[marysol5]

Took a fair while for people to "jailbreak" the PSP.

But then when they discovered that there was a factory bypass in the battery, it was game over

[itsmartapuntocm]

I was in the scene when the pandora's battery was discovered and to say it was huge was a understatement. After years of playing cat and mouse with Sony over exploits, not only was every PSP to date now forever hackable, but it also allowed previously bricked consoles to be brought back to life.

[speed_spread]

Yet a few years before that Sony had no qualms selling walkmans, blank tape cassettes and dual-tape portable sound systems, often with double speed copy function. We would gather for afternoons and make actual copy parties. Recording quality wasn't great but we didn't care.

[kmeisthax]

Yes, but that was also the era where Sony was fighting Congress to keep DAT legal. Even when they got their way, no label would touch the format and it was a total, abject failure.

Sony's response to this was to use their bubble-era money to start buying US record labels, purely so they could force them to support their formats. But they ultimately wound up buying the exact same mentality that they were fighting against, and the labels won that fight internally. Sure, Sony had Minidisc releases of major label music, but the format flopped anyway, because they were entirely unwilling to market it for recording in the US. Outside of the US, Minidisc was the Apple "Rip. Mix. Burn" experience half a decade prior to the iPod; but in the US that experience basically didn't exist unless you knew exactly where to look.

[mghackerlady]

not to mention minidisc, which was pretty much exclusively used as a format to copy your CDs to

[akersten]

> the NW-HD1

Ah, something tells me it wasn't the technical capabilities that held this very pronounceable and fashionable product back.

[efficax]

i pirated a ton but i also ripped all my cds and all my friends cds (and their parents cds). i took my macbook around everywhere and ripped every cd in could find

[rusk]

> Apple knew they were selling a device to play pirated music

If I’m remembering right, the tagline on the Mac mini was “rip mix burn”

[SllX]

Predates the Mac mini (tagline: The most affordable Mac ever.) by a good few years—predates the iPod even—but it was an Apple ad campaign:

https://youtu.be/K0ZWuhcM7t4

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Apples-Rip-Mix-Burn-camp...

You can’t really call it a pro-piracy message though. Ripping implies you have the original CD already.

[rusk]

> You can’t really call it a pro-piracy message though.

Of course not. That would probably infringe on advertising standards. But it is the clear implication.

[SllX]

It’s really not. Ripping a CD is just copying the tracks to your computer. It says & implies nothing about sharing them on Napster.

[rusk]

Okay bro.

[marysol5]

Not really, you have to rip CD's and import them into their software to load up the iPod.

Ripping CD's for personal usage and storage is perfectly legal everywhere

[francisofascii]

> selling a device to play pirated music.

Am I the only one here who legit purchased MP3s downloads for 99 cents off Amazon? (This was the era after Napster stopped working.)