Posted by mcgin 1 day ago
Equivalent of what.cd today is RED.
But, TBH, most of the pirated music today is on YouTube anyway.
I have an easy time managing a playlist through the many available audio player frontends writing to an .m3u which is itself usable as a file path list in scripts to copy the music from my library to an external device.
Piracy is largely a response to arbitrary rules in media distribution, like how, where, when or even if you can buy something. Hiding piracy behind a "textbook-length list of rules" is bad just as the system it is responding to.
Like all piracy, it didn't condition access on payment. And like all P2P, more users (because free) meant more content available to everybody.
The rules weren't perfect, but they imposed order and organization and prevented harmful (for P2P networks) duplication and fragmentation. Like any society, the rules helped to provide a framework to solve a coordination problem in a hopefully-global-utility-maximizing way.
The result was a vibrant community cooperatively maintaining a virtual Library of Alexandria of music where library cards were cost free.
Here’s an example, a Minnesota woman who was fined $1.9 million dollars for 24 downloaded songs.
I’d suspect lobbying from the entertainment industry was a factor.
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2009/06/18/woman-ordered-to-pa...