History: RIAA/MPAA War on File Sharing
There were a bunch of conflicts of the past several decades which had a substantial impact on how I think about things today — not just based on the outcome, but on how the fight itself went. While the final boss is still there to be defeated, a lot of these mini boss battles. The “crypto wars” were the biggest (both the memories/consequences of the first (Cold War and 80s), and the second (key length limits, somewhat using pretext of ITAR but more focused on commercial users, PGP in between but SSL strongly in the sights of the second.), but the War on Commercial Use of NSFnet, War on File Sharing (P2P stuff) and the War on To Protect The Children from Bad Lyrics and Adult Content were all major influences too.
In 1999, I was starting work on HavenCo, our offshore datahaven in the “Principality of Sealand”. We launched in 2000, and at the time one of the biggest battles was with the Recording Industry Association of America (i.e. the moderate-sized Satan).
At the time, they were trying to go after anyone sharing mp3 files of music. There was no legal way to buy music online — you could buy CDs or tapes as physical media, but these were inconvenient to deal with (especially for the emerging 0.1% of digital nomads, college students, etc.), and expensive (they bundled 11 bad tracks with 1 decent song and sold it for $15). The market wanted online music, and would have paid for it, but the music industry wanted to continue selling physical media, so sharing files (“piracy”) exploded. Napster was the first big consumer p2p application, but we were sharing software (“warez”) on BBSes, on USENET, on private FTP servers (“topsites”, often in universities or in Korea…) well before that.
Since CDs were a relatively open format (“Red Book”), and the players were a massive installed base, there were no technical “copy protection” means available to the industry. It was pretty trivial to “rip” a CD and turn it into an mp3 (they went after encoder software, but it was open source and had some non-infringing uses, so it wasn’t possible to block.)
Industry threatened individuals with massive civil lawsuits (minor children being given bills for $50-100k, i.e. at retail value of an album every time it was shared — sometimes this could theoretically go into millions of dollars), enlisting ISPs and others to help (through our broken third party doctrine, you have no privacy once a third party has your business records in the normal course of their business.) This wasn’t enough for them, so they went to press for special laws, too.
The pinnacle of this was the ultracuck Lars Ulrich of Metallica and the “you wouldn’t download a car.”
RIAA’s evil bigger brother, the Motion Picture Association of America (and their allies/affiliated entities), tried to implement copy protection on their video format, the DVD (irony that DVD, CD, etc. are all increasingly extinct today; the LP record has outlasted them as a viable, if niche, format.). This was software called “CSS”. They used their bought representatives in Congress to put “anti-circumvention” language into the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, making it a crime to circumvent “effective technical controls”, such as CSS.
People figured out how to defeat CSS, distributing software called DeCSS. Industry tried to send people to jail. Lawsuits happened in the US as well, and distributing the software became a whack-a-mole game.
For a while, there was a credible risk of open computing architectures being essentially destroyed in the quest for copyright enforcement. Richard Stallman (PBUH)’s excellent Right to Read essay was not supposed to be a how-to manual. A lot of the DRM technology (Microsoft Palladium, the TPM chip, later TXT, SGX, etc.) which is now used to support confidential computing on servers/clouds had an origin in copyright enforcement on the desktop — I was vehemently against it at the time, but changed my mind around 2010 (when I did a TPM/TXT backed virtualization startup) because we were already losing the open computing battle to closed mobile computing platforms anyway.
This mostly got won just through how easy it was to distribute software, as well as the creation of things like YouTube, RealPlayer, Netflix streaming, etc., so there was a viable way to pay for media online (both a la carte and as bulk subscriptions), but even today, I’m 100% pro piracy of any RIAA/MPAA protected content if at all possible whenever possible, even if it’s less convenient than licensing it, merely as an act of revenge.
Call it…Reparations.