My letter from the RIAA 26 years ago

I got 256K/256K DSL in our college apartment the end of 1999 and it was AMAZING. Of course everyone living on campus had ethernet but I was ok with that tradeoff.

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Roanoketrees@reddit

No doubt....that was blazing fast for that time.

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-IGadget-@reddit

10 megabits per second... about 100 times faster than dialup.

When internet2 came along I remember streaming mp3s from a college in another part of the state at speeds faster than we could play the audio.

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DefiantArtist8@reddit

I got one of these sent to my work network admin work e-mail address, was hosting thousands of songs within a few months of Napster really taking hold

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Telecommie@reddit

Neat!

Now gotta dig out my MPAA cease and decist letter I received.

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onepertater@reddit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOdvmjsn4tc

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onepertater@reddit

Hehe not many people have probably, it is from circa 2006

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Korenchkin12@reddit

You wouldn' download a car....you wouldn't download a gun...oh wait...

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Assuming they were using automation for discovering servers hosting infringing content, I’m kind of surprised that they discovered your FTP server that apparently didn’t allow anonymous logins. Not that mp3/mp3 is a particularly unpredictable username/password combo for a server like this; I suppose it could have been on a list of common logins to try.

Or this was so early in their anti-MP3 crusade that they actually had humans tracking this stuff down semi-manually.

Outside of friends/other students, did you advertise this server on IRC or something like that? I guess any of your users also could have shared it that way.

In middle school (~1998), I remember a friend’s older brother introducing us to a similar server (although it was an HTTP server with directory listing turned on) hosted in a friend’s dorm room. He has an absolutely massive MP3 collection for the time (20GB+), crazy bandwidth, and we absolutely raided that thing in the dial-up era (and I think also when we got broadband in the next year or two). An absolute pre-Napster goldmine.

God bless my local state university network admins for really believing in the end-to-end principle and assigning a public IP address to every PC plugged into an ethernet port on campus — I guess when you have a 0.0.0.0/16 block (~65k IP addrs) you might as well use it. They were still doing this when I eventually went there in 2003, which a bit of a disaster honestly — thousands of unpatched Windows XP machines were given public IP addrs every September in the dorms. They were constantly tracking down PCs that were saturating their 100mbps upstream with botnet DDoS traffic.

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generaldis@reddit (OP)

Yeah I was advertising it on IRC. I always assumed that's how they found out.

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einTier@reddit

I have one of these from about 1997. Mine was much more strongly worded. It was a private server I ran at an ISP I worked at. I would often saturate a T1 line with it.

They didn’t know if what I was doing was legal or not yet but they were happy to let me be the test case. I got an attorney and we talked to their council and since I had the server down since I got the letter and agreed to never set it up again, they let me go.

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generaldis@reddit (OP)

Today, it's amazing to think the legality of this was in question at the time.

I still have some of the albums that got uploaded to it.

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einTier@reddit

It was less about “is it legal?” and more about “who’s committing the crime?” but there was still an element of abstraction about it all.

It was seen as legal to take a CD you owned and make MP3s from it for your own use. If you also had the same CD, I should be able to give you copies of the MP3s I made. This is how MP3.com operated for a few years.

Now, if I’m running a server, it gets weird. All the files I hosted I created and were from CDs I owned. Can I give you those MP3s? Well, I certainly wasn’t verifying if you had the CD before I let you download. Did I have to? In 1997, no one knew. If you took the files, did you commit copyright infringement, did I, or did we both?

Again, no one knew. The RIAA wanted a particularly strong case of infringement because they wanted a very broad ruling that would shut all this down once and for all. My case wasn’t a great one but it probably would have sufficed if I’d been wealthy enough and dumb enough to fight it. They were more interested in shutting everything down they could until they found that court case, which if I remember correctly was about a year after I got my letter.

I forget how they got the ruling against MP3.com but I remember Napster could have gone the other way — it was the users doing the infringement, the company only provided a place where it could happen.

I thought and still think the outcome was always going to be this way but by the letter of the law at the time it was legal.

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zorinlynx@reddit

What always amazed me is how hard they were fighting this stuff in court yet took so long to finally set up legit online music stores.

They KNEW people wanted to download music and were basically ignoring a market for several years.

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giantsparklerobot@reddit

Oh the RIAA came up with all sorts of insipid and ultimately stillborn music download ideas. They wanted to charge ridiculous prices and always involved onerous DRM. Even ripping CDs would lock the encoded files into their stupid DRM schemes.

The RIAA was (and is) obsessed with anti-consumer rent seeking.

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zorinlynx@reddit

Hah this is wild. I remember those early Wild West days of sharing music all too well!

From 1996 until around 1998-99 the record labels didn't care and it was open season. We had several file shares at work (university) full of music we shared amongst each other, including burning CDs full of music to take home.

Of course in this particular case it probably wasn't great to use "mp3/mp3" as the login! RIAA probably had a list of logins they'd try in scanning and of course this was one of them.

We never exposed our MP3 shares to the internet as we were afraid of getting in trouble. But were always thankful to those who did allowing us to build massive collections so quickly. Kudos!

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generaldis@reddit (OP)

Well.....I was advertising it on IRC. So that's probably how they found out. Young and stupid, but that's how I got people to use it.

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HardlyRetro@reddit

That’s a cool artifact. ;-)

I remember a site with many music files shared, called meat.net. I think it might have been an FTP server, too. It was a contemporary of Napster’s heyday.

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generaldis@reddit (OP)

Anyone remember oth.net? It was an FTP search engine!

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hisyn@reddit

I’d frame that in a pirate theme frame and hang that shit proudly. That’s awesome

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generaldis@reddit (OP)

There's a reason I kept it all these years. I assumed (and hoped LOL) it would be the first and last one like this I'd get.

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Sample_And_Hold@reddit

Badge of honor.

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Sme11y1@reddit

They are assuming the infringer was a student and not faculty.

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et-pengvin@reddit

In the mid-2000s I tended to have the best success downloading MP3s by using google, just giving keywords and type:mp3 -- Much better than Limewire or other pirating sites.

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stuffitystuff@reddit

I was a student worker in the early 2000s working the dark side for the Acceptable Use Policy officer at my university and man, the Apache request logs at the time were wild. I remember finding a photo of student doing blow in her dorm room in her home directory full of MP3s (I told no one about the photo).

It's difficult to believe any normal, non-engineering coke snorting student would take the time nowadays to learn how to use their homedir.

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zorinlynx@reddit

We still offer it in the CS department here, and aside from web development classes where it's part of the curriculum, nobody sets up their "home page" anymore.

Hell, my own hasn't been updated in over a decade.

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Muted_Land782@reddit

Would you steal a car?

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Sample_And_Hold@reddit

No, but I would definitely download a copy of it.

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zombi-roboto@reddit

THE ELDERS OF THE INTERNET

KNOW WHO YOU ARE

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