Last Updated on October 11, 2025 by Dave Farquhar
MP3 piracy was born August 10, 1996. That day, a pirate using the handle of Netfrack released a copy of Metallica’s Until it Sleeps for free download on IRC, an Internet protocol intended for chat, not file sharing.
In 1994, Fraunhofer Institute started giving away an encoder that compressed music into the then-new MP3 format, a much more compact format than the more conventional formats like WAV or IFF. The executable, called L3Enc, soon fell into the hands of people like Netfrack.
To commercialize the format, Fraunhofer started producing an MP3 player as well. They charged money for that, if you wanted to listen to more than 20 songs. But that wasn’t Netfrack’s problem. Other pirates could solve that.
When the patent expired and MP3 became free for all, Fraunhofer pulled some shenanigans, declaring the format dead, in an effort to direct people to use its newer, still-encumbered format.
Netfrack and Compress Da Audio
Pirates used handles, a practice borrowed from the days of CB radio, and organized themselves into groups. The groups sometimes had rivalries. Their releases would be accompanied with elaborate ASCII artwork promoting the group and release.
Some of Netfrack’s groupmates were more prolific, releasing more titles. But Netfrack was first.
The first MP3 leaked wasn’t even a new release. Metallica’s load album was two months old at the time. MP3 was still so new and novel that for a time, pirates could get by with releasing material that was already available in stores. In time, the pirate music scene would shift to leaking material before anyone could buy it, and that caught the FBI’s attention once it reached a large enough scale.
Metallica may or may not have been aware of the release at the time. But as MP3 piracy grew, Metallica of course became very vocal about it. Metallica (in)famously sued Napster on April 13, 2000, the first highly publicized instance of an artist directly suing a P2P software company. This was separate from A&M Records’ lawsuit on behalf of the RIAA.
What early piracy was like
Pirating files over IRC was clunky at best, involving communicating with bots that were using a specification called DCC, or Direct Client Communication.
Transferring files over Usenet was a bit less clunky, but you had to have access to a Usenet server. That usually cost money. You also had to know Usenet existed. So in 1996, there was no shortage of people willing to put up with pirating files over IRC. I don’t think there’s any way to prove one method was more common than the other in the early days.
But for whatever it’s worth, uuencode and uudecode, the tools used to swap files over Usenet, had been around since 1980. IRC wasn’t invented until 1988.
The right way to pirate MP3 files, in theory
The conventional way to share files in 1996 over the Internet would have been to use FTP, a protocol whose name literally stood for file transfer protocol. The problem was, FTP servers cost money to operate. You needed a fast Internet connection and a fast server to host it. The people who had access to such things were rarely willing to risk their jobs hosting pirated files. Notice I said rarely. Not never.
You see, I once knew this guy named Max who was running some kind of an illicit FTP server on the college campus where we both worked. When I caught him, he knew he had some time to cover his tracks. By the time I obtained permission to hack into his server to find out what he was doing, he had wiped every trace of the “you know, just ‘stuff'” he’d been hosting.
Guys like Max are hard to come by and unreliable. So if you were an Internet pirate in those early days, you got a lot further if you got creative and creatively used other protocols under the radar for the purpose.
File sharing services came into being within a few years, making MP3 piracy mainstream. Piracy was rare in the early days because it required a fair bit of technical know-how to pull off. But Napster made piracy easier than buying. That’s when MP3 piracy really went mainstream, and it didn’t end when Napster ended. The girl I dated in 2002, who wasn’t technical at all, had a huge collection of MP3s she downloaded off services like Limewire and Kazaa.
It also didn’t help that record labels stomped efforts to use MP3s legally like MP3.com.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.