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. It’s appropriate that the first pirated MP3 was a Metallica song, given Metallica’s litigious attitude toward MP3s just a few short years later.
How MP3 changed audio
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.
With greater compression came greater overhead, but bandwidth was scarce and storage was expensive, so before MP3, people just didn’t store music on computers very much. When they did, it was typically limited to short clips. A minute of audio in WAV format took 10 megabytes on disk, compared to half a megabyte in MP3 format encoded at 64 kilobits per second. And at 56K dialup speeds, a minute of audio encoded at 64 kbps took a little over a minute to download. In WAV format, a minute of audio would take 25 minutes to download. CPUs were getting faster too. A Pentium CPU could decode an MP3 and have power left to perform other tasks. And a 1 gigabyte hard drive had enough room left over to store around 500 songs after you installed Windows and a few essential apps.
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, and they did. Of course, other MP3 players soon followed. These also cost money, because the publishers owed Fraunhofer a royalty.
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. But 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 ingeniously used other protocols under the radar for the purpose.
How and why MP3 piracy became mainstream
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. Other services quickly sprung up to take its place. It also didn’t help that record labels stomped efforts to use MP3s legally like MP3.com.
How mainstream did piracy become? The girl I dated in 2002, who wasn’t technical at all, had a collection of a few hundred radio-friendly MP3s she downloaded off services like Limewire and Kazaa. And it was all Top 40 and adult contemporary stuff. Her idea of edgy was Matchbox Twenty, and a library of 500 songs was a lot to her. By then, a 40 gigabyte hard drive was cheap so the limiting factor was her Internet speed. The process of finding any song she wanted took about a minute, and downloading took about three minutes over dialup if she wasn’t picky about the quality. I can’t remember if she had broadband. She could casually download a song every couple of days on average and have all the music she’d ever want in less than three years.
MP3 piracy ended when people like her could buy any song they heard on the radio or in a bar for 99 cents and the whole process took around three minutes. But when it was easier and more convenient to sail the high seas, that’s what they did.
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.