The People Who Were Sued for Downloading Music... What Ever Happened? 

I think the music industry solved the piracy problem in a most unique way in the end. Make music so terrible that nobody would ever bother downloading it.

I love when the CEO's of these record labels pretend they care about the rights of the artists on their labels..

I think it’s not fully understood by a lot of people how severely the RIAA going after regular people for millions of dollars damaged the music industry’s reputation for decades.

This unlocked memories of my grandmother yelling, “you better not be stealing music & get me sued” to me & my cousins when we went over to use her computer. I miss that lady😢

All of this happened because they didn't have NORD VPN back then

The real thieves here are the record companies who pay the artists only 50 freakin cents(!) for every $20 CD they sold.

A friend of mine was working for one of the record companies during part of this period doing royalty "clearance". The record company formula deducted all kinds of charges against sales before calculating the profit that they gave a small percentage of to the artists. One charge was for a percentage of "breakage" going back to the older, brittle phonograph records, but still charged, even against CDs. There also was that they frequently just kept the royalties in an account that were owed to lesser known artists that they didn't have contact information for and couldn't be bothered to try to find. Composers, arrangers and performers often got checks for less than $10.00 when tens of thousands of recordings had been sold. But, the RIAA insisted that the artists were the victims of piracy, when in reality the thievery was being done by the record companies, the agents and the lawyers.

I love that the RIAA probably spent more in legal fees than they got out of suing private individuals.

"Now that Napster is shut down, the labels can go back to being the ones screwing over artists". - John Stewart

The Napster affair made me realize how badly the record industry was screwing us over. Most albums only have 1 or 2 good songs on them, but we are forced to buy entire album of crap just to get those few songs that we want.

The sad part is, these people the RIAA decided to make examples out of were probably nothing compared to what my neighbor was supposedly doing. During the file sharing era, he bought himself a CD burner and would make CDs with any songs you wanted for a flat fee, $5 or something. Never got caught.

Everytime I’m in traffic at a red light and hear Metallica coming from someone’s vehicle, I mail Lars Ulrich a few bucks so I won’t get sued for listening for free.

I cannot imagine being on a jury and handing out a $220K verdict for sharing 24 songs to anyone.

That woman was tough. All the way down to practically all you have to do is make a video for us and she still held her ground. Good for her.

The RIAA spent 2.9 million dollars to sue people that are barely getting by. Yet Ticketmaster is running around charging "service fees" to concert goers because they know we ultimately have no choice. Can we sue Ticketmaster? Should we? Or do we just shrug our shoulders and say "F..k it..I might as well pay the fees..."

I think it's fucking hilarious that record labels call downloaders pirates when they in fact take such a big share of artist's money without having to do shit for it.

Fun fact since Napster became a legal streaming service they pay their artist more than spotify ironic.

As someone who recorded music off of the radio all the time as a kid, and later recorded all my friends albums onto cassettes, I feel the entire thing was ridiculous.

It's crazy how many artists were on the side of the record companies knowing how little money they made from sales. The ceos were literally stealing their profits.

As an ex signed guitarist I will tell you in the mid 2010’s we realized as touring artists that we’d rather kids got our music for free and show up to our shows and buy merch than them never getting ahold of the music at all. That was quite the revelation back then.

RIAA: we are here to protect artists. CD costs 75 cents to produce, artist makes 50 cents per cd, company sells cd for $17 making $15.75 profit. Remind us again RIAA who the thieves are🤔

It showed the true colors of "artists" like metallica, kiss, Dr Dr, et al who sold the image of being a rebel and fighting the man, but in reality were the man.

10:25 a multi millionaire sueing a single mom that's native American is pretty low. She should have countersued them for spying on her hard drive breaking privacy laws.

The real screwed up part about this whole riaa and file sharing story is that while they were using Shawn Fanning for Napster, the record companies were going behind the RIAA's back and asking Napster to provide data to them because they realized that people weren't just downloading music, they were making decisions about what they like and that had value. So on one side you're being sued for damages, on the other side you are being paid for user data. It's all a big mess and nobody came out of it undamaged or a head. The music industry today is nothing like it was in the 80s and 90s and nothing will ever be like that again. It's such a sad story.

“It’s a very dangerous machine” translation “I can’t make money off of abusive contracts and I’m scared”

Funniest thing happened early this year Metallica tried to live stream a concert on Twitch and it got hit with a DMCA and had random non copyright music played over it.

This reminds of the story of the schoolgirl who was illegally downloading music and video off of the Internet and was punished by her father, who is a judge. She was ready with a webcam when her father came into her bedroom to punish her again for a repeat offense. The daughter released the video of her beating online.

This video was absolutely great. And so needed. Thanks for the hard work making a documentary and explainer that just had to exist.

Limewire did FAR more damage to my PC downloading music illegally than I ever did to the music industry.

I remember when Radiohead self released their album on the internet cutting the label completely out of the process.. It was relatively epic.

Your pacing, delivery, and production on this video was awesome. I really enjoyed it. Thank you!

It was really scary at the time I remember I was told by my dad not to bring my mp3 full of pirated music when crossing the border so we don’t risk selling our house and filing bankruptcy. Glad there are streaming services now.

“Did the record labels ever get their money?” I sure hope not

I’m still waiting to download a car.

This is a really comprehensive documentary. Please continue to make more great videos like this.

I remember learning the term "rip" music from a CD to put onto my mp3 player. We would show our playlists to friends and compare how many songs we had on our players. That was an indication of how much time we spent ripping CDs, downloading from Napster, and how cool we were. Downloading and sharing files is how I discovered an whole new genre of music! In my small hick town, we had a country station, a religious station, and a classic rock station that played more disco than anything. Metal and grunge were new and exciting, and I never heard of Metallica before Napster. So there's that.

Imagine a punk band being mad at someone pirating though. The irony.

Hi. Thanks for this video. I can confirm as a primary source that I did file for bankruptcy and the RIAA never got a dime. It’s nice to see a retrospective like this showing that the people who fought back were found on the right side of history, that scaring people into an antiquated business model was never going to work.

Dude this video was beyond excellent, very well done work man.

Good work in this piece. Well done!

When this happened, I never purchased any music moving forward. None. Their greed was disgusting.

"This will kill the music industry" No, you guys did that on your own.

That was a trip down memory lane! When I was 15 in 05' I got sued (technically my single mom) for copyright infringement. $22,500,000.00! I forgot to "not share" on lime wire. So I was sharing like 3-4000 songs. We ended up settling for $4000.00 plus another 4k in attorney fees. I eventually paid my mom back after 4 years.

Great video, very informative and pleasant. Thanks a lot.

And to think the new "legal" streaming actually gives so little money to artists it's effectively piracy on their end

Greed played a big role in this. In the pre-digital age records were fairly affordable. When CDs came out the industry promised us that prices would drop as they ramped up production. It did not. Prices remained about 2 to 3 times the price of a vinyl record at that time. People wanted affordable music. The internet only made that easier to get.

Thank you so very much for sharing 😊

Terrific documentary. You know your history.

I was in college during that period, and my Music History professor correctly predicted the industry should embrace downloading and that it actually would help artists get free exposure.

This is one video I'm actually surprised wasn't sponsored by NordVPN.

Record company need a search warrant to search those hard drives, how did they know people had illegal music without breaking privacy laws 🤔

Napster was great, it had basically any audio mankind had ever recorded. It took us over a decade to get back to that point

Imagine if people starting coming out saying they all pirated until the IRAA wasn't able to even pursue legal action. They would have bankrupted themselves.

You know why pirating took off? CD’s cost $18, only had one or two good songs on them and if you got a scratch on it you were buying the whole damn thing again. It wasn’t uncommon to buy the same CD two or three times just from damage especially if you were sliding it in and out of a CD carrier. The argument that people were downloading music they already owned was probably truer than you might assume.

I bet music industry would make us forget the song we heard each time we heard it if they could. For them, even remembering a song in your head can be considered piracy.

Most of these record labels are absolute heartless criminals anyway. They care as much about their artists as they did the children and single, working moms they tried to rob with ¼million dollar lawsuits. Screw em. Zero sympathy.

When you pirate music... you're stealing from the record company because they get 99% of the money anyway, not the artist. The artists make their money from merch and concert tickets. Fuck the industry. If you want to support a band, acquire their music however you want, and then donate them money directly on patreon/etc.

I personally helped digitize my parents' music collection from vinyl and tape, so that they wouldn't have to pay the record companies a third time for the same damn music.

Interesting video. Thanks. I always wondered what happened.

Superb documentary. 👌🏼

Wasnt there a south park episode where piracy was affecting music artists to where they couldn't afford their premium private jet so they had to settle for a normal one lol

Music piracy has dropped significantly because you can easily buy the individual song you want for usually a dollar and not be forced to spend $20 for an entire album filled with songs you have no interest in.

Congrats. As a musicologist, semi-pro musician, die-hard music lover from classical music to rock, I lived through all this. And I think I can form a professional opinion. I think you nailed it, and reported as objectively as possible.

I appreciate your splaining

I used to use these sites to find new music I didn’t wanna pay for , found some bands I really liked and even ended up buying merch , the albums, concert tickets , so they made their money back lmao

They pointed out the greatest argument against RIAA. Just because someone is downloading your music for free doesn’t mean the labels and artists were actually losing money. Most people who did it would never go out and pay for it. If you’re going to sue a lone individual for downloads and claim it cost you money, you would have to prove that person would’ve purchased the music in lieu of the piracy, and that’s impossible. Imagine paying $17 for a CD. They scammed us for years. To hell with them.

20 years from now let's look back as you say in the end. Well, 18 years and counting now. I'll still be with you!

This was cool. Always wondered if people are ever forced to pay the ridiculous sums. Thanks!

There was nothing like downloading a bunch of songs. 13 hours later your CD was ready.

They went after a 12-year-old, that like trying to sue a kid for stealing penny sweats. A firm telling off and some form of punishment might have been a better idea.

Thanks for the video. I remember all of this very well, and I knew a lot of people who downloaded mp3s at that time. It needs to be said though, that before (and during) this era, the RIAA were ripping off consumers mightily. People had to buy albums of a dozen or so songs when they really only wanted one or two. Of course it was a very popular practice to get just the songs people wanted. It wasn’t so much the “free” aspect as it was just getting those individual songs. Luckily, this is now the norm. The RIAA is happy, and consumers are happy. Great presentation - thank you.

Thanks for the video. To me the biggest crime though has been regional encoding if DVDs and Bly Rays. That has done unimaginable harm to consumers and the entertainment industry due to the piracy that regional encoding generated.

Now you can't even play a song for 5 seconds on RU-vid without it claiming the whole video. LOVELY.

I remember the panic in everybody’s face when the police came on a bi-monthly basis to our college dorm to check if we were stealing music. 1996-99 was just a different time

It’s neat to see the PMP300 in various videos over time. Still have mine! I have a 16mb smart media card to expand on the 32mb internal memory

1:10 I had that stereo in 76, this is the first time Ive seen a picture of it out side of my photo album

I for one was tired of having to shell out my hard earned money to buy a CD that had maybe one song I liked. When I later found out that a tiny fraction of my money went to the artist, I stopped paying for music. THAT is the fault of the greedy RIAA.

It's been a long time since I've heard about the RIAA. It leaves a bitter taste in your mouth.

So glad I didn’t get sued, I had 7000 songs on my Napster until I downloaded a virus that gave me the blue screen of death

As a person who had an MP3 player in the late 90s, Napster and p2p was used mainly for computer playback and not mp3 players at the time. It wasn’t until later on when the market for mp3 players got larger, in the late 90s it was Avery small niche market.

I remember being staggered by all this when it happened. The amount of stupid things the industry did to try and stop the 'evil pirates'. I bought a CD which had to be played through its own player that was installed on the CD to stop you ripping it to your hard drive but meant the album never played on a computer and now doesn't play at all. And besides, the industry's still the same. Gatekeepers still exist, artists are still getting screwed, record labels still make a fortune. Not much has changed in my opinion. Record companies have been saying the industry is going to collapse every year like clockwork and it's still making money hand over fist for the labels but not the artists. Anyway. Rant moan complain. This stuff just really makes me mad.

I think USA's Court system is one of the strangest in the world. How in earths name did they come up with 22,500 USD per song!!

I have an old computer in a storage locker with a hard drive that probably contains way too many downloaded songs. Remember the threats of being sued in the media, and always wondered if someone would one day knock on my door notifying me of a lawsuit. I also remember the magic number being +1000 songs, I’m sure I had hundreds, but it was mostly music I already had in another purchased format, or things that were so obscure or bootlegged that would never be obtainable anyway. What a silly time!

Great video🤟

I was a Napster wiz and was one of the few kids at school who had a CD burner in my pc. Let’s just say that my computer was never shut off due to constant downloads and burning for classmates. Ahhh, the good days.

“The handful of gatekeepers who controlled what got played on the radio” hasn’t this part actually gotten worse over the last 20 years? Every radio station in the entire USA is owned by fucking Clear Channel and plays the same 10 songs

The copyright system is still broken: I have Cox internet and work from home. Last year, my nephew came to visit and downloaded an episode of Rick and Morty on my home network via some service. Cox responded by tuning off my internet in the middle of a workday. This is despite the fact that I had a cable package which included Cartoon Neatwork. Since my home phone is VOIP, I could not even call them to ask what was happening. When I did get ahold of them via mobile, I asked them why they would jump straight to disrupting my business workflow to appease the holder of a copyright as a course of action, as opposed to you know, asking me about it first. There was no warning, throttling or other indication, just an instant kill switch. They held firm and said that they had the right to turn off my connectivity to protect themselves from a lawsuit over enabling the illegal file sharing int he first place; to this day, I contend that the file was likely shared online BY the copyright holder in an entrapment scheme and Cox did not even care that I had a timeshift right to the content which I was paying for home use in the first place. And now we are seeing the evolution of streaming services with strikes in multiple industries because those who control the means of production and distribution see their fortunes threatened. Same story with Net Neutrality and nothing new; just the story (albeit a good one) of an industry completely failing to recognize and adapt to change and being shot-sighted about profitability.

Like Gabe Newell once said, "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem."

have to respect that woman's persistence. if not for her the RIAA would probably still be going after people with ludicrous fines.

Didn't expect to be reminded of DAT today. Quickly passed by the mini disc!

This was a trip down memory lane. I might have had a hand in shaping piracy in the late 90's.

The music industry in my humble opinion is killing themselves. They no longer allow RU-vid creators to push their fun music and their videos for copyright claim and so no one ever hears about certain songs that people would then go and listen to

I was one of those students. I got sued for a huge amount of money, but settled for a few hundred. As a broke college student, that seemed horrible but I actually don't remember that I ever actually paid. The judgement is nearly twenty years old now, so I'm not too worried.

The jury sounded like they were anti-technology and wanted to make someone an example. They pretty much ignored the evidence and went with their feelings against technology

I was a major pirate as a kid and one of the major results was my getting into a bunch of bands from Japan that I never would have known about and buying a bunch of their stuff. So in the end, they made profit because I pirated their music and it's not music I would have ever bought or known about in the first place.

19:59 “...Piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue...The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.” - Gabe Newell

Also around 2003 the RIAA started flooding the file sharing networks with fake and corrupted copies of popular music. At first the fakes were too short in length and too small in file size to be the real thing, making them easy to avoid, but then they started uploading files that appeared to be the correct length and size, but when you downloaded them, they would play for about 30 seconds and then start making loud screeching noises. This drove away many users, because it often became nearly impossible to find legitimate copies of popular songs among all the fakes. And meanwhile, the record companies started putting out "copy protected" CDs that could not be played on a computer without installing special software that would limit your ability to make copies of the CD, and would actually install a rootkit virus on your computer. Sony Music was the biggest proponent of this system, and after a class-action lawsuit was filed, they stopped making copy-protected CDs, released software to remove the virus, and offered to recall and replace the copy-protected CDs with regular, non-protected CDs.

I am actually glad to see Vinyl making a comeback, albeit small. I have always thought Vinyl had one of the best unique sounds. I think the reason for it ( at least back then) is the warmth of the music being played. Music from the studio was being recorded directly to Vinyl, so it is the actual imprint of a person voice, or instrument vs music being converted in to 1s and 0s. I guess you have to kind of come from that era to understand. I have my stands Hi-Fi rack system from the late 70s and early 80s and it has outlasted any of the "newer" stereo rack systems I have purchased over the years. It still runs strong and I would put it up against most systems today. There is just something about putting on a Record on the turntable and laying back in your most comfortable chair, whether it be a sofa or a recliner or whatever and losing yourself with a glass of wine, glass of brandy, whiskey or whatever or even a nice Joint. I have tons of MP3s and CDs however when I want to really indulge myself I listen to my large collection of Vinyls ranging from classical music, to jazz, to 70s and 80s rock. MP3s and even CDs to a point will never really be worth much, not like Vinyl ( Records). ( yes I am somewhat old, born in 1974 lol)

Great video, very interesting. One criticism, “In the Hall of the Mountain King” is so overused as a way to convey something spiraling out of control. I fast forwarded through the first playing of it but you used it several more times!

I think in hindsight, it’s important we look at how the government and the justice system leapt to the aid of the recording industry. Protecting capital over all else. Even to the point of going after students and poor people to somehow make amends for fictitious losses by a dying industry.