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April 24, 2003
I just posted this on
I just posted this on NTFS.org, on hearing from their article that MP3/WMA Land has been closed down and the webmasters arrested. It seems to have affected me rather profoundly for whatever reason.
I'm sort of shocked, I've been going there for years now, and these guys are just basically nice guys who share mp3s. sure they weren't the most legal of people but they weren't trying to profit from it in any way, they were just a bunch of kids who thought it was cool to share music.
It says something about those that arrested them that they're not going after the hardcore warez sites or the IRC channels/ftp dumps - they're going after people who were just not bothering to hide - who sincerely believed that they weren't really doing that much wrong.
Mp3 Wma always prided themselves on making downloading easy for people, and avoiding annoying, money-centric behavior when every other mp3 site (and there were, and are so many others) was pushing porn pop-ups in your face.
They were just a small time op who just leeched off gullible isp's who hosted them for nothing - you'd think they'd have better targets than kids just out of school.
Whatever you might want to say about them, they were a very community centric group who used their site as a social gathering place as much as a place to get music you could get off Kazaa for much less fuss - or off IRC if you knew how to.
They were optimists, perhaps of a reckless sort in hindsight, and so devoted to somthing that was theirs - they seemed to me for a long time what the promised land of the internet was supposed to be. They seemed to spend more time fighting off leechers than they did trying to conceal their presence from the law - I wonder if they were ever even sent a cease and desist letter for their candour.
I hope they don't get into too much trouble.
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Posted by subtitles at April 24, 2003 11:50 AM | Blogger Entries